And the Marble Ass saw the second coming of Tito: Želimir Žilnik’s cinematic representations of a transitional society through the revolutionary carnivalesque

Abstract

The violent disintegration of the federation at the beginning of the 1990s transformed the Yugoslav sphere into a landscape plagued by its complicated shared history and the arduous process of transition. Coinciding with Milošević’s tendencies towards Greater Serbia, Belgrade became an intersection of anti-war activists, socio-economic difficulties, and nationalist propaganda. Produced within the microcosmos of a post-socialist society undergoing a transition, Želimir Žilnik’s Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time (1994) and Marble Ass (1995) can be understood through Kevin M. F. Platt’s (1997) notion of the ‘revolutionary grotesque’. For Platt (1997), the revolutionary grotesque is an artistic response that emerges during the periods of radical social transformation, and it is marked by the unusual confrontations and deformations of the past and future. The paper will examine the nature of the revolutionary grotesque found in Žilnik’s films through the collective memory of a post-socialist society and the post-war trauma of its transgressive individuals. To understand Žilnik’s blend of documentary and fiction, which often deploys the notion of the carnivalesque, I will introduce the term ‘revolutionary carnivalesque’ to further corroborate the filmmaker’s cinematic representations of a transitional microcosmos as the space turned upside down.