Dialogi
Eurozine
Dialogi
2011-11-30
Summary of Dialogi 9/2011
In the Introductory editorial, Dialogi's film editor Matic Majcen shares a few observations from this year's Mostra -- the Venice film festival. He first addresses the question of whether Slovenian cinema, as a small national one, should be presented and compared on this global market, then turns to the issue of the future of film festivals more generally. Even such a world film giant as Mostra, writes Majcen, is essentially a multifaceted and fragile organism which is not only dependent on capital and big names, but is also being shaped by visitors at the very bottom of the pyramid. This means a heavy dependence on media in which there are increasingly fewer independent reviews, and which all over Europe are being undermined by the onslaught of commercialization and tabloidization.
Robert Petrovic, our editor for independent culture, contributes a wide-ranging interview with feminist and English linguist Lilijana Burcar, who works in gender studies, post-colonial and neo-colonial studies, and contemporary British and American literature. Burcar is the author of the book A New Wave of Innocence in Children's Literature: What is the Message of Harry Potter and Lyra Silvertongue?, in which she argues that the idea of the innocence of childhood originating from the 18th and 19th centuries is once again making a return in works of children's literature such as the well known Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Burcar also analyzes animated films, in particular those from the Disney empire. Disney has long been serving the geopolitical interests of the USA; behind the multiculturalism of its cartoons lies a justification of colonization, according to Burcar.
Next are two articles in the field of literary history. In the first one Petra Samec analyzes sevdalinka, the love folk songs of Balkan Muslim women who lived in a multicultural patriarchal environment, for the most part confined to their homes and immediate surrounding environment. From a structural point of view, sevdalinka is a lyrical monologue or voice of a woman commenting on life and expressing a particular love emotion -- sevdah. The origins of sevdalinka reach back to the 16th century; its golden age lasted up until the occupation of Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878, when it came under the control of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. At that point the circumstances in which the conventions of the sevdalinka could be renewed without interruption began to disappear.
Gaja Kos compares six original and foreign young adult problem novels and shows how the same problem topics (drug addiction, suicidality, and eating disorders) are addressed by different authors and what draws their attention. Although the selected novels vary greatly in quality, from below average to artistically ambitious, a range of constant and similar features can be observed, indicating that this type of production is forming a recognized literary phenomenon.
In Reading, under the editorship of Robert Titan Felix, we publish short stories by Slovenian writers Marko Pristov, Marko Golja and Matjaz Drev, along with a selection of poems by Croatian poet Miroslav Micanovic, translated by Jurij Hudolin.
In Cultural diagnosis Matic Majcen writes about Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's trilogy Empire (2003) -- Multitude (2005) -- Commonwealth (2010). Gaja Kos reviews this year's winner of the Vecernica Prize for the best Slovenian children's book, Revenge of the Little Oyster (Mascevanje male ostrige) by Mate Dolenc. Cvetka Bevc reviews the poetry collection Touching the Void (Dotakniti se prazne sredine), in which the Slovakian poet Stanislava Chrobakova Repar, who lives in Slovenia, presents her first writing in Slovene language. Film critics Ana Sturm, Katja Cicigoj and Matic Majcen analyze the following films: The King's Speech (directed by Tom Hooper, 2010), Best Worst Movie (directed Michael Stephenson, 2009), It's Kind of a Funny Story (directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2010) and The Tree of Life (directed by Terrence Malick, 2011). Ana Perne in her account of this year's Mladi levi (Young Lions) festival concludes that its selection process has for a long time not only encouraged young artists just setting out, for whom the festival is intended, but also attracted works with different contents and forms, and the festival is also moving increasingly from closed spaces on to the streets.
In Detector, theatre editor Primoz Jesenko talks with Sasa Pavcek, who is a stage actress, professor of performing literature at AGRFT (Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Televison), and according to her inner vocation a dramatist and poet, about her transitions between different creative fields and the effect on her of the poetic heritage of her father Tone Pavcek, one of the classic authors of postwar Slovenian poetry, and of her brother Marko Pavcek, who left only one collection of poetry before his premature death, but an outstanding one.