Justified Images: Committed Documentary after Yugoslavia

Abstract

Justified Images is a study of contemporary documentary cinema from the territories formerly known as Yugoslavia. It argues that non-fiction filmmakers in the Yugoslav successor states are developing a diachronous model of political cinema. Dismantling the aesthetic and narrative grammars of immediacy, urgency, and exigency, cineastes in the ex-communist Balkans have, I argue, devised documentary forms emerging from strategies of temporal disjunction, repetition, and interruption. In this dissertation, I constellate four filmmakers and filmmaking collectives – Nika Autor and the Newsreel Front, Ian Soroka, doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran), and Želimir Žilnik – in an effort to diagram the ways in which they all operate against what we could call the doxa of actionist presentism: the idea that action needs to be taken here and now with no time to spare, lest the fight for a better world be lost. Instead of agitating for instant intervention, these artists take a step back and critically reactivate history (especially the history of film) while upholding their commitments to the current moment. They do so by unearthing transnational archives of defunct media formats (the state-sponsored newsreel, in the case of Autor), by producing creative sequels of their own early work (Žilnik), and by hijacking generic tropes and technics in the service of anti-fascist politics (Soroka and doplgenger). By dwelling in the aperture of historical intervals, the filmmakers activate and operationalize interruption as the onus of their projects, not unlike how a justified text links left and right with a discontinuous sequence of words and spaces. Through rupture, asynchrony, and the rerouting of undead images, an original self-reflexive form of engaged documentary is, I conclude, being forged in Southeast Europe as we speak.