Modernization in the film “Dear Video” – anthropological analysis

The subject of this paper is a Serbian feature film Dear Video from 1991. Two brothers, one who is living in Germany and the other who is living in Serbian village and their families are communicating through VHS video tapes. Instead of facilitating their communication, the VHS video tapes actually reveal all that was suppressed and hidden from surface relationships (dishonesty, jealousy, deceptions).  Thus, this paper combines two approaches: film ethnography (its diegesis) explained by Kovačević and Herzfeld’s cultural intimacy applied in Serbian film analysis by Naumović. Feature films, as part of pop cultural phenomena, interpret and give comments on socio-cultural phenomena and therefore can serve also as cognitive tools for understanding the world around us. The aim of the paper is to examine how this film solves the issue of unsuccessful modernization of Serbian villages, in other words, why guest workers did not have greater and more important influence on modernization on their places of origins. The film shows discord between the two brothers, discord among cousines, discord among villagers and discord among different nationalities in Yugoslavia. At the same time, discord can be interpreted as a self-defiant inner voice of the Serbs, and thus as the example of cultural intimacy and part of Serbian cultural identity. Consequently, these disharmonies can be understood as the answer of failed modernization.