Ana Vujanović, “Landscapes of Resistance: Time and Temporality of Feminist Storytelling”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 103 (October 2022)
This article explores feminist storytelling through the dramaturgical work behind the documentary film Landscapes of Resistance (dir. by Marta Popivoda, 2022). My motivation for discussing this film stems from a desire to highlight feminist storytelling in cinema and to share insights into dramaturgical work—a specific form of artistic practice that is often overlooked in filmmaking discourse.
Landscapes of Resistance centers on my 97-year-old great-aunt Sonja, a communist, antifascist, and one of Yugoslavia’s first registered female partisan fighters. Captured in 1942, she spent four years in Nazi prisons and concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she continued resisting as part of the resistance movement. Through Sonja’s stories, the film guides viewers across the landscapes of her life—from the Serbian mountains of her revolutionary youth to the muddy terrain of Birkenau. Her memories intertwine with those of Marta and myself, through our reflections on the resurgence of fascism in Europe during this decade-long film project, captured in my project journal.
The process of shaping this film presented two key challenges. First, we aimed to create a temporal and visual composition capable of connecting the anti-fascist past to the present, offering it as a legacy for the future. Second, we sought to craft a communist and partisan film without relying on the masculinist aesthetic canon of leftist activist cinema, such as the Eisensteinian montage of attraction. In our discussions, Marta and I critiqued such aesthetics and pursued a feminist approach to narrating antifascism. Marta’s direction drew inspiration from leftist artistic forms outside socialist realism, such as cubist landscape paintings and constructivist collages, which informed the film’s visual composition.
As dramaturge, my role was to craft an affective, contemplative, and non-spectacular composition, resisting the pull of conventional dramatic narratives and masculinist “hero’s journey” tropes. Our focus centered on temporality and the interplay between story and silence, which became key to articulating a feminist vision of antifascism.
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