https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4491-4763
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ABSTRACT
The study is concerned with the possibility of reframing the visibility of migrants onscreen in Želimir Žilnik’s documentary films. It is claimed that Žilnik’s selected works such as the Kennedi trilogy open up a space for reversing the lens of the dominant hegemonies of viewing by enacting a productive instability in performing their actual lives on the one side but also provoking the spectators to reconstruct stories in the same way the protagonists do. In including the voice of the migrant, as well as (de)constructing his own presence, we can understand Žilnik’s films as formulating a political background in the very logic of the frame that disrupts self-colonising or balkanising perspective as it gives voice to those that were usually silent, silenced or implicated. The study proposes a possible space, both physical and epistemological for the articulation of the right to be seen in films that thematise those usually found on the outskirts of social visibility by proposing that complex narratives and images irreducible to the general idea of ‘the Balkans’ can be a transformative social and cultural gesture as it rearticulate power-positions of those marginalised of the level of counter-narrative, counter-archive, and the counter-image.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 It should be noted that the majority of refugees from Syria did not traverse to Europe, contrary to the populist beliefs in the EU, most of the refugees were, and still are, in the neighbouring countries in the Middle East.
2 In 2015 there was total of a little over a million arrivals to Europe, mostly through Greece, resulting in IOM calling the situation the biggest European refugee crisis since Second World War. The process of closing the Balkan corridor began on 18 November 2015. Austrian first introduced daily and annual caps on the number of asylum seekers, and the collapse of the coalition between Germany and Austria in early 2016 sped up the dissolution. The corridor was closed on 8 March 2016, leaving almost 80 thousand people stranded in ‘transit countries’.
3 Some films, such as Early Works (1969) and Black Film (1971) were crucial in forming the ‘crni talas’ (Black Wave) movement in aesthetical and political sense.
4 Želimir Žilnik (Citation2005).
5 Dimitrijević goes as far as to say that the connection between Žilnik and those ‘left behind’ was influenced by his own life story – he was born in a concentration camp during WW2.
6 See, for example Le Normand (Citation2021).
7 Recently, there has been a noticeable surge in both amateur, low budget, as well as professionally produced films such as Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi 2016), The Wire (Tiha Gudac 2021), Lifeboat (Skye Fitzgerald 2018), Havarie (Philip Scheffner 2016) Near our Border (Martina Troxler 2021), Revenir (Kumut Imesh & David Fedele 2018) etc.
9 The trilogy consists of films Kenedi Goes Back Home (2003), Kenedi, Lost and Found (2005) and Kenedi is Getting Married (2007).
10 It is enough to remind of the political crisis regarding Hong Kong’s and China diplomatic relations from 2021 when the UK stepped up to offer up to 3,5 million passports to all those afraid of potential Chinese infringement on their wellbeing. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-hongkong-security-britain-china-idUSKBN29Y0Q1.
11 For more, see Naficy (Citation2001).
12 Even the EU’s European Cultural Foundation recognises the deficiency in The Displaced in Media Recipe Book (European Cultural Foundation Citation2018) that starts with the need for a change in storytelling perspective, posing that migrants need to become authors of their own stories: ‘as artists, writers, journalists and broadcasters. Without their voices, the media tends to represent migrants with, at best, guesswork and, at worst, prejudice’ (Citation2018, 3). Their project not only highlights textual experiences put also provides a platform for articulation for individual stories of exiles in Europe.
13 In a workshop held in Sofia in the summer od 2023, scholar and activist Jelena Savić noted the danger of overestimating the political power of Žilnik's films. She claims that Žilnik cannot be seen as a completely transparent storyteller as his epistemic position is that of the producer of representations of Roma. While the argument stands, I claim that Žilnik's films, taking into account the limitations of film medium and documentary form, provoke as much as they can, the precise form of representations usually employed.
14 He proposes that ‘every cut in an edited film is haunted by lost footage, rushes that were shot but did not make the final edit’ (Oldenborgh Citation2022, 108). His research deals with the scenes captured during the siege of Mostar in 1993 and 1994, edited and prepared for TV (the so-called rushes) that were never publicly shown.
15 The latter was the basis of Benjamin’s discussion on the power of the image, as well as Barthes’ early deconstruction of the rhetoric of the image by disentangling language from the image to prove the image as language in itself.
16 Insofar, his oeuvre is akin to that of famous German cineaste Harun Farocki, who throughout his career alienated documentary film by demystifying its creation process and by making himself seen.
17 Žilnik remarks in an interview for an opening of his exhibition in Vienna that the methodology of filming is always the same: long talks with the characters in the story before filming. Before shooting Logbook Serbistan, Žilnik stated that he learned more about particularities of migration from migrants themselves then from European of Balkan Media.
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Boris Ružić
Boris Ružić, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Rijeka, Croatia. He teaches four courses engaged with film studies and visual culture. His interests lie at the intersection of politics of emancipation, (amateur) moving image, migrations, and digital technologies. Publishes scientific articles in books and journals. Co-authored a book regarding film and media analysis. Coordinates three international projects in the domains of humanities, film and visual culture, and memory studies.