Events

New Europe, Old Europe: Balkan Masculinities in War Cinema

We invite you to join us for a lecture by Tomislav Z. Longinovic, New Europe, Old Europe: Balkan Masculinities in War Cinema at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, February 21, 2006 at 7 p.m. Professor Longinovic will be introduced by Dragan Kujundzic, Chair and Professor, Department of German and Slavic Studies, University of Florida. This event is sponsored by the Harn Museum of Art, the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and the Center for European Studies. Admission is free.

Dr. Tomislav Z. Longinovic will lecture on Balkan war cinema with film clips drawn from Underground by Emir Kusturica, Cabaret Balkan by Goran Paskaljevic and Before the Rain by Milcho Manchevski. According to Longinovic, these films are the symptoms of an internalized culture of "self-Balkanization," articulated by the filmmakers as a response both to the exclusion of their native lands from the Western vision of civilization and as an implicit critique of the domestic glorification of righteous uses of violence. The experience of being watched by the West has reduced the repertoire of available masculine images worthy of being played back to the imaginary gaze of the viewer in the West. Characterized by the hopeless repetition of masculine stereotypes, these films represent the post-Yugoslav space as a zone where distortions of extreme passions strive to satisfy the demand for participation in the violence and war as observers from afar.

Tomislav Z. Longinovic is a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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