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Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema

by Pavle Levi
Stanford University Press, Berkeley, CA, 2007
203 pp., illus. 40 b/w.  Trade, $49.50
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5368-5.

Reviewed by Fred Andersson
Magistratsvägen 43, lgh 332
226 43 Lund
Sweden

konstfred@yahoo.com

The film theorist Pavle Levi has written this book about the cinematic culture of what once used to be the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. As he himself admits in the preface, his approach is heavily influenced by Slavoj Zizek and the Slovenian "school" of psychoanalytical social theory. The first chapter of the book is dedicated to the so-called "black wave" of the Sixties with directors such as Dusan Makavejev and Zelimir Zilnik. Makavejev's Mysteries of the Organism reflects the impact of the sexual revolution and how it was suppressed by censorship. This film seems to provide a particularly fruitful example in the context of Levi's argument. He describes it as a satire that in the end shows State oppression to be a largely sexual and “phallocentric” affair.

The second chapter deals with the cinema of the Seventies and Eighties. In the seventies, the relatively reformist and tolerant cultural climate of the past decade was replaced by a tightened ideological grip and a cultural policy that promoted the growth of conventional genres such as detective stories and heroic partisan dramas. Tito died in 1980, and as the Federation slowly declined and disintegrated, new forms of cultural rebellion appeared. But whilst the ideological basis of the "black wave" in the Sixties had been Marxism as a reformist agenda within Socialist society itself, the general alternative culture of the Eighties had lost its faith in Society altogether. Here, Levi focuses on the Sarajevo group SNP (Sarajevo New Primitives) and its TV series Top list of the surrealists that continued to be broadcast well into the dark period of the Bosnian war.

As the Federation disintegrated, each region got their own ruling patriarchs with more or less xenophobic agendas. In the third chapter, Levi investigates what he calls the "aesthetics of nationalist pleasure" in Yugoslav (i.e. Serbian) cinema of the Eighties and Nineties. Levis' primary example is Emir Kusturica and the comedy and excess that is characteristic of the work of this internationally recognized director. For Levi, the pleasure that Kusturica grants the audience has to do primarily with sexual energy, with libido. But he also describes it as a "genitofugal" pleasure, i.e. a pleasure that doesn't focus on genital activity but that eroticizes the whole body, even the whole society. Following Herbert Marcuse, he describes it as a non-repressive sublimatory process.

Chapter four is dedicated to the more explicitly nationalist and xenophobic films that were legitimized by the various fighting camps of the years or war and ethnic cleansing. Consequently, this chapter is entitled "Hatred Explained, Hatred Legitimized". In the fifth and last chapter, called "Ethnic Enemy as Acousmetre", Levi analyses the psychological role of sound in some post-Yugoslav war movies, and in Society at large. The term "acousmetre" refers to sounds that are interpreted by the film audience as emanating from subjects that are not visible. The film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996) by Srdjan Dragojevic provides the main example. Until the Enemy finally appears at the end of the film, there is nothing to prove that it really exists, and that the voices that the soldiers hear are not just hallucinations. In Lacanian terms, there is thus an “imaginary” dimension in this movie that threatens to invade or destabilize the “symbolic reality” of ethnic polarization.

As far as I can judge, Levi's book must be a significant contribution to the study of less known aspects of international film culture. The example of Yugoslavian film must also be a rewarding parallel for people who want to study film production in other war-ridden regions of ethic conflict and diversity. A weakness of Levi's book, at least as regards its relevance for a wider audience, is the specialization of its Lacanian framework and terminology. A clarification of terms would in some passages have made Levi's analysis more transparent and more open for critical debate.

Another issue that Levi might have addressed more explicitly is the issue of the interplay between the interpreter and the object of interpretation. The particular brand of Lacanian theory that Levi vindicates is, after all, a product of the same cultural and socio-political context as the movies that he writes about. To account more fully for this context of the interpretation as such (and not just of the interpreted object) would again have made the arguments more transparent. And it would hopefully have reduced the amount of concepts and conclusions that are never spelled out by Levi, but simply taken for granted.