"Social horror": A critical analysis of ideological and poetic function of the motive of victim in the contemporary Serbian film

Abstract

This paper analyses achievements of Serbian cinematography after 2000, which narrative strategies and visual aesthetics are focused on the issues of violence and victims in the context of social despair, post-communist transition and ongoing global value crisis. Films made by Mladen Djordjevic Life and Death of a Porn Gang (2009), Srdjan Spasojevic A Serbian Movie (2010), and Marko Novakovic Menagerie (2012) integrate these complex characteristics of disintegration of Serbian community and dysfunctional state system into their cinematic poetics. These films present examples of radical film aesthetics, which, through strategies of making things unusual, and the influence of underground, pornography and horror on the realistic drama, speak about permanently traumatised Serbian society. They directly connect collective political state and the domain of personal, family, intimate and sexual, controversially relying on the images and narratives of gender misogyny and the violence it produces and its victims. The paper critically approaches these issues from the gender- feminist perspective.