Ethnic nationalism and globalization (Milcho Manchevski's 'Before the Rain')

In this paper, I explore the intriguing connections the film Before The Rain makes between the deadly resurgence of a kind of ethnic primordialism and what would appear to be its opposite, globalization, seen most clearly in the emergence of an international youth culture, visible in the common cultural vocabulary shared among the youth of different nations portrayed in the film. I argue that these two powerful vectors of contemporary life-the allure of ethnic identification and the global penetration of certain mass cultural styles of dress, music, entertainment, and communications-are recapitulated in the film's own style and mode of production, which renders an ancient ethnic conflict in a cinematic idiom drawn from the genre of the international art film. A style of filmmaking commonly identified with the 'Young Cinema' movements of the world such as the French New Wave and the New German Cinema, the international art film has often served as the vanguard expression of new national consciousness, and has come to be identified with emergent forms of national identification, as in the emergence of the New Polish Cinema, the New Hungarian Cinema, and the New Australian Cinema. In Before The Rain, however, the film's art cinema narrative style-characterized by a complicated temporal order, gaps in causality, weak or inscrutable character motivation, ellipses, psychological interiority, dream sequences, and the pronounced use of parallelism rather than cause and effect linkages-conveys a set of messages that are quite distinct from the nationalist projections that frame the Young Cinema movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Before The Rain might be seen to empty the art cinema genre of its original content in order to convert it to the expression of a very different set of messages.