and politics of the Balkan region
The people and politics in the region known as "The Balkans" will be examined in discussions and films during a conference being held Thursday-Sunday, Feb. 6-9, at the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), 53 Wall St.
The conference, titled "No Man's Land, Everyone's Image: Cinema in the Balkans," is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the European Studies Council, part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the Hellenic Studies and Film Studies programs, and the WHC.
"Today the very world 'Balkan' still tolls with a deeply ominous tone," write the conference organizers,. " ... But a robust cinema has brought this region and its politics forcefully to our attention. Ravaged by conflict and dangerously mined, this 'Powderkeg of Europe' has served as a charged movie set for off-shore and local productions that are able to exploit its spectacularly varied topography (the Adriatic coastline, fields and villages astride the Danube, dark forested mountains) and its diverse languages, religions and folk rituals."
The goal of the Yale conference, the organizers add, is to show that "the region and its cinema are older and broader than recent politics."
The conference will begin on Thursday at 4 p.m. with a talk titled "Balkan Cinema and the Geopolitical Imaginary" by Fredric Jameson, a professor at Duke University and former Yale faculty member. Jameson will discuss the region as political allegory for the rest of the world, a cautionary tale about the motives and consequences of neo-nationalism.
The conference panels will be: "Space, Territory, Geopolitics," "Registers of Emotion: Comedy, Music, Allegory," "Once There Was a Country: Kusturica," "Cultural Memory/Identity," "Whose Cinema? Who's Writing its History," and "Looking at 'Them', Defining Ourselves."
The cinematic offerings at the conference will include "No Man's Land" by Danis Tanovic, which is set during the Bosnian war and won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; "Before the Rain" by Milcho Manchouski, which looks at the downfall of Yugoslavia and won the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival; "Valkanisateur," a Greek "road film" by Sotoris Goritsas; and more.
Director Rajko Grlic will present two of his films, a documentary chronicling the 2000 presidential race in Croatia, and his renowned work "In the Jaws of Life," which is set during the end of the peaceable Yugoslav era.
Further examples of the breadth and depth of "Balkan" cinema -- including films from Yugoslavia's "black wave" of the 1960s and 1970s and from filmmakers documenting the recent wars of succession -- can be viewed throughout the weekend at a concurrently running WHC videothèque.
A complete schedule can be found at http://www.yale.edu/filmstudiesprogram/Balkan.html. For further information, call the Film Studies Program at (203) 436-4668.
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