Croatian cinematic identity: A Balkan entity or a European individual?

Abstract

Croatian cinema, much like Croatia itself, is situated on Europe's periphery, and consequently has to work extremely hard to overcome the simplifications that are inherent to western perceptions of the region. A number of commentators have argued that western representations of the various nations of the former Yugoslavia are marked by a kind of automatic essentialism. The western gaze thus acts as a powerful gesture of reduction and simplification, and the diverse national identities become replaced with a single, stable core identity. Contemporary critics define this western strategy of essentialist reduction as a form of ‘Balkanism’, functioning in a similar way to Edward Saïd's Orientalism. This article will attempt to explore how recent Croatian films, especially those by Vinko Brešan, construct cinematic representations of an independent Croatian national identity in spite of these western preconceptions. I propose that national identity in recent Croatian films is perhaps best read in the context of Michael Herzfeld's concept of ‘cultural intimacy’. In a cinematic context, films that capture this ambiguous relationship through their focal attention to questions of Croatian culpability and collective guilt in the war for independence therefore construct a culturally intimate Croatian national identity.

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