goEast_2024_Katalog

The same problems of simplification can be found in
the concept of Eastern European cinema. As the late
Slovenian film critic Nika Bohinc (2009) wrote: “Eastern
European cinema is an elusive categorization, and
sometimes it seems that even those that use it do not
have a clear idea who and what it represents.” Used as an
umbrella term for very different cinemas, “[t]he western
gaze recognizes one strong common denominator in
this rather vast territory of the European ‘East’ which
obviously does not have as much to do with geography
as it does with politics: namely, the social and economic
change each of these countries endured in their
transitions from their old communist regimes to the ‘New’
democratic Europe and its free market.”
Pondering the big questions, with an awareness of the
limitations of a single event, it became obvious that it is
not just a matter of making queer stories about non-normative
sexualities and genders from the peripheries
visible – it is also about queering geographies, histories,
images, theoretical frameworks and the very formats
of symposiums. To that ends, this event brings together
artists, activists, archivists, programmers and scholars
exploring the present, past and future of cinematic
queerness to collectively construct a kaleidoscopic vision
– a multiplicity of fragments forming an image that is fluid.
“‘Zbochenstvo’ [a Ukrainian analogue of “perversion”,
something that is “outside the norm”, – authors note] is
even perverting ‘queer’– turning it over and turning the
conversation from West to East, from North to South, and
upside down.”
Syaivo, ZBOKU collective
The Present
During the Symposium, we will be looking at current practices
and challenges of queer cinema, art and activism in
Slovenia, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan,
Lithuania, Armenia, Croatia, Romania and other countries
and regions, but also engaging critically with the concept
of “Eastern/post-socialist queerness”: What is it exactly?
Is it an imitation of “Western” frameworks or something
different, multiple, potentially disruptive?
As Ukrainian academic and activist Olga Plakhotnik
writes, contemporary queer movements in the region are
trying to reframe and critique “Western models of sexual
citizenship”, offering different imaginaries of sexuality
and political activism. This also entails experimenting
with language and concepts, reclaiming the old
and inventing new ones to challenge “the dominant
position and epistemic authority of Western knowledge”.
Plakhotnik gives an example of a neologism, “heteropryrechenist”
(in Ukrainian), which was coined by an
anonymous activist collective and first started popping
up in Kyiv graffiti. Translated as “heterodoom”, the concept
is related to heteronormativity, but also has a specific
affective intensity connected to regional concerns of
violent erasure: “It signifies not just a social regime that is
grasped analytically but the state of mind that determines
people’s lives painfully and hopelessly.” (2019, 213-214)
Representatives of grassroots art festivals and artists
have been invited to talk about local strategies and struggles:
making, excavating and/or curating queer art as a
political act; fighting local nationalisms, homophobia and
transphobia; and thinking about queerness in times of the
Russian war against Ukraine. War is a tragic link between
Ukraine and the post-Yugoslav region, where a number
of films have treated the (im)possibilities of queerness
in periods of murderous violence. One of the first queer
films to be realised after the disintegration of Yugoslavia,
MARBLE ASS / DUPE OD MRAMORA (1995, Želimir Žilnik)*,
which was shot in Belgrade while the country was at war
with its neighbours, is a crucial document from the midst
of an armed conflict. The devastating violence serves as
the backdrop of the film, in which two transgender sex
workers attempt to navigate their way around aggressive
men (customers and boyfriends) by establishing their
own queer time and space in an abandoned house on the
outskirts of Belgrade. Writing about MARBLE ASS, Dijana
Jelača posits that queer films have
“the potential […] to intervene in the processes [of
collective national trauma constructions] by which
the claiming of trauma is typically made possible
only for those citizens who successfully re/produce,
literally and figuratively, the ‘ideal’ heterosexual body
that is inevitably linked to ethno-national ideology.”
(2016, 104)
The admittedly uneasy relationship between regional
ethno-nationalistic collective memory and queer trauma
is the thread that connects most post-Yugoslav queer
feature films. These mechanisms of violent community
construction and exclusion are also laid out rather
schematically in one of the region’s biggest hits, a
transnational co-production effort involving multiple
former Yugoslav states, THE PARADE / PARADA; (this 2011
film, directed by Srđan Dragojević, will not be screened
at the festival). PARADE’s reception was characterised
by ambivalence: a hit among audiences eager for a dose
of Yugonostalgia, and praised by Western press as the
Serbian equivalent of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, it was
often reviewed unfavorably by local critics, who saw the
comedy about homophobic former-war-enemies-turnedbuddies
coming together to protect the Belgrade Pride
event as a simplification of the past. In her recent analysis
of the film, Anamarija Horvat proposes that THE PARADE
“reflect[s] the complexity and contradictory nature of
certain political approaches to memory” in the region and
“presents a complex commentary which both critiques
– and perpetuates – politically significant memory
narratives about national culpability, innocence and a
transnational solidarity” (Horvat 2023). The author will
appear as a guest speaker at the Symposium, addressing
the complicated ways in which films “remember” and
co-construct collective memories in her lecture “Memory,
Resistance and (In)Visibility: Queer Cinema in the Region
of Former Yugoslavia”.
CINEMA ARCHIPELAGO: SYMPOSIUM
* MARBLE ASS will be screened during the festival as part of
the Yugoretten and Symposium programmes.
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