Event overview
This session will include a partial screening of the film "Battle of Neretva" (1969) and two presentations.
Speakers:
Andrea Gelardi - "Songs from the Battlefield: Disrupting the Cinematic Narrative of War"
Spectacularised images of hero-soldiers opposing waves of faceless villains are a cliché in cinematic reproductions of war. Even though the aestheticization of violence generally characterises war movies as a genre, films have also critically engaged with the representation of war, denouncing its dreads and looking beyond stories of heroic deeds. But how are films able to question the grand narrative of war? Can we identify any mean through which films challenge the teleology of a conflict? I argue that intradiegetic songs perform such a task and that they represent a recurring narrative trope in world cinema.
In order to investigate this topic, I will elaborate on the case of Bikita na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva, 1969), a well-known Yugoslav movie about the partisans who fought the Axis forces in World War II. In particular, I will focus on one scene of the film in which the Yugoslavian wounded soldiers, while under attack by Axis tanks, begin to sing the partisan song “Padaj Silo I Nepravdo”. As an act of defiance and resilience, the song erupts in the amidst of the battle invading not only the battlefield itself, but also the film theatre. Indeed, by evoking a sensorial space that overlaps and collides with the gore of the battlefield, the intradiegetic act of coral singing coagulates both characters and spectators within a unifying experience of listening.
The intradiegetic song, I maintain, represents a trope extensively used in the history of world cinema in order to extemporise the act of war, thus conveying a shared sense of estrangement from both the narrative and the aim of the conflict. In this connection, I will present other meaningful examples from Paths of Glory (1957) and Zulu (1964)
Mina Radovic (Goldsmiths) - 20 minute paper
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Feb 2019 | 5:30pm - 8:00pm |
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