ABSTRACT
Cinematic depictions of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s have almost invariably portrayed the conflict as a resurgence of ancient and repressed ethnic hatreds that were simply waiting to erupt. Films such as Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) or Srđjan Dragojević’s Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996), while both critical of the Milošević regime in many respects, eventually fall back on traditional clichés of the Balkans as a region of ancient and repressed hatreds. What is absent from this account is any sense of the internal resistance to ethnic nationalism and authoritarianism during this period (see Cohen, 2001; Gagnon, 2004; Gordy, 1999; Lazić, 1999; Thomas, 1999). In repeated surveys of the population of the former Yugoslavia, the majority of people never identified themselves in ethno-nationalist terms and Milošević’s Socialist Party never held a majority of the votes (Gagnon, 2004; Gordy, 1999; Woodward, 1995). Balkan film scholars have also reflected on the way in which non-nationalist voices in the conflict were silenced or ignored, forcing writers and filmmakers to take sides, if they wanted to be heard at all (Iordanova, 2001). In relation to the most protracted and violent of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Levi notes, the recognition of the three ethnonational parties as the sole representatives of the Bosnian people after the 1990 elections effectively negated the existence of a fourth faction, ‘the significant and certainly not all too easily dismissable segment of the population consisting of all those who refused to be labeled exclusively in ethnic terms’ (Levi, 2007: 2).
