Disintegration in frames: Film form, national identity, and inter-ethnic relations in the (post-) Yugolslav cinema

Disintegration in Frames examines manifestations of the complex relationship between audio-visual form and ideology in a number of films---and occasionally video and television productions---from the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, and its successor states, especially Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. The focus of the dissertation is on the variety of ways in which national identity---whether identity conceived along the lines of trans/multi-ethnicity, or other, more exclusive and ethnocentric forms of identity (Serb, Croat, etc.)---is approached, evaluated, or critically dissected, in works such as: Emir Kusturica's Underground, Srdjan Dragojevic's Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, Stjepan Sabljak's Surrounded, and the television series The Top List of the Surrealists.; The study seeks to develop a systematic critique of ideology in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema, at the foundation of which critique is the following crucial premise about the federation's break-up: naturalization of ethnic intolerance in the region---its seeming "inevitability"---is the key mechanism of ideological deception, by means of which the local political and social authorities have justified their territorial aspirations/war, and their lust for power. The project offers a series of exhaustive, historically, culturally, and theoretically firmly contextualized, analyses of texts produced in the period extending from 1980---the year when Josip Broz Tito, the father of the modern Yugoslav nation, died---through the late 1980s, the period of socialism's gradual collapse, to the mid and late 1990s---the time of Yugoslavia's break-up, and wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Some prestigious examples of politically radical filmmaking from the late 1960s---Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, for instance---are also discussed.; All films are engaged on a level which pays close attention to their underlying aesthetic conceptions, and their concrete formal properties. The distinct stylistic characteristics of the chosen works---relationship between image and sound, narrative logic or the absence thereof, mise-en-scene, composition, camera work---are considered in relation to the specific socio-political and cultural values they textually reinforce.