Boosting the image of a nation: the use of history in contemporary Serbian film

The article investigates the links between history film in the former communist state of Serbia and its contemporary political correlations. Inspired by enquiries into ethnicity, the paper cultivates the instrumentalist approach to history, perceiving the interpretation of the past as a device employed by different interest- and status-groups to achieve some other, most-often material objective. Following the key premise that history film exhibit particular eagerness to point to contemporaneous political concerns the paper shows how history film in Serbia actively participated in the dominant discourses on the (recent and more distant) past in Serbia, and by doing so, suggested (alternative) ways of conceptualizing the political, economic, and cultural transformations in the last two decades. The article looks at case studies related to both the Milosevic era and the post-Milosevic era and points to a transformation and diversification in the forms of history film and genres in the new post-Milosevic generation.