Monographs by Igor Krstić
Near to one billion people call slums their home, making it a reasonable claim to describe our wo... more Near to one billion people call slums their home, making it a reasonable claim to describe our world as a ‘planet of slums.’ But how has this hard and unyielding way of life been depicted on screen? How have filmmakers engaged historically and across the globe with the social conditions of what is often perceived as the world’s most miserable habitats?
Combining approaches from cultural, globalisation and film studies, Igor Krstić outlines a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, barrios poulares or chawls of our ‘planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film culture. From Jacob Riis’ How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of films from different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predeccesors, demonstrating the way various filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes to convey life in our ‘planet of slums’.
More on: http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9781474406864
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The monograph is a revised maters thesis that has originally been written in 1999 - during the NA... more The monograph is a revised maters thesis that has originally been written in 1999 - during the NATO bombing of Serbia - at the University of Amsterdam. It presents an analysis of Serbian war and crime movies of the 1990s, using Foucuauldian discourse analysis, New Historicism and Slavoj Zizek's Lacanian approach to popular culture as theoretical and methodological framework.
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Edited collections by Igor Krstić
Edinburgh University Press, Jun 30, 2019
(Forthcoming) World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are... more (Forthcoming) World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by non-Western filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of globalization. With case studies of essayistic works by John Akomfrah, Nguyen Trinh Thi and Apichatpong Weerasekul, amongst many others, and with a photo-essay by Trinh T. Min-ha and a discussion of Frances Calvert’s work, it expands current research on the essay film beyond canonical filmmakers and frameworks, and presents transnational perspectives on what is becoming a global film practice.
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This special issue of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film is drawn from a panel on ‘film ph... more This special issue of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film is drawn from a panel on ‘film philosophy’ that took place at the BAFTSS conference in April 2016 at the University of Reading. The issue addresses this thriving field in film studies by presenting a variety of perspectives and approaches to showcase ways of doing film philosophy with a special focus on non-fiction film.
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Inmitten des Medienwandels der letzten zwei Jahrzehnte scheint auch eine vermehrte Aufmerksamkeit... more Inmitten des Medienwandels der letzten zwei Jahrzehnte scheint auch eine vermehrte Aufmerksamkeit auf den Slum gerichtet zu sein. Das öffentliche Interesse an den Lebensverhältnissen in den Slums, mag es schaulustige Faszination (Slumtourismus), nüchterne Analyse oder naserümpfende Abscheu beinhalten, hat seit den 1990er Jahren stetig zugenommen. Filmemacher, Fotografen oder Fernsehproduktionsteams interessieren sich zunehmend für die urban outcasts ihrer Banlieues, Problemviertel und Ghettos vor der Haustür. Aber es lässt sich auch eine Art global turn hinsichtlich dieses öffentlichen Interesses beobachten, insbesondere seit die UN-HABITAT ihre Studie Challenge of Slums (2003) herausgegeben hat. Zahlreiche neuere journalistische und soziologische Publikationen beschreiben nicht nur die globale Verstädterung, sondern auch die damit einhergehende globale Slumisierung. Transnationale Filmcrews erzählen nicht nur lokale Slumgeschichte(n), sondern vermarkten diese mit Hilfe Hollywoodscher Medienkonglomerate, woraus global erfolgreiche Slum-Blockbuster entstehen. Mittlerweile, so die UN-HABITAT, leben weltweit etwa eine Milliarde Menschen in Slums. Diese Zahl wird sich bis 2030 aller Voraussicht nach verdoppeln. Der "Planet der Slums" ist aber nicht nur eine Herausforderung für Soziologen, Politiker und Stadtplaner -- er stellt uns ebenso vor die Herausforderung den medialen Slum neu zu überdenken.
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Journal articles and book chapters by Igor Krstić
The Routledge Companion to European Cinema, 2021
This chapter deals with what Dina Iordanova has called in her book Cinema of Flames ‘diasporic po... more This chapter deals with what Dina Iordanova has called in her book Cinema of Flames ‘diasporic post-Yugoslav cinema’, but which one could alternatively also label differently, such as ‘accented’ or ‘migrant post-Yugoslav cinema’ (2001: 269–73). Here are a few examples of what
I believe are such films: Zoran Solomun’s Müde Weggefährten (1997), Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999) or Damir Marjanović’s My Father’s Angel (1999); Goran Rebić’s Jugofilm (1997), Andrea Štaka’s Das Fräulein (2006), Goran Rušinović’s Buick Riviera (2006), Dino Murselović’s
Elsker deg ogsa (2012), Michaela Kezele’s Die Brücke am Ibar (2012) and Igor Drljača’s Krivina
(2012) and The Waiting Room (2015).
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Mediapolis: Journal of Cities and Culture, 2021
Igor Krstić discusses the ethics and politics of representing slums in contemporary film, televis... more Igor Krstić discusses the ethics and politics of representing slums in contemporary film, television, and video games, from computer-generated imagery of Victorian London to documentaries about Mumbai.
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Coils of the serpent - Issue 7, Special issue: Crowd(ed) Futures, 2020
Overpopulation is, next to global warming, authoritarian surveillance states or a Third World War... more Overpopulation is, next to global warming, authoritarian surveillance states or a Third World War, one of the major dystopic fears we have when we imagine humanity’s future. However, despite of its immense popularity in both culture and society, overpopulation is, unlike environmental issues, trauma and war or the threat of surveillance states to democracies, not a popular topic among Cultural Studies scholars.The question is why this is the case. The article argues that this is the case, because Cultural Studies scholars have on the one hand conveniently dismissed the fears and arguments against overpopulation and on the other seem to enter into a
never-ending conundrum of contradictions and inconvenient antagonisms, when they tackle either the realities or the fears of population growth. It sets out four classical arguments against the fear of overpopulation and in which way these arguments coalesce with the general viewpoints of many Cultural Studies scholars as well as why they are inherently contradictory.
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Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, 2020
Some personal reflections on the legacy of Thomas Elsaesser as a thinker, a teacher, and a mentor.
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Mediapolis: Journal of Cities and Culture, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2019
How have slums been represented onscreen? In the first installment of a three-part series, Igor K... more How have slums been represented onscreen? In the first installment of a three-part series, Igor Krstić considers the history of the cinematic representation of slums and examines the capacity of visual media to portray the complex relationships between capitalism and urban development.
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World Cinema and the Essay Film (Edinburgh University Press), 2019
(Forthcoming) This chapter brings together the notion of ‘accented cinema theory’– which has been... more (Forthcoming) This chapter brings together the notion of ‘accented cinema theory’– which has been put forward by Hamid Naficy in his ground-breaking An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001) – with the category of the essay, in order to conceptualise a burgeoning body of film, video, and other moving image practices in what sociologists have termed ‘the age of migration.’ Through this confluence of a supposedly generic category (the essay film) with a theory that has, undoubtedly, been of great importance to film scholarship since its emergence, the chapter provides new perspectives on an emerging transnational body of films, all of which have been produced by diasporic, exilic or interstitial documentary and/or essay filmmakers in the recent past. In applying Naficy’s terminology, I argue that one can describe these examples as ‘accented essay films’, because they all deal with displacement, exile or migration in the essayistic format. These include better-known examples, such as The Nine Muses (Akomfrah, 2009), but also lesser known ‘world cinema’ examples, such as the (South and North) Korean film Grandmother’s Flower (Jeong-Hyun Mun, 2007), the Czech film Home (Hruza, 2008) or the Brazilian essay film A Hungarian Passport (Kogut, 2001).
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Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, 2018
Secound round introduction to a Mediapolis roundtable discussion with Laura Rascaroli, Brenda Hol... more Secound round introduction to a Mediapolis roundtable discussion with Laura Rascaroli, Brenda Hollweg, Roberto Cavallini, Iván Villarmea Àlvarez and Thomas Elsaesser on 'The Essay Film and the City'
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Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, 2018
Introduction to a Mediapolis roundtable discussion with Laura Rascaroli, Brenda Hollweg, Roberto ... more Introduction to a Mediapolis roundtable discussion with Laura Rascaroli, Brenda Hollweg, Roberto Cavallini, Iván Villarmea Àlvarez and Thomas Elsaesser
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New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2017
Editorial introduction to New Cinema's special issue on documentary film philosophy.
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New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Fillm, 2017
This essay explores how philosophical ideas, a literary and filmic practice and the biographical ... more This essay explores how philosophical ideas, a literary and filmic practice and the biographical predicament of being a migrant intersect to create a form of cinema that could be best described as ‘minor’. It uses thereby Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ in regard to Jonas Mekas’s classical 1960s and 1970s diary films Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969), Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) - films that can now be regarded as important predecessors to autobiographical documentary film practices today. The essay proceeds by first outlining philosophy’s difficult relation to autobiography, before situating the emergence of autobiographical documentary practices within the transnational cine-writing culture of the 1960s as well as within a genuinely American ‘culture of the self’ that stems from Romanticism and Transcendentalism. With figures like Mekas, not only a practice, but a whole ‘philosophy of autobiographical documentary’ emerges in the 1960s in America, one in which documentary filmmakers explore themes like accented or embodied authorship, the relation between images and words or autobiographical approaches to memory and perception. Taking all of this into account, the essay explores, towards the end, Mekas’s oeuvre as an exemplary case of minor cinema - a cinema for those who feel lost, displaced or alienated, whether in foreign languages, images or in foreign social realities.
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(This is an abstract of a book chapter that has been published in the volume 'Global Cinematic Ci... more (This is an abstract of a book chapter that has been published in the volume 'Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media', eds. Andersson & Webb, Wallflower Press 2016).
Jonas Bendiksen’s photo book The Places We Live (2008) consists of pictures of slum-dwellers and their homes. More precisely, it provides a combination of written text and photographic imagery in the form of panoramic folding images of slum exteriors and interiors in four of the most rapidly expanding megacities of the world: Mumbai (India), Caracas (Venezuela), Nairobi (Kenya), and Jakarta (Indonesia). The Places We Live thus promises a quasi-global perspective on what the urban sociologist Mike Davis has proposed to call a ‘planet of slums’, that is, a planet in which by now a vast number of people, approximately one billion, call slums their home. In fact, The Places We Live was published in the exact same year in which, according to many sociologists, mankind encountered a pivotal turning point: since 2008, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in the countryside. According to Bendiksen, his project is an artistic response to these staggering figures and the historical watershed it involves. However, it was also conceived as a media experiment: Bendiksen published his images not only in a photo book; they have also been used for an interactive web documentary (theplaceswelive.com) as well as for a touring exhibition installation, in both of which slum-dwellers tell their personal stories via recorded (but dubbed) interviews directly to their audience.
Accordingly, this paper argues via new media theories (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Manovich 2001; Grau 2004; Jenkins 2006), that it is not so much the ‘artistry’ of the (social documentary) photographer that lends a new sensory (or immersive) experience to the spectator, but rather the new possibilities of digital media technologies. It will thus provide a reading of The Places We Live which emphasises it less as artistic innovation, and more as what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin called a 'remediation', because Bendiksen’s project promises to reform ‘our’ mediated encounter with the (urban) Other, and because it attempts to refashion older ways of mediating the urban poor.
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Im England des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts etabliert sich nicht nur der Gebrauch des Wortes »Slum«, s... more Im England des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts etabliert sich nicht nur der Gebrauch des Wortes »Slum«, sondern auch ein populärer Diskurs, der den Slum als »Anderes« der westlichen Zivilisation dar-stellte; eine dystopische Sichtweise auf den Slum, als Schattenseite der Industrialisierung und Urba-nisierung und vor allem als Schattenseite einer Vision von Moderne, die gerade das hinter sich lassen möchte, was der Slum in diesen Diskursen symbolisiert: Das Gegenteil von Ordnung, Fortschritt und Hygiene. Diese dystopischen Slumdiskurse kehren heute wieder, wenngleich mit den empirischen Daten der UN-HABITAT-Studie Challenge of Slums (2003) untermauert und übertragen auf geopo-litisch gänzlich veränderte Verhältnisse. So findet beispielsweise der Soziologe Zygmunt Bauman, dass das Ergebnis von Globalisierungs-und Modernisierungsprozessen zwangsläufig urbane Müll-halden produziert, wo die Ausgegrenzten der Moderne, wie Abfall, der nicht mehr gebraucht wird, abgeladen werden. Mike Davis übernimmt in seinem Planet der Slums gleichfalls einen rhetori-schen Gestus, der die »üblichen Verdächtigen« anklagt (Globalisierung, IWF, Weltbank, Neolibera-lismus), aber zugleich auch prophetisch in die Zukunft deutet: In Davis' dystopischer Vision gleicht die unaufhaltsame »wildwüchsige« Slumisierung von Megastädten des globalen Südens einer Na-turkatastrophe, die das 21. Jahrhundert maßgeblich prägen wird. In dieser Hinsicht sind Davis' und Baumans dystopische Sichtweisen aber auch Fortschreibungen dessen, was bereits im 19. Jahrhun-dert diskursiv angelegt war. Davis beschreibt die Slums der globalisierten Welt des 21. Jahrhunderts tatsächlich auch in Rückgriff auf die viktorianischen Slums des 19. Jahrhunderts, in einem Kapitel, welches »Zurück zu Dickens« heißt, wenn er schreibt: »Im Prozess der Urbanisierung der Dritten Welt wiederholen und vermischen sich die Dynamiken ihrer Vorläufer aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhun-dert in Europa und Nordamerika.« Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts war es aber nicht nur Charles Dickens, sondern vor allem sein Zeitge-nosse, der Journalist Henry Mayhew, der eine erste detaillierte Bestandsaufnahme Londoner Slums in London Labour and the London Poor (1851) vornahm und somit einen Slumdiskurs begründete, der zunächst maßgebend werden sollte. Mayhew, der »soziologische Dickens«, wird von einigen Stadtsoziologen als Pionier der Stadtforschung a bezeichnet. Der kulturgeschichtliche Kontext die-ser Pionierarbeit war die christlich geprägte Reformbewegung, der auch Mayhew angehörte und dessen Buch eigentlich nur die Spitze eines Bergs an reformistisch geprägter Slum-Literatur, Slum-Berichterstattung und Slum-Reportage ist. Eine Diskursanalyse dieser zahlreichen journalistisch-reformistischen Auseinandersetzungen mit Slums im 19. Jahrhundert lieferten die Literaturwissen-schaftler Peter Stallybrass und Allon White. Der Slum, so Stallybrass und White, stand in diesen frühen Diskursen semantisch immer in Verbindung zu Schmutz und moralischem Laster; er wurde als ein Sündenpfuhl aus Prostitution, Kriminalität und Barbarei, aber gleichzeitig auch als dreckige Kloake, in der sich allerlei Krankheiten herausbildeten, beschrieben. Diese biblisch/babylonische Assoziationskette – Schmutz-Sünde-Krankheit – war also konstitu-tiv für frühe Slumdiskurse und Mayhews zwar detaillierter, aber dennoch moralisierender, in diesen a http://parapluie.de/archiv/stadt parapluie no. 28 (Herbst 2012). http://parapluie.de/archiv/slums/slumdarstellung/ issn 1439–1163, © 1997–2011 parapluie & die autorinnen und autoren. alle rechte vorbehalten.
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New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 9 (2012): 2+3, pp. 83-99
Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) has been criticized for its lack of authenticity, plausi... more Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) has been criticized for its lack of authenticity, plausibility and realism. Another frequently appearing critique of numerous re/viewers revolved around the issue of ‘poorism’; the film’s alleged deployment of an orientalist Western gaze in depicting the dirty underbelly of a megacity in the developing world. Instead of asking whether Slumdog Millionaire‘represents’ Mumbai and its urban poor in a realistic or non-realistic (orientalist) way, this article tries to inquire whether and how the film engages its spectators into a visceral, sensual viewing experience. The article presents an analysis of the film’s deployment of participatory narrative strategies, kinaesthetic cinematography and notions of embodiment, in order to inquire the filmmaker’s overall ambition to immerse viewers into the experience of living in contemporary Mumbai.
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Parapluie. Nr. 26: Visuelle Kultur (2010)
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KulturPoetik 2009, Issue 2
Cultural history often combines the approaches of anthropology, history, philology and various ot... more Cultural history often combines the approaches of anthropology, history, philology and various other humanistic disciplines. Marshall McLuhan’s theories on the other hand have been rather discussed in the field of media – and communications. This article tries to situate McLuhan's work in the larger framework of "cultural history", while trying to unfold the various influences from a range of different disciplines that are woven into McLuhans œuvre. It so tries to present the »McLuhan-Galaxy« as an attempt to describe a non-linear cultural history, which is profoundly grounded in literary studies.
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Monographs by Igor Krstić
Combining approaches from cultural, globalisation and film studies, Igor Krstić outlines a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, barrios poulares or chawls of our ‘planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film culture. From Jacob Riis’ How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of films from different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predeccesors, demonstrating the way various filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes to convey life in our ‘planet of slums’.
More on: http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9781474406864
Edited collections by Igor Krstić
Journal articles and book chapters by Igor Krstić
I believe are such films: Zoran Solomun’s Müde Weggefährten (1997), Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999) or Damir Marjanović’s My Father’s Angel (1999); Goran Rebić’s Jugofilm (1997), Andrea Štaka’s Das Fräulein (2006), Goran Rušinović’s Buick Riviera (2006), Dino Murselović’s
Elsker deg ogsa (2012), Michaela Kezele’s Die Brücke am Ibar (2012) and Igor Drljača’s Krivina
(2012) and The Waiting Room (2015).
never-ending conundrum of contradictions and inconvenient antagonisms, when they tackle either the realities or the fears of population growth. It sets out four classical arguments against the fear of overpopulation and in which way these arguments coalesce with the general viewpoints of many Cultural Studies scholars as well as why they are inherently contradictory.
Jonas Bendiksen’s photo book The Places We Live (2008) consists of pictures of slum-dwellers and their homes. More precisely, it provides a combination of written text and photographic imagery in the form of panoramic folding images of slum exteriors and interiors in four of the most rapidly expanding megacities of the world: Mumbai (India), Caracas (Venezuela), Nairobi (Kenya), and Jakarta (Indonesia). The Places We Live thus promises a quasi-global perspective on what the urban sociologist Mike Davis has proposed to call a ‘planet of slums’, that is, a planet in which by now a vast number of people, approximately one billion, call slums their home. In fact, The Places We Live was published in the exact same year in which, according to many sociologists, mankind encountered a pivotal turning point: since 2008, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in the countryside. According to Bendiksen, his project is an artistic response to these staggering figures and the historical watershed it involves. However, it was also conceived as a media experiment: Bendiksen published his images not only in a photo book; they have also been used for an interactive web documentary (theplaceswelive.com) as well as for a touring exhibition installation, in both of which slum-dwellers tell their personal stories via recorded (but dubbed) interviews directly to their audience.
Accordingly, this paper argues via new media theories (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Manovich 2001; Grau 2004; Jenkins 2006), that it is not so much the ‘artistry’ of the (social documentary) photographer that lends a new sensory (or immersive) experience to the spectator, but rather the new possibilities of digital media technologies. It will thus provide a reading of The Places We Live which emphasises it less as artistic innovation, and more as what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin called a 'remediation', because Bendiksen’s project promises to reform ‘our’ mediated encounter with the (urban) Other, and because it attempts to refashion older ways of mediating the urban poor.
Combining approaches from cultural, globalisation and film studies, Igor Krstić outlines a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, barrios poulares or chawls of our ‘planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film culture. From Jacob Riis’ How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of films from different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predeccesors, demonstrating the way various filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes to convey life in our ‘planet of slums’.
More on: http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9781474406864
I believe are such films: Zoran Solomun’s Müde Weggefährten (1997), Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999) or Damir Marjanović’s My Father’s Angel (1999); Goran Rebić’s Jugofilm (1997), Andrea Štaka’s Das Fräulein (2006), Goran Rušinović’s Buick Riviera (2006), Dino Murselović’s
Elsker deg ogsa (2012), Michaela Kezele’s Die Brücke am Ibar (2012) and Igor Drljača’s Krivina
(2012) and The Waiting Room (2015).
never-ending conundrum of contradictions and inconvenient antagonisms, when they tackle either the realities or the fears of population growth. It sets out four classical arguments against the fear of overpopulation and in which way these arguments coalesce with the general viewpoints of many Cultural Studies scholars as well as why they are inherently contradictory.
Jonas Bendiksen’s photo book The Places We Live (2008) consists of pictures of slum-dwellers and their homes. More precisely, it provides a combination of written text and photographic imagery in the form of panoramic folding images of slum exteriors and interiors in four of the most rapidly expanding megacities of the world: Mumbai (India), Caracas (Venezuela), Nairobi (Kenya), and Jakarta (Indonesia). The Places We Live thus promises a quasi-global perspective on what the urban sociologist Mike Davis has proposed to call a ‘planet of slums’, that is, a planet in which by now a vast number of people, approximately one billion, call slums their home. In fact, The Places We Live was published in the exact same year in which, according to many sociologists, mankind encountered a pivotal turning point: since 2008, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in the countryside. According to Bendiksen, his project is an artistic response to these staggering figures and the historical watershed it involves. However, it was also conceived as a media experiment: Bendiksen published his images not only in a photo book; they have also been used for an interactive web documentary (theplaceswelive.com) as well as for a touring exhibition installation, in both of which slum-dwellers tell their personal stories via recorded (but dubbed) interviews directly to their audience.
Accordingly, this paper argues via new media theories (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Manovich 2001; Grau 2004; Jenkins 2006), that it is not so much the ‘artistry’ of the (social documentary) photographer that lends a new sensory (or immersive) experience to the spectator, but rather the new possibilities of digital media technologies. It will thus provide a reading of The Places We Live which emphasises it less as artistic innovation, and more as what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin called a 'remediation', because Bendiksen’s project promises to reform ‘our’ mediated encounter with the (urban) Other, and because it attempts to refashion older ways of mediating the urban poor.