The New European Cinema by Galt Rosalind;

Author:Galt, Rosalind;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General, HIS010000, History/Europe/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2006-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

Images of History

As much as Balkanism is a question of space, it is also, in the logic of modernity, a question of time. The idea that Yugoslavia is distant, primitive, and tribal contains within it an assumption that is also pre-modern and historically less advanced than the West. And, whereas the West is seen as standing for progress and the march of historical time, the Balkans are viewed as timeless, operating in a cyclical and essentially unchanging fashion. Todorova touches on this argument, describing Balkanism as “a discourse utilizing the construct [Balkans] as a powerful symbol conveniently located outside historical time.”49 And Žižek adds this claim to his charge against both Underground and Before the Rain.50 But Underground cannot simply promulgate this myth of timelessness, for at its most basic level it is a historical film. A film like Before the Rain, by dint of its single temporal location, may enable spectacular excess to connote nothing but mythical primitivism, but in Underground time and history cannot be totally suspended. War, Communism, and post-Communist conflict are all clearly marked as a historical process. The cellar suspends and warps the passage of time for its inhabitants but not for the spectator: the film is quite clear in its historical representation and seems to take historical confusion as its fantastic subject rather than to promote it. Blacky may not be able to understand his own historical place, but the spectator always can. But how does the film’s spatial structure produce a historicity? For if the myth of the Balkans is timeless, Underground is constituted by history.

As the excessive mise-en-scène of the cellar suggests, the historical image in Underground is spectacular. As with the Italian films, historicity is produced not through the conventions of historical realism and authenticity but through a claim on an overtly cinematic language. Here, the similarities appear to end. Underground is not a heritage film, and its spectacle is not based on a nationally slanted version of the picturesque or the beautiful view. It makes little claim on an indexical real based on a vision of national landscape, and none on what I have described as an auratic relationship to the temporality of loss. There is no direct representation of an affective landscape, and we can trace this difference in the production of a melancholic relation to historical loss. Instead of the clearly experienced “too late” structure of melodrama, the film confuses its historical loss, refusing any straightforward representation of what has been lost or of where we could locate a national-historical image. The structure of the crypt precludes any direct representation of a historical truth. The first task, then, is to trace the contours of this spectacle, to consider where, other than the cellar, historicity is imagined. And in doing so, we may also think Underground’s historicity in relation to the dialectical image: to theorize how the spectacular spaces of Balkanism work to connect past and present, to read the film’s spatial and temporal mapping ideologically, and to consider

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