21-23

Feminist film theories are, therefore, crucial in explaining the relation between the dominant ideology and gender in the Yugoslav film-making. Feminist film theories have de-constructed and re-constructed, re-developed and re-shaped the existing film theory, without Yugoslav film criticism taking notice of it. Film, specifically, has an ideological power as an apparatus which relies on the mechanisms of identification and sexual fantasy which we all seem to participate in. "If ideology is effective, it is because it works at the most rudimentary levels of psychic identity and the drives¹⁰". More specifically, cinema has power to construct, in uniting fantasy with 'documentary authenticity' and, as Haskell (1987) posits, in an immediacy which gives an illusion of reality, quite unlike the metaphorical 'images' produced by literature and other art forms, the images of patriarchal ideology or male fantasy. Film also has the capacity to naturalise these constructions through the role of the female star who embodies these images.

The structure of the look is one of the most important elements in defining visual pleasure. According to Mulvey (1975), film narrative is made for the pleasure of the male spectator alone, who 'indirectly' possesses the female through the look, or rather a series of looks created by the camera, the male star's gaze, and the spectator's own gaze. Men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession which is lacking in the female gaze. Female characters are reduced by a male enunciation to a fantasist projection of traditional docile-virgin/sexual object dichotomy. As the female protagonist is simultaneously moral and amoral, 'proper' and seductive, the uncertainty of the narrative is maintained along with the duality whore/mother in Yugoslav so-called black film. The prostitute body, particularly, offers a visual image for progressive cinema, while the maternal character represents traditional values, i.e. the prostitute body becomes an object for the male gaze and viewing pleasure.

As the symbolical female is absent in the relationship between men and women, dominated by only one sex – male, cinematic representations result in relations of abuse, torture, rape and violence. Silence, political passivity and subsequent culpabilization of women are systematically shown. Women are rarely present and if they are, it is only to display their bodies, as prostitutes, or play the roles of silent, obedient mothers, wives or sisters, uninterested in politics or in the reality surrounding them. Such reductive representation of female gender is reinforced by visually coded spectacle serving for fetishization of sexualized bodies and sadistic voyeurism of degradation and rape of female bodies. As the site of the »menacing other«¹¹, woman is objectified and turned into an enemy that must be destroyed. The destroyer is different in each film and makes pragmatic use of the ideological weapon as it suits him: political military, medical authority, projected male masochism, emotional and physical death, murder by the new revolutionary authority of the state apparatus as an act of settling the accounts with the 'ideological enemy' etc. Consequently, rape is not viewed as a violent gender/sexual conflict between victim and attacker but as emblematic of a class rebellion (most explicitely conveyed by the character Jugoslava, in Zelimir Zilnik's highly controversial Rani Radovi, 1969).

"Rape is one the most frequent motifs of Yugoslav cinema at the end of the 1960's; the main types of women – mother in black, prostitute/singer, raped girl, have been elaborated both in Yugoslav war films and those dealing with contemporary themes. We can observe similar typology in the already mentioned films of Zivojin Pavlovic and in many others, with less artistic value. In the portrayal of women, there was no significant difference between ideologically 'correct' films and 'black wave', which was attacked by the state apparatus, forbidden or prevented by reduction of finances"¹².

Sites of potential resistance:
possibility of female gaze?

Female gaze as the expression of female desire is always perceived as a dangerous, if not deadly, thing (Braidotti, 2006: 88)

As the dominant culture is deeply committed to myths of demarcated sex differences, called 'masculine' and 'feminine', these concepts rely, first, on a complex gaze apparatus and, second, on dominance-submission patterns. In films exclusively made by men, the woman is as the male authors see her. Such films rest almost entirely on the re-presentation of female characters. They are women, "not only made by men, they are made for men"¹³. But, can the concept of fetishistic scopophilia which binds the female into an oppresive position of »to-be-looked-at-ness« be revised? Or is a female fetish always »reassuring rather than dangerous«¹⁴? Can a female character in male-authored narrative cinema return the gaze and act upon it?

As cultural imperatives dictate a direct correspondence between biological sex and subject-position, any deviation from such imperatives would make, in Kuhn's (1988) terms, a site of potential resistance to sexual difference. Such deviation can be perceived to occur in the films of Srdjan Karanovic and Zivko Nikolic. In Petrija's Wreath, for example, Karanovic's choice of the female narrator and the fluctuating gaze, positioned so as to convey the shifting nature of gender relations, strengthens the emancipatory potential of the film's heroine, as the narrative progresses: because of the narrative procedé, the spectator is always an accomplice of Petrija. As she tells the story of her life, the viewer is invited to follow Petrija's development into an active heroine. She dares the spectator not only through her verbal account which encourages his/her identification and sympathy with her, but also through her triumphant returning of the gaze – her direct look at the camera in the final scene of the film. In Something In-Between, on the other hand, the fluctuating gaze conveys more complex shifting gender relations along not only the axis of patriarchy/emancipation, but also along the axis of national-domestic/foreign-the other. Although Eva is the exoticised occidentalized other in the socialist Yugoslavia, she remains the other of the other, as the source of both fear and fascination for the patriarchal male norm. However, the relation between the author and his male characters is more ambivalent than in a typical Yugoslav new film: the viewer is divided between feelings of sympathy for the heroes who resemble him and disgust for their cynicism and cowardice. In films usually constructed around the male point of view, where female characters are only objects of men's domination and misogyny, Karanovic's female protagonists demonstrate a possibility of de-objectification of women, through their, even if only occasional, possession of gaze.