This thesis examines how madness has been used in post-Yugoslav cinemas to facilitate thinking about experiences of the break-up of the SFRY throughout the 1990s and 2000s, its consequences and implications for the future. The study conceptualises post-Yugoslav film cultures as public spheres in which artistic and industrial practices are often combined to create meaning around the core themes of trauma and identity in post-Yugoslav cultures. Working with seven feature-length titles from a range of post-Yugoslav successor states (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo) I illustrate how images of madness have been essential in the cultural processing of events of the 1990s. Whilst featuring individuals suffering mental instabilities and disturbances, and sometimes asylums or mental health institutions, I contend such films are not ultimately concerned – on a thematic level – with mental health, but instead focus on the use of such characters in a metaphoric capacity for engaging core themes of Yugoslav break-up, conflicts, and difficulties of subsequent transition. Using the semantic/syntactic approach to genre, I identify two common ways in which madness is used on a textual level to engage these core themes. The first of these, the ‘inside-out asylum trope of madness’, is concerned with the use of the asylum in films which assess critically the dominant political ideologies of the successor states in question at a time when political pluralism was not yet established by the transition process. Films discussed include Burlesque Tragedy (Marković, 1995), Marshall Tito’s Spirit (Brešan, 1999), and Kukumi (Qosja, 2005). The second trope is the ‘multiple realities trope of madness’ in which the presentation of diegetic reality on screen is adapted to reflect various conceptualisations of trauma and loss arising from Yugoslav break-up and transition. Here the films include Loving Glances (Karanović, 2003), Fuse (Žalica, 2003), Mirage (Ristovski, 2004) and Land of Truth, Love and Freedom (Petrović, 2000). Across the films selected, it is madness which ultimately provides a diverse pool of metaphors and images for an assessment of Yugoslavia’s traumatic demise and the ensuing process of picking through the debris of its ideology, cultural practices, values and ways of living for precisely what might be salvageable and what should be discarded.

Dans cette thèse, nous analysons le Festival yougoslave du film documentaire et du court-métrage, dans le but de questionner la manière dont celui-ci a participé au processus de création d'une identité (nationale) commune dans deux contextes distincts et successifs – celui de la Yougoslavie socialiste multinationale (1943) et celui de la Yougoslavie postsocialiste, État serbe mono-national (1992). Parce qu’il montre des images de véritables personnes, des vrais lieux et des vraies situations, le documentaire, au lieu d'être perçu comme la vision artistique de la réalité, peut être confondu par le public avec la réalité elle-même. Dans cette optique, l'objectif de ce travail est de questionner à travers l'analyse des programmes du festival, le type de « réalité » qui était présenté aux différents publics à une époque marquée par la succession de deux régimes autoritaires, mais opposés sur le plan idéologique. L’analyse débute par la création du festival en 1954 et se conclue par son internationalisation en 2004. Il s’agit pour le festival, d’un adieu officiel à son passé yougoslave, plus d’une décennie après sa sortie effective du cadre yougoslave. / This thesis analyses the programs of the Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival in order to examine how the festival participated in the creation of common (national) identities of two of its host-states – firstly, the multi-national socialist Yugoslavia (created in 1943) and secondly, the post-socialist Yugoslavia as a mono-national Serbian state (created in 1992). Due to its particular form, completely relying on the images ‘from the reality’ (real people, places and situations), the general audiences might tend to understand documentary cinema as a truthful representation of reality, instead of critically analyzing it as an artistic vision of reality. Bearing in mind the previous assessment, the study examines what kind of ‘reality’ was presented to the festival audiences in two distinct political periods, corresponding to the establishment of two different states, both born in wars, and both defined by authoritarian, but mutually opposing political regimes. The analysis starts with the creation of the festival in 1954 and ends with its internationalisation in 2004.