The figure of the imaginary gypsy in film: I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
The present thesis focuses on the representations of the Roma minority in Yugoslavian and Serbian narrative film. As a corpus-based study (with the total of 35 films divided into seven periods running from 1945 to 2010), it examines in detail the representational strategies employed in depicting the filmic Roma, and aims to specify a developmental trajectory that these strategies take. To this end, a two-step analytical procedure is used: (1) Information Structure Analysis, the analytical framework developed by the present author for the purposes of studying narrative representations, makes use of the diegetic domain categories (Topic/Focus; Active/Passive/Perceiver) as well as the meta-diegetic domain categories (Frame Setter) in order to identify the narrative signals deployed in the construction of minority representations. (2) Narrative-Semiotic Analysis is concerned with the specifics of the representational content. It takes as input the findings of the Information Structure A...
2018
Representations of the Roma are ubiquitous in the history of Balkan cinema. These films have tended to be by non-Roma directors, with the Roma as the object of representation. Consequently, the critical reception of the films has focused on the issue of verisimilitude. In recent scholarship critics have utilized the psychoanalytic concept of "projective identification" to account for the persistent interest in Gypsy culture and life. In this paper I draw on an alternative tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that Tony Gatlif's Gadjo dilo, rather than presenting an authentic picture of Roma culture, foregrounds the impossibility of representation ever truthfully capturing the object. Deploying the Lacanian concepts of das Ding and "The Woman does not exist," the paper demonstrates how Gatlif problematises the very notion of the Roma as a homogenized culture and identity.
The ‘White’ Mask and the ‘Gypsy’ Mask in Film
Interdisciplinary Studies in Antigypsyism, 2022
The study ventures into a topic that has been so far largely neglected in film studies: the ‘gypsy’ phantasm on the big screen. It reconstructs the history of ‘gypsy’ representations in film since the birth of the medium providing a systematic film-theoretical analysis of their aesthetic and social functions. Based on a corpus of over 150 works from European and US cinema, it is shown that ‘gypsy’-themed feature films share the pattern of an ‘ethno-racial’ masquerade, irrespective of the place and time of their origin. The author thus expands the research, concentrated until now in the field of literature, with another art form, film, opening up new dimensions of (popular) cultural antigypsyism. To read the book in an HTML format or to download it as a PDF file, please visit the website of Heidelberg University Publishing: https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book/989?lang=en
Questioning ‘Gypsy’-themed Films and Their Technology of Truth Production
Dimensions of Antigypsyism in Europe, 2019
For the purposes of my research, I have compiled a large corpus of fiction and documentary films featuring imaginary ‘gypsy’ figures/Roma representations on the basis of which I want to abstract and describe dominant and counter-dominant aesthetic tendencies at work. The current paper provides an outline of the film corpus, comments on the relevance of the term “mask” (which I introduce and use in the analysis of films) and focuses on the first and most dominant aesthetic tendency in film, the tendency of authenticating the ‘gypsy’ mask. The main point of interest here is the technology of truth production, in the Foucault sense, employed in films about ‘gypsies’ conceived within the European cultural realm. The tendency in question is exemplified by a list of films which I call ‘gypsy’-themed films; the identified titles, grouped around the thematic axis, are further divided into three sub-groups. Since ‘gypsy’-themed films are a largely uncharted territory for media and cultural/post-colonial studies, there is a palpable need for an analytical approach that is tailor-made to evaluate their particular content and form. The current paper offers a scheme for such a methodology, an algorithm of questions specifying the different levels pertinent to the analysis.
Critical Romani Studies, 2020
The problem of the observer has long been a key concern of social theories. However, in mainstream sociology, it was not until three decades ago that the relationship between image and text, seeing and gaze, appeared on the horizon of the discipline. Studying the visual representation of Roma in Modernity, one sees how Central European societies create their own sexualised and feminised Blackness through ‘savage’ groups and individuals. The central thesis of the article is that, across Europe, the panoptic regime of Modernity operates with the optical unconscious in two ways. On the one hand, by re-visualising social differences that became invisible after the collapse of feudal society; on the other, by bringing the oppressed into sight and rendering the oppressors invisible. However, there is a significant difference between the Western and Eastern European representations of ‘savages’: in the process of nation-building, the ‘Gypsy’ became an ambiguous part of the national imaginary in Eastern European countries. The paper argues that ideas and visual representations of Roma commuted between Central and Western Europe resulted in tensions between the colonial and emancipatory gazes.