In a Partisan Way: Želimir Žilnik’s Uprising in Jazak and the Reconstruction of Antifascist Memory from Below
This text examines Želimir Žilnik’s short film Uprising in Jazak (Ustanak u Jazku, 1973) at the intersection of film, memory and politics. Most notably, the text will present visual and alternative memory strategies. The text argues that Žilnik’s film is one of the most successful examples of making a partisan film in a partisan way in the period of socialist Yugoslavia. The film’s raw image and editing are a conscious politico-aesthetical intervention into the dominant genre of the time in socialist Yugoslavia, that is, the epic war partisan spectacles, also called “red westerns”. Žilnik’s method consists of a refined bottom-up ethnographic reconstruction of partisan and antifascist memory of poor villagers in Vojvodina (in the village Jazak), who − 30 years after the war – collectively tell and reconstruct the stories of antifascist resistance during the war.
The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!