Authors

Discussion

The paper will focus on a close examination of the film Nikoletina Bursać, directed by Branko Bauer and released in 1964. Through its representation of the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle, Bauer’s film attempts to invent a specific kind of revolutionary subjectivity based in what could best be described as “peasant egalitarianism”. 

This re-evaluative gesture can be regarded as an answer to the Marxist teleological discourse, which systematically marginalises the “underdeveloped” as incapable of revolution, the South Slavs being firmly inscribed into this category. The culture of socialist Yugoslavia was thus facing a major challenge: how to symbolically appropriate the revolutionary grand narrative while bracketing off those of its elements that ascribe Yugoslav culture a marginal position. In other words, the revolution needed to be “liberated” on a symbolic level. 

Nikoletina Bursać offers an impressive answer to this complex task: it not only represents the revolution as a rupture with old society and the beginning of a new teleological process but also, it ruptures the teleology through inscribing into it those who should have remained excluded. This double rupture witnesses to an intense negotiation on symbolic capital, which had far-reaching consequences for Yugoslav cultural self-fashioning.