Partisan Memory from Below: Landscapes of Resistance

This text is an exploratory contribution to the alternative and cinematic landscape of resistance marked by Marta Popivoda’s Landscapes of Resistance (Pejzaži otpora, 2021). The analysis focuses on the sequences that show various symbolic deaths of the film’s protagonist and the persistence and rebirth of new ones, as well as of our antifascist memory and present. My thesis is that whoever takes up the partisan theme faces a difficult task: on the one hand, the new partisan film wants to affirm the antifascist heritage in the era of right-wing revisionism, but, on the other hand, it also does not want to mythologise or perform a purely nostalgic function of the once joint state. I read the partisan gesture as both political and aesthetical.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!