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to everyday popular culture as well as highbrow literature and cinema (Imre 2014 ). Indeed, south-east European studies uses the critique of balkanism to discern a common politics of representation and exotification – with many incentives for creators to internalise exoticising Western gazes on their region – affecting music, cinema and literature alike (Iordanova 2001 ; Baker 2008 ; Volčič 2013 ). 1 More than just a parallel to what Stuart Hall termed the ‘spectacle of the “Other” ’ (Hall 1997 ) driving the construction of racial difference since imperial
accompanied by connected yet contending tendencies, socialism and communism, which could now form compelling friendships and now forge intimate enmities. These intellectual-political impulses had a profound impact on the arts – from painting to literature to theater to cinema – in the 1940s. The tumultuous times of famine and suffering, an antifascist war and subaltern struggles, the end of empire and
the cinema era. Indeed, despite the past tense in the above, as the Marx Brothers were still producing films as Dialectic of Enlightenment was written, this popular art would seem to be still alive for Adorno. As in his approving reference a few pages later to ‘those features of the culture industry by which it resembles the circus’, the implication is plain – a non-pernicious use of ‘buffoonery and clowning’ would be more generally possible were it not for the ‘monopoly’ organization of production that Adorno tends to assume. Even on this point, however, there
the cinema as an institution whose historical function was largely to ‘paralyze social life, reifying it into ornamental patterns, and evacuating the possibility for individual judgment or critical thought’.30 Such a view of cinema as being primarily and institutionally conservative was also Adorno’s default position at the time.31 But in Kracauer’s second English-language book, Theory of Film (1960), the reifying process of filmic representation is given a more open-ended and even positive spin. There, cinematic reification appears as a force capable of realizing
… Balkan Otherness’ in defence of civilisation; its perception of the Balkans as ‘the terrain of ethnic savagery’ that can only be reconciled by ascribing racism to the Other, not oneself; an ‘inverted racism that celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Balkan Other’, a fetishisation which for Žižek (as for the film scholar Dina Iordanova ( 1998 )) explains why hedonistic visions of the Balkans in the cinema of directors like Emir Kusturica are so popular; and a ‘logic of displaced racism’ whereby ‘[b]ecause Balkan remains a part of Europe and is inhabited by white
allusion for the Parisian readership of Cahiers du Cinema . However, its insight was considerable, and certainly prophetic. At the theoretical core of Barthes's conception of mythology is a proposed ‘second order semiological system’ whereby the Saussurean signifier/signified division of the linguistic sign is reiterated. Thus, an established sign becomes a signifier once again and a supraordinate new sign within a ‘metalanguage’ is so produced – in effect a realm of metaphor. 37 It was by this means
leading proponent later adapted the technique to the needs of the Nazi regime. 100 Its leading proponent, Hugo Münsterberg, who also emigrated to the USA, wrote one of the first theoretical treatises on cinema and used cinematic techniques within his psychotechnics. 101 One of the main Weimar empirical psychotechnical studies conducted concerned The Tiller Girls dancing troupe. Any of these developments may have suggested to Adorno the relevance of psychotechnics to the
Violence (1997), for a feminist analysis of Girard and Kristeva on the question of sacrifice. 9780719069604_4_000.qxd 09/01/2009 09:54 AM Page 13 Introduction to that ubiquitous mirror of contemporary souls, mainstream cinema, to see the ways such ideologies are rarely applied to discourses on love. In offering a critique of the patriarchal and masculine character of these very notions of autonomy, independence and individuality, second-wave feminism has undoubtedly paved the way for a rethinking of women’s relations to these symbolic, secular attributes of power
existed in cultural and intellectual production, post-Yugoslav leaders did not express them in the way that Tito had championed an alternative diplomatic position. Post-Yugoslav state-of-the-nation cinema, with plots that juxtaposed members of various marginalised social groups to symbolise different aspects of post-Yugoslav crisis and dislocation, not uncommonly contained undocumented migrant characters from the Global South, particularly Chinese – though most lacked agency and primarily seemed to be there so that their visible, racialised difference could represent
was quickly abandoned in favour of a policy of silence and forgetting that did not address the fact that there was deep support for Nazism in the country. For example, reports of Jews returning to Vienna broadcast in cinemas after the war were greeted with cries of ‘Gas ‘em.’ 90 For much of the postwar era Austria had been able to ignore the past by emphasising its status as ‘Hitler’s first victim.’ 91 The opening of Austrian memory was driven by the fall of the Soviet Union and the revelation that President Kurt Waldheim had lied about his wartime service as an