CL 12/13

Knjiga Filmski pogled, rod i nacija u jugoslovenskom filmu: od 1945. do 1991, koja je bazirana na istoimenoj doktorskoj tezi, bavi se pitanjem - kojim se ranije rijetko ko bavio - kompleksnih odnosa izmedju filma i roda u Jugoslaviji od kraja 2. svjetskog rata do raspada Jugoslavije. Istorijski i ideološki specifična, ali još uvijek akademski nedovoljno istražena, ova tema nudi brojne mogućnosti za inovativno akademsko istraživanje, sistematizovanje i procjenjivanje. Dr Maja Bogojević se usudila da uradi upravo ovo. Nemoguće je istaći u dovoljnoj mjeri njen pionirski, teorijski originalan i, u konačnoj instanci, inspiritivan rad o jugoslovenskom filmu i njegovom rodu i rodovima.

U dugom i sjajno strukturiranom prvom poglavlju, Maja Bogojević se bavi različitim filmskim teorijama koje uvode koncept roda ili proizilaze iz feminističke teorije, sa posebnom pažnjom posvećenom konceptu "filmskog pogleda", koji je prvo formulisala Lora Malvi. Autorka istražuje i procjenjuje sve najvažnije filmske teorije prošlog stoljeća, tako da sâmo 1. poglavlje predstavlja do sada najpregledniji teorijski udžbenik, koji sadrži sve relevantne teorije misli i škole interpretacije.

Drugo poglavlje predstavlja kompleksni pregled jugoslovenskog filma, koji nije strukturisan prema čistom diahronicitetu, već prema konceptualizovanoj istoriji promjena, vladajućim školama misli i inovacijama, vodeći do glavne teme – pozicije žena u društvu.

U trećem poglavlju, analiziran je veliki broj jugoslovenskih filmova, sa fokusom na problematiku ideološkog uticaja (socijalističke ideologije). Ovdje se ističe poseban kvalitet inovativnosti: autorka nije samo talentovana istoričarka kulture, već i iskusna filmska kritičarka, koja koristi vještine evaluacije, analize i interpretacije umjetničkog djela kako bi povezala svoje teorijske pozicije sa temom istraživanja. Pravi užitak za čitanje, zahvaljujući elegantnom autorkinom stilu, ovaj dio se završava sa dugo priželjkivanom perspektivom recepcije jugoslovenskog filma.

U četvrtom poglavlju, autorka analizira novu, društveno i kulturno provokativnu jugoslovensku filmsku produkciju 60-ih i 70-ih godina, koja se često pozicionirala u jugoslovenskoj disidenciji i revoltu protiv jugoslovenskog para-staljinističkog režima. Ovu poziciju djelimično raskrinkava autorka, čije ponovno iščitavanje i re-interpretacija filmskog teksta smještaju filmsku avangardu u okvire osvetničkog patrijarhata, koji je našao svoj način za obračun ne samo sa užasavajućom situacijom u kojoj su se nalazili jugoslovensko društvo i jugoslovenska kinematografija, već i sa socijalističkim položajem žena. Bogojević detaljno preispituje ovu ambivalentnu situaciju novog filma i insistira na uravnoteženom, ali kritičkom pristupu ovoj "svetoj" zoni jugoslovenskog filmskog identiteta i slave. Autorkine tvrdnje, usmjerene ne samo na filmsku produkciju, već i na kritiku sa obje strane – napadnute filmske autore i ideološke policajce - obiluju originalnošću i duhom, ubjedljive su, elegantne i umjerene, ali i poštene i iskrene kada se radi o patrijarhalnom pretjerivanju i vulgarnosti. Najelaboriranije poglavlje, u kojem autorka definiše ključni teorijski okvir koji u ovom trenutku nedostaje feminističkoj teoriji, ruši sve postojeće analize jugoslovenskog filma i predlaže novi, relevantan dijalog sa tekućim svjetskim teorijama umjetnosti.

U petom poglavlju, autorka se bavi jednim filmskim autorom, filmskim pogledom Živka Nikolića, manje poznatog i nedovoljnoi analiziranog filmskog režisera. U ovom slučaju, stvari se okreću u novom smjeru, putem preispitivanja patrijarhalnog autoriteta, i orodnjenog pogleda, a za analizu ovog autora, uveden je i novi koncept - pogled izokrenute rodne maškarade, kojim se završava analitičko putovanje kroz jugoslovenski film.

Knjiga Filmski pogled, Rod i Nacija u jugoslovenskom filmu: od 1945. do 1991. predstavlja zreo, originalan, pionirski istraživački rad, koji zaslužuje uticaj na široj medjunarodnoj sceni. Izvanredno napisan, jasan u argumentaciji, čvrsto pozicinioran i savršeno dokumentovan., pripada sferi najboljih akademskih radova na ISH-u. Uz pažljiv izbor izvora i ukazivanje poštovanja prema različitim idejama i teorijama, promoviše akademski dignitet, nezavisnost mišljenja i hrabrost u suprotstavljanju mnogim vladajućim školama misli.

Prof. dr Svetlana Slapšak,
Dekanka Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana
Da naručite i kupite knjigu kontaktirajte This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Cinematic Gaze, Nation and Gender in Yugoslav Film: 1945-1991 is divided into five chapters, which are further subdivided in numerous thematic sections. In a vast and exemplarily well structured first chapter, the candidate deals with the film theories which introduce gender or originate from the feminist theory, with special attention to the theory of the gaze, which was first formulated by Laura Mulvey. Bogojević skillfully and responsibly epitomizes the grand theoretical venues of the past century, and gives a paradigmatic handbook-styled text, which comprises all the relevant theoretical lines of thinking and schools of interpretation. Remarkably ordinated and presented in a clear and rational way, this overview in itself presents a fine work of the academic desktop production. It is also an overview of the main feminist schools of thought, which is a clever way to underline how feminist theories affected many areas of culture which might have not been the center of their interest or critique. This "overflow" of feminist theories' relevance for understanding of modern culture and de-stabilizing of petrified academic settlements of desirable topics is written in a style coloured with personal passion and thirst for knowledge, which is a rare quality in academic production. The author ends this chapter by inviting a new debate on the purpose and impact of feminist critique in today's film production.

In the second chapter, Bogojević provides a complex and data-packed overview of the Yugoslav film, which is not based on pure diachronicity, but on the problem-based and conceptualized history of changes, ruling schools and innovations, guiding to the main topic – the position of women. A rich social and cultural analysis of Yugoslavia was necessary for such a presentation: the hidden work of a historiographer lurks behind this presentation.

In the third chapter, the problematics of the ideological impact (of socialist ideology) is analysed in a number of Yugoslav films. All examples chosen bear surprisingly unexplored possibilities of interpretation. This gives a special innovative quality to Bogojević's work: she is not only a gifted historian of culture, but also an experienced film critic, who employs her skills of description, evaluating and interpreting to connect her theoretical positions and her research topic. Read with pleasure, due to the elegance of the style, this chapter ends with a much desired perspective of the reception of the Yugoslav film.

The fourth chapter explores the innovative, socially and culturally provocative Yugoslav film production in the 1960s' and 1970's, which is often positioned in the Yugoslav dissidence and revolt against the Yugoslav para-stalinist regime. This merit is partly deconstructed by Bogojević, who re-reads the film avantgarde of this period in the framework of the revenging patriarchy, which found its way to formulate its discontent not only with the appalling situation of the Yugoslav society and film-making, but also with the socialist position of women. This ambivalent situation of the new film is thoroughly debated by the author, who insists on balanced, yet critical approach to a kind of "sacred" area of the Yugoslav film identity and glory. The argument Bogojević develops is sinuous but convincing, bursting with originality and wit, elegant and respectful, but utterly honest when it comes to patriarchal exaggeration and vulgar force. The double-oriented, but firm and clear argumentations tackle not only the film production, but also the current critique by both sides – attacked film-makers and the ideological watch-dogs. This is by far the most elaborated chapter of the book, in which the candidate posits the key-theoretical framework to foster the feminist criticism, which at the moment is absent. Innovative in its evaluations, it rocks all the existing evaluations of the Yugoslav cinema, and proposes a new, relevant dialogue with the running theories of the world. A remarkable number of films are analysed in this chapter: most of the interpretations have never been uttered in such a way. Again, the chapter ends with an elaborated view of the reception of films analysed and mentioned (in fact, all the films of the avantgarde movement), and with a perspective of further feminist involvement in the interpretation of this cultural area, heavily marked by the patriarchal discourse even today.

In the fifth chapter, Bogojević proposes a single film analysis, that of the cinematic gaze of the director Živko Nikolić. In this specific case, the tables have been turned in new directions, which question patriarchal authority, gendered gaze(s), and the notion of reversed masqueraded look is introduced. In turning the attention to a less known and less analysed film-maker and his original revision of the gaze, Bogojević concludes her analytical journey through the Yugoslav film.

Maja Bogojević's Cinematic Gaze, Nation and Gender in Yugoslav Film: 1945-1991 represents a mature, original, thematically pioneering work of study and research, which deserves publication and impact on the international level. It is exemplarily well written, clear in the argument, firm in its positioning, and perfectly documented. It has entered the realm of the best research production of Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, promoting academic dignity, independence of thinking and courage of opposing many running schools of thought, but at the same time a careful choice of sources and respectful presentation of differing ideas and theories.

Prof. Dr. Svetlana Slapšak
Dean of Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana
To order and buy the book contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Jean Cocteau

In Camera Lucida's double issue 12-13 you will read Ronald Bergan's tributes to Designing Woman: Helen Rose and Max Ophuls, Igor Toholjs' analysis of Academy Award winner Walter Murch's editing in Conversation, Merima Omeragić's Ellipsis of Cries and Pain in her analysis of documentary film Calling the Ghosts by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelinčić, Aleksandar Bečanović's analysis of Carpenter's The Thing, Radoslav T. Stanišić's analysis of Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains; four exclusive interviews: with Agnes Kocsis by Steven Yates, with Margarethe von Trotta by Lidija Perović, with Arsen Ostojić, by Maja Bogojević, and with Elia Suleiman by Nevena Matović.

The Festivals section presents Maja Bogojević' s report on Cannes Film Festival 2013 and Nikola Vukčević's homage to Vlatko Gilić retrospective screened at Underhill Festival 2013.

Mala educacion focuses on Yugoslav film masters, Miša Radivojević, Lordan Zafranović, Srđan Karanović and Vlatko Gilić in texts by Luka Rakojević, Milena Pejović, Bojana Mrvaljević and Ana Vujadinović.

In Memoriam pays tribute to Roger Ebert and Bigas Luna.

Thanks to our wonderful translators, Jasmina Kaljić and Stevan Milivojević, most texts are translated both from and to English.

You will also discover New Montenegrin films, screened at the Belgrade Festival of Short and Documentary Films.

Enjoy Camera Lucida's impressive no 12-13.

Maja Bogojević

MVT: Yes, the skirt suits were the order of the day, you had to be correct. And she was correct by choice, she didn't like women wearing trousers. In this area, she was conservative. But that scene in the lecture hall... she is coming down into the arena. It is a coliseum that she is thrown into, and aggression awaits down below.

BLVR: OK, but your film actually makes theory and intellectual debate very sexy.

MVT: Entertaining too, I hope. Mary McCarthy's wit also helps. They're often together in the film.

II. BETWEEN WOMEN

BLVR: Speaking of women conversing, have you ever heard of the Bechdel Test? You've been practicing it for decades before it was actually named.

MVT: I have?

BLVR: To pass, a film has to have at least two women, these two need to have some sort of conversation at some point, and that conversation needs to be about something other than a man. Most films fail.

MVT: I like it! And let's add, they can't be talking about babies and cooking and such.

BLVR: Your films have been showing us that when you put two women together in a sustained conversation or action that is not revolving around some guy, something happens.

MVT: Yes. And I've noticed that men still get unhappy about this... women talking about something other than men, or love, or babies.

BLVR: But you also show some of the darker sides of closeness between two women. In Sisters, for example.

MVT: Sisters was also a way to show the two sides of myself—they are so different, and so far from each other, the one who is doing and fighting, and the other who is so sensitive and so offering . . . I had to put it in two characters. At the end, the main character is there with a notebook and she says, "I have to become both Anna and Maria in one person."

BLVR: And you based Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane) on the long conversations you had with one of the two sisters on whose life story the film is based.

MVT: Yes, Christiane. She became a friend. I met her at the funeral of her sister, Gudrun Ensslin, who was the so-called terrorist one. I added so many things to the story, but this basic difference between them was a fact. I lived in Germany in the fifties and there was really this bleierne Zeit—the leaden times. You understood unconsciously that there was something terrible in the past but nobody spoke about it. This grey cover over us... We felt there was something off but our parents didn't tell us and we weren't taught about it in school. That started only in the sixties. It was the same with the survivors in Israel. They didn't speak with their children about the Holocaust—the victims didn't speak, the perpetrators didn't speak. Fifties was the silent time.

BLVR: So the Holocaust and the aftermath are important in the film, although not obviously at the forefront.

MVT: There's a moment when the father of the two girls shows in his parish hall the film Night and Fog by Alain Resnais.

BLVR: What's the second film that they're watching as grown women?

MVT: Documentary images of the war in Vietnam. They are making the link between what they saw as young girls—the images of the Holocaust—and the images from Vietnam, with people running on the streets, being burned...

BLVR: So the character based on Gudrun saw her fight against militarism of her time as something that would resemble the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany in the thirties and forties?

MVT: Yes...

BLVR: What is it that they did, Gudrun and her friends? You never show their actions. Other characters mention bombs being thrown, etc.

MVT: Yes, I didn't want to make an action film. And I am following Christiane's point of view, and she only saw her sister twice in this period when Gudrun was part of the terrorist group.

Once they meet in a museum; second time, when Gudrun's group come to her home late at night. We stay with her perspective all the way until and after Gudrun's death. After the funeral of the real Gudrun in '77 many people in Germany, especially on the Left, believed that they were murdered in prison. Few people believed that it was a suicide. Only perhaps ten years later we became aware that it could have been a suicide.

BLVR: You leave that indeterminate in the film.

MVT: I did the film in '81 and we couldn't know the truth then. Perhaps we will never know.

BLVR: What did the real Gudrun and her group do? Destruction of property, mainly?

MVT: They robbed banks. They also killed people.

BLVR: Where do you stand on violent action today? My impression was that the sixties and the seventies saw more serious and braver activists than we are today.

MVT: It was interesting to me to discover that there were many women in these groups that espoused violence. In larger society, women were far from equality—their talents and their will were not valued—and yet here we had these radical groups where women were accepted as equals. They could join in the fight. The anger they had in themselves, they could express and act on. And they were valued as thinking and acting human beings.

BLVR: And meanwhile in some other groups of the New Left, women still made coffee.

MVT: I have a scene in the film—really, I did it as Christiane told it to me, I could not have imagined a scene like this. Christiane said that the two men at one point in a meeting said to her, Make us coffee, and that she got up and did it. She was in the group, and she did the coffee. It's a just a detail in the scene, but it's there.

BLVR: But seriously, where do you stand on direct action? The only two groups I can think of today that employ direct action for the cause of equality for women are Femen, and La Barbe in France. Neither is violent, though. Do you think there is anything today worth doing something violent about?

MVT: I must say I was never in favor of violence, like Gudrun was. I am always in favor of expressing anger, though. I am always in favor of revolt, and can even understand some forms of property crime. But I am not in favor of killing—that for me is the line not to be crossed. I was a very serious leftist and feminist in the early seventies and Gudrun once asked me to come with her lawyer and visit her in prison. I didn't go; I knew she wanted to convince me to continue her legacy—to become her. On the one hand I didn't want to disappoint her, she was in prison and unhappy. On the other, I knew I couldn't say yes. So I didn't go.

BLVR: Wow. You would have been making very different films had you said yes.

MVT: I was a member of a group that helped political prisoners—not Gudrun, but other ones—and I went to prison visits once a month and corresponded and sent them things they needed... But her, no. I couldn't. It's strange, no.

Another group I was in had this terrible communist reductionist language, and that was for me always an obstacle. I read poetry, and was much more open to art... all of a sudden it was like a sin to still read poetry.

BLVR: Your film The Second Awakening of Christina Klages is also based on a true story—a woman whose daycare loses funding and she robs a bank to get some money so it could stay open.

MVT: The story is true, but I invented all the travels and the people she meets in the film. The woman who did it in real life plays a small role in the film, she is in the kindergarten scenes. It was after her prison years, so when she came out I put her in the film... after that she worked as the script girl for two or three of my films.

BLVR: I like that you give people jobs.

MVT: After that she did two films on her own as a director. But now I don't know where she is, I've lost her on my way.