Constructs of Slovenianness in Slovenian Partisan Films
Constructs of Slovenianness in Slovenian Partisan Films

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses the question, whether there could be identified a consistent pattern of representations of Slovenianness in Slovenian partisan films, the film genre about communist-led guerrilla fighters (so-called 'partisans'), and their struggle against the German and Italian occupying forces during WW II. The analysis of all feature films made in this genre shows that the official communist discourse on Slovenian national identity, at least as revealed in the partisan films, was in Slovenia in many respects not really along the orthodox Marxist lines of understanding national identity as an essentially disposable bourgeois ideological construct, since it actively encouraged it, to a large extent even in terms of the established, conservative construct of Slovenianness as something that in its essence is likened to a simple, rustic life in the midst of unspoiled nature. In the films made after the late 1960s, however, the pattern changes and the Slovenian partisan films with their new, distinctive urban character turn into a medium of restructuring of national identity.

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