Yugoslavia’s Wars, Cinema, and Screen Trauma

Abstract

In 1965, a notable Yugoslav film director Puriša Ðorđević made Devojka (The Girl), a layered and intricately challenging cinematic poem about the relationship between war, screen, trauma, and memory, of a kind previously unseen in regional filmmaking. By tracing a fragmented and never fully knowable history of war’s trauma, Ðorđević weaved together a poetic film—Petar Volk refers to it as “elegy” (1986: 169)—that simultaneously speaks to the importance of attempting to know and the impossibility of fully knowing the extents of someone else’s intimate war experience. Attempting to piece together a story about the mysterious girl, we learn about her from temporally dislocated fragments of a storyline that is only one possible narrative of who she is and what had happened to her. We first encounter the girl through a photographic image locked away in a bureaucratic drawer—a frozen image which is the only thing that remains long after she herself had disappeared without a trace. The film itself calls attention not only to the inadequacy of the photograph to capture the girl’s story, but also to its necessity. A frame—not only of photography, but also of cinema—functions as a trigger for memory and for the necessity of historical witnessing, even though it cannot ever convey the full story. In a scene that depicts the moment when the photographic image is taken, the girl tells the photographer that she did not smile for the photograph because “the time between the two seconds it took to take the photograph was enough for me to see everything again—that is why I didn’t smile.”