THE SUBVERSIVE POTENTIAL OF THE MOVIE GYPSY WOMAN (1953) DIRECTED BY VOJISLAV NANOVIĆ

Abstract

The paper analyzes the movie Gypsy Woman (1953), directed by Vojislav Nanović. Its subversive potential has only been noticed in contemporary film criticism, and consists in the director’s focus on the strength of individual who challenges the collective in an unexpected way. In the movie Gypsy Woman, the “strong individual” is represented by a woman, whose power to threaten the order is based on her talent, fatal femininity and the need for freedom. The thesis we present here is that Vojislav Nanović faded into oblivion for a long time precisely because of the characters he consistently created in his movies, one of which was the character of a Gypsy woman. The movie Gypsy Woman, as well as Nanović’s other films, during the socialist regime was possible for two reasons. First, the director occupied the highest position in the film industry already in the first post-war decade, which was possible due to his impeccable communist biography. Nevertheless, he began to distance himself from the party line with his works that did not fit into the proclaimed cultural models, and thus Nanović gradually began to represent a social, artistic and political anomaly of his time. The subversive potential of the movie can be interpreted in various ways, and one of them is its comparison with the concept of purity and danger developed by British anthropologist Mary Douglas. A Gypsy Woman corresponds to the concept of dangerous and dirty that has the power to threaten the system. Consequently, the Gipsy woman had to be sacrificed through the ritual of marriage for the purpose of preserving the social order and its purity.