Oedipus Unresolved
"Covert and Overt Narrative Discourse in Emir Kusturica's "When Father Was Away on Business
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8904948 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrew Horton (0000-0001-6067-8778, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 64-64 |
| Publication date | 1988-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cinema Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1225153 |
| OpenAlex | W2317962382 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 1 |
The intense scrutiny of narrative theory in film and literary studies in recent years justifies claim of Wallace Martin that we have come to appreciate narrative, whatever medium, as of understanding past that has its own rationale.' I wish to consider in this article both context and text of an appealingly complex film that begins as a family portrait but by end finds pulse of nation.2 The film is Emir Kusturica's When Father Was Away on Business (Otac No Sluzbenom Putu), which won Palme d'Or for Best Film at Cannes in 1985. My general interest will be how narrative codes, interprets, and re-presents past, in this case past involving conflicts within Yugoslavia during anti-Stalinist purges of early 1950s, after Tito's break with Moscow in 1948. More specifically, I will treat context (cultural and political) in which Kusturica's film exists and then examine narrative from following perspectives: first, from Raymond Bellour's observation that we can detect narrative space as defined by (or mimicked by) the schema of family relations;3 and second, within such framework, implications of Kusturica's intertwining of overt (first-person child narrator/character) and covert (effaced) narration, which I will examine by making particular use of theories of both Seymour Chatman and Gerard Genette. Such close reading may help illumine both method and rationale of this significant Yugoslav film while suggesting an approach to narrative study in other films as well
Aesthetics · Art · Covert · Humanities · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Cinema and Media Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2001 - 2001 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |