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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick

The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film


The event is an exception to being not insofar as it would not be a multiple, but insofar as its multiplicity is ontologically forbidden, i.e. mathematically rejected, at least in the standard axiomatics for sets. Quentin Meillassoux1

Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater. Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari2

1. It's the context! CON-TEXT!

How does one face the collapse of ideals when (sometimes) faced with the harsh realities of being? With Nietzsche, one can assert that in mutated forms, this has been for long years the concern of political thought.3 And, above all, this has been recently popularized by post-Marxian thinkers such as Badiou or Rancire in their affirmation of the politics of the Event. Before I proceed to a more detailed outlining of the problem that concerns the following analysis, let me elaborate for a second on what I seek to affirm here. As highlighted in the quote by Meillassoux in the epigraph, for Badiou, the Event is that which escapes the regular ontology of a social order, the incalculable, unpredictable, that which puts the (axiomatics of the) order into question. The new, the challenging, the possible. And, of course, for both Badiou and Rancire (even though the latter's stress is not put on the concept of event as such,
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Quentin Meillassoux History and Event in Alain Badiou in Parrhesia no.12, 2010, p.2 Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2000 [first press 1983], p. 334 Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power, transl. Walter Kauffman, New York: Random House, 1967

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick but is captured in the theorization of contingency through a reminder of Plato's stress on Arkh4 - the disposition, drawing of cards that flows through and vitalizes the hierarchies in the political society) the politics (of the event) are enabling for emancipatiory social change, be it with the intellectual as militant (Badiou) or a much more democratic hope of emancipation that turns on equality as its principle5 with Rancire.

This is both a challenge and demand upon political practice, as much as (despite the normative qualities of these thinkers) unpredicted events have been also read as assimilated by force 6, or read as the other side of the coin that makes up for difficulties of the politics of security 7 the dominant liberal ideology is in this instance seen as seeking to colonize social forces with ever-expanding naturalized violence instead of accepting the demands they pose on the ideals of a free-market, corporate/bourgeois order. Or, to echo Neocleous, his assertion is that it has never been a case among canonical liberal thinkers (Hobbes, Locke, Fergusson, Smith...) that liberty would be put before security; instead, the common pattern is that of liberty being always conditioned by a good enlightened ruler, who, when he fails, lets the society fall with him. For this manner then, the processes studied as security talk about the way how certain forms of contingency are systematically outsourced by the order, no matter how much violence it takes (of course, security becomes an unquestioned buzzword at the same time): the Event is policed by processes of security that are cherished as a core value of modernity. 8 Secure or insecure, this makes for another case for asking if any form of emancipatory politics, be it with

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Jacques Rancire Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics transl. Steven Corcoran, New York & London: Continuum, 2010, p. 51 Jacques Rancire Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, transl. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. ix Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007 Mark Neocleous Critique of Security, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008 Neocleous, Critique of Security, chapter 2.

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Rancire's egalitarianism or Badiou's militancy are possible9 to be pushed forward, or whether we are facing a passion for something closer to impossible. Affirming a politics of the Event demands a double reading that looks for resonance and dissonance, both the political and philosophical level.10 I'm very much drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari here, considering social networks to be alike abstract machines abstract machine is a social totality (but not infinity, as far as I understand this), a set of interconnections, where everything works besides everything else and is in a certain degree dependent on everything else. Such a machine resonates. One piece does not make a difference, several, resonating together, may. Causal relationships are not of concern here, instead we have a network of correlations of varying strength and intensity (also, see below). In this sense, the more of a common pattern (or a lack thereof) of behaviour (in terms of resonance or dissonance) there is, the more it can tell us about the abstract machine, the social totality itself. My general aim here is to study the expression of ideology (expressed as the social totality) that is faced with an Event (say, infinity minus totality). Perhaps, one can add, there is indeed a point with Derrida's sensibility when it comes to what he termed as the politics of the messianic, 11 In short, there seems to be a kind of indistinction between Events that are to come and the Event as the very living experience, as that which escapes any prior theorization. The former are captured in the telos, the latter seem to me as those of kairos. The first one comes from a chronology and is self-defeating, while the other comes from the moment (such as Nietzsche's Eternal Return with the moment connecting the past and the present with both perpetually dependent on them or Heidegger's conceptualization of
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See also Dillon's critique of Rancire: Michael Dillon A Passion for the (Im)possible: Jacques Rancire, Equality, Pedagogy and the Messianic in European Journal of Political Theory, Vol.4 no.4, 2005 In a sense, this is taken up by Pierre Bourdieu Social Space and Symbolic Power in Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 1989, p.22 Jacques Derrida Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, New York and London: Routledge, Routledge Classics edition 2006 [originally published in 1994]

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick technology as simultaneous enframing [Gestell] and revealing/concealment). In any case, the concept of the Event helps us to think about contingency, the way how we relate ourselves to things or people and how we can or do respond politically.

I now wish to put forward a speculation, suggesting that the recent Serbian movie, provocatively titled A Serbian Film makes up itself a form of Event, be it by pushing the boundaries of violence and taboos in Balkanese cinema, constituting audiovisual metaphors and questions about human predicament(s), subordination, humiliation and the unhealthy state of affairs in post-war Serbian society. Or simply by being a work of art, in the sense of performative production, rather than a value in the sublime. One can, of course, remark that the fate of Serbia is tragic, be it the civil war of the early 1990s, the neo-fascist / patrimonial rule of Slobodan Milosevic, and so is the general character of the national cinema, marked by a lack of historical distance and the fact that poverty, humiliation, victimization, and violence in Serbia were so severe that no symbolic representation could match the real violence in the streets, the media, the battlefield, and ultimately in people's homes, where violence entered mainly through media propaganda and hate rhetoric but also through dissatisfaction, distress, and lack of perspective.12 It is not the major task to dispute the amount of violence and desolation in A Serbian Film or its inappropriateness, much rather to question what politics its hyperbolic character pushes through. Of course, there have been many discussions about how to interpret movies across social science,13 and, indeed, many place the challenge of subjectivity (be it choices of the movies or movie parts, the particular aesthetic and discursive layers of interaction, etc.) at the forefront.
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Ivana Kronja: The Aesthetics of Violence in Recent Serbian Cinema: Masculinity in Crisis in Film Criticism, Vol. 30, 2006, p. 32-33 For a good case about what is at stake, in particular in so-called Cinematic International Relations, see Gerard Holden, Cinematic IR, the Sublime, and the Indistinctness of Art , in Millennium : Journal of International Studies, vol. 34, no. 3 2006, p. 793-818

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Which is making me stress my first important point although interested in the analytical interpretation of the movie, this is a secondary task. The hope is to use the movie as a vehicle to examine the questions about what is referred to as post-politics, as iek explains: 'post-politics' designates the reduction of politics to the expert administration of social life. Such a politics is ultimately a politics of fear, a politics focused on the defense against a potential victimization or harassment. 14 My explicit aim is to study the resonance and dissonance it creates. My focus is limited, although conscious of the outside, to study a very specific social space: movie reviews. Odd as it may sound, I see the challenge in its specificity reviews offer more than mere information as sites where it, in ways, expresses subjectivity to a much greater degree than, say, standardized adverts, and, if we accept a non-linear, networked ontology of ideology, participate in (en)framing of experience, a priori or ex-post narratives that deform and re-organize the networks of signs, symbols and discursive connections contained in the experience.

Which begs a story about the structure and character of what I aim to grasp. Let me therefore say a few words about the narrative of the film, the questions it poses and the challenges and choices it demands for pursuing a systematic analysis. As was suggested, the trouble with the Event lies with its position at the intersection between past and future, between order and chaos, between security and insecurity, between the possible and the impossible. Which begs for an affirmation of the Event as a site of perpetual interplay, yet, something fundamental to the politics of aesthetics which this project seeks to put into question.

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Slavoj iek Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World, at http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=247 (accessed September 4 2011)

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick 2. From Cinema to misery... and back.

No, Milos, no, no! Not pornography, but life itself! That's life of a victim. Love, art, blood... Flesh and soul of a victim. Transmitted live to the world who has lost all that and now is paying to watch that from the comfort of an armchair. I have no doubt that it sells well based on the sum you offered me. Victim sells, Milos. Victim is the priciest sell in this world. The victim feels the most and suffers the best. We are a victim, Milos. You, me, this whole nation is a victim. (dialogue from A Serbian Film)

Serbian Film speaks of a movie within a movie. Milos, a retired pornographic actor is approached by his former co-star with an offer to participate in a grand project, administered by eccentric Vukumir, offered excellent money. With scenes in the making getting more obscure and more violent, Milos investigates Vukumir in his villa only to find the project is a snuff movie including pedophilia, necrophilia, rape, torture and things that make Abu Ghraib seem like a trip to Disneyland. From that moment, Milos's resistance turns into a game of survival and re-construction of the absent memories after subsequent state of intoxication by Vukumir's people. The results are far more disturbing than expected and lead to a macabre bloodbath, breaking any socially accepted taboos one can think of, as well as affecting the contingent networks of his closest family. There are several reasons why this makes for a challenging spectacle first of all, the movie itself is of mainstream production (among others, an American distributor), stars popular Serbian actors (Sran Todorovi, Sergej Trifunovi) and in ways, makes subtle and explicit references to the political fate of Serbia. The topic, echoed through, is victimhood: everyone in Serbia is a victim a victim of 6

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick the government, a victim of the others, a victim of the self (see the citation above). The question coming into forefront is the clich of but what can we do?.15 Indeed, in particular difficult when there is nothing much to do. And here is the rub the questionable antagonism is that between a society of no values (passive nihilism) or the value of no society (radical nihilism). The first one is manifested by the Bartleby-style cynicism of I would prefer not to... (right after Vukumir's claim about victimhood, Milos replies by saying We're just too retarded. And I won't be a victim because of that.), while the latter is expressed through violence and terror against other members of society (the rest of the movie...).16 Of course, these are not the only forms of nihilism. There can, of course, be values, treated as universal, forming a despotic social cage, no matter what (religious nihilism) or being in the form of a permanent, performative re-valuation (perfect nihilism). Rather, the binary of radical and passive nihilism shows what is at stake with the 'post-politics' captured by the 9/11 clich: if you are not with us, you are with the terrorists - you are either ready to cynically support the sacrifice of democracy (political rights) in the name of democracy or you are a self-conscious enemy of a virtual, incomplete and cynical order. The puzzling question that comes to the fore then might sound (in theoretical terms) like this: on what basis is this distinction (between passive and radical nihilism) presented as true, where are its limits and how does it relate to the Event? That said, as even the director, Srdjan Spasojevic, remarked on some occasions, the movie is a political allegory. And in this sense, the gruesome aesthetics seem to be coming into conflict with positive narratives of emancipation, good, or moral obligation. Which makes up for a political boundary. One, that is to be worked with, critiqued and understood in the terms of the politics of the event. Boundaries are aporias, complex sites of production that are often
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Ironically, this question is many times echoed in Joe Sacco's graphic novel Palestine, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001 Blent Diken Nihilism (Key Ideas) New York and London: Routledge, 2009, p.29

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick naturalized, unquestioned or reinforced, often all of this without a sense of their history. Ignoring them means leaving politics (or a lack thereof) as it is. Affirming and challenging them instead makes potentiality for political action especially in Rancire's sense. 17

3. Getting it done. First take.

To pursue the analysis of the reviews, the strategy is a double reading. The first reading would seek to identify basic qualitative features of the text. It will identify the arguments, points, positive and negative evaluations of specific features of the movie highlighted in the reviews. This will be done through a division of the criteria into clusters of performance and technical-related issues (lighting, camera, actors performance, music...) as opposed to content-based evaluations. These in particular contain references to the plot, dialogues, characters, etc. However, most attention is to monitor the relationship of the reviewer to and depictions of the displayed violence and sexuality, as much as this allows for a certain understanding of taboos, norms and their individual resonance. As well, to an extent this may (although it speaks of a particular strata of society and not of a comprehensive sample as it can be said this would be closer to a non-probability sampling method 18 in quantitative surveying) help providing a general overview of the matters at stake. While reviews do not hide claims to subjective evaluations, this makes this part significantly easier at the expense of the second. The second reading will be more akin to Derrida's work, although will not be following Derrida slavishly. The basic idea is that meaning is located inside the discourse and is structured around binary opposites. (Discourse here is treated as intertextuality a text always connects to others, see below. As well, unlike Bourdieu's approach, I am unconvinced that discourse could be conceived just as a
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Rancire Disagreement Statistics Canada Survey Methods and Practices, Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2003, p.89

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick negotiation to of objective social positions; instead, I see these positions as produced by boundaries, aporias and structures of the discourse itself. That with itself brings about a different meaning on discourse and text, elaborated on below. That is to say, instead of accepting that reality is structured, the concern is much more about how is it structured; as well, empirical analyses by Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida (be it into the work of other philosophers or sciences), for that matter, reveal there are other possible conceptions of [micro]politics, change and boundaries.)

This said, a few words should be spent on the research 'frame'. The basic idea was that of choosing reviews at random, however, as well, upon the criterion of resonance. While this could have been further adjusted quantitatively through search algorithms (NexusLexus, Factiva), the easy solution was, even though it contains subjective (user-specific) appropriations, to use the Google search engine. After all, the first twenty responses to the query Serbian film review included hits on websites such as The New York Times and The Guardian among others, therefore appearing as representative in terms of resonant media samples. The core attribute of the assumption of resonance in many ways contradicts standard statistical sampling procedures, as it assumes an open network of (cor-)relations and translates a core difficulty with such sampling approaches that simply assume the relative autonomy of data. That is to say, I seek to displace the tautological cycle of < the data are stratified, because are of different relevance / the data are of different relevance because they are stratified > by moving the difficulty onto the very character of these data; e.g. not asking the positivist question does this review speak to the issue of reception but instead asking how does this review speak to the issue of reception when it comes to the movie. In this sense, this sample is to crack open some of the problems instead of being fully and confidently speaking about the social totality (which, by the way, places precisely the event outside of itself and in this sense is not total at all). 9

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick The first top 20 Google hits for the keyword combination serbian + film + review resulted as briefly mentioned, in a rather interesting set of internet links: besides Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, the results went straightforward: reviews of A Serbian Film from print media (The Guardian, New York Times, Slant Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, Austinist [Austin, Texas], Sbs.com.au [Australian news broadcast]) through movie websites (Totalfilm, Moviesonline, Cinemaautopsy, Pajiba, Digital Retribution,) to specified Horror-film sites (Fangoria, Anythinghorror, Bloody-Disgusting, The Bloodsprayer). As well, some of the search returns included feature blogs (e.g. staff blogs (cinemaautopsy) or specific authored blog sites dedicated to movie reviewing ( blogs.crikey.com.au , Blogcritics ). The website horrormovies.ca that appeared in the search was removed from the data compilation due its structure, like IMDb: listing only technical aspects of the movie and relying on user review contributions. The results make up for 18 entries total, all reviewing the movie. These are broken into the following tables (Table 1, 2 & 3). Table 1.
Totalfilm.com Rating Technical: Acting & directing Hysterical, too-slant Intelligent directing, Valuable acting, production & music Filmmaking breathtaking: lighting, acting believable, Fitting very well shot and excellent levels extremely well-acted of detail , with many very great looking strong performances Positive Deep, multilayered ratio of 2.4:1 and looks really good 2/5 (bad) (-) Pajiba.com Positive (+) Moviesonline.ca Mixed (+/-) fangoria.com 3/4 (good) (+) Anythinghorror.com Good (+) Blogcritics.com Recommended ( +)

Plot

predictable

Complex relationship, challenging N/a

Tension, but damaging Music

Formal

N/a

Censorship

N/a

Content: Sex Partly entertaining Out of control

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Table 1.
Violence - not distressing exposure of torture porn; Damaging; psychological Believable, depraved, but without sensibility The political message getting lost, despite there 7 out of 10 Exploring passion and aggression with a cumulative effect something important underneath the surface that may never truly be seen outside of its homeland for that Build-up, passion

Politics

challenge to Irresponsible: porn machinery Reduced to depression & pessimism

political film about the victims of a country which is itself a victim of a cold and uncaring world

Other?

Censorship (-) the Aristocrats joke, Serbian style

N/A

Affective About empathy relationship/dr ag-in

Presented is a summary based on the criteria divided into two basic rows: technical and content technical, with, of course, problematic boundaries referring to aspects such as acting & directing and plot. Formal refers, shortly, to issues of formal technical data: resolution, sound, etc. Content is divided to four sub-sections: Sex, violence, politics (what does the review have to tell on the subjects); arrows refer to cases where these are merged/discussed at once. Last, other? lists some other marginal or key notes that drive the evaluation (if any). The entries are then listing major expressions, keywords (in quotation marks) and/or are modified into expressions that best summarize the review claims into given categories (no quotation marks). Of course, this is not without difficulties, due the uneasy boundaries between how is the relationship subjectively conceived. As well, as much as some reviews explicitly or implicitly left out some of the characteristics, this is further accommodated with blank ( N/A as not available) or merger of fields.

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Table 2.
Twitchfilm.com Bloodydisgusting.com Rating Technical: Acting & directing very well made film, with superb special effects and pacing that keeps you gripped a powerful film conceived in a place that saw the absolute worst of what humanity is capable. technically competent movie, peopled by good actors, steered by a very able director, and peppered with violence of the most graphic and upsetting sort badly filmed, not The sobriety of acted and without skill, this raggedy setup directed forces us to analyze the envelope-pushing elements Pointless, Open for aspires interpretation to be a satire Enjoyed ( + ) digitalretribution.com Slantmagazine.co The m guardian 3/4 ( + ) 1/5 ( - ) Movies.nytim es.com Positive ( + )

Polarizing, 2/10 ( - ) 4/5 ( + )

Plot

Challenging itself

Difficult to relate to

The first half of the Folds into film is very psychological successful though, if resonance not as a social commentary then as a suspense thriller, dnouement hysterical, gratuitous, needlessly upsetting, horrendously violent and utterly unnecessary N/A N/A

Formal

Censorship, cut N/A scenes

N/A

slick and lurid widescreen composition

Content: Sex no-one's suggesting that rape, murder and sexual violence are 'funny' routine sexual deviancy from Milo, his brother, and unsettling snippets on Vukmir's set the focus is less on the act being depicted than the market for outrageously exaggerated sadism. not to offend our rubric of taste, but to dismantle it, and thereby reveal the pensively might be more honest that work of Emir sheer inventive awfulness and dares the viewer to find a more serious

Violence

absurdist nightmare

designed to make you sick

Confrontation is the raison d'tre for horror cinema and on this ground A Serbian Film might be lauded a success.

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Table 2.
anthropological nuance Politics Pushes imagination perhaps the film is a success and in that success the world would never go to war again. Contrasting revolted reception that Pasolini's film19 received on its release compared to that which it is enjoying some thirtysix years on, as a movie of some eminence and relevance. - value more as a shock movie due political obviousness Built on the contrast between political movie & horror cinema We are all born intoand out of histories of tasteless perversion that we silence as we begin to consider the needs of others as well as our own. N/A Kusturica layer of meaning. attempt corrosive at 'controver social sy' criticism, exposing a national psychology of sadism, misogyny and self-pity N/A The best part of this movie may be that members of the M.P.A.A. ratings board had to sit through it.

Other?

doesn't work as N/A a horror flick

As with the brief overview of results, 5 were negative of the movie (28%), 2 neutral (11%), and 11 positive (61%). The website Moviereviewintelligence.com that provides statistics for movie reviews in major media has also concluded the reviews tended toward positive (59.6%). Also, their indicator, review separation reached 20.8 percentage points, whereas the norm is 18.4 percentage points. Less than 18.4 indicates more consistent reviews; greater than 18.4 indicates more mixed reviews.20 In short, statistics as a strata of knowledge (in particular akin to Foucault's connaissance as
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The reference repeated in several of the reviews is Paolo Passolini's controversial movie Sal: Or 120 Days of Sodom based on a re-interpretation of Marquis de Sade's novel situated in a fascist concentration camp. In some ways, this is indeed an apt comparison, because A Serbian Film is based on psychological and aestheticized violence seeking to build discomfort, compared to, say, Quentin Tarantino's movies that explicitly use violence for entertainment. For some useful discussion, see Franois Debrix Kill Bill, Volume I and Volume II in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol.34 No.2, 2006 'A Serbian Film reviews: Good (Not Great) | Movie Review Intelligence' at: http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/a_serbian_film/

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick opposed to savoir, e.g. a comprehension structured by a separate field [such as Judical, psychiatric, medical, etc.] instead of the totality of the whole system of knowledge) assume that there is a logical organizing principle to what meets the eye, 21 which, of course, is a problematic assumption that prevents us from drawing a clear conclusion about the resonance/dissonance of the movie (after all, this is expected as much as one of the considerations of an Event is that it escapes ordinary forms of calculability22). Yet, let us make a few brief considerations based on the overview: if we distribute the explanations/attitudes toward the film, three major positions emerge. Either, the movie is seen as unfinished or hysterical, meaning an inability to fully express its political challenge (Totalfilm, Moviesonline, Bloody-disgusting, The Guardian, Sbs.com.au, Austinist, Crickey.com). The movie is as well, reversely, seen as extremely well-handled, sometimes even depicted as able to build tension not through the few violent scenes, but with their psychologization and drawing of the spectator inside of itself (Fangoria, Anythinghorror, Blogcritics, Cinemaautopsy, The Boston Phoenix, and in particular Slant Magazine and The Bloodsprayer). The last cluster is one of reviewer cynicism noting a message unclear (Moviesonline.ca, Blogcritics, Bloody-disgusting) or too regionally specific - too Serbian (Fangoria, Pajiba). This said, if we expect this to be a somewhat representative sample, this might be saying, upon a general overview, that the movie is indeed polarizing, while giving a set of things to
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Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences New York and London: Routledge, Routledge Classics edition 2009 [originally published in 1989] The wonderful line (besides the distinction between conaissance and savoir in the same English preface) that problematizes this is between the already encoded eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself (p. xxi) The specific issue that concerns me at this point is the logic that, because of treating data as autonomous, treats their representation as objective: e.g. whatever fact there is, its projection into any layer or geometrical space is thought of as not distorting, only representing its properties. On the issue of calculation and the way how the mutual position of geometry and arithmetics has historically changed with in particular Descartes and the Enlightenment, see Stuart Elden Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006 Meillassoux History and Event in Alain Badiou, p.2

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick which the viewer might politically relate to: whether this might be censorship (considered from artistically damaging to pointless with regard to the expressive quality or lack of the movie) through a politics of humanism (how do the acts of violence dehumanize subjects and how this makes a political challenge and worth) [Cinemaautopsy, Fangoria, Anythinghorror, Blogcritics] to the boundary between aesthetics and politics (approached from both sides either the viewer is to relate him- or herself to the hidden artistic message politically [Bloodsprayer, NY Times, Twitchfilm] or the politics are too obvious for the aesthetics to gain worth [Bloody-disgusting, Austinist, Crickey.com]). Table 3.
Cinemaautopsy.co Sbs.com.au m Rating Technical: Acting & directing Anti-climatic, stylistic and narrative focus on artificiality and second-hand experiences some good acting, locales and set design that suggests a decent budget, and some stellar cinematography handled well -decisive camera movements and terse dialogue create an atmosphere of dreadful inevitability without relying on too much stylization. It's in these sequences that the film shows promise, if not complexity. "new extremism" Europe's latest contribution to the horror-film genre. European-bred horror genre whose aim is not funhouse titillation but a full-out assault on the body and psyche. shot and edited Implied as well, with a central musty offcolour look and an atmosphere carefully and eerily handled. 3/5 Good ( + ) 2.5/5 ( + / - ) Austinist Sceptical ( - ) The phoenix Positive ( + ) Crickey.com Skip it ( - ) The bloodsprayer Positive ( + )

Plot

Analogy with Faust

flaccid

aspiring towards Enabling (...) exploration of intellectualism, but the theme in the end, it just doesn't have the ideas to back it up. ridiculous plot devices N/A

selfconsciously smart

less of a narrative and more of a commentary

Formal Content:

N/A

Censorship, (but N/A not damaging)

Censorship (pointless)

N/A

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Table 3.
Sex Intended depiction Pornographic as fake iconography blurs with horror iconography; makes for a disconcerting blend of that which repulses and stimulates audiences of both genres Related to depictions of violence, but does not succeed Dehumanizatio n, objectification of people from pornography downwards to places not to be talked about The intention was to attack the sex industry and show the effects of 'bought and sold' sex and then use the rape, drugging, and murder as allegorical material to Serbia. The sexual deviance of the father and Serbian politics leads to the death of the family and creates a nihilistic picture. a sense of dispossession that the Serbians experienced that created fear and lack of identity. (...) taken out of the normalcy that they were comfortable with (like less violence and being taken advantage of by thugs) negative discourse on nihilism (Fight Club) and politics human condition or what separates us from the animals becomes a large topic at the end of the film.

Violence

suggesting that it is more engaged with issues of onscreen images of sex and violence

scenes that should provide unparalleled malevolence play as camp and rather silly

able to act out its most monstrous and reprehensible scenes behind the veil of assumed moral centeredness

not disgusting in a flippant or sensationalistic manner

scenes involving sexualised violence designed to push the boundaries of public tolerance and then some.

Politics

Does challenge abuses of power , aware of the desire for manufactured reality.

The horrors portrayed are an effective tool for commentary (even satire), but they are gruelling to endure

Discussions of link between art and life are clearly meant to lend some deeper meaning to A Serbian Film as a whole, but are really facile observations far too simplistic to carry any real observational

Beyond shock value, however, the film has serious and consequential things to say about the nature of pornography, and its formulation of people as commodities. victimization

No amount of flimsy academic posturing or faux Freudian analysis can come close to legitimising A Serbian Film

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Table 3.
weight as a cultural product of fundamental human desperation and despair. N/A N/A The film as art

Other?

N/A

N/A

N/A

To make sense of this preliminary reading, these observations at least allow for hypothesizing that the less homogeneous and more stratified (according to the divides such as censorship/art, human/inhuman, aesthetics/politics), the more uneasy the relationship of the social totality and the Event and the more possibility of an emancipated spectator, 23 empirically showing both patterns of resonance (positive reviews or identification with the aesthetico-political space the movie opens) and dissonance (negative reviews, inability to identify with this space, aims at reassertion of original identities), with, rather positive evaluation and in some cases ability to further relate and open the political space winning over the centre of gravity. But as was at several occasions remarked, with the whole demand for thinking the politics of the Event, it is necessary to go beyond a rather positive and descriptive account. After all, there are at least two cases for thinking through some of the difficulties at face, which, despite their differences have an overlap upon which the next section will be built. In short, there are two different pathbreaking accounts that have sought to conceptualize the social totality: one was Michel Foucault's Order of things, the second the collaborative work by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari manifested in the concept of rhizome in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. For Foucault, the metaphor capturing the aim is to analyze the table upon which the specific pieces, things, are placed, while the rhizome is as well an abstract system of relations where everything is
23

Jacques Rancire The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London & New York: Verso, 2009

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick connected to everything else. What I see as crucial is that Foucault has later made more explicit his reading was not that of dialectical relations, but of strategic relations: a dialectical reading renders the relationship between elements to be already harmonious, that they are already mutually related, while the strategist would be concerned first into bringing the disorganized elements into an order there is a lot to be said here on the etymology of signs in relationship to a battle ground. 24 Deleuze and Guattari (sometimes perhaps seen less aware of this than I seek to imply, such as in the work of Hardt & Negri) advance to this with the concepts of deterritorialization and (re-)territorialization, which, through their book are bound together at the moment the wasp approaches the orchid when the rhizome gets introduced,25 or later: Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on its interior milieus.26 Of course, there are differences between the treatment of strategy by these thinkers (in particular, for Deleuze, war is always waged against, 27 while for Foucault this seems more ambiguous) which as well opens some questions vis--vis the strategic placement of the Event. 28 Nevertheless, it is precisely here where we need to put the questions of strategy and power into question so as to make the concluding assessment.

24

25

26 27 28

Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, cited in Michael Dillon, Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian Moment in Theory & Event, Volume 11, Issue 2, 2008, E-ISSN: 1092-311X, (Accessed online, citation in paragraph 25) Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 [original print 1987] p.10 Deleuze & Guattari A Thousand Plateaus p.55 Deleuze, cited in Diken, Nihilism, p.63 Dillon Lethal Freedom

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick 4. Welcome to the des(s)ert of the discourse... (A second reading)

The second reading aims to bring about a greater deal of abstraction, place into question things that are reflected or absent in the analyzed discourse. As was already suggested, in particular with the echoes of Derrida, the discourse (or, with the above said, its strategic placements) takes place throughout binary oppositions. To give an example, making a statement that a thing is beautiful is conditioned by a presupposition that something else is not beautiful a thing of different quality (yet also of a degree of the same quality as much as not being a part of the same social totality would mean these things would be impossible to compare). The crucial point is that this difference is not neutral, but instead is constituted by power (more alike the french pouvoir, e.g. power as capability than puissance, e.g. power as force, although this does not foreclose the possibility of power turning violent). And, what comes in Derrida's Writing and Difference is the claim that at a certain point in (Western) history, discourse ceased to refer to where it came from.29 This is also a common theme in Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, which also describes a transition from when texts were stated as references (criticisms, commentaries, etc.) to canonical texts, to a point when their networkedness became loose, 30 therefore making the reference in a way untraceable without a subjective insertion of claims based on a conception of finitude. In different words, the problem is not that there are binary oppositions, but that these oppositions are always subjectively inserted into the discourse. This is captured by Derrida's concept of differnce, which highlights that there are ways how binary opposites move around but never reveal the source of their power. Which in a way relates to what is in particular visible in later Derrida and some of Foucault's other work 31 - the concern with temporality and finitude, which traces
29

30 31

Jacques Derrida,Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass, New York and London:Routledge, Routledge Classics edition 2001 [originally published in 1978] , p. 352-353 Foucault The Order of Things, chapter 3, especially p. 70-86 Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, transl. David Wills, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick to Heidegger (Being as being-towards-death) and arguably further back through Kant, Hobbes or Machiavelli. (Also, this intersects with fundamentals of Badiou's ontology, which reflects on the processes of relating infinity to finite [calculable] systems as I understand this infinity is a form of metaphysics, finitude speaks to ontology. 32 While for Badiou, this is a matter for mathematical resolution, I am unconvinced by his application of mathematics across this intersection; instead, I see mathematics as of a quasi-transcendental character, or differently put, something that is an expression of a specific ontology rather than an ontology in itself. 33) In short, as Wilson remarks, while consumer capitalism is sometimes seen by the U.S. as weapon, the main point of capitalism was always to generate wealth. Its generation of wealth, however, has always involved a relation to death. 34, there is something about music (and for that manner fine art or cinema) that escapes this pure commodityvalue: the movie or a song doesn't cease to exist after it is consumed. 35 That makes the relationship rather uneasy, perhaps as well symptomatic of a broader change of the complex relationship between war and capitalism, perhaps bringing us back to iek and the reduction of politics (from von Clausewitz on, the politics that are intimately related to war) to the expert administration of social life. To move on, the preliminary observations give a point of departure: three of many other differences were established around the nexus of censorship/art, human/inhuman and

politics/aesthetics. The second is perhaps the easiest, worth quoting at length: most of all youll feel morose because youll empathize with the pain of the people who live in a country filled with victims that have no escape from the daily horrors Serbia presents them. Just like the film never really ends

32 33 34

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Derrida Specters of Marx, Michel Foucault Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in Paul Rainbow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984 Meillassoux History and Event in Alain Badiou In this regard, Elden Speaking Against Number discusses this issue at detail. Scott Wilson Great Satan's Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009, p. 17 Wilson Great Satan's Rage, p. 6-7

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick (Milos families atrocities continue even after death), the people of Serbia are always facing their unending victimhood. You cant watch this film without getting the political message. (anythinghorror.com) Born of nearly 20 years of conflict, genocide and a systematic military campaign of rape as a tactical weapon. Serbian Film follows French cinema pioneers Gaspar Noe (Irreversible) and Virginie Despentes (Baise-moi) in destroying the status quo regarding on screen violence and sexuality. It is as much a revelation as to the power of image as it is a repulsion to all be the most depraved viewer. Is it designed to make you sick. Is it designed to make you wish you were never born with the blessing of sight and the beauty of a moral compass. Is it a powerful film conceived in a place that saw the absolute worst of what humanity is capable. If you cant imagine what is like to sit though this movie, how can you ever imagine or empathize, understand or respect what the Serbian, Albanian, Croatian and other former residents of Yugoslavia endured for almost 15-years? (BloodyDisgusting.com) The idea of the human is invoked explicitly here as a residual of the acts of inhumanity, violence and depravity; that which remains a certain sensibility when all is said and done. As iek notes on this, we live in an age marked by the consumption of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, the Powell doctrine of war without casualties or the conception of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics36 - in many ways an ultimate expression of passive nihilism of the postpolitical impasse. But the crux of this argument is that this masquerades 'real reality' for the virtual, decaffeinated reality of the product with which we seek to feel good and reassure ourselves, snuff movies being one of the extreme examples. 37 What penetrates iek's case here is the moment, perhaps an Event within an Event, the final scene in the movie where the dead bodies of Milos and his family
36

37

Slavoj iek Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates London: Verso, 2002, p. 10-11 iek Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p.12

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick are approached by a film-making crew (explored by the anythinghorror.com review above), arguably opening up the lifespan of a subject beyond desire. Or, to put it in the terms developed above, even the discovery of nothingness/death beyond the desert of the Real does not stop the machine of strategic relations (porn machinery; pajiba.com) from running, presenting, in fact, the dichotomy of passive (cynical acceptance of the ambiguity of desire) and radical (suicide, guilt) nihilism as false. Politics/aesthetics: This film IS a political film; it was made to be viewed through a political lense. (anythinghorror.com) In particular, yet, Slant magazine gives some hint about what is going on: Much like Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, A Serbian Film daringly sexualizes the prepubescent experience by acknowledgingand perhaps even celebratingthe psychology of witnessing. Both films, too, recognize voyeurism as essential to development, not only because it helps to take the guesswork out of erotic preference, but because the observer "floats" in a space where they can become both passive and active, both aggressor and victim. Floating - perhaps most clearly taken up by Rancire: Images change our gaze and the landscape of the possible if they are not anticipated by their meaning and do not anticipate their effects.38 Taking up this boundary (tolerable / intolerable image, image / reality, passive acceptance / action) very seriously, we are faced with the link that it makes up, so that Rancire can point to the work of Chilean artist, Alfredo Jaar, whose art aims precisely at the disattachment of this link: we are either given images that don't tell us about reality in themselves or are given non-images (closed black boxes containing the photographs of the Rwanda genocide victims, so we can not see) as establishing the moment for critical thought. So far, so good. How is it that all the examples of lines of flight... turn out so badly? 39 asks Deleuze, exemplified with how the Fight Club, a desperate search for reality of pain in the Desert of Real, turns into a micro38 39

Rancire The Emancipated Spectator, p. 105, see also p.88-94 Deleuze and Parnet Dialogues, cited in Blent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen Enjoy Your Fight! - 'Fight Club' as a Symptom of the Network Society in Cultural Values, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2002, p. 349

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick fascist movement by Diken and Laustsen. Is this the rub from which the attempt at the displacement of the passive/destructive participation in the snuff porn machinery becomes an end in itself? Let me at this moment lump this matter together with the distinction between art and censorship, as much as censorship has been, as exemplified above, described both as a form of violence, in this matter, seeking to break down or restrict the boundaries (tolerable / intolerable image, image / reality, passive acceptance / action) as much as, for example, the Totalfilm.com review comes back with a claim about Heavily and somewhat unfairly censored Serbian horror or, New York Times pulls out the ironic verdict line that The best part of this movie may be that members of the M.P.A.A. ratings board had to sit through it., showing perhaps a sensibility anticipating a line of flight in the worst possible way (religious nihilism, despotism)? The Crickey.com review adds that A Serbian Film got in trouble with the censors: because it is a revolting experience. (...) Even civil libertarians will pause to consider what theyre fighting for and whether its worth it. This dissonance is as well revealing, in the form of a question of whether indeed, there is a line of flight coming from the intolerable that might enable for a progressive politics. If there is anything to conclude, interestingly, it is that from the examples taken up, there seems to be a hint of resonance, even in the cases disliking the film in an outspoken fashion. (Indeed, the previous section considered this, perhaps unjustly, dissonance, however, it is to demonstrate the difference in terms of what a sensitivity toward a motion: a line of flight, or virtuality, in turn says back into the discourse.) It is perhaps less to say that the disjunctive synthesis of the boundary is here presented as false, perhaps much better to be said, as uneasy.

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Conclusion: Staring back at the Event

There are many more observations that could be made about the largely affective relationship that structures the relationship of the reception of A Serbian Film to the current, arguably post-political situation more broadly. I have restricted myself to the examples that speak in many ways more directly to the problematic, especially in the second reading, which, unlike taking up only the moment when evaluations are placed as the discourse, operates also the modalities of temporal systems, largely conceived in the constitution of the virtual 40. It seems, however, rather convincing that based on the technique and chosen samples, there are two things a conclusion might be drawn. First, unlike the completely counter-strategic readings of Neocleous, or perhaps Naomi Klein, the Event (if hypothetized correctly) indeed seems able to open up the situation and find things that are difficult to relate to, enable for reflection and affirmation. The second observation is, that based on the idea of resonance, there seems to be slightly more going on than just a placement of a specific boundary between passive and radical nihilism. As much as Diken marginally suggests that this placement is a specifically modern condition, due the position between transcendence and immanence, as well as purity and hybridity (drawing on Latour), what I called an uneasy resonance that attempts at guarding some of the possible movements suggests on one hand that the disjunctive synthesis has a certain potential to hold, therefore making nihilism indeed a topic that might need much more attention, in particular in relationship to violence. The last conclusion is that when the idea of humanity gets invoked, the conception of nihilism, respectively its disjunctive synthesis of passive and radical nihilism appears somewhat false. This might be indeed drawing further attention not merely to the problem of subjectivity, but as well to that
40

iek Welcome to the Desert of the Real

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick of how much the embodiment of affects still leaves some space, some possibility for a political change in the background. That might be, at the moment, one of the very key issues that need to be addressed before affirming a complete potential of the Event.

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POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Bibliography:

Pierre Bourdieu Social Space and Symbolic Power in Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 1989 Simon Critchley A Heroism of the Decision, a Politics of the Event in The London Review of Books, vol. 29, no. 18, 20 September 2007 Franois Debrix Kill Bill, Volume I and Volume II in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol.34 No.2, 2006 Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 [first press 1987] Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2000 [first press 1983] Jacques Derrida Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, New York and London: Routledge, Routledge Classics edition 2006 [originally published in 1994] Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, transl. David Wills, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995 Jacques Derrida,Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass, New York and London:Routledge, Routledge Classics edition 2001 [originally published in 1978] Blent Diken Nihilism (Key Ideas) New York and London: Routledge, 2009 Blent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen Enjoy Your Fight! - 'Fight Club' as a Symptom of the Network Society in Cultural Values, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2002 Michael Dillon A Passion for the (Im)possible: Jacques Rancire, Equality, Pedagogy and the Messianic in European Journal of Political Theory, Vol.4 no.4, 2005 26

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Stuart Elden Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006 Michel Foucault Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Paul Rainbow (ed.): The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York and London: Routledge, Routledge Classics edition 2009 [originally published in 1989] Gerard Holden, Cinematic IR, the Sublime, and the Indistinctness of Art in Millennium : Journal of International Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2006 Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007 Ivana Kronja: The Aesthetics of Violence in Recent Serbian Cinema: Masculinity in Crisis in Film Criticism, Vol. 30, 2006 Quentin Meillassoux History and Event in Alain Badiou in Parrhesia no.12, 2010 Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power, transl. Walter Kauffman, New York: Random House, 1967 Mark Neocleous Critique of Security, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008 Jacques Rancire Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, transl. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 Jacques Rancire Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, transl. Steven Corcoran, New York & London: Continuum, 2010 Jacques Rancire The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London & New York: Verso, 2009 Joe Sacco Palestine, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001 Statistics Canada Survey Methods and Practices, Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2003 Scott Wilson Great Satan's Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism, 27

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009 Slavoj iek Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World, at http://www.lacan.com/symptom/? page_id=247 (accessed September 4 2011) Slavoj iek Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates London: Verso, 2002

Analyzed reviews (online; all last accessed Dec 26. 2011 ): A Serbian Film by Josh Graham, (totalfilm.com) http://www.totalfilm.com/reviews/cinema/aserbian-film For Torture Porn Filmmakers Who Considered Rape-icide When Hostel Didn't Go Far Enuf by Brian Prisco (pajiba.com) http://www.pajiba.com/twisted_masterpieces/a-serbian-film-for-torture-pornfilmmakers-who-considered-rapeicide-when-hostel-didnt-go-far-enuf.php A Serbian Film Movie Review (moviesonline.ca) http://www.moviesonline.ca/2010/11/serbian-filmmovie-review/ A Serbian Film (DVD) Review by Rebekah Mckendry (fangoria.com) http://www.fangoria.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5979:a-serbian-filmdvd-review&catid=58:dvd-blu-ray-reviews&Itemid=182 MOVIE REVIEW: A SERBIAN FILM (2010) (anythinghorror.com) http://anythinghorror.com/2011/03/10/movie-review-a-serbian-film-2010/ Blu-ray Review: A Serbian Film by Chris Beaumont (blogcritics.com) http://blogcritics.org/video/article/blu-ray-review-a-serbian-film/ A Serbian Film Review by James Dennis (twitchfilm.com) http://twitchfilm.com/reviews/2010/11/aserbian-film-review.php A Serbian Film (limited) by Tim Anderson (bloody-disgusting.com) http://www.bloodydisgusting.com/film/4501/review A Serbian Film by Joseph Jon Lanthier (slantmagazine.com) http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/a-serbian-film/5515 A Serbian Film review by Peter Bradshaw (the guardian) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/dec/09/a-serbian-film-review 28

POL 7108 The post-political cinema, nihilism and resonance in A Serbian Film Luk Makovick Torture or Porn? No Need to Choose by A.O.Scott (New York Times) http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/movies/a-serbian-film-directed-by-srdjan-spasojevicreview.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1325173857-Anm/di5+XGnw7N+IquTt9w A Serbian Film (2010) by Julian (digital-retribution.com) http://www.digitalretribution.com/reviews/other/f029.php DVD review A Serbian Film (2010), Region 4, Accent by Thomas Caldwell (cinemaautopsy.com) http://blog.cinemaautopsy.com/2011/09/20/dvd-review-a-serbian-film-2010-region-4-accent/ Edited shocker serbs up infamy and distaste. By Simon Foster (sbs.com.au) http://www.sbs.com.au/films/movie/12608/A-Serbian-FilmA Serbian Film: Review by Adam Protextor (Austinist) http://austinist.com/2011/05/14/a_serbian_film_review.php Review: A Serbian Film by Simon Paul Augustine (The Phoenix) http://thephoenix.com/boston/movies/121141-review-a-serbian-film/?page=2#TOPCONTENT A Serbian Film movie review: morally irredeemable by Luke Buckmaster (crickey.com) http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2011/08/26/a-serbian-film-movie-review-morallyirredeemable/ 'A Serbian Film': As Art and Commentary by Jesse Bartel (bloodsprayer.com) http://www.bloodsprayer.com/reviews/movies/a-serbian-film-as-art-and-commentary/

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