This article explores the forgotten queer pasts of Eastern European cinema under socialism and highlights the queer cinematic histories of Yugoslavia, specifically its former Republic of Slovenia. ...Through visual, substantive, and contextual analysis, the article focuses on the selected films with queer undertones made post WWII, arguing that the relationship between queerness and Yugoslav society and cinema was more complex than previously thought. The examples demonstrate that Yugoslav cinema reflected the country's ambivalent attitudes towards queerness: on the one side, the analysed films featured numerous unhappy queer people and sad endings, on the other, they portrayed images of different non-normative sexualities and gender expressions rebelliously and more openly than is currently acknowledged in queer cinema scholarship.
The Slovenian LGBT Film Festival, the oldest film festival concerned with LGBT+ sexualities, life, and art in Europe, has been an important instrument of political and cultural activism in the ...region. It is pivotal to contextualize its history and transformations in relation to state socialism and later democratic transition combined with a rampant increase of nationalist definitions of, and interventions in, sexuality, as well as a surge and transformations of the LGBT+ movement since the 1980s. The start of LGBT+ activism in 1980s was inseparably linked to a surge of Slovenian civil-society movements that have had a key role in subverting the political status quo through cultural activism and making queer bodies visible. Analysing the archives of Slovenian LGBT+ activism and interviews with Suzana Tratnik and Brane Mozetič, two long-time selectors of the Festival, the article focuses on the Slovenian LGBT Film Festival in relation to a unique configuration of political forces, state institutions, transition, contested meanings of the public and the Festival's visitors, as well as direct and subtle violence the Festival has had to deal with within its 36-year history. The article thus documents a marginalized history of transitions and reinventions of LGBT+ activism in Yugoslavia and Slovenia.
Produced, distributed, and consumed in a de-territorialised way, modern popular music presents a set of challenges to cultural heritage policies which largely rely on spatial frameworks, as needs for ...the preservation of local, regional, or national cultural heritage are typically highlighted. Moreover, certain popular music genres dating back to the mid-20th century are both representations and re-inventions of local and ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ music and have become a part of many living heritage practices. Slovenian folk-pop (FP) music is a case in point: a modern genre in terms of history and production conditions, nationally registered as intangible cultural heritage. This article offers an analysis of how FP music is integrated into authorised heritage discourse in Slovenia, foregrounding the results of extensive interviews with 14 heritage gatekeepers, such as organisers of FP festivals and curators of thematic museums. The article discusses how operational definitions of FP as heritage, used by various gatekeepers that operate locally, regionally, and internationally deviate from the definition provided in the national intangible heritage register. The analysis traces how discourses about national and cultural identity get intertwined with music and establishes that gatekeepers’ understandings of culture as either territorialised or dynamic significantly impact their heritage activities.
Cultural heritage tourism partly depends on authorized heritage definitions, and partly on complex bottom-up processes of heritage identification, interpretation, and communication. This paper ...addresses the ways in which music, when understood as intangible heritage, may be used for place making and nation branding purposes, and the dynamic between these two processes, as seen from the perspective of cultural and heritage tourism workers. To analyze this dynamic, we focus on the genre of Slovenian folk-pop music. Invented in the 1950s, it has since then become the prevalent (popular) musical element of the Slovenian cultural landscape, while its variants have also, and in parallel to 'national' characterization of the genre, been appropriated in various local contexts. We trace how Slovenian folk pop simultaneously partakes in the construction of the country's national brand and in local place making strategies of heritage promotion, deployed by national, regional, and local stakeholders. We draw on an extensive literature review, document analysis, and interviews with folk-pop festival organizers. Based on this initial mapping of the major stakeholders, we propose a classification of folk-pop music festivals that accounts for the different ways in which folk pop is used as an instrument of heritage tourism, place making, nation branding, and entertainment industries.
This article is concerned with alternative notions of temporality, specifically with alternative imaginings of the future that are important now more than ever. We try to deconstruct the politics of ...teleologically ordained linear temporalities which can function – if not questioned – as some sort of repetition without any real difference, through conceptualizing time ruptures and intervals, which would open up important ways of thinking about potentialities of the new. We attempt to think about time and the future through queer and Deleuzian feminist film theory, specifically the feminist film Born in Flames. We argue that cinema affects us, opens us up to thinking about potentialities of the new, futurity and new ways of connecting (new forms of communities), and therefore holds crucial transformative potential.
Od prelomnega besedila feministične filmske teorije Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema (1989/1975) Laure Mulvey, v katerem je nekoliko pesimistično opisala »moški
pogled«, eno okularno logiko, ki ...žensko na filmu vedno podredi in objektivizira, se je v feministični filmski teoriji in praksi zgodilo izjemno mnoštvo premikov. L. Mulvey je bila po članku večkrat kritizirana, navsezadnje je opisala vseprežemajoče patriarhalno oko, ki si podreja ženske v vsakdanjem življenju in fikciji filma, ki mu podobno kot božjemu ženske pač ne morejo uiti. L. Mulvey je treba šteti v plus to, da je v 70. letih prejšnjega stoletja, zlatem času seksploatacijskega filma, napisala brezkompromisen manifest, ki je fikcijo filma jasno zvezal s feminističnim bojem tistega časa, a manifest je hkrati deloval na način zaprte strukture, ki je ustvarila »ojdipsko, falično paradigmo, ki je veliko bolj totalizirajoča in monolitna kot karkoli so filmi, o katerih govori, sposobni artikulirati. …
Članek se ukvarja s queerovskim otrokom, nenormativnim otrokom, ki znotraj formulacije otroka kot nedolžnega bitja s predpostavljeno bodočo heteroseksualnostjo po navadi ostaja skrit. Zanima nas, ...kje iskati queerovskega otroka in kako o njem govoriti. Ravno zato, ker je queerovskemu otroku navadno zanikano mesto znotraj formulacij otroštva in se izrekanje queerovstva v sedanjiku (»Sem queerovski otrok.«) le malokrat zgodi, ga iščemo v fikciji z avtobiografskimi elementi, ki queerovstvo otroku pripiše za nazaj. Skozi primere biomitografije Zami: novo črkovanje mojega imena in eksperimentalnega dokumentarca Hide and Seek poskušamo pokazati, kako queerovsko otroštvo odpira potenciale drugačne formulacije želje in rasti, ki jima ne moremo zlahka določiti smeri in izid.
