Syllabus

Balkan Cinema: Watching Across Borders
University of Chicago, October 2008

Prof. Dina Iordanova
Film Studies, University of St. Andrews
Scotland, UK
di1@st-andrews.ac.uk
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmstudies; http://www.DinaView.com

In the four sessions of this short course, we will look at various aspects of Balkan cinema. It is characterized by a specific poeticism, often linked to slow-paced narrative, long takes, elaborately choreographed scenes, understated colors, misty barren scenery, and haunting musical scores. Pictorial influences come from Byzantine and Ottoman aesthetics, as well as from the rich tradition of naivist painting; heritage referencing is widely used, as seen in films featuring communal events, from weddings to funerals. But we also find works that reflect harsh social realities in gritty and dynamic narration. Thus, seemingly incompatible lines — the magic realist world of poetic imagination, folk legends and composite cosmologies and the critical social investigations driven by restless moral anxiety — come together uniquely in Balkan cinema.

All issues will be approached and explored transculturally, and even where the assigned films come from one national tradition, we will make the effort to ‘watch across borders’ and reference to a wider Balkan context. It is not only the region’s shared history, the Ottoman footprint, and the fact that in post-Cold War period the Balkans linger at the periphery as a culturally incompatible civilizational chunk that makes it imperative to assert a newly consolidated concept of Balkan cinema. This need is, most of all, based on the discovery of consistent stylistic and thematic features shared by the cinemas of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Greece, and sometimes Turkey. 

The course includes four two hour-long seminar sessions, for which students are expected to, as a minimum, view at least one of the main films (please try to see as many as possible as viewing is essential in studying film). You will also be expected to have done the key readings listed in the seminar entry for the session, in order for a meaningful discussion to take place. Should you want to deepen your familiarity with texts related to the subject matter, please consult the general readings listing at the end of this document, as well as the list of Balkan films available at the University of Chicago.

The class sessions will consist of an introduction by the professor, followed by a discussion of the films and the selected texts and by the presentation of further relevant material, be it via videoclips or discussion items. The themes of the sessions will cover:

October 6 Memories of Conflict: Conflicting Memories
October 8 Patriarchy and Urbanism: Balkan Migration Cycle Cinema
October 13 Mimicry and Plagiarism: Reconciling Actual and Metaphoric Gypsies
October 15 From Rembetiko to Bandit: Popular Genres at Europe's Fringe

Here are the session descriptions with the related viewing/reading recommendations. All sessions will be held in Cobb 106. A viewing schedule of relevant films is available here:

A. Memories of Conflict: Conflicting Memories - Oct. 6, Cobb Hall 106

Everybody in the Balkans has fought everybody else and has practiced the assimilation business at some point and then has conveniently obliterated wrongdoings from memory. The history books of most Balkan nations tell the past in a way that uses idiosyncratic and often self-serving approaches to reconciling records of contested events. Each one stresses on what has been done onto them, while simultaneously remaining silent on what they have done to others. Narratives of displacements and assimilations that have taken place as part of bigger historical processes in the Balkans are often contested and remain suppressed in the region’s official historiography. Regularly avoided in public discourse they are nonetheless kept alive in oral history and tackled in anthropological writing and intercultural cinema. The stories that have been banished from memory persist, they cannot disappear altogether. Many areas in the Balkans are sites of intercultural memory, full of hushed histories that come with a daunting scarcity of record. The films that attempt to tackle such problems are often politically awkward and contentious, either because they bring up issues that would rather remain unspoken of, or because they pass judgment over the politics of neighbors and present controversial takes on history. In this session, we will endeavor to explore cinematic texts that tackle, in their own way, issues of the conflicting memories of key moments in history.

Reading:
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Our Balkanist Gaze: About Memory’s No Man’s Land’ (2003). In: European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2005. pp. 356-373.
Iordanova, Dina. “Intercultural Cinema and Balkan Hushed Histories” in New Review of Film and Television, Vol. 6, Nr. 1, April 2008, pp. 5-16.
Iordanova, Dina. “Kusturica’s Underground (1995): Historical Allegory or Propaganda.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and TV. Vol. l9, No. l , l999. pp.69-86.

Additional Reading:
Goulding, Daniel. Occupation in 26 Scenes. Flicks Books, 1996.
Iordanova, Dina. Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media. BFI, 2001.
Iordanova, Dina. Emir Kusturica, London: BFI, 2002.
Kuehner, Jay. ‘12:08 East of Bucharest.’ Cinema Scope 29. Available: http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs29/spot_kuehner_bucharest.html
Levi, Pavle. ‘Hatred Explained, Hatred Legitimized.’ In Disintegration in Frames. Stanford University Press, 2007. pp. 109-135.

Viewing:
Corneliu Porumboiu, 12:08 East of Bucharest (Romania, 2006)
Emir Kusturica, Underground (France/Hungary/ Yugoslavia, 1995)
Class viewings

Additional viewing:
Vulo Radev, Kradetsat na praskovi/The Peach Thief  (Bulgaria, 1964)
Lordan Zafranovic. Okupacija u 26 Slika/Ocupation in 26 Scenes (Yugoslavia, 1978)
Andrei Ujica and Harun Farocki, Videograms of a Revolution (Germany, 1993)
Milutin Petrovic, Zemlja istine, ljubavi i slobode/Land of Truth, Love and Freedom (Yugoslavia, 2000)
Danis Tanovic, No Man’s Land (Bosnia/Slovenia/Italy/France/UK/Belgium, 2001)
Pjer Zalica, Gori vatra/ Fuse (Bosnia, 2003)
Yesim Ustaoglu, Bulutlari beklerken/Waiting for the Clouds (France/Turkey/Germany/Greece, 2005)

B. Patriarchy and Urbanism: Balkan Migration Cycle Cinema - Oct. 8, Cobb Hall 106

‘With migration to the cities during a period of adjustment to Occidental capitalism, cinema diverted its focus to urbanisation and the issues of the migrant workers seeking an identity in a liminal space.’
Gonul Donmez-Collin

Balkan films are often preoccupied with the painful clash between patriarchy and modernity and feature a village-to-city migration plot. Conflicts evolve around the collision between the imperative to suppress the crude and unrefined (but also untouched) peasant essence for the demanding (but ultimately alien) free-spirited city morality. Some of the most important films from the 1960s to the early 1980s focus on the migration from the villages to semi-industrialized towns and bigger cities (and sometimes abroad), telling stories of gradual depopulation, of difficult adjustment and traumas. In Greece it can be traced back to classics like Alexis Damianos’ Until the Ship Sails (1966), Theo Angelopoulos’ early Reconstruction (1970), and in Bulgaria – to work by directors such as Lyudmil Kirkov (Peasant On a Bicycle, 1974; Matriarchy, 1977), Hristo Hristov (A Tree Without Roots, 1974) and Eduard Zakhariev (Villa Zone, 1975). In this session we will look closer at two films from Yugoslavia that also relate to these issues. When I am Dead and Pale powerfully establishes the theme of the uneasy relationship between patriarchy and modernity, rural and urban. Pavlović’s quintessentially provincial protagonists move on the outskirts of the urban. This specific characterization of the Balkan metropolis as a place of urban deficiency where the city’s inhabitants are actually peasants is also seen in the liminality of the protagonists in Makavejev’s Love Affair (1967).

Reading:
Eagle, Herbert. ‘Yugoslav Marxist Humanism and the Films of Dusan Makavejev.’ In: Paul, David (ed.) Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema. Macmillan, 1983.
Levi, Pavle. ‘When I am Pale and Dead.’ In: Iordanova, Dina (ed.) Cinema of the Balkans. London: Wallflower, 2006.

Additional reading:
Dakovic, Nevena (‘Petrija’s Wreath’) and Nikola Mijovc (‘Beauty of Sin’) In: Iordanova, Dina (ed.) Cinema of the Balkans. London: Wallflower, 2006.
Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. ‘Questioning totalities: constructions of masculinity in the popular Greek cinema of the1960s’, Screen, vol. 36, no. 3, Autumn 1995, pp. 233-242.
Iordanova, Dina. Emir Kusturica, BFI, 2002.
Iordanova, Dina. New Bulgarian Cinema, College Gate, 2008.
Ravetto, Kriss. ‘Reframing Europe’s Double Border,’ Aniko Imre ed., East European Cinemas. New York: Routledge, 2005. pp. 274-295.
Stojanova, Christina (2006) ‘Ivan Nichev: The Storyteller.’ In: Kinokultura, Special Issue on Bulgarian Cinema, Available: http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/5/stojanova.shtml.

Viewing:
Zivojin Pavlovic, Kad budem mrtav i beo/When I am Dead and Pale (Yugoslavia, 1967)
Dusan Makavejev, Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T./Love Affair or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Yugoslavia, 1967)
Class viewings

Additional viewing:
Emir Kusturica, Sjecas li se, Dolly Bell?/Do Your Remember Dolly Bell? (1981)
E. Kusturica, Otac na sluzhbenom putu/When Father Was Away on Business (Yugoslavia, 1985)
Zdravko Sotra, Zona Zamfirova (Serbia, 2002)

C. Mimicry and Plagiarism: Reconciling Actual and Metaphoric Gypsies - Oct. 13, Cobb Hall 106

Historically, no other ethnic group has supplied so much ‘metaphoric material’ for the arts. The persistent interest in ‘Gypsies’ has repeatedly raised questions of stylisation, patronisation and exoticisation, in a context marked by overwhelming lack of knowledge of the true nature of the Roma’s culture and heritage.
Whatever the plot details, the typical ‘Gypsy’ narrative revolves around presumptions about what ‘true’ Gypsies are like. They live an exciting lifestyle, gripped by all-consuming passions and inhabit a microcosm populated by freewheeling sensual women and men who make love in the open-air, thus turning even the most miserable environment into a setting full of high-spirited splendour. Film-makers and producers have routinely engaged in mercantile exploitation of the visual sumptuousness of colourful Roma; the cinematic celebrations of zealous Roma are regularly laced with added excitement, showing strikingly-looking protagonists who may be short on pragmatic acumen but are rich in heartfelt passion and in possession of mesmerising love secrets, often allowing for spectacularly beautiful (even if ethnographically inaccurate) magic-realist visuals accompanied by exuberant Gypsy music and dance. Gypsy films have been recycling – or, shall we say, plagiarising from each other – the same narrative tropes of self-destructive love fixations and reckless confrontations with the law. They have featured protagonists who are astoundingly shrewd yet impractical and intractable, usually unable to break free from the complex patriarchal nets of a community which sticks together mainly out of the shared mistrust of all ‘Gadje’ outsiders.

For this session, we will look at Romani representation as they have evolved in the context of some of the best-known works of Yugoslav cinema.

Reading:
Iordanova, Dina. ‘Looking at ‘Them,’ Defining Oneself,’ Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media, 2001. pp. 213-235.
Iordanova, Dina. Editorial to Special Romani Representation Issue of Framework 44.2 (Fall 2003). Available: http://www.frameworkonline.com/latest442.htm
Iordanova, Dina. “Mimicry and Plagiarism: Reconciling Real and Metaphoric Gypsies,” Third Text, Vol.22, Issue 3, May 2008, pp. 305-310.

Additional Reading:
Dakovic, Nevena. I Even Met Happy Gypsies. Framework 44.2 (Fall 2003)
Glajar, Valentina and Dominica Radulescu (eds.) Imagining the Gypsies: Romanies in European Literature and Culture, London: Palgrave McMillan, 2008.
Iordanova, Dina. Emir Kusturica, London: BFI, 2001.

Viewing:
Aleksandar Petrovic, Skupljaci perja/ I even Met Happy Gypsies Yugoslavia, 1967)
Emir Kusturica, Dom za vesanje/ Time of the Gypsies (Yugoslavia, 1989)  [Call No. DVD PN1997.D65 1990]
Emir Kusturica, Crna macka, beli macor/ Black Cat, White Cat(Serbia/France, 1998)
Tony Gatlif, Gadjo dilo/ The Crazy Stranger (France/Romania, 1998)
Class viewing

D. From Rembetiko to Bandit: Popular Genres at Europe's Fringe - Oct. 15, Cobb Hall 106

The popular cinema of the countries on Europe’s fringe remains an under-researched phenomenon. Many of the most popular cinematic texts of these regions remain internationally unknown and unavailable, as it is often believed that they are only of local interest. Dotted with idiosyncratic examples of local humour, the popular genres convey specific features of the respective national identity and are particularly important for understanding regional cultures. In the context of this concluding session, we will discuss the impact of legendary figures of popular cinema in the Balkans, such as film composers Manos Hadjidakis, Mikis Theodorakis, and Goran Bregovic, comedy actor Tanassis Vengos, heroic-type legendary actors Yilmaz Guney and Bata Zivojnovic, or simply great actresses like Melina Mercouri or actors like Sener Sen. We will look into phenomena that have unravelled particularly clearly in the context of Balkan cinema, such as self-exoticism and film-induced tourism. And last but not least, we will explore specific popular genres such as partisan film, weepy melodrama, comedy, musical, action-adventure, gangster film, crime drama, and so on.

Readings:
Tsitsopoulou, Vassiliki. ‘Greekness, Gender Stereotypes, and the Hollywood Musical in Jules Dassin's Never on Sunday.’ Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 18.1, May 2000.
Papadimitriou, Lydia. ‘Traveling on Screen: Tourism and the Greek Film Musical,’ Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 18.1, May 2000.
Strain, Ellen, ‘Snapshots of Greece: Never on Sunday and the East / West Politics of the
Vacation Film,’ Journal of Film and Video, Spring / Summer 1997  v. 49  no. 1 / 2.
 Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. 'A cultural colony of India': Indian films in Greece in the 1950s and 1960s, South Asian Popular Culture, Volume 4 Issue 2 2006, pp.101 – 112

Additional Reading:
Papadimitriou, Lydia. Introduction to The Greek Film Musical: A Critical and Cultural History. McFarlane & Co., 2005.
Petropoulos, Elias. Songs of the Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition. London: Saqi Books, 2000.
Erdogan, Nezih, “Mute Bodies, Disembodied Voices: Notes on Sound in Turkish Popular Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 43 No. 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 233-249.
Robins, Kevin and Asu Aksoy, “Deep Nation: The National Question and Turkish Cinema Culture” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (Eds), Cinema and Nation, London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Suner, Asuman, “Horror of a different Kind: Dissonant Voices in the New Turkish Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 45, No. 4, Winter 2004.

Viewing:
Jules Dassin, Never on Sunday (Greece, 1960)
Yavuz Turgul Eskiya/Bandit (Turkey, 1996)
Fatih Akin Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (Germant/Turkey, 2005)
Costas Ferris Rembetiko (Greece, 1983)
Class viewing

General Reading:

Bjelić, Dušan and Obrad Savić (eds.), Balkans as Metaphor: Between Globalisation and Fragmentation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Contemporary Balkan Cinema Supplement to Cineaste, ed. Dina Iordanova, Summer 2008.

DinaView, Dina Iordanova’s blog, see categories Balkan cinema, Turkish cinema, Albanian cinema, Greek cinema. Available: www.DinaView.com

Galt, Rosalind. The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Goulding, Daniel. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2003.

Imre, Aniko (ed.), East European Cinemas. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Iordanova, Dina. Cinema of Flames : Balkan Film, Culture and the Media, London: BFI, 2001.

Iordanova, Dina (ed.) Cinema of the Balkans, London: Wallflower, 2006.

Iordanova, Dina. ‘Jagged Narratives and Discerning Remembrance in Balkan Cinema,” Christensen, Miyase and Nezih Erdogan (eds.) Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. pp. 49-68.

Kinoeye, various articles, ed. Andrew J. Horton, Available: www.kinoeye.org

Kinokultura, special issues on Bulgaria and Romania, eds. D. Iordanova; Chr. Stojanova, Available: www.kinokultura.com

Jameson, Fredrick (2004) ‘Thoughts on Balkan Cinema’ In Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (eds) Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film. Cambridge, A: MIT Press/Alphabet City Media, 231-259.

Levi, Pavle. Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema. Stanford University Press, 2007.

‘Re-Imagining the Balkans,’ Special issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies, edited by Sasa Vojkovic, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2008.

Todorova, Maria, ‘The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,’ Slavic Review, Summer 1994. Vol. 53, No. 2. pp. 453-483.