Imposing an ideology: cultural trauma and political taboo in Nebojša Slijepčević’s Srbenka

Abstract

The present paper analyzes Nebojša Slijepčević’s documentary Srbenka from a political and cultural perspective, from the point of view of political taboo and cultural trauma. By tackling the murder of the Zec family during the Croatian War of Independence, the film reflects on the situation of the Serbian national minority and the conflictive situation it has to confront due to the national narratives that the Croatian state has developed, which are a representation of political taboo. This situation provokes and reinforces an almost impossible to solve cultural trauma inside the Serbian community, whose population, as a result, reacts by hiding their ethnic origin in the public sphere, in a behavioural pattern known as unacknowledgeability. The reconstruction of the murder will allow me to analyze witness traumatization. In the end, a study of documentary theory, based on Nichols six modes to categorize documentaries will be developed, in order to analyze how cinema, and also the arts in general, can be used as vessels for the exposition of struggles and the development of empathy.