Rethinking the Balkans

There is, probably, no better time for a book on Balkan film and media to appear. After a decade of crises, amidst the ambiguity of Balkan cultural definition, Dina Iordanova's book Cinema of flames: Balkan film, culture and the media clearly states its intention to discuss the body of Balkan films as an entity rather than as a loose composition of national cinemas. In this sense Dina Iordanova's study can be regarded as a significant contribution to an ambitious collective project being undertaken by a growing group of prominent Balkan-born intellectuals to re-define Balkan cultural space. These include intellectuals such as Ismail Kadare, Andrei Cordescu, Dubravka Ugresic, Slavenka Drakulic, Nevena Dakovic, Milica Bakic-Hayden, Maria Todorova, and Slavoj Zizek. As part of this collective effort, Iordanova's book aims "to create an impact by changing unproductive approaches and entrenched patterns of thinking"(23). According to Dina Iordanova, the concept of Eastern European cinema - regarded as an entity - already belongs to the past. In contrast, Balkan cinema emerges as a phenomenon with a number of common characteristics which need precise conceptualization. Her prediction is that the region will attract more attention in the future as it presents a liminal, transitive zone characterized by intensive internal transformation. Although some national cinemas from the region are relatively well known around the world (Greek, Yugoslav) and some directors are international celebrities (Kusturica, Angelopoulos), the idea of the region's communality has never been popular. To define Balkan cinema as an entity seems a risky undertaking given the stubborn internal resistance to unifying definitions. Among the scanty Balkan cinema studies (Stoil, 1974, 1982), Iordanova's project strives to create a context for further examination. Her work through the last decade sought to identify specific features of Balkan-ness, to expand the territory of investigation beyond the traditional one-national cinema approach and to re-define the Balkans as a common discursive space rather than as a sum of national cultures. Although she accepts that it is difficult to identify some unifying cinematic style, she looks for commonality on other levels, focussing on shared themes and artistic strategies. This approach, she believes, will shatter "the entrenched patterns of thought" and the stereotypical interpretations. The book presents film and media production from and about the Balkans in the 1990s, the decade of the Yugoslav conflicts. It is particularly concerned with the crisis in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The study covers feature films and documentaries, visual and printed media and literary and academic essays. Priority is given to contextual rather than textual analysis. Such a comparative strategy allows the juxtaposition of the "look from within" and the "look from without". Balkan discourse is articulated in debate with Western ideas about representation. If their encounter is not a "declared war of representations" it definitely highlights a certain gap between the two discourses. The media role in this process is clearly defined, especially in the discussion of its role in situations of crisis. It is in this dialogue between both views that the controversial issue of common Balkan identity is developed.

What does define the specificity and commonality of Balkan culture? Is it possible to clearly identify such characteristics and to trace them within the several national cultures designated as "Balkan"? What does it mean to inhabit both the margins of Europe and the transition-zone of Euroasia? The zeal of individual countries to neglect their affiliation to the Balkans and their common historical roots is a familiar phenonmenon in the Balkan internal debate. In the external discourse, however, the Balkan cultural space has already been defined as an entity, although in negative terms. In Western discourse the Balkans have been traditionally represented as Europe's other. Balkan cultures were described as "uncivilised" and "unsophisticated" and the conflicts there as a consequence of these. Due to such characterizations the Balkans attracted a monolithic definition - "a dark and primitive periphery doomed to eternal troubles" (73), and inhabited by "violence-crazed and violence-craving" people, who may be "exotic and attractive" but "who are impossible to deal with" (63). Authors such as Larry Wolf, Maria Todorova and Milica Bakic-Hayden among others, traced in detail the construction of this frozen image. According to Dina Iordanova, this representation is an effect of inertia rather than a deliberate policy of denigration. Nevertheless, her text aims to break these long lasting stereotypes and to offer a new vision of Balkan culture. However, it is not the historical process of establishing representational patterns that is Iordanova's priority. While recognizing their persistence and influence, she has instead chosen to concentrate on their crucial and damaging role in times of crisis. This is the context in which the issue of admissability -the Balkans belonging to the European cultural space (chapter 1)- becomes a central problem. The region's geographic marginality paradoxically was transformed into a policy of marginalization, its suitability to European cultural standards constantly questioned. The issue of belonging/exclusion generated myriad artistic interpretations, which Iordanova examines in depth. For instance, the specific issue of representation of the Gypsy minority within the Balkan discourse (chapter 11) seems to get at the core of the problem of self-representation. The image of the Gypsies (and any other minority) appears as a metonym of the Balkan condition itself: "the Balkanites are the Gypsies of Europe" (216). Gypsies' marginality in the Balkan context reflects the Balkans' marginality in European context. While the Balkan preoccupation with this issue may seem an "innocuous fixation", the role of the media in the process could be associated with the "gravest misdemeanours that characterize the Balkan region today" (52). The international media re-affirmed and further facilitated the continent's symbolic division by situating the debate on the Balkan crisis within a cultural rather than socio-political framework. The media politics of representation revitalised the "primordialist argument" by emphasizing the "ancient" nature of current hatred and ethnic hostility. Discussing the role of the media image/text in the construction of such visions, Iordanova links it with certain narrative strategies, referring to the travelogue form as dominant (chapter 2). The visitor's gaze situates the Balkans as an object of desire and as an exotic, strange and idiosyncratic site. If we accept the assumption that the travelogue form dominates the internal discourse as well, numerous questions arise. Why does the Balkan narrative need an "observer"

within its own narrative space? What is the function of the master "foreign" gaze in the internal narratives? How is the travelogue form read within the Balkan context? What are the key images and words that make the Balkan consciousness more sensitive to this particular form rather than to other narrative structures? Dina Iordanova's discussion of all these issues focuses on the capacity of the travelogue form to accommodate both internal and external views while constantly crossing an inside/outside line. Its dominance, according to her, is an effect of the "European complex" - of an uncritical Eurocentrism combined with, "a specific voluntary selfexoticism". While the process of narrativization is a way to "tame" the hostility of the foreign gaze, at the same time, it mirrors the established stereotypes by simply reproducing the image of the Balkans as violent, uncontrollable and exotic. The travelogue form, more than other narrative forms, makes "the mirror effect" visible by emphasizing "the established framework of concessionary self-denigration and lack of self-confidence", "the reluctance to engage into subversion" (68), the obsession with the past as "drama" and "bloody tragedy" and the "obvious predisposition to re-enact it" obsessively (72). Iordanova's suggestion is that the Balkan discourse "will most likely fail to question radically" this traditional narrative form (68). In fact, the travelogue form itself changes continuously under the pressure of "migrating minds" which shift hierarchical positions, power relations and priorities in the process. How does the Balkan travelogue genre respond to these shifts? Discussing Balkan migration in the last chapters of her book, Iordanova does not return to the genre transformation in the light of both internal and external changes concerning the Balkans. In her discussion of the actual violence and its cinematic/media representation (chapter 8) Iordanova's vision differs from general opinion. While the Balkans is stereotypically associated with violence and turbulence, its cinema's attitude to violence is not that of celebration. In Balkan film/media, claims Iordanova, violence is almost always presented as a painful, non-desirable, and self-destructive experience. As a rule, Balkan films emphasize the devastating effect of the violent cycles. They are much less preoccupied with the aestheticization of screen violence compared to other world cinemas: "When looking at cinema, it is difficult to sustain the Balkans' reputation for endemic violence. Compared to the gun-crazy tradition of the Western, to the elaborately choreographed martial art movies, or to the bullet-ridden escapades of Hong Kong thrillers, Balkan cinema has exploited very little of the spectacular visual quality of violence. In relation to these high-profile traditions, Balkan film violence is a poor relative [. . .]" (161). But how can one explain the eruption of violence that characterized the Yugoslav succession in 1990s? Iordanova finds the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's model an appropriate theoretical framework to explain this complex issue. Appadurai noted a strange repetition of terms like "deception", "betrayal", "imposture", "secrecy"', and "treachery" in reports about the ethnic wars in different parts of the world. This made him examine the links between local imagination and large-scale identities circulated through the media. Thus the concept of "violated trust" - of neighbor-turned-to-villain becomes a key plausibly to explain the eruption of ethnic violence within a global context. Iordanova argues that this precise pattern - the transformation of yesterday's

neighbors into today's enemies - could be found as a recurring motif in Balkan film plots. What Appadurai calls "cognitive paranoia about the identity of the ethnic enemy" seems to underpin most of the Balkan's media stories of the 1990s. Appadurai's rejection of the "primordilist" argument as an explanation of the current ethnic violence, and his insistence on the media's crucial role in recent ethnic conflicts, allows Iordanova to bring together issues of ethnicity, violence, and globality in her own discussion of locality. Thus, the central argument of her book, the definition of the Balkans as a cultural entity, acquires a new dimension. In the context of the global/local interaction, to seek the roots of the conflicts in the various local "exoticisms" means to seek another synonym of primordialism. The extension of the conceptual framework from regional to global relocates the issue in a different grid and in a different cause-effect chain. For instance, the issue of the internalized bad image could be interpreted not as a straight "mirror effect" in the process of communication but rather as a complex play of perceptual and self-perceptual images. Similarly, it is almost impossible anymore to lock the interpretation of the Balkan identity into a local cause-effect chain, as the world mass media play a significant role by shifting the traditional priorities and dominants. The correlation of national/transnational is an increasingly sensitive zone in Balkan discourse as the international media interacts with already complex local image/text formations, the ones which are already hybrid cultural structures. Iordanova argues that violence - both actual and cinematic - has more to do with an identity crisis than with territorial aspirations or even ethnic hostility. What ignites ethnic violence nowadays is not so much the contest of language, blood, belonging or territory (although these issues often appear in nationalistic discourses), but rather shattered identities. The uncertainty about the other's "real" identity generates suspicions and preemptive violence; its bodily ritualistic aspect serves not only to symbolically uncover and expose "the enemy within the body" of the others, but also to confirm one's own identity. At this point Iordanova comes close to Julia Kristeva's comments on the Balkan crises as huge dramas of shattered identities of nations captured in the unstable, insecure and shifting middle ground between Eastern and Western cultural spaces. Being aware of the crucial role of history (past, recollection, memory, forgetting) in the structure of ethnic sentiments, Iordanova provides an extended discussion on the representation of the past in film/media. Thus, the uses and abuses of history emerge as a central issue in the internal Balkan debate as it brings together memory, rhetoric, violence and gender. Outside of the Balkans, its history is viewed as recurring cycles of violent conflicts, endless vendettas and bloody feuds. The Balkans sees its own history as "drama" and "bloody tragedy". Comparing both views, Iordanova underlines that both are focused on compulsive repetition and stubborn re-enactment within different historical, political and social contexts. Her analysis includes a wide spectrum of cinematic visions on the past: from Dusan Makavejev's famous historical collages, to Zelimir Zelnic mockumentary (Tito among the Serbs for a second time Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 1993) and Manchevski's pseudo-historical narrative of what - in Robert Rosenstone's words - "has not yet happened"(Before the rain Republic of Macedonia/France/UK 1994). Several conceptual similarities emerge within the diversity of approaches. All Balkan national cinemas are concerned with the problem of the

manipulation of the past for the purposes of the present, with the selectivity of historical references in the nationalist discourse, and with the emphasis on the belligerence, troubles, and "premeditated murders". The common orientation of most historical plots is toward traumatic memory rather than to examples of cultural syncretism and cultural translations - an alternative which is an equally strong trend in Balkan culture. In this context, the famous historical sagas of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos and Emir Kusturica's carnivalesque, subversive strategies voice what Iordanova calls an "ultimately subjective account of the personal experience of the history and regionality" (103). Kusturica is given a special place in the book. Detailed discussion on his Underground (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/France/Germany/Hungary 1995) appears right in the centre of textual composition (chapter 6), thus implying his special significance within Iordanova's map of Balkan cinematic culture. The film is conceptualized "as symptomatic moral case" which is "worth discussing beyond the narrow scope of the Balkan conflict."(112). Analysed as text and context, the film's artistic ideas and message are linked to its production history, reception, and aftermath debate. While the internal critics strongly accused the director of "collaboration with the aggressors" (because of the Serb financial support of the production), most of the outside critics were focused on the artistic qualities of the film and its specific Balkan spirit and temper. The chapter leaves the issue of Kusturica's "moral relativism" open to further comments. I tend to associate Kusturica's "misdemeanour" with his publicly declared refusal to confine himself to a clear-cut ethnic identity. In the midst of the sharpest ethnic confrontation in former Yugoslavia he continued to regard himself as a Yugoslav, rather than as a Bosnian or as a Muslim. There is probably a link between the scandalous conduct of the Balkan "enfant terrible" and his definition of Balkan identities as fluid and multiple. According to the director, the paradoxical ambiguity and multiplicity of the Balkan identities are their immanent and even advantageous characteristics. "Only if one acquires multinational identity one can realise the Balkans" says the director in one of his interviews, which is not cited in the book. Ironically, precisely because of its controversies, Kusturica's case serves as another strong argument supporting the idea of the communality of the Balkan cultural space, composed of double and multiple rather than "pure" national identities. This is why "taking sides" (chapter 7) is such a dramatic dilemma in the Balkan context. It is not only Kusturica who dismisses clear-cut ethnic identity. There is a long list of Yugoslav films of the 1990s, which are concerned with the same issue. Srdjan Dragojevic's Pretty village, pretty flame (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Greece 1996) is probably the strongest example. By concentrating on the meaninglessness and destructiveness of ethnic war, these films make an attempt to "rise above damaging side-taking by showing the madness of all sides [. . .]" (141). Here, the Western media involvement was crucial. It clearly took sides and "dismissed the very idea of diversity". By seeking the dramatic in their war reports, the media showed the Yugoslav crisis as a series of clashes of "pure" rather than hybrid ethnic/religious/cultural identities.

The elegant transition from Kusturica's "moral relativism" to a more general moral dilemma - villains vs. victims (chapter 9) - opens a new direction in the central argument. One of the moral paradoxes of the profit-oriented media is the obvious disproportion of the representation of villains and victims. In the Yugoslav case there was a tendency to portray villains - the politicians, the thugs, the warlords or the retarded 'killing machines' - as "action heroes who led the narrative". The victims were more often "passive extras, whose only function was to enable the narrative to evolve as defined by villainous protagonists" (194). At this point Iordanova's study touches one of the most sensitive issues of the Balkan internal debate. The concept of victimhood is part of a larger ideological and political construction of nearly every group involved in the conflict. While recognizing victimhood as one of the basic aspects of the Yugoslav nationalist discourse, Iordanova regards the stubborn use of the term "victims" (for the Bosnian women, for instance) by the media as a process of additional vicitimization of people who have already suffered. Such stylistic, tropological and terminological nuances are often under Iordanova's scrutiny, as they are indicative of the world media's policy. The media developed such subtle mechanisms of manipulation that most of their visual and verbal accents remain unaccountable. However, the multicultural Balkan space proved to be extremely sensitive to these sophisticated influences. This is one of the reasons why Iordanova pays such precise attention to details of image/text constructions in both Balkan and international media coverage of the events of the 1990s. The final chapter of the book signals the surprising reversal in the Balkan mindset. In the process of "unthinking Eurocentrism", the Balkan "migrating mind" goes to the world, crossing multiple borders. The most famous Balkan directors nowadays work in different parts of the world. Kusturica, Manchevski, and Paskalevic shuttle between Europe and the U.S., their cinema uniquely uniting both Balkan and universal elements. Even the predominantly male image of the Balkans (tough, barbarian warriors) seems to crumble: it is women-writers, whom Iordanova sees as a crucial intellectual force in the process of re-defining the Balkans, as Michnik, Havel and Konrad were for Central European countries' re-definition in the 1980s. The dynamics of this constant move comes not only from the margins to the centre but from many different directions, thus disturbing previously established hierarchies. What will we call Balkan cinema in the future? Is it that created within the region's borders, or that which reveals a specific Balkan experience no matter where its creators live? "The expanding universe" of Balkan cinema (and any other local cinema), the dispersed film community, and the international conditions of filmmaking - all these reformulate such traditional notions as cultural reproduction and national cinema. The book's concluding chapter outlines the directions and fluctuations of these dynamics. After the decade of war and turmoil in former Yugoslavia, it seems that the priorities in the collective Balkan mind are re-arranged. The fixation on Europe begins to languish. The initial quest for admissibility steps back and gives way to another hierarchy of places and priorities. An alternative self-perception makes its way to the surface, contesting the entrenched ethnocentric visions.

The argument advanced in Iordanova's book offers abundant material to support the idea of a common Balkan space. Re-defining the Balkans as a cultural entity, she simultaneously locates this entity within the more general framework of the migrating world. The cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary and cross-media approach seems the only adequate method to cover such a transitional subject. Although Yugoslav crisis culture is Iordanova's principal preocupation, the book as a whole, overcomes the exhausted one-culture approach. In a sense, Cinema of flames is for Balkan film studies what Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans is for Balkan historical studies. Both seek to define the Balkans as a semantic entity; both set the trends for further investigations and both are involved in the task of re-thinking Balkan studies. Iordanova's Bulgarian background, her knowledge of at least three Balkan languages and her expertise on the region';s history and culture bring significant weight to her project. The text's inclusive information makes it a very useful teaching resource. It is a good introductory reading for everyone who is interested in Balkan cinema/media studies. And, above all, this book is for those who are willing to examine the subtle and crucial role of images and words circulated around the world - before, during and after times of crisis.