Phenomena such as "Titostalgia", nationalist mobilization, nation-branding, rewriting of history, inventing of traditions, and symbolic violence that have surfaced in recent years are interpreted in the light of Yugoslavia's legacy. Against the still widely held presumption that the cultural production of allegedly "totalitarian" states such as Yugoslavia can be neglected as they were penetrated by state ideology, the contributions offer a corrective image of the complex ideological dynamics and discoursive potentials in various artistic and cultural fields. Within the vast field of Balkan Studies such visual materials have rarely been taken for important empirical evidence. "On Retracing Images: The essays in this collection disclose cultural and political dynamics as they occurred before and in the wake of Yugoslavia's dissolution (1991-92) by analyzing visual data such as film, art, graffiti, street-art, public advertisement, memorials, and monuments. From the narrative of Ali Baba ve 7 Dwarfs film produced in Turkey in the year 2015, (Yılmaz) distorted representation of Balkan image created by the Balkan representations are studied. ![]() The repeating codes and the framework of the style of Balkan cinema are discussed through these analyzed films. An Unforgettable Summer/Romania (Pintilie, 1994), Ulysses' Gaze/Greece (Angelopoulos, 1995), Pretty Villages Pretty Flame/Serbia (Dragojevic, 1996) and The Perfects Circle/Bosnia Herzegovina (Kenovic, 1997) are movies that are being analyzed. In this regard, four important films of post-1990s Balkan Cinema are discussed and repeating codes are analyzed. This study analyzes the Balkan representations in cinema and the impact of these representations on Balkan image. Representations produced both in Balkans and under Hollywood conditions distribute an image produced towards Balkans in the world by prioritizing it over the Balkan reality. The world considers the movies shot in Balkan countries within the " Balkan " parenthesis. In that sense, while Balkan movies focus on the singular stories, they at the same time produce Balkan image. Balkan representations are produced in a way to include this essential wholeness and difference or in cases where this wholeness is not shown, they do not get the opportunity and interest for the demonstration. Secondly, Balkans reproduces the Eurocentric perspective and reflect it on their speeches and at the same time, legitimize the Eurocentric perspective and make it permanent. However, during this process, violence was removed from its political and historical context and located in a way to point at the nature of the Balkans and determine the Balkan image in Balkan representations in cinema. After 1990 following the fall of Yugoslavia, it seems that nation-states were emerging for good. In the process of transition from empire to nation-state, there are ethnic conflicts and migrations in Balkans that are continuous. Whether this is subversion or proliferation of Balkanism remains to be settled. ![]() Finally, I conclude with an appeal to giving intra-textual evidence or rebuttals of Balkanism greater emphasis than extra-textual ones, especially because in Kusturica’s case it reveals that the often overlooked aesthetic break that takes place with Dom za vesanje goes hand in hand with the representation of Balkan sterotypes. Thus, we should focus on the comments made not the commentators. I point out that the study of Balkanism is itself a political project and thus has an ideological slant, and that the commentators, regardless of their nationality stand to gain or lose something. Secondly, I tackle the reviewer’s skepticism of “insider” analysis because it necessarily has an ideological/nationalistic slant (the reviewer points out all ex-Yugoslav commentators have something to gain or lose by the virtue of their nationalities). Nevertheless, I demonstrate that the focus should be switched from Underground to Zivot je cudo. I argue that it is illegitimate to expand the canon to works the circulation of which is limited and that is why Kusturica remains our best bet. New movies and director’s should be sought out in order to apply Todorova’s (1997) theoretical framework. First, the reviewer points out that studying Kusturica’s movies, especially Underground, brings nothing new to the table because it rehashes old formulas touching either on ethnic propaganda (Cerovic 1995, Finkielkraut 1995a, 1995b) or on Balkan stereotypes (Iordanova 2001, Zizek 1997a, 1997b, Levi 2007). Prompted by comments and criticisms of a paper dealing with Emir Kusturica’s Zivot je cudo made by an anonymous reviewer I hope to address three issues: 1) the expansion of the canon studied, 2) the ideological slant of the study, and 3) the question of weight given to extra-textual evidence.
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