Two Emperors and a Queen: Holocaust and the river Danube

Two Emperors and a Queen is an experimental documentary film that follows on from my broader research on the river Danube as a Holocaust landscape. The film (re)traces an escape attempt of a group of Jewish refugees from central Europe, later known in history as the Kladovo transport. The group’s entire journey was marked by striking relations to time, starting from its overall duration of more than two years (from 1939 to 1941-42) dominated by stasis rather than movement. The group derived its name from the Serbian town of Kladovo where their trip came to a prolonged halt. In the telling of this historical narrative, my project draws from a large interdisciplinary field spanning from Holocaust geographies to film phenomenology. In utilising filmmaking practice as my key mode of inquiry, I am able not only to provide a unique perspective on this episode of liquid histories of the Balkans, but more importantly, an embodied engagement with the past. In this context, my study centres on phenomenological discourse around cinematic time and haptic quality of cinematic image in order to explore the ways in which film can evoke the times past. Film situates the viewer in time in a particular way, and in doing so offers a unique platform for experiential engagement with multiple temporalities inherent to our understanding of history. The film, which is now freely available online, was screened on multiple occasions including in the Wiener Library, Serbian embassy, Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade (Serbia) and a number of universities. The research was also presented internationally, including in conferences like Visible Evidence (Los Angeles, USA), TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) (Cardiff, UK) or CHAT (Aarhus, Denmark).

- (2019) Two emperors and a queen. Screenworks – the peer-reviewed online publication of practice research in film and screen media. [Article]
The film Two Emperors and a Queen has been produced as central element of my practice-as-research PhD project ‘The River Danube as a Holocaust Landscape: Journey of the Kladovo Transport’.
- (2019) Film practice as interdisciplinary research: a case study. Media Practice and Education. [Article]
Referring primarily to my own doctoral practice-as-research project as a case study, this chapter explores cinematic practice as a mode of interdisciplinary research.