Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Whether trauma can be narrated in linear, traditional forms is a matter of con- tention for trauma theorists. While Cathy Caruth’s theories are widely under- stood as claiming that trauma is often inexpressible, that might be an oversim- plification of her ideas. Berlant (2001) and Stacey & Ahmed (2001) emphasize trauma’s ineloquence as a way to challenge the primacy of testimonials as the normative genre of trauma, while Jane Robinett (2007) challenges assump- tions that trauma cannot be expressed, arguing that the survivors’ impulse to write—even in syntactically non-normative ways that point to the breakdown of language rather than its ability to fully depict traumatic experiences—is proof to the otherwise. 2. Morag insightfully notes in her discussion that perpetrator trauma has been largely repressed in the vast majority of trauma research (13). In her defini- tion of perpetrator trauma, Morag draws on LaCapra’s statement that “there is the possibility of perpetrator trauma which must itself be acknowledged and in some sense worked through if perpetrators are to distance themselves from an earlier implication in deadly ideologies and practices” (2001: 79; quoted in Morag 2013: 13). 3. In his response to Craps & Buelens, Michael Rothberg warns that “[I]nstead of focusing criticism on the supposed ‘whiteness’ of trauma studies’ subjects, we might want to say that as long as trauma studies foregoes comparative study and remains tied to a narrow Eurocentric framework, it distorts the histories it addresses (such as the Holocaust) and threatens to reproduce the very Eurocentrism that lies behind those histories” (2008: 227). 4. Several other volumes have looked at the circulation, reverberation, and con- stitution of trauma in cinema in the context of different conflicts. Thomas Elsaesser’s German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (2014) looks at German cinema made in the aftermath of World War II. While Elsaesser’s book concentrates on Germany’s coming to terms (or unwilling- ness to do so) with the Holocaust as played out through cinema, Raya Morag’s Defeated Masculinity looks at the ways in which film contributes to a stabi- lization of certain kinds of cultural memories over others. Morag looks at New German Cinema and American Vietnam War cinema and takes on a distinctly psychoanalytic trauma study approach that positions gender as its 240 NOTES main framework of critique. In Waltzing with Bashir (2013), Morag looks at perpetrator trauma, in particular, as a form of trauma that is increasingly permeating the cinematic screen and its relation to injury. Other volumes on war, cinema, and trauma include Nurith Gertz and George Kheleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (2008); Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (2004); and Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Rep- resentations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2013). 5. Freud argues the following: “What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself—in this respect, the resistance gets its way; what is recorded is another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one—and in this respect, the first principle shows its strength, the principle which endeavors to fix important impressions by establishing reproducible mnemic images. The result of the conflict is therefore that, instead of the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one” (1976: 490). 6. https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo- liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ Chapter 1 1. Originally in BCS. All translations of BCS sources into English are mine, unless otherwise stated. 2. With production so high-profile that major Hollywood stars were brought in to participate, most notably Richard Burton, who played Tito himself in The Battle of Sutjeska (Sutjeska,StipeDelic´ 1973), or The Battle of Neretva (Bitka na Neretvi, Veljko Blajic´ 1969), in which Orson Welles played a Chetnik leader and Yul Brynner the lead partisan soldier’s role. On the role of such films in cultural memory and last Yugoslav wars, Eric Gordy notes: The Partisan epics were not only popular—for many people they consti- tuted the only source of knowledge about elements of the WWII experience that were not taught. So when war started again in 1991, and paramilitaries started searching for a visual code to define their new identities, they found them in the previous generation’s films. A new group of violent enthusiasts who wanted to play as Ustashe and Chetniks went into the fray disguised as the actors who played them in the Partisan films. The elaborately produced ignorance of one period became the negative dogma of a later one. (Gordy, Eric, “The Opposite of Memory Is Not Forgetting,” The Balkanist, November 26, 2014: http://balkanist.net/ the-opposite-of-memory-is-not-forgetting/) 3. Wolff argues that “the idea of Eastern Europe was entangled with evolv- ing Orientalism,” which had the result of constructing “Eastern Europe as a NOTES 241 paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe” (7). Similarly, Todorova notes that, while “the West and the Orient are usually pre- sented as incompatible entities, antiworlds, but completed antiworlds [ ...], the Balkans, on the other hand, have always evoked the image of a bridge, or a crossroads” (15). 4. In addition, Iordanova refers to it as “voluntary self-denigration” and “self- inflicted exoticism” (2001: 67), and “Third-Worldisation” (68). 5. As Dubravka Ugrešic´ argues in The Culture of Lies: “Today Europe rummages through drawers of memories, particularly those which contain the traumatic files of the First World War, the Second World War, fascism and communism.” London: Phoenix House (1998: 224). 6. For insightful work on the role of memory in the post-Yugoslav context, see Jansen, Stef. “The violence of memories: Local narratives of the past after ethnic cleansing in Croatia.” Rethinking History 6.1 (2002): 77–93; Volciˇ c,ˇ Zala. “Yugo-nostalgia: Cultural memory and media in the former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.1 (2007): 21–38; Hoepken, Wolfgang. “War, memory, and education in a fragmented society: The case of Yugoslavia.” East European Politics & Societies 13.1 (1998): 190–227; Mikula, Maja. “Virtual landscapes of memory.” Information, Communica- tion & Society 6.2 (2003): 169–86; Velikonja, Mitja. “Lost in transition: Nostal- gia for socialism in post-socialist countries.” East European Politics & Societies 23(4) (2009): 535–551; Miller, Paul B. “Contested memories: The Bosnian genocide in Serb and Muslim minds.” Journal of Genocide Research 8.3 (2006): 311–24. 7. Jurica Paviciˇ c’s´ unfavorable review of the film criticizes it for glossing over the more uncomfortable aspects of Croatian collaboration with the Nazi regime during WWII (“Lea i Darija:Malogradanska fantazija o tome kakvi smo bili dok na vlast nisu došli divljaci,” Jutarnji list,April2, 2012: http://www.jutarnji.hr/-lea-i-darija—malogradanska-fantazija-o-tome– kakvi-smo-bili-dok-na-vlast-nisu-dosli-divljaci/1004366/) 8. Reportedly, while filming in Višegrad, Žbanic´ had to keep local Serbian author- ities in the dark since any kind of memorialization of atrocities that were committed in the town during the war is immediately suppressed. 9. I take the term “counter-monument” from James Young (2000). 10. For recent surveys of some aspects of post-Yugoslav cinema, see Jurica Paviciˇ c,´ Postjugoslavenski film: Stil i ideologija (Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez. 2011), Vidan, Aida. “Spaces of ideology in South Slavic films” (Studies in Eastern European Cinema 2.2 (2011): 173–92), Gordana P. Crnkovic,´ Post-Yugoslav Literature and Film: Fires, Foundations, Flourishes (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2012), and Andrew Horton, “The Vibrant Cinemas in the Post-Yugoslav Space” (in After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land. Edited by Radmila Gorup, 185–99. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2013). Separate ethno-national cinemas are discussed in Ranko Munitic’s´ Srpski vek filma (Beograd: Institut za film. 1999), Lojz Tršan’s Slovenski film in njegovo varovanje (Ljubljana: Arhiv Republike Slovenije. 242 NOTES 1998), Dejan Kosanovic’s´ History of Cinema in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1897–1945 (Beograd: Naucnaˇ KMD, Feniks Film. 2005), Nikica Gilic’s´ Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma (Zagreb: Leykam International. 2010), Ante Peterlic’s´ Iz povijesti hrvatske filmologije i filma (Zagreb: Leykam International. 2012), to name but a few notable works. 11. Indeed, efforts to establish neatly divided ethnocentric film traditions have extended to Yugoslav cinematic tradition itself. Nebojša Jovanovic´ (2012) has noted that these efforts to divide Yugoslav cinema into separate ethno-national film histories has resulted in an implication that Yugoslav cinema as such never truly existed. 12. Dubravka Lakic,´ “Ðavo je bio civil”/“Devil was a civilian,” Politika,Novem- ber 3, 2011 (http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/Kritika/filmska-kritika/Davo-je- bio-civil.lt.html) 13. Iordanova classifies under diasporic post-Yugoslav films’ additional titles such as Zoran Solomun’s Tired Companions (1997), Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful Peo- ple (1999), and Damir Marjanovic’s´ My Father’s Angel (1999). Other examples of accented/diasporic cinema in the post-Yugoslav context include Goran Rebic’s´ Yugofilm (1997),

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