New Memory of the Old Trauma?

Abstract

Recently, there has been a significant rise in the production of films on the ‎Jasenovac camp and related Ustasha crimes, taking their share in the mnemonic‎ politics. The paper focuses on the two most recent films, The Diary of‎ Diana B., a docufiction filmed in Croatia, and Dara of Jasenovac, a feature‎ film which was Serbia’s candidate for an Oscar. The memory of traumatic ‎events is remediated in each film differently and used for representing diverse‎ group identities through temporal relation with the difficult past. Comparison ‎between the two films focuses on subject positions and regimes of historicity ‎as categories that make the production of meaning mechanism visible. The‎ main questions that guide the analysis are: how are victims and perpetrators ‎portrayed, who is witnessing traumatic events, and to whom is the trauma attributed?‎ Do they bring something new to the cultural memory of the Holocaust‎ and genocide in the Independent State of Croatia?‎