THE ROLE OF FEATURE FILM IN PROMOTING SENSES OF NATIONAL IDENTITY

Abstract

The study is based on the recreation of issues of national identity, multiple social identities and memories, which are in complex interactions and constant change, touching on the relationship between audio-visual art and ideological mythomania. The starting point is in the McLuhan’s hypothesis (Marshall Mc Luhan, Understanding the Media) that every form of media incorporates itself into the message it conveys and influences the way the message is interpreted, but also that the multiple functions of the message indicate something in order to establish psychological contact with the recipient. Reference examples are focused on the reception and perception of chronologically determined films made in the former Yugoslavia, from the constitution of Yugoslav cinematography to more recent films made in the region, which confirm that conflicts have penetrated everywhere, into the themes of films also, and that every new generation of directors has the right to recycle the forgotten memory, read and interpret the past and its mythical patterns. The approach to the analysis of the work is based on the observation of films as media presentations and interpretations of national contents by genre conventions on which they are based and with which the authors play or violate them. Considering war as a pattern, state or consequence, the films continued the war by other means after which tensions are raised or are an attempt at dialogue between different layers of individual and collective memory that the film suggestively provides. Inevitably, the film must communicate with the audience and it is questionable whether a film in which ideology is dominant and that reflects propaganda, forms an ecstatic understanding of reality and ideas about ourselves and our lives, has the power to become a social event, to have artistic value and its inherent esthetic experience.