(AUTO)EXOTISATION OF THE BALKANS AND THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE BEARER OF MEANING IN THREE EXAMPLES OF “THE SEVENTH ART”

Povijesno se, a napose početkom i tijekom 20. stoljeća, geografski neodređen prostor Balkana u “zapadnjačkoj” spisateljsko-umjetničkoj produkciji opisuje u terminima brutalnog, sadističkog, neupravljivog te naposljetku polu-, odnosno, neciviliziranog. Analizom i interpretacijom triju recentnih primjera filmske umjetnosti – Prije kiše (1994.) Milča Mančevskog, Underground (1995.) Emira Kusturice i Kino Lika (2007.) Dalibora Matanića, u radu se pokazuje žilavost diskursa o egzotičnome Drugome, što u produkciji sineasta s prostora Balkana kulminira u fenomenu (auto)-egzotizacije, odnosno prihvaćanju i repetiranju prikaza stereotipnih životnih modusa na poluotoku.Through analysis and interpretation of three very successful films, examples of the cinema art well-received by critics and audiences alike – Milča Mančevski’s Prije kiše (1994), Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) and Dalibor Matanić’s Kino Lika (2007) – the twofold discourse that emerges from that small opus of ‘the seventh art’ is analysed in this paper. Relying on the one hand on the sterotypical-exotisation markets present in Western writing and artistic output (travelogues, pamphlets, paintings, etc.), it is possible to interpret those films within the realm of the auto- and/or voluntary self-exotisation that has become the favoured mode of self-presentation for many directors from the Balkan peninsula region. On the other hand, one also finds ethno-anthropological issues grafted on to this production discourse, since the film directors in question almost always underpin their own artistic decisions with an empiric and documentary quality that escalates into an assumed auto-ethnography of sorts in which one’s own culture and the culture of the Other need to coincide, also giving rise to an authoritative discourse on exoticized closeness and/or the assumed more authentic representation of the relations and mode of existence in one’s own thematicised clime