Surfing the Black

Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema...

From Early Works (1969) by elimir ilnik
In the eyes of the despot, men are always debased. They drown before
his eyes and on his behalf in the mire of common life from which, like toads,
they always rise up again. Muta pecora, prona et ventri oboedientia. [The herd is
silent, docile and obeys its stomach.] For our part, it is our task to drag the old
world into the full light of day and to give positive shape to the new one.
(Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge)
Early Works
 Surng the Black Index

5 Introduction

Yugoslav Black Wave Essays

Cinema and Its Trangressive
Moments
10 New Yugoslav Cinema A Humanist Cinema? Not Really.
Essay by Gal Kirn

46 We Cannot Promise To Do More than Experiment!

On Yugoslav Experimental Film and Cine Clubs in the 60s and

Edited by 70s by Ana Janevski

Gal Kirn, Dubravka Sekulic

78 The Raw Image by Pavle Levi

106 On Makavejev, On Ideology The Concrete and the Abstract

and iga Testen in the Readings of Duan Makavejevs Films by Sezgin Boynik

170 Shoot It Black! An Introduction to elimir ilnik

Essay by Boris Buden

180 Marxism and Mud Landscape, Urbanism and Socialist

Space in the Black Wave by Owen Hatherley

Zines

25 Surng the Black Zine No. 1 Inflation of Radical Phrases as

Opposed to a Lack of Radical Action

27 Surng the Black Zine No. 2 Those Who Make Revolutions

Half Way Only Dig Their Own Graves

121 Surng the Black Zine No. 3 Black Wave ABC

3
 Prologue currently leang through. We investigated
the subject with a critical but also biased
The four of them, who make do and get by, do distance (as three of us were born in
it in such a manner that it is obvious that they
Yugoslavia), in an attempt to open up
avoid any guidance or project that would enable
their activities to take the shape of a concrete the discussion of the Black Wave from
action or event. Regardlessly they keep insisting its (limited) post-Yugoslav context and
on referring to a certain project. investigate its possible correlations and
This is revealed by the fact that the interpretations.
four of them, who make do and get by, are not
novel and unknown to us but carry with them a
familiar structure. A structure that nevertheless The Black Wave
appears to be stuck onto them from the past
and is attached to them in accordance with the Recent developments (in Yugoslav lm)
real, while not bearing any guiding or motivating evolved into a movement difcult to overlook
function for them. They have not yet abolished today. New lm. Above all it stands for the
the project, but it is already so supercial that it subordination of form to the psychological
only appears to us as dead weight. contents of human ethical and metaphysical
drama today. New lm doesnt intend to
sparkle, but to torture. It doesnt want to seduce,
The above statement (quoted from a text but rather to burden our ethical, political and
by Rudi eligo on ilniks Early Works state conformism, by impertinently portraying
written in 1969) is unspecic and general the fate of its heroes.
enough to designate many four of them. However, New lm doesnt use a
slogan or pun, but the revelation of
Originally referring to the four protagonists of psychological truths, which come as a
ilniks Early Works, it became upon being consequence of ethical crises and the ideological
discovered in a pile of photocopied articles wilderness of the contemporary world.
on the Black Wave a sort of a motto for a
series of activities Pietro Bianchi, Gal Kirn, ivojin Pavlovi used those words to express
Dubravka Sekuli and iga Testen undertook the political and aesthetic discontinuity
when our disparate interests found common that characterized the new cinema movement
ground in the topic of the Yugoslav Black that spread in Yugoslavia from the mid 60s
Wave cinema. until the early 70s. This period, frequently
A steady but constant worldwide referred to as the golden age of Yugoslav
increase of interest in this relatively marginal, cinema, saw a true outburst of creativity in
yet revealing, episode of Yugoslavian history cinema.
contributed a feeling of urgency to our The decade witnessed a proliferation
inquiry, but at the same time lacked a clear of lms by talented young authors who,
idea as to where it would eventually take us. working under the sign of individual
Nevertheless, it seemed this could potentially expression and aesthetic experimentation,
be the moment when history offers a glimpse pushed and explored the limits of the
of a possible rupture of a not yet dened constraints of the socialist state and lead to a
or articulated event and as such stands on new path of visual expression.
disposal for the present.

Consequently, the aforementioned four Finding both inspiration and support

initiated the project entitled Surng the for their artistic inclinations among the
Black, under the auspices of the Jan van abundant innovative tendencies of the recent
Eyck Academie, that was structured as a international cinema (some of them the
multi-disciplinary research attempting to Italian neorealism, some other the French
cross over politics, philosophy, design, art, Nouvelle Vague, and some in Jonas Mekkas)
architecture, and some speculative thinking but re-shaping them in an innovative and
with the activities ranging from archival work, original way
interviews, seminars, screenings, a conference Aleksandar Petrovi,
and, is nally reaching a (temporary) Botjan Hladnik,
conclusion with the publication you are ivojin Pavlovi,

5
 Duan Makavejev, The Book photographic work by Slovenian the specic historical resources that would
Ante Babaja, photographer Peter Rauch specially for give an answer to some of the paradoxes and
Vatroslav Mimica, The book consists of two integral parts; A this book. deadlocks of the current affairs.
Kokan Rakonjac, collection of six theoretical essays and three Apart from a more concise and
Krsto Papi, fanzines that zigzag between the essays, Those Who Make revolutions Only Half complex understanding of the past,
Matjaz Klopi, consisting of loose thoughts, leftovers, Way Dig Their Own Graves is an interview emancipatory thought strives to stay always
Bato engi, posters by various contributors, and an the editors of this book made with elimir opened to the future, which goes beyond
elimir ilnik (unconsciously) interview. ilnik in the winter of 2010. ilnik reflects the nationalistic mythologisation and blunt
participated in something that would be on the lm production of the 60s and 70s, afrmation of the existing state of affairs.
called novi jugoslovenski lm (New Part One evoking structural changes in socialist Instead of applying a simplied schema of
Yugoslav Film). political economy, but also noting that the eternal struggle between dissident ART
Connected mostly through their The six essays collected in this volume were lm had a crucial role in Yugoslav society VS. totalitarian STATE, we attempted to do
cinema club beginnings, that subsequently originally presented at the international of the time. justice to the specicity of Yugoslav black
became regarded as a movement under a conference Surng the Black held at the Finally, he comments on his current wave lm experience, which pointed to some
pejorative name The Black Wave, which Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in lm production in relation to the topics he central questions of the relation between
was a result of an ideological campaign (June 28-29, 2010) and the series of seminars opened during the black wave period and revolutionary art and politics.
launched against some of those lmmakers that preceded the conference. questions the continuities and ruptures. Finally, these lms - beside being rst
by political-cultural apparatchiks. Later, the The conference was organised as to open some social and political topics -
lmmakers appropriated this name. a workshop for intensive discussion and Black Wave ABC is a glossary addressing showed not only that another way of seeing
collaborative scrutiny of the Black Wave some of the key concepts and terms the world is possible, but also another way of
The Yugoslavian Black Wave can be through each individual paper, which were related to the Black Wave but at the same making things together.
considered a unique movement in the subsequently revised in the light of the time expanding the scope of attention to The history cannot be simply
history of cinema, interesting both due to its discussions and screenings. Additionally, other topics ranging from daily politics nationalized, as we were taught in the post-
political implication as a critical voice toward a number of other authors were invited and economic concepts (such as self- Yugoslav communities.
bureaucratic Yugoslavian state socialism of to contribute texts in order to compose a management), flickering thoughts that could
the 60s and its aesthetic form with a visual representative volume of contemporary open a new angle on these lms and possibly
freedom that is nowhere to be found even in scholarship in Yugoslav Black Wave cinema. chart a new research trajectory through the
the context of European experimental cinema The authors of the essays returned to materials; contemporary notions (troll) that
of that decade. different aesthetic and political moments could inspire new readings of the past, and
Although it is nowadays almost half of this complex topic surrounding the lm forgotten ideas of the past that could help us
forgotten in the western part of Europe and production. in the future.
the United States, from that new cinema Last, but not least, it is also in some
something completely different emerged Part Two way an index of the contemporary artists
that challenged not only the ideological whose work is informed and inspired by the
and aesthetic apparatus of the then The other block of the book has been Black Wave.
Yugoslav state but that it is still preserving reserved for a series of contributions by
a challenging stance to our contemporary writers, artists and designers collected during (Un)intentionally following what Branko
approach to ways of viewing. our inquiry and thematically distributed Vuievi calls the Serbian cutting when
The urgency of these lms now among three fanzines. discussing Duan Makavejevs editing
lies not only in the fact that their topics method, the content of this book is
such as unemployment, homelessness, the Inflation of Radical Phrases as opposed to distributed among sections of sixteen pages
impediments of class immobility are, at least, a Lack of Radical Action is a fanzine that interlacing the essays with the zines and
as current now as they were in the 1960s, but documents a series of contributions received allowing them to intervene with each other.
also in the fact that they were produced as a from artist and designers we asked to design
highly critical content within the system of posters for some of the Black Wave lms. Now What?
controlled funding. This also makes them With some notable exceptions the posters
relevant beyond the limited (post-)Yugoslav accompanying the Black Wave lmography We returned to this specic political-artistic
context, and was a focus of our research and rarely critically engaged with the content of sequence of the Yugoslav past not simply
the book. the lms or their own medium. to bring back memories of the good old
We requested the invited contributors times. Even less did we want to emancipate
to do it and in return got some un/expected Yugoslavian art from the socialist ideology as
results. A selection of the posters it existed in midair. Rethinking conjuncture,
was interpreted as an independent in our case history of lm meant to mobilise

6 7
 'Inflation of Radical Phrases as Opposed to a Lack of Radical Action'
Posters on display at the Jan van Eyck Academie gallery space during the
Surng the Black conference (photo by Lilo Bauer)

8
 Gal Kirn Introduction:
Humanist hypothesis

New Yugoslav Cinema In contemporary cultural theory on the Yugoslav cinema there is a
widespread belief that the 1960s New Yugoslav Film is a dissident
A Humanist Cinema? cinema. Moreover, it is believed that new lm movement was
massively influenced by humanist Marxist philosophy school Praxis1,

Not Really. which itself was already at the time extremely critical towards the
ofcial Yugoslav Communist Party. Praxis school was some kind of
avant-garde in Yugoslav theory that was based on the works of Early
Marx expounding the critique of collectivism and all forms of
authoritarianism.2 As is common with all avant-garde groups,
they try to impose their worldview on all other phenomena: the
New Yugoslav Film simply translated and mediated Praxis humanist
ideas into the cinematic world. The cognitive climate of Praxis p. 167
overdetermined the sphere of culture. This process of a cultural
translation shall be called a humanist hypothesis. The hypothesis
here is used in a sense from ancient theater, where it meant a
program that would be handed out by the ushers before a play would
begin. Ushers provide the summary that denes the setting and
identies the actors giving a few notes about the production. Many
contemporary ushers, cultural researchers like Daniel Goulding
(2002), Gregg DeCuir (2010), Krunoslav Stojakovi (2011)3 and
others would subscribe to this hypothesis. One of the central
concerns of the article is a refutation of this hypothesis that in turn
sketches elements for a more complex reading of New Yugoslav

1 Luxemburg Foundation (12-16th October

The Praxis school anchored its major 2011, Korula). Some literature can be
theoretical preoccupation around found in the journal 11.teza Jerki and
the conceptual double of alienation- Mokrovi (2007), a very important
disalienation and individual Subject-praxis. contribution was made by Mikuli (internet
This was a common tendency in the Western source). See also the interview with Pupovac
Marxism of that time, which returned to (2011).
humanist Marx and put too much hope in
the gure of Man. This beautiful dream of 2
socialist Man never came true. This was These claims were reiterated by different
not only due to the wrong course of the Praxis philosophers, from Gajo Petrovi and
Yugoslav socialist leadership. It was also Milan Kangrga to Zagorka Golubovi and
due to the poverty of thought, its inability to Neboja Popov. See also Goudling (2002).
articulate itself more openly and stringently
with revolutionary politics. 3
The abstract notion of Man is the Pavle Levi (2007) in his excellent rst chapter
major symptom of the humanist turn. explores this hypothesis. We
Its vague nature proofed to be extremely should admit that Levis account is much
difcult to locate or to be realized at any more complex and further reserved towards
point in historical development. We will a too direct link between Praxis and
not go into details, let us only direct on our New Yugoslav Film.
and Ozren Pupovacs contributions on the
conference on Praxis organized by Rosa

10 11
 Film. In the rst part we discuss the role of the self-management Some of its theoretical representatives drown social conflicts in
infrastructure and the ofcial cultural policy of socialist Yugoslavia, psychological traits of Tito (cult of personality) treating history
whereas in the second part we move towards an evaluation of poly- as development of psychology of one person and his partners in
valent politics of aesthetics that shows different cinematographic crime. Others, especially external and neutral observers, promote
forms from the period of 1960s and 1970s, especially centring on lm a more orientalist view on the Balkans: the Balkans is a land of
works of Makavejev and Pavlovi. eternal animosities of ethnicities and clashes of religions. It could
not be but condemned to a failure, Yugoslavia was a prison-house
Antitotalitarian memory and liberal nostalgia of nations or articial entity, soon to be forgotten.8
on the role of art in Yugoslavia Problem of this narrative is that it reduces the history of
Yugoslavia to the negative of history of League of Yugoslav
Before starting the more lmic part of the article, we should place our Communists9 p. 153, a mere mirror of what communist leadership
intervention in a broader body of the cultural research that partici- was telling about the dissidents, anarcho-liberals. Now, the
pates in the rewriting of the Yugoslav (cultural) past. The humanist communist leadership becomes this dark force that governs all the
hypothesis does not simply fall from the sky. In some cases it directly historical processes. Analogically, the antitotalitarian narrative
ts into the simplistic schema, which opposes good Art and the evil posits the role of art in an instrumental way. Art in socialist times
State party apparatus.4 This schema was imported from a broader and is an instrument in the hands of the Party, which supports the
dominant theoretico-ideological narrative of the Yugoslav past. This thesis that art is only a supplement to politics, thus it becomes state
narrative brings together seemingly opposed, but democratic art or propaganda10. This formulation receives a specic turn
perspectives: the dominant anti-totalitarian and liberal-memorial. when applied to forms of dissident art, which opposed the
Firstly, the anti-totalitarian narrative is an essential ideological stringent authoritarian rule of Tito. Two consequences stem from
background of different nationalistic historiographies and everyday this twist: rstly, dissident artists, preferably writers, but also lm
journalism. In the period of 1990s, post-socialist countries witnessed directors, are retrospectively labelled as the representatives of the
a veritable massive process of rewriting the history that was national literature and national lm (not Yugoslavian, but Serbian
embedded in the new nationalistic-building process.5 The anticommu- cinema, Croatian literature, new Slovenian art). Secondly, and
nist reference to monolith totalitarianism distorts Arendts thesis on more importantly, their dissident art becomes a directly political
the origins of totalitarianism6 and simply applies without any critical art. Instead of propaganda art we have dissident art that
comparisons the ideological matrix to all post-socialist societies. propagates the real values and freedom. According to heroic
There was no freedom, only repression. In the post-Yugoslav context dissidents, art becomes a supplement to the future national State, a
antitotalitarian discourse destined Yugoslavia to an image of gloomy supplement to nationalistic politics, which became a part of new
repressive past and projected a conspiracy of an ever more corrupted ideological universe. Miko uvakovi lucidly coined this new
communist elite that dominated and controlled all social spheres.7 synthesis as Nationalist Realism(2006).

4 6 8 principle was underlining the difference with

An emblematic example of this standpoint Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Besides its transhistorical assertion, this the Soviet type of socialism.
was delivered by Nebojsa Popov, who Totalitarianism explicitly states that narrative played an active part in the
in 1960s and 1970s was a member of a Titos Yugoslavia is not a totalitarian state nationalistic break-up of Yugoslavia. For 10
critical Marxist school Praxis. Recently, (1973). An extremely important analysis of a general theory of Orientalism see Said Apart from the very early post-War years
he launched a retrospective account on totalitarianist discourse, its ideological (1979), for a critique of re-appropriation Yugoslavian leadership did not impose
socialist Yugoslavia as a dualism between being embedded in the end of history see of Orientalism in post-Yugoslav lms see a doctrine of socialist realism. Quite
Praxis (emancipation) and anti-Praxis iek (2001). iek (1997), Pavle Levi (2007), Jovanovi the opposite, the mainstream doctrine
(anti-emancipation of Party), i.e. between (forthcoming). became (socialist) Modernism, a specic
dissidents and corrupted communist 7 cultural policy that would distinguish the
Party (2003). The victory of anti-Praxis A whole series of memoirs of former 9 Yugoslavian type of socialism from other
signaled the break-up of Yugoslavia. communist politicians and the emerging The Communist Party was renamed existing socialisms. See the catalogue of
new political elite appeared, centred around the League of Yugoslav Communists, WHW on Baki and their general approach
5 the question who was more dissident or which was a federal institution, but had to Modernism via exhibitions.
For an excellent critical account of more reformist. republican Leagues: the League of Slovenian
transitology and anti-totalitarianism Communists, the League of Croatian
see Buden (2009), Rakita (2011). Communists, This organizational

12 13
 Secondly, the liberal-memorial account is a counterhegemonic Cultural policy and cultural infrastructure
account, but shares the dissident kernel of historical revisionism11. in self-management socialism
This reading rehabilitates specic political and artistic moments
insofar as emancipated from the socialist past and its ideology. There A recent lm Cinema Kommunisto narrates the Yugoslav lm history
were some bright moments in socialist past that should be remem- (from Mila Turajli) shows pathetically Titos fascination for lm
bered today. According to this theoretical account art is one of the (Titostalgia). Much more than this personal anecdote on the big
presupposed elds in society (politics, economy, culture), whose leader, it is important to recognize the ofcial stance of the League of
autonomy should be taken for granted. Stemming from this Yugoslav Communists that embraced Lenins thesis of the lm as the
autonomy of art is a necessary precondition for artistic freedom.12 It most important art and means that reaches the masses. From the
is only from this guaranteed artistic oasis that individual artists will 1950s onwards something that we can name Yugoslav socialist
be able express their freedom: artist speaks in the name of Art, which Modernism emerged. Contrary to the contemporary antitotalitarian
through individual freedom/expression could enable real collective memory, we need to stress that Modernism was a part of the ofcial
freedom. The liberal account posits true ART as the lighthouse of cultural policy of Yugoslavian state. After the break-up with Stalin in
freedom and individual artistic expression. To be more precise, the 1948, when the short era of socialist realism nished, the search for
liberal argument was by no means absent from the Yugoslav artistic/ new image of Yugoslavia was launched, the search for legitimacy of
theoretical space in times of socialism. Many critical intellectuals, new independent path to socialism.
like Praxis philosophers13, some Black Wave lm-makers and The central role normally given to diplomacy and economy was
lm-critics, were developing their arguments along similar lines.14 We necessarily attributed to socialist art, which was invested with a
need to add that this account has many variations: from Yugonostal- modernist claim: art can convey the eternity of communist struggle,
gia15 p. 169 to a liberal reading of the past that also does away with all the future will be remembered by artworks and not everyday political
nostalgic accounts. discussion16. The cultural and cognitive conditions cannot be
What follows is a critical suggestion for a reading that goes understood without the general cultural policy that was oriented to
beyond dissident discourse of the Yugoslav cinematic past and maps international promotion of self-management socialism (Zimmerman
out complex inter-relations between ideology, art and socialist 2010). It pushed for the representation of Yugoslavia as free and
political economy. We shall answer the question, whether the New democratic, more humane socialism. Artists could travel to West and
Yugoslav Film opened a path towards a specic non-bourgeois East and they were not having difculties to show their artwork
autonomy of art. outside Yugoslavia. The existence of Praxis school, Black Wave and
generally socialist Modernism are all sign of political and cultural
freedom, rather than political repression and dogmatic over-
politicized cultural policy.
11 14 According to Sergio Germani, an important scholar on Yugo-
I have described political roots of Yugoslav This view on Yugoslav lm was articulated slav lm, Yugoslav Modernism was a broad movement, which com-
liberalism in another article (2011). by Duan Stojanovi (see Goulding 2002).
prised of a general creative swing in the theatre, literature, ne arts
A very good critique of the bourgeois
12 view from the beginnings of Yugoslavia was and music (2010: 280). To this list we can add new graphic art, and
The eld of art in relation to the ideology of written by Komelj (2009). later body art and performances: never before or after was Yugoslav
authenticity and the bourgeois ideology of art so flourishing, it reached its peak in different cities throughout
autonomy is elaborated by Rastko Monik in 15 Yugoslavia from Ljubljana and Zagreb to Novi Sad, Belgrade and
many of his works on literary theory and art See Velikonja (2009). Sarajevo (uvakovi 2006). Surely, this development was polyvalent in
in general. terms of aesthetics and politics of artworks. There was a mass of
mainstream conservative Modernism, which was accompanied and
13
For a further account see the entry in the
challenged by a more radical, to some extent also neo-avant-garde
glossary of this volume. There is not much artistic practices. The latter, at least in terms of aesthetics, attacked or
written on the Praxis school, as it has been radically departed from either the established and canonized art of
largely erased from the ofcial cannons of
intellectual history. Some texts can be found
in the journal 11.teza Jerki and Mokrovi 16
(2007). An important contribution was For a thoughtful account of the status of
made by Mikuli (internet source). See also this picture and the role of art see Boris
the interview with Pupovac (2011). Budens contribution to this volume.

14 15
 Modernism or from socialist kitsch, which entered into the sphere of became economically responsible for the success of the lm. Howev-
culture en masse from the late 1960s onwards. The examples of these er, cultural workers were not simply left to the market and they also
new radical tendencies can be found in avant-garde cinema (Tomi did not have to organize everything from the scratch. On the oppo-
Gotovac), graphic arts (International Graphic Bienalle), memorial site, people working in the lm industry beneted from social infra-
sites (Bogdan Bogdanovi, Vojin Baki, Duan Damonja) but also in structure of studios and laboratories, there was certainly waiting-
theatre, body art (Marina Abramovi from 1973 onwards) and line, but any serious lm project got access to the technical
performances (group OHO).17 Many of progressive artistic initia- infrastructure. ilnik assessed that the major institutions (state and
tives dealt with issues of Yugoslav modernization and failure of republican governing bodies) and self-managed enterprises budgeted
existing socialism very openly and polemically.18 also art lms and not only entertainment lms or war spectacles. In
Apart from the dismissal to discuss the general cultural policy 1960s a tremendous lm production took the place due to the
and its effects (spread of Modernism), proponents of humanist economic prosperity and tremendous technical improvements like
hypothesis forget to analyze material conditions of socialist art. the use of smaller cameras, but also with the rise of Jadran and
Branka uri correctly points out that contemporary cultural Avala lm studios. Avala studios became one of the biggest lm
analysis, but also Praxis school excludes the realm of culture from studios in Europe with very capable and progressive studio manage-
the sphere of production.19 The cultural realm and human creativity ment. Apart from producing big-budget co-productions22, studio
is analyzed autonomously without reference to the economical management stayed very supportive towards new lmic tendencies,
processes. The idealist gesture that cuts culture from production experimentation with lm. Each year they would produce one debut
means a lack of proper analytical tools to analyze postfordist turn feature-movie of a non-established lm-director.
in socialist Yugoslavia, that happened precisely in the period of More importantly, the implementation of the self-management
1960s. This was the period, where creativity and culture became an model and promotion of decentralization triggered an emergence of
important part of socialist economy that was opened to market new cultural institutions on local levels. New Yugoslav Film with its
(domination over plan, see20). After the US and USSR, Yugoslavia polyvalent tendencies should be necessarily researched via the
had the highest percentage of people enrolled to universities (see interference of cinema clubs and different amateur and anti-genre
uri 2011). We argue that in order to understand the emergence of lm festivals23. It was due to this emerging platform-infrastructure
New Yugoslav Film it is necessary to include the analysis of self- that cultural workers enjoyed material support either for organiza-
managed infrastructure and structural transformations.21 tion of discussions and events, or through small budgets that enabled
There are a couple of important historical points that show on critical research and cultural production. Cine-clubs p. 125 were
specicity of the arts condition. Artists in Yugoslavia were already places, where young amateurs and would-be lm directors would get
from the 1950s onwards granted a legal status of the freelancer (see technical equipment (camera) in order to lm. This was again part of
Levi also*) and this was particularly valid in the lm industry, where the ofcial cultural policy that promoted the idea technique to the
lmmakers were pushed in a constant search for new projects. They people. However, this more technical framework needs to be
expanded on a political perspective. It is noteworthy that few artists
groups or artists organized politico-economically, as a lm collective,
17 19 or even started creating independent lm enterprises. The emblem-
For a more detailed account of some See 2011. atic case is a successful lm enterprise Neoplanta from Novi Sad,
groups see the book edited by uri which enabled lm-directors a great deal of economic independence.
and uvakovi (2003). On the rst serious 20 Neoplanta was a lm company standing developing independent
analysis of the Yugoslav avant-garde We analyzed the structural transformation lm production and most often worked with prot.24 We could name
cinema see the catalogue edited by Pikur of the socialist political economy in another
and Soban (2010). article (2010), wit a particular focus on
the consequences of the market reform that 22 24
18 introduced a range of capitalist elements For a detailed lmography see Let us take the example of ilniks Early
It was a time of introduction of market as early as in 1965. their webpage: http://www.lminserbia. Works: the lms cost is estimated around
relations where market forces would com/Stages/Studios/Avala_Film_ 130,000 dollars, but its prot was around
slowly start substituting planned economy. 21 Studios/116/Default.aspx. 650,000 dollars. These were signicant
Capitalist elements were not even hidden See the interview with elimir ilnik numbers and could be invested either
in the market reform of 1965. More on and the text by Ana Janevski in this volume. 23 in future lm projects or in additional
the development of the postfordist tendency For a detailed analysis see Ana Janevskis equipment. However, the highest prots
can be found in my article on the postfordist contribution in this book. were made with partisan audiences by
tendency in Yugoslavia (2010). mainstream lm directors.

16 17
 this type of enterprise some sort of a private-public enterprise avant disqualication, which was relentlessly used against the lm-makers
la lettre, as they produced and distributed lms across Yugoslavia, making quite difcult circumstances to continue their work.
even abroad, having their own material means, but as well being What were the most obvious reasons for this political move on
dependent on a larger social infrastructure and state/municipal the side of the Party? The ofcial critique attacked these new lms
budgets. as pessimist and nihilist, losing all beliefs in the socialist progress, or
The autonomy of art was not simply granted, but had to be totally losing contact with reality. A pessimist representation of
struggled for, and gained only via skills, improvisation and organiza- socialist reality replaced the former optimistic one. As one critic
tional efforts of artists.25 The analysis of the general material condi- would say new lm-makers portrayed entire society as one big toilet,
tions brings us closer to rethink the birth and shaping of the whole where social outcasts play a major role. This condemnation later on
generation of the New Yugoslav Film directors. Pavlovi, ilnik, culminated in more systematic political pressure, which meant a
Makavejev, Godina and so many others marched through the cine- very dark future for these lm-directors. Some of them went abroad,
club path. Surely, together with the organizational efforts the sheer (Duan Makavejev, elimir ilnik, Lazar Stojanovi), while others
amount and novel aesthetical forms opened a path for a specic, remained in Yugoslavia (Aleksander Petrovi, ivojin Pavlovi,
non-bourgeois art autonomy. This new generation of lm-makers Karpo Godina), though marginalized and with difculties, they
was not yet established and fought for specic autonomy that would carried on with their work.
emancipate Art from the more etatist instrumentalization of art. Contemporary readings of this lm period radically disagree
Surely, we can agree that this struggle was ambivalent, because it was already with the naming and status of this vast body of lms. Some
guided by at least two contradictory, even exclusive perspectives: on theorists would side with the name Black Wave cinema, while the
the one hand they strived for bourgeois autonomy, more rights of others with new Yugoslav lm. First reading is already our known
artistic freedom and experimentation. More or less consciously, they opponent, the dissident and simplifying reading, which suggests that
advocated for autonomy as an individual engagement, as Duan we should stick with the term Black Wave in order to stress the
Stojanovi would say, they strived to transform one collective antagonism between Party and dissident artists (DeCuir). Mostly,
mythology into plurality of individual mythologies (see also these accounts repeat the ofcial, Party functionary view, but in
Goulding 2002*). But on the other hand, through their own artistic contrast to Party view, they only stress the dissident message, roman-
production they did not only stick with individual declarations, but ticizing the artists and their artworks. They encompass the radical
succeeded in producing a distinctive aesthetical stamp that still today difference between ofcial and alternative (artistic) representation of
remains so fascinating. In other words, New Yugoslav Film returned the socialist society (krabalo 1998, Tirnani, 2008). Our research
to the initial question of the avant-garde art, namely, what is the role sides much more with critical and close readings of that period done
of art in transforming the society? Authors from New Yugoslav Film by Goulding (2002), Jovanovi (2011), Levi (2007).
delivered extremely different answers, ranging from more revolution- These authors rightfully stress a polyvalent character of the
ary, dissident to individualistic, revisionary and disillusioned. lms. This thesis also means that Black Wave/new Yugoslav Film
was never a homogenous lm movement, even more, it arguably
New Yugoslav lm or Black Wave? cannot be even seen as a movement. Even if the Party recognized its
potentially destructive and nihilist force, the fact is that lm directors
Filmmakers and lm-critics that actively participated in the 1960s never wrote any manifesto and we would have immense difculties to
and 1970s, more specically in the period between 1962 and 1972, extract criteria for specic aesthetics of their movies. On the opposite
called the progressive tendency New Yugoslav Film or a bit less closer we observe these lms, more differences in their approach and
frequently open lm (Goulding 2002 and Levi 2007). The term New politics can we detect. We could unquestionably nd striking devia-
Yugoslav Film operated until 1969, when the ofcial Party-intellectu- tions. For example, lms of the same director ivojin Pavlovi vary
al journal Borba p. 124 published an article from Dejan Jovii, whose considerably, even when we are talking about the same decade. Or,
article should be seen as a start of an offensive that denounced new the other extreme, the distinct stamp of critical lmic language of
lm as black lm. Black Wave was a political and an aesthetical elimir ilnik can be recognized all throughout his work. Most
adequately we could name new Yugoslav lm was auteur cinema,
which was emerging and interpenetrating Western and Eastern
25 cinematographies.
See the panel discussion from the However, it is much easier to completely reject the term Black
book Omitted History (2006) and
Wave than to ght for its re-appropriation. Let us exercise a defence
again the already mentioned interview
of the term Black in order for a different future use. The history of
with ilnik.

18 19
 struggles for interpretation gives us at least one lesson: one should Against the humanist hypothesis and for
never leave the theoretical terrain to the ideological enemy. DeCuirs plurality of political aesthetics
analysis in this respect is symptomatic; he suggests to reduce Black
Wave lms to political rhetoric, to a methodological Marxist call to From what we wrote so far it is quite clear that we are putting into
criticize all the existing. Our thesis is precisely the opposite: in the brackets the humanist hypothesis, that is, that Black Wave lm
incredibly creative period of 10 years many of these authors devel- should be understood along the humanist lines, which would put
oped a specic lmic language that is very different from the under Praxis philosophy. Surely, there were influences, but differ-
previous and later Yugoslav cinema. Much more than the dissident ence in political and aesthetical orientations within new Yugoslav
position of authors (and consequent attack from the Party), we argue lm simply do not allow us to verify this thesis. At best we could say
that politics in Black Wave appeared through a certain detour, that there is a certain analogy in their political effect: they were
through specic aesthetical innovations. Also, there is a certain both ghting for specic autonomy, and (in)directly criticised the role
tradition of the black that can be traced to crucial past references of the Party in the Yugoslav society (autonomy of art, autonomy of
in the lm history. In this respect Daniel Goulding rightly asserts: theory). Apart from this analogy we will see that we do not gain
anything if we force the humanist hypothesis.
The term black lm had its origins in the short-lived Perhaps the easiest way to test the humanist hypothesis against
black series of Polish documentary lms in the fties, the major new Yugoslav lms would be on the level of political
the Czech dark wave lms of the sixties, and the French message. Most of these lms belong the cinematic tradition of
lms of black pessimism of the thirties especially those social critique, which is more or less explicitly political. As Kruno-
of Marcel Carn.26 slav Stojakovi (2011) showed, their role was in ideology-critique,
that is, in the critique of the Yugoslav existing socialism, which
To this list we could add some Italian neo-realist lms. Through this according to idealist distinction can be measured in the distance
politico-aesthetical interpretation we can emancipate the term between ofcial ideas and reality. However, apart from this directly
black from the Party-narrative, which saw Black Wave as a simple political verication of these lms, we will provide a sketch for
negation of the socialist reality, or as the wrong representation of further research on the cinematographic form27 that we can detect
then existing socialism. Like the Polish predecessors or Czech black in three different lms of that time: Lazar Stojanovis Plastic Jesus
contemporaries, Black Wave lm-makers were not simply opposed to (1971), Duan Makavejevs WR Mysteries of Organism (1971) and
socialism, because most of their lms did not have a supercial ivojin Pavlovis When I am dead and Pale (1967).
anti-communist message. On the opposite, many of these lms
showed what was going wrong in Yugoslav socialism, with dominant Stojanovis antitotalitarian
dealing with past and present issues. These lms attempted to cinematographic form
strengthen socialism, to criticize it from within and at the same time
to rethink what socialist art should be. They succeeded in criticising Let us begin at the very end of the new Yugoslav lm period. It is in
the dominant genre convention and explored rened aesthetical the year 1971, when Lazar Stojanovi made Plastic Jesus (1971). If
means: from naturalistic shocking development to intellectual and there is a lm that ts antitotalitarian-dissident discourse, it is
affective montage, from docudrama to partisan lms. We prefer to Plastic Jesus. After the lm appeared Lazar Stojanovi was
use the term new Yugoslav lm (or auteur cinema), but also insist in improsned. It is noteworthy that he was the only artist-lm-maker
not relegating the term Black Wave to the dissident discourse. In imprisoned because of his artwork in socialist Yugoslavia. However,
this respect it is pertinent to ask, what was the reason that such a unfair or brutal this charge was, what remains also true is the poor
massive and self-evident re-appropriation of the Yugoslav black lms aesthetical and political value of the movie. Already weak in the
into the mainstream anti-totalitarian discourse happened? Does it composition, the movie Plastic Jesus dialectically edits and treats
only have to with some supercial readings, fabrications of the Nazism and socialism along the same line. It shows Tito and Hitler
lm-makers (their biographical anecdotes), or with something that is one after another, comparing Nazi ceremonial to Yugoslav socialist
internal to the political aesthetics of their lms? celebration. Anyone making this kind of lm already knew what will

26 27
(2002: 79). See Emanuel Barots facinating account
Camera politica (2009).

20 21
 wait for him. In the country, where antifascism was an ofcial vidual and most importantly sexual liberation, which challenged
ideology and where it was strictly forbidden to edit the images of patriarchal and other structures of domination. Empty formula of
leaders, this lm would necessarily provoke and produce a subversive old Left and their unrealized dream of socialism were challenged by
meaning. But even if we do not nd much aesthetical value in Plastic the radical subversive messages of young Left. But already within
Jesus, even if it is one of the major political opponents, we should the lm, dont these revolutionary phrases of Milena also run the
nevertheless give it a credit for starting the old ethical form of art risk of emptiness she strived to criticize? The same weapon that was
(see Rancire, 2004). For the rst time in lm history, Plastic Jesus used against the Party started rolling against the subversive protago-
articulates the totalitarian image avant la lettre and becomes a rst nists from its very beginning.
cinematographic form of dissidentism-totalitarian paradigm that The sense of general irony operates with the mechanism of
opened a path that was (ab)used by many dissidents artists and counter-repression, which challenges any rigid order, either capitalist
ideologists up until today. or socialist, but also one could argue their own political position.
Even if at some moments there is a place for self-irony, spectators
Makavejevs humanist cinema cannot but avoid having impression of certain navet of this
strategy. Once this logic of subversion was included in the govern-
The closest exemplication of humanist cinema - introducing the mental machinery, re-appropriating individual desires in the adver-
humanist ideals into the symbolic imagery - can be ascribed only to tising techniques, the subversive potentialities lost all its power.
one lm-director, namely to Duan Makavejev. His lm Mystery of Moreover, they become the heart of the new postfordist regime. The
Organism28 is somehow a common representation of Zeitgeist, governmental response to May 68 could be read through Foucauld-
liberal atmosphere of the end of 60s. During the lm a whole range ian negative critique of the sexuality: the latter is one of the funda-
of speeches reminds the spectator on student demands for greater mental stakes-objects of postmodern and biopolitical regime that
freedoms and especially sexual liberation. In some interviews but regulates the diverse bodies, horizons and practices of enjoyment.29
also clearly visible throughout the lm, Makavejev strives to develop I would denitely agree that in terms of aesthetics Makavejev
certain anarchistic imaginary of politics, politics of subversion that remains to be one of the most innovative and influential gures of
he orchestrated through a rened editing, Serbian cutting, of the the Black Wave, some would even say that he made a new approach
material. for mainstream avant-garde cinema, I would be very critical towards
Images from the communes from USA, organon to release his political stance. The fundamental thrust of the politics of subver-
sexual tensions and old images from revolutionary history are sion and deconstruction resulted in plurality of identities and ways
interwoven with the central plot of the character Milena, who of enjoyment, which would be later on easily incorporated in the
engages in the real revolution of everyday life in the suburban capitalist machinery or socialist power strategies. Thus, Makavejevs
settlements of a big city. On various occasions she stands on the lm exemplies the image of humanism, the idea of disalienated
balcony and agitates for sexual liberation in the revolutionary Wo-Man and sexually empowered masses.
movement and transformation of the society. Opposite to the image
of young woman, spectator sees the counter-image of young man Pavlovis socialist self-management realism
Iliych (Lenin), who is the rigid and Soviet professional ice-skater.
Metaphorically, Iliych stands for the professional revolutionary that On the other spectre of Black Wave politics I would locate ivojin
relies on the instance of Party and obeys its program. Against his Pavlovi. If something Pavlovi is a precise counter-image to Maka-
image and on the background of the discussion with Old Left vejev, exemplifying the image of antihumanism. My thesis is that
(Party), New Left - Milena - is a perfect embodiment of the principle many of his lms that dealt with social topics are a good example of
of self-creativity and individual engagement. This political principle,
which relies on the emancipation of human being, is perfectly
29 he granted them more freedoms and
congruent with the theoretical teachings of Praxis group. In Yugoslavian politics the student revolts participation in the university organisations
In Mystery of Organism Makavejev portrays the creative and had a very interesting epilogue. Most in order to develop more autonomy. At the
revolutionary force of May 68 generation that celebrates the indi- of students were ghting socialism with same time, he used their political demands in
socialist demands on the basis of equality order to deal with the nationalist tendencies,
and bigger freedoms. The socialist leadership imposing a course of re-centralization and
28 waited and thwarted their emancipatory ideological conformity to his line.
For a short review that criticizes a mere potentiality with a brilliant strategy.
postcommunist reading of Makavejevs lm As Tito admitted students to ofcial
see Buden (2008). talks, he peacefully embraced their demands;

22 23
 socialist realism, or rather self-management realism, which I do not Inflation of Radical Phrases as Opposed
read in ironical way. As already mentioned above the initial idea of to a Lack of Radical Action
socialist realism was very much linked to avant-garde and afrming
role of art in transforming the world. Socialist realism does not mean
only a mere imitation of the reality, but is revealing the reality in its
revolutionary development. I will take a closer look of lm When I
am dead and pale to proof this thesis, which is actually an antihu-
manist hypothesis.30 In terms of its aesthetics, the lm has a much
darker, not a very uplifting portrayal of the scenery, whereas its
dramaturgical constitution follows a linear narrative, where the
protagonist meets different layers of the society and its subdued to
certain internal transformations that are paralleled on the macro
level. Politically, it does not follow a typical humanist topos of the
discrepancy between ofcial ideology and historical reality. It does
not the lament about the empty formula of old socialist world and
elevate the new formula of the young.
In all his lms spectators will not nd gures of the ruling
class counterposed by revolutionary slogans of students or
marginalized. When I am dead and pale is much more a meticulous
and skilful portrayal of the landscape of Yugoslav society in all its
contradictory nature. The lm did not show the reality as it was, but
its extremes, it wanted to show much more how extremes of major
contradictions might develop after the market reform in the mid
1960s. In one of the most important and prophetic shot of the lm
we see a semi-provincial setting. The camera takes a spectator on the
short journey through Yugoslavia, cutting its way through the whole
society. We see a side shot of the chief protagonist Jimmy that is
passed by a group of ghting peasants, protesting workers gathering
around factory and singing soldiers, who are on the move against
imaginary enemies This shot contains a very poetic, but also a
pessimistic picture that evokes the future disintegration if the
tendency is to realize and the hypothesis that some different social
groups never encounter.
Apart from the social commentary that focused on the transi-
tion processes in Yugoslavia, the story itself introduces one of the
rst antiheros, Jimmy Barka (Jimmy the Boat) p. 123. Starting from the
countryside, Pavlovi does not romanticize a pure soul of the rural
countryside, his characters, anti-heroes, meet tremendous problems
to assert any kind of activity. Pavlovi is interested in the portrayal
of life on the margins of economic existence (Levi, 2007: 36). But
cant we also say the opposite: isnt Jimmy completely free, the
generic human being that can do whatever he wants, freed from the

30
I have developed a more detailed analysis
of this lm in the magazine Pages: http://
www.pagesproject.net/2006/daily_pages.
php?lang=en&date=2009-03-01

24 Surng the Black Zine No. 1

 New Collectivism Prologue line regarding other elds of art was one of
a yugoslavian kind of soft modernism. In
W.R. Mysteries of the Organism An amusing anecdote circulates regarding stark difference to the Soviet socialist realism
the poster for Duan Makavejevs 1967 present at the time and to whose influence
feature movie Love Affair, or the Case of Yugoslavian graphic design digresses to only
the Missing Switchboard Operator. The for a short period of time.
poster was submitted for the Zagreb Salon
of Applied Arts where it was evaluated It seems more that the federal republic based
by a less than impressed jury and almost local graphic design associations and its
immediately rejected. Presumably the reason promoters (that were namely very scarce) in
for this rejection was the fact that the jury true self-managed tradition would be left to
immediately recognised (the works were themseles to gure out what was expected of
submitted anonimously) and associated design under the given circumstances. They
the formal qualities of the poster with the would eventually reach a certain concensuss
high modernism like works of the legendary on a formalist modernist approach with a
Croatian graphic designer Ivan Picelj. strong association to industry and technology
Just before being completely eliminated the source of progress and modernisation
from the competition one of the jurors noted of the country with occassional digressions
though that it cant be Piceljs work after all - if into popular culture. The kind of swiss
it had been him the movie stills appearing on modernism of Picelj was not a singular voice
the poster would have remained identical all or even a dissident exception in socialist
the way But wait! he said There is a break Yugoslavia but rather something that was
in the pattern - the images in the sequence tolerated, promoted and most probably even
occasionaly change and there is more of a supported by the state as well.
melody than a rhythm present on the poster. There were critical voices arguing
Hence it cant be Picelj! This surprising against or at least raising doubts about this
discovery eventually enabled the poster to approach as well though as this short review
not only appear in the exhibition but also be from the student newspaper Tribuna shows.
awarded by the very same jury. The poster The following review of an exhibition of Swiss
in quesion turned out to be the work of posters 60 - 61 organised and exhibited in
Piceljs younger colleague and occassional the Modern Gallery of Ljubljana was written
collaborator Mihajlo Arsovski who not only by one of the foremost members of the
designed the poster but in fact commissioned slovene conceptual art scene Marko Poganik
himself for the job (the poster was only used at the time already an active member of the
to advertise a screening of the lm in Zagreb conceptual art formation OHO.
and was not to be used as a country wide
promotional material). Is the notion of a professionaly designed
spoon merely a trick to attract potential
spoon buyers? Is the spoon designed to inflict
This anecdote, entertaining as it is pleasure on the user? Is it designed in a way that
nevertheless hints at the predominant would encourage the enthousiasm of culinary
conosieurs for the applied arts? Spoons are eating
direction and concerns Yugoslavian graphic
tools. Things are.
design has been taking and occupying itself The painter, that paints a house
with at the time. From the stricht rationale (the man that designs a Cockta poster, the painter
of the grid of Ivan Picelj to pop/art and painting a zebra crossing, the architect designing a
building, the painter painting a painting), all form
counterculture inspired soft modernist works a visual ambiance. In this chaos of visual impulses
of his younger colleagues Mihajlo Arsovski there are no better or worse objects. Things appear
and Slobodan Mai in Zagreb and Belgrade in this world with their appearance.
respectively and all the way to the highly Clearly designed and aestheticaly
puried trafc sign on the edge of the road
rational and pragmatic works by Slovene causes the complex of things (paint, metal
graphic designers. etc.) to become a transmittor of visual impulses
It is impossible to say (at least from the and hence constitutes space. Being, the totality
of all things via visual impulses is called the
material available to the writer of these lines) enviroment. The enviroment is a secondary thing,
if there has been any pressure from the state being a mere substitute for the unsubstitutable
on the direction of graphic design. The ofcial presence of things.

26 27
 In forming the direct visual reality, becoming a designer one most decide between Joris Kritis All the posters were rst shown in Belgrade in
the poster has its function, that is constantly
earning money or being of use to society at Luisa Lorenza Corna & 2011 and have since then mostly thanks to
being reestablished by its directness while it is
incorporating itself to the visual ambiance of the large) casualy scribbled accross a series of Marianne Noble photographer Peter Rauch ocassionaly made
street. (here its economic reality is secondary) generic industrial products (such as an ofce Emilio Macchia illegal appearances in Slovenia, France, the
Therefor we ask ourselves, what is the chair etc.) while the author of the article calls Vasilis Marmatakis Netherlands etc.
point of exhibiting swiss posters in the Modern
Gallery. We can think of 3 peripheral reasons
for more of such engaged interpretations of Metahaven This section of the book documents
messages transmitted via graphic design - Avigail Moss a small selection of the submitted works. They
1 For the economists to see an clearly absent in the graphic design practice of Isidora Nikoli were interpreted as an independent work by
efcient poster Novi Kolektivizem
the time. the Slovene photographer Peter Rauch.
2 for the audince to enjoy
colorfull piecese of paper Our Polite Society He worked according to a series of
3 to please the conosieurs of Coming full circle back to the topic of the Mark Owens premediated shooting scripts and / or
applied arts. Yugoslavain Black Wave it was perhaps a Rasmus Spanggaard Troelsen situations exploring the notion of
In the meantime the street where the masses
slightly disappointing discovery that these Nina Stttrup Larsen interventions into public space. The locations
move out of need not pleasure remains (albeit rare) critical moments of Yugoslavian Sulki & Min and scripts loosely reference the plots of
unnavigable in its uncommunicativeness. graphic design did not make any contact with Katarina oki the lms but the emphasis was on chance
the Black Wave authors. While te posters and KART encounters and situations that happened
The above text, probably hastily written in accompanying printed ephemera and title during the actions. In this way a rather
an attempt to be more of a poetic writting sequences were often designed by renowned They were asked to deliver black and white B1 utalitarian and technical notion of a photo-
exercise than in making an argument designers such as Slobodan Mai and posters in digital format with no other shoot turned into a (collective) event.
nevertheless clearly expresses the sentiment Mihajlo Arsovski they are mostly more or demands regarding the content of the posters
of the already visibly present critique of less exercises in form and very rarely actively (specically it was noted that the posters may
design and consumerism worldwide. A couple engage with the content of the lms or their or may not contain the title of the lm) - and a
of years after Poganiks text was published own context as mass media devices. note was added on request of one of the
Viktor Papaneks Design for the Real World As a simple gesture of possibly participants that the poster may or may not
was published in Split (1974), Jerko Denegri reawakening the potential of the black wave take the form of a graphic work.
edits a critical design reader entitled Design lmography we have commisioned a series
and Culture featuring among others the rst of graphic works from selected designers and
Yugoslavian translation of Jean Baudrillard artists each working on interpreting one Black
- an excerpt from his Critique of the Political Wave feature lm as a starting point.
Economy of the Sign. We have cued them that we aim at
Clear connections and associations using their works as simple poster campaigns
were made to the Italian led anti-design to be showcased on the streets of ex-
movement such as the works of Bruno Yugoslavian cities - here again departing from
Munari, Enzo Mari, the writings of Manfredo Poganiks text.
Tafuri, etc. and some concrete practise related
experiments in such a critical direction are Brief
made by the designer of the Student Cultural
Centre in Belgrade, Dragan Stojanovski. Each designer or artist was given a movie
In fact an interesting article can be found to react on and asked to produce a work,
reviewing another poster exhibiton taking preferably to be used as a poster. The list
place in Belgrade - this time an exhibition of collaborators that included artists and
documenting the poster competition for the designers from the area as well as worldwide
poster of the Ljubljana Biennial of Industrial currently includes
Design where the author comments on bke
the selected posters reffering to them as David Bennewith
mererely decorative arangments without any Alexandre Bettler
transformative potential on the street and Rafaela Drai
especially points to one completely rejected Experimental Jetset
series of posters that has been neverhtless in Neda Firfova
an inspired move by Dragan Stojanovski used Paul Gangloff & Hilde Meeus
on the inviation card for the show. Bardhi Haliti
The series is by Gorki uvela and Jack Henrie Fisher & Popahna Brandes
features a series of quotes from Papaneks I.T.U. - International Typographic
Design for the Real World (such as When Union

28 29
 Luisa Corna & Marianne Noble
The Role of my Family in the World Revolution

30 31
 Joris Kritis Plastic Jesus
David Bennewith Innocence Unprotected

32 33
Paul Gangloff & Hilde Meeus Innocence Unprotected
Our Polite Society Black Film

34 35
 Nina Stttrup Larsen When Im Dead and Gone
Sulki & Min I Miss Sonia Henie

36 37
Jack Henrie Fisher & Popanha Brandes Three
Experimental Jetset Early Works

38 39
 Jack Henrie Fisher & Popanha Brandes Three social ties? The self-managed man in the self-managed society?
Avigail Moss The Role of my Family in the World Revolution wasnt this an ultimate phantasm of the Yugoslav ideologues and
Praxis philosophers? Isnt he a perfect ideological subject?
Jimmy can manage his own life in his own way, he is a nomad
that travels from village to city, back and forth, and manages to
survive. He can pick up any job he wants, and to certain degree he
becomes even successful Nevertheless, it nally turns out that
this self-managed subject fails to integrate in the self-managed
society. From the one that has nothing to lose and is free to one as
the ultimate failure is only a small step. Jimmy is a young man in
his twenties who is not employed and has big troubles nding a
stable job He is not nihilist or completely passive and he is also
not close to a subjective gure of Bartleby who prefers not to do
anything. As Levi says, Jimmy is in permanent present, a social
outcast who doesnt lack vitality (2007: 36) and to some extent
resembles Godards hero Poiccard in his A bout de souffl. The
whole social order rests on the condition that a young man and
woman enter the sphere of labour, the sphere where you can really
start participating in the self-management of the social relations.
However, there is a major blockage that prevents Jimmy from
entering this realm of work. On the one hand, he is faced with the
harshness of the social situation, rising unemployment and under-
development of the countryside and on the other hand, he himself
claims not to be happy to work too much. These objective and
subjective conditions make him a perfect example of excluded
subjectivity, of something that represents a stain on the symbolic
order that cannot be integrated. That is why he is treated as a
dangerous element, something that disrupts the order: in the
village he undermines the authority of the corrupt local headman,
whereas in the city the law of competition excludes him. He is on
the run again. There is no space for a bad folk singer in the midst
of rock and roll subculture.
In Althussers terms ideological interpellation31 did not
work in the case of Jimmy Barka. Jimmy could have been the
perfect subject, a perfect self-manager, but the journey reveals
specic ideological conditions of self-managed state, the vital entry
gates of ideological institutions. When Althusser talked about
ideology he rethought the role of State and Law in the process of
reproduction of social relations. What the lm shows is the specic
role the State assumed, it is precisely through the absence of any
State institutions that we can learn something about Yugoslavian
past. Self-management socialist order was supposed to facilitate
maximum political involvement of all working people on all levels
of society. Despite the revolutionary character of the self-manage-

31
See especially his essay on Ideological State
Apparatuses (2008).

40 41
ment model in the history of socialisms, the fact is, that the role of hypothesis and a general antitotalitarian frame that is based on a
the Party in Yugoslavia was never questioned. simplied schema of eternal struggle between dissident ART VS.
The League of Yugoslav Communists operated on the prin- totalitarian STATE.
ciple of democratic centralism, it avant-garde role demanded First provisionary conclusion would be that in order to under-
organization and discussion: how to direct society? In these precise stand the specic effectivity and cultural practices of the Black
historical circumstances the political decision was to cede the domi- Wave lm-directors, we should take into account the material
nation of economy from planned economy to market forces, politi- conditions of self-management production. Much more than simple
cally to the domination of technocratic fraction in the ruling class. lmic adaptation of Praxis ideas, we have to do with a set of cultural
And the lm of Pavlovi demonstrates this in relation to the specic practices and specic dynamic of cultural production. Also, we
set of institutions that held Yugoslav society together. In the coun- should take into account the development of resonances and
tryside the social life was organized around seasonal work that local tensions with ofcial cultural policy, how artists and their artworks
headman - manager set in a primitive infrastructure, whereas family struggled for formation of specic type of art-autonomy, which as
ties dissolved precisely in the places we would least expect. In we saw oscillated between bourgeois (individual mythologies,
Belgrade the entrance of the market hit the city life with all its freedom of artists) and socialist (organization of freelance
intensity: cultural industry opened a set of new professions (cultural cultural workers, socialist critique of socialism) answer to this
managers, free-lancers) and institutions, with which younger genera- eminently political problem.
tions identied. However, all these old and new institutions that Second provisionary conclusion pertains to our schematic
operated in new conditions of self-management necessitated one analysis of cinematographic forms in three different lm. We rejected
move on the side of the subject. It was a structural need to enter the the uniformed hypothesis of humanism in these lms and afrmed a
sphere of more stable work, which our subject Jimmy Barka never radically heterogonous character of the new Yugoslav lms. These
came even close to. artworks embrace new aesthetics and old genres, ranging from
This structural condition of Jimmy Barka was not so excep- socialist realism and neorealism (Pavlovi), to antitotaliarian image
tional or alien to the Yugoslav context. As ofcial gures show (Stojanovi) and humanist cinema (Makavejev). Above all, different
Yugoslavia at that time had to deal with a severe unemployment for politics of these lms is evident, and this is even more valid, when we
the rst time after WWII. This fact was something unimaginable for add the works of Aleksander Petrovi (revisionism of Three), elimir
the state of working people, something that needed to be hidden and ilnik (critique and des-illusionment of Early Works, docudrama
was not dealt with politically. And this is basically one of the analyti- Unemployed people), Karpo Godina and others.
cal paths opened by the lm. Pavlovi located, with artistic means, What remains important for further research is to explore the
the start of transition and the beginning of the end of socialist ways, in which these artworks opened a question of the role of art in
welfare. Some marginal political-economists articulated the effects transforming the society. The perspective through which we could
of these economic processes only 15 years later32, when Yugoslavia approach these progressive currents in Yugoslav lm and art could
was walking its nal Marathon round on the explosive public toilet be formulated in the concluding question: how did new Yugoslav
of Europe. The lm itself ends on a pessimist note in absurd manner. lm create a specic art-autonomy (politics) and if it succeeded in
After making the whole round of the Yugoslav society he is shot creating an artistic form of revolution? The question remains, how
dead on the public toilet in the village, where he grew up. to stay engaged politically but at the distance from the Party
prescription? However today, with the absence of Party and
Instead of a conclusion revolutionary politics, the question should be again displaced to the
realm of politics and should not be simply guarded by utopian
To be interested in Yugoslavian past today does not mean to bring promise of art.
back memories of good old times. Even less would I want to emanci-
pate Yugoslavian art from the socialist ideology.33 Rethinking 32
conjuncture, in our case lmic history, always mobilizes specic Bavar, Kirn, Korzika (1985).
historical resources. Apart from a more concise and complex under-
standing of the past, emancipatory thought strives to stay always 33
opened to the future, which goes beyond the nationalistic mythologi- Typical example Bogdan iis lm
zations and blunt afrmation of the existing state of affairs. To Damnatio memoriae (2001) I analyzed
other examples of re-appropriation
return to the interiority and contradictoriness of the new Yugoslav
of socialist memorial sites in another
lm we needed to challenge two dominant readings: a humanist
article (2009).

42 43
 Bibliography Kirn, Gal. Antifascist Memorial Sites: Pure Art or
Althusser, Louis. Pour Marx. London: Verso. 2005. Mythologization of Socialist Yugoslavia?,
Althusser, Louis. On Ideology. New York: WHW: Zagreb. 2010.
Verso. 2008. Komelj, Miklav. Kako misliti partizansko
Arendt, Hannah. Origins of Totalitarianism. umetnost?. Ljubljana: zaloba cf./*. 2009.
Orlando: Harcourt. 1973. Levi, Pavle. Disintegration in frames. Stanford:
Bavar, Igor, Kirn, Sreo and Korsika, Bojan. Stanford University Press. 2007.
Kapital + delo v SFRJ. Ljubljana: zaloba Maga, Branka. The destruction of Yugoslavia.
KRT. 1985. London: Verso, 1993.
Arnke, Ins. Avant-Garde in the Rearview Mirror. Mikuli, Borislav. Ideology of design,
On the Paradigm Shifts of Reception of the mudrac.ffzg.hr/~bmikulic/Arhiv/Praxis60_
Avant-Garde in (ex) Yugoslavia and Russia Ideology%20of%20design.pdf
from the 80s to the Present. Ljubljana: Monik, Rastko. Teorija za politiko. [Theory for
Maska. 2006. politics] Ljubljana: Zaloba /*cf. 2003.
Barot, Emmanuel. Camera Politica. New Media Center_kuda.org Omitted history.
Paris: Vrin. 2009. Frankfurt: Revolver - Archiv fr aktuelle
Bowlt, John. Russian art of the avant-garde: Kunst. 2006.
theory and criticism 1902-1934. London: Pikur, Bojana and Soban, Tamara. This is all lm:
Thames and Hudson. 1991. experimental lm in Yugoslavia 1951-1991,
Buden, Boris. Behind the Velvet Curtain. Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana. 2010.
Remembering Duan Makavejevs W.R.: Praxis, kritika i humanistiki socijalizam, RLS:
Mysteries of the Organism, Afterall 18, **. Beograd, 13-15 October. 2011. (Conference
2008. http://www.afterall.org/journal/ reader on Praxis philosophy).
issue.18/behind.velvet.curtain.remembering. Pupovac, Ozren. Projekt Jugoslavija: dialektika
dusan.makavejevs. revolucije. [Project Yugoslavia: dialectics of
Accessed on 15 November 2010. revolution]. Ljubljana: Agregat. Vol.4. No.
Buden, Boris. Zone des bergangs: vom Ende des 9/10. 2006.
Postkommunismus. Frankfurt am Main: Interview with Ozren Pupovac uvaj se dovrene
Suhrkamp. 2009. drave. Conducted by Sreko Pulig. In journal
uri, Branka. Kultura po meri oveka. In: Novosti, n.575. Zagreb. 2011.
Praxis, kritika i humanistiki socijalizam, p. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books:
55-60. RLS: Beograd, 13-15 October. 2011. New York. 1979.
(Conference reader on Praxis philosophy). Stojakovi, Krunoslav. Praxis als kognitiver
DeCuir, Jr., G. Black Wave polemics: rhetoric Rahmen der Kultur. In: Praxis, kritika i
as aesthetic, Studies in Eastern European humanistiki socijalizam, p.50-55. RLS:
Cinema 1: 1, pp. 8596, doi: 10.1386/ Beograd, 13-15 October. 2011. (Conference
seec.1.1.85/1. 2010. reader on Praxis philosophy).
Djuri, Dubravka and uvakovi, Miko. krabalo, Ivo. 101 godina lma u Hrvatskoj
Impossible histories. Cambridge: 18961997: Pregled povijesti hrvatske
MIT Press. 2003. kinematograje, Zagreb: Nakladni zavod
Germani, Sergio. Jugoslavija misterije Globus. 1998.
organizma In: Socijalizam. Nr.17/18. p. Rancire, Jacques. Politics of Aesthetics.
265-292. Zagreb: Up&Underground. 2010. The distribution of the sensible. New York:
Goulding, Daniel. Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Continuum. 2004.
Experience 1945-2001. Bloomington and Neboja Popov. Freedom and Violence: a
Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press. 2002 conversation about the Praxis journal and
Jerki, Pero, Mokrovi, Nikola. Problem Praxis. Korula Summer school (Sloboda i nasilje:
11.teza: Zagreb. 2007 Razgovor o asopisu Praxis i Korulanskoj
Jovanovi, Neboja, A Commentary on Black letnjoj koli), Res publica, Beograd. 2003.
Wave polemics: rhetoric as aesthetic by Greg Rakita, Milan. Prilog kritici teorija modernizacije i
DeCuir. Forthcoming in Studies in Eastern tranzitologije u drutvenim naukama. p.7-33.
European Cinema. In: Ana Veselinovi et all. Izgubljeno u
Kirn, Gal. Issues of the transition, self-managed tranziciji. RLS: Beograd. 2011.
subjectivity and culturalisation of antagonisms Tirnani, B. Crni talas. Belgrade: Filmski centar
in ivojin Pavlovis lm When I will be white Srbije. 2008.
and pale. http://www.pagesproject.net/2006/ Velikonja, Mitja. Titostalgia. Ljubljana:
daily_pages.php?lang=en&date=2009-03-01. Mirovni Intitut. 2009.
Kirn, Gal. Remembering or thinking the partisan Zimermman, Tanja. Novi kontinent Jugoslavija.
movement. In: Catalogue Museum on the Politina geograja tretje poti. In: Zbornik
street. (Eds.) Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana za umetnostno zgodovino. Archives dhistoire
Pikur. Museum of Modern Art. 2009. de lart, n. s. XLVI, Ljubljana 165-190. 2010.
Kirn, Gal. From partisan primacy of politics to iek, Slavoj. Plague of Fantasies.
postfordist tendency in Yugoslav Verso: London. 1997.
self-management. In: Postfordism and its iek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
discontents. (Ed.) Gal Kirn. Maastricht/ Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a
Ljubljana: Jan van Eyck Academie and Peace Notation. London: Verso. 2001.
Institute. 2010.

44
 Ana Janevski The staring point for this essay is the experimental lm in the former
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in all its potentiality.1 This
type of lm established an important shift in the dominant lmic
We Cannot Promise To Do More language and proposed new and different thematic, aesthetic and
production paradigms at the time.
Than Experiment
*
In general, experimental lm has been considered as separate
from mainstream lm. For a long time it has been predominantly
considered within the domain of fairly marginalized theory and
practice. Also, its denition and its parameters of classication have
been quite contested issues. Although its designation could be the
On the Yugoslav subject of a dissertation, it is interesting to note that, beside being
called experimental and avant-garde, this form of cinematic
Experimental Film and expression has also been named visionary cinema (P. Adams
Sitney), independent cinema (Emory Menefee), underground/

Cine Clubs in the 1960s and independent cinema (Jonas Mekas), not to mention the principles
of antilm and alternative lm elaborated by Yugoslavian
theory and practice in Zagreb and Belgrade.
1970s What Jan-Christopher Harak wrote about US tradition in
the earliest phases the American avant-garde movement cannot be
separated from the history of amateur lm2 holds true for the
Yugoslavian experimental tradition too. In the former Yugoslavia,
experimental lm almost consistently derived from the tradition of
the so-called amateur lm, whose base consisted in the numerous
cinema clubs (kinoklub) that developed in all major cities of the
former federation, especially in the 1960s and 70s.
According to the ofcial system the socialist self-
management system of that time self-organization was also present
in the eld of culture. Even more so, cinema clubs were part of the
socialist project to bring technical culture and achievements closer to

* 2
Reply of the KOD Group, a group of visual Harak J-C (ed.): Lovers of Cinema: The
artists from Novi Sad, Serbia, to Duan First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-
Makavejev when he invited them, as a 1945, Madison University of Wisconsin
selector of a the special program at the Press, 1995, p.18. quoted in Stevan Vukovi,
newly established Belgrade Film Festival in Notes on Paradigms in Experimental Film
1971, to do something performative. in Socialist Yugoslavia in the catalogue
This is All Movie: Experimental Film in
1 Yugoslavia 1951-1991, exhibition curated by
This essay is an updated version of the text Bojana Pikur, Ana Janevski, Jurij Meden
already published on the occasion of As Soon and Stevan Vukovi, Museum of Modern
As I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiments Art Ljubljana, 2010.
in Yugoslav art in 60s and 70s, curated by Ana
Janevski, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw,
2011 and This is All Movie: Experimental Film
in Yugoslavia 1951-1991, exhibition curated
by Bojana Pikur, Ana Janevski, Jurij Meden
and Stevan Vukovi, Museum of Modern
Art Ljubljana, 2010.

46 47
all citizens, not only professionals. Thus, forming amateur societies theatre movies, regular readers about lms and possessed a vast
(amateur lm, amateur photography, visual amateur groups, knowledge about the lms already mentioned. One of the major
colonies, etc.) was systematically encouraged. In 1946, the special impetuses came also from the modernist models of other arts: visual
institution Narodna tehnika (Popular Engineering Society) was arts, literature and theatre. Yet, lm as a medium was becoming
established with the aim of organizing, sponsoring and promoting more and more widespread. It was the only medium that allowed an
different amateur activities. Even though the amateurs were under intertwining of visual arts, the literature of (anti)narrative, music and
the political control of the centre and hierarchically organized, lm references: it allowed the choice of different subjects and the
they were mostly left to their own devices as peripheral amateur employment of various techniques.
reservations. Due to constant demands for professionalization in all social
The chance to pursue lm was primarily taken up by young systems, especially in the art world, from todays perspective it is
people, often students and lm buffs. In this way an important almost impossible to read correctly the meaning of the terms
platform was created for experimenting and the conventional lm amateur lm and amateurism as related to lm buffs active in
language of Yugoslav cinematography was reassessed. After WWII, the cinema clubs in the 60s and beginning of the 70s all over socialist
Yugoslav cinematography was nationalized and in all republics the Yugoslavia. Yet members of cine-clubs were amateurs, most of them
development of the infrastructure of the lm industry was adhering to the meanings Maya Deren stressed in her 1959 essay
intensively worked on.3 During the 1950s, the war themes, the Amateur Versus Professional, in particular her consideration on
Peoples Liberation Struggle, the partisan ght against fascism, and the Latin roots of the term amateur. It designates ones practice as
the revolution were the most frequently used sources of inspiration being for the love of the thing rather than for economic reasons and
among lm authors. The ofcial politics privileged this form of lm necessity.5 Or as Jonas Mekas pointed referring to the independent
expression, which made the distance between professionalism and lmmaker: You will make movies, you will record and celebrate the
so-called amateurism grow. Yet the marginalization of amateurism life, but you will not make any money.6
into the sphere of cinema clubs allowed more freedom of action. In the former Yugoslavia, the term amateur mainly designated
When referring to the creation of new institutional forms in production conditions while experimental indicated the procedures,
former Yugoslavia, touching upon broader political contexts is aspirations and effects of a specic cinematic expression. Thus the
unavoidable. In fact, Titos model of Yugoslavian socialism, separation between the two is unstable and unclear. This creative
implemented after the break with Stalin in 1948, tried to take confusion in classication can be attributed in part to most of the
advantage of the two dominant systems it promoted both the lmmakers whose works can, in retrospect, be described as
foreign policy of non-alignment and a new form of socialist economy experimental met few possible destinies. Either they soon exchanged
in the self-management system. Its theoretical basis was provided by amateur lmmaking for professional work in the cinema (e.g. Duan
the Praxis movement in the human anthropology of early Marx, Makavejev) or in the visual arts (e.g. Mladen Stilinovi) or they went
and by the summer school on the island of Korula , where leading
Marxist philosophers from all over the world gathered in the 1964-
1974 period. 3 jurisdiction of the Republic of Serbia,
At the same time, Titos historical no to Stalin detached One of the best examples is the Avala so that other republics subsequently opened
artistic practices from social realism and helped open the country to Film, founded in 1945 in Belgrade, the largest similar movie theatres. The rst was opened
lm company in the country. The studio in Zagreb in 1957, and then in Sarajevo
Western cultural influence by putting it in a position between East
made its rst lm in the post-war Yugoslavia and in Ljubljana in 1963. Stevan Vukovi,
and West, introducing wider cultural freedom, assuming a of 1947 and went on to produce or co- ibid., p. 64.
modernist paradigm of abstract art as the ofcial state art and produce over 400 documentaries, 200
showing Hollywood lms in the cinemas. Moreover, the Yugoslav Yugoslav feature lms and 120 international 5
Film Archive or Yugoslav Cinemateque (Kinoteka) was formally productions. Nevertheless, every republic Maya Deren, Amateur Versus
established in 1949 in Belgrade with the aim to preserve Yugoslav hosted at least one lm production company. Professional, Film Cualture 39, winter 1965,
lms and lm material and to further lm culture and education. In p. 46.
4
1951, it became part of the international network (FIAF - Federation
Public program including the touring of 6
Internationale des Archives du Film) and started with the screening 89 Yugoslavian towns were realized in 1952. Jonas Mekas about underground lm,
of the rst avant-garde lms from the twenties and thirties, It was then that the movie theatre was Whitney Museum, New York, 1992.
Hollywood movies, French New Wave, Italian Neorealism.4 opened in Belgrade. The Museum of
The people who participated in the lm evenings in cinema Yugoslavian Film Archive was a federal
clubs in the former Socialist Yugoslavia were frequent visitors of institution but in 1952 it come under the

48 49
 down in (or out of ) history as lm amateurs when the mid 70s saw of the authors involvement to his work, then the reduction of
the decline of cine clubs.7 narration, of expressive means in the lm, of rational metaphor, of
The Serbian lmmaker Lazar Stojanovi, writing about the the traditional communication with the viewers, etc.
American underground lm, associates it with freedom and Immediately the biennial Genre Experimental Film Festival,
rebellion, rather than with a cinematographic genre, where better known as GEFF, was established in Zagreb (the last one was
underground equals amateurism, directness, imperfection and held in 1970), parallel to the Music Biennial and the New
resistance. Moreover, a(n independent) lm director is supposed to Tendencies.11 The festival attracted lm enthusiasts from cinema
have above all a good knowledge of lm and a strong personality. clubs across the former Yugoslavia and they contributied to the
This praise of amateurism, in combination with a militant attitude of creation of formal and informal cinematic networks.12
the director, can also be observed, albeit in a more apolitical version, From the very rst edition of the festival, named Anti-Film and
in Mihovil Pansini and his GEFF.8 New Tendencies in Cinematography, GEFFs inclination to connect all
human activities was expressed, not only in the eld of art, but in
Main GEFF tendencies are: to ght against conventional lm, science and technology as well, overlapped with the broader world
and especially against conventional work in amateur lm. To tendencies and interest in lm as a subject of historical and
draw our amateur lm from the narrow frameworks of the theoretical research.
amateurish. [] we want the tear down the borders that existed Thus the themes of the following festivals were: Exploration of
between amateur and professional lm. Film is one. [] Cinematography and Exploration through Cinematography (1965),
Someone makes a lm as an amateur but works as a Cybernetics and Aesthetics (1967), and Sexuality as a New Road towards
professional. On the other hand, amateur lm can be sold Humanity (1970). Yet, what were the expressive novelties that antilm
subsequently. There fore it is not possible to say what amateur, and cinema-club experimental movies introduced, and who were the
what professional lm was. If we cannot determine this, then participants in GEFF? Paul Adams Sitney during his visit to Zagreb
there is no point in dividing lms into amateur and describes the GEFF as such: [] the festival of GEFF, a remarkable
professionalism.9 affair in which the entire Yugoslavian cinema comes together, feature
makers, professional animators, experiments dadaist of the lm, and
In 1962 and 1963, a group of lm amateurs gathered in the Cinema rank amateurs in 8mm club. 13 The festival was accompanied by
Club Zagreb that was founded in 1953. They came up with the term thematic discussions with the participation of lmmakers,
antilm. To be precise, two members of the cinema club, Mihovil philosophers and artists, while the informative section included
Pansini and Tomislav Kobija, initiated lively discussions on the retrospectives of avant-garde lms from the twenties, and the
concept of antilm, and these conversations were spontaneously projections of foreign avant-garde lms. In the rst GEFF edition, a
named Antilm and Us.10 The main postulates of the antilm were the Belgrade-based Yugoslav Cinemateque (Kinoteka) program included
negating of lm as an act of conveyance, as an act of expression or a selection of the French, German, and American avant-garde
communication between the artist and the viewers, but rather features, and a set of movies by Norman McLaren. In 1967, the
considering it as an act of disclosure, of research exploration and guest star was Paul Adams Sitney with a ten-hour program of the
reduction. The antilm requested multiple reductions: the reduction American avant-garde and the Fluxus Anthology, while at the last

7 9 11 see the catalogue This is All Movie:

See Bojana Pikur and Jurij Meden A brief Mihovil Pansini, Prvi dan 19.12.1963, The rst GEFF Book, which documents Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951-1991,
Introduction to Slovenian Experimental in Prva knjiga GEFFA 63, Mihovil in detail the so-called ve discussions exhibition curated by Bojana Pikur,
Flm in the catalogue This is All Movie: Pansini, Vladimir Petek, Zlatko Sudovi, on anti-lm, together with he booklet of Ana Janevski, Jurij Meden and Stevan
Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951-1991, Kruno Hajdler, Milan Samec (eds), GEFF the 67 edition and the newspapers Vukovi, Museum of Modern Art
exhibition curated by Bojana Pikur, Ana Komitet, Zagreb, 1967. accompanying the last one, are the only Ljubljana, 2010.
Janevski, Jurij Meden and Stevan Vukovi, documents that testify to the festival
Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, 2010. 10 activities. The graphic designer Mihajlo 13
Along with Pansini and Kobija, Arsovski designed all the material. Paul Adams Sitney, Italy, Yugoslavia
8 Vladimir Petek, Zlatko Sudovi, Kruno (fragments) publsihed in Film Culture, no. 46,
Sezgin Boynik, Contributions to a Hajdler, Milan amec, and a number of 12 Autumn 1967, republished in As soon
better Apprehension and Appreciation of other authors also took part. For an accurate list of the most prominent As I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiments in
Plastic Jesus by Lazar Stojanovi, in ivot organizations and events related to Yugoslav art in 60s and 70s. Ed. Ana Janevski,
Umjetnosti, no. 83, Zagreb, 2008. experimental lm in the former Yugoslavia, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2011.p.

50 51
GEFF the guest was Paul Morrissey with lms from the Warhol previous humanistic methods of production of meaning and to
Workshop and Carolee Schneemann with her diary-sexual movies. allow for a different perspective, transcending human imagination
The projections of the lms were an important and fascinating and perception, rather than differing from them.15
source for experimenting and deconstructing the traditional Visual artist Mladen Stlinovi established in 1969 the student
cinematic structures and the established parameters in editing lm lm club Pan 69. Through the Union of Socialist Youth the club
materials, both on the levels of form and content. received some funds to buy the necessary equipment and start
The main centres of avant-garde lm expression were the making lms. At rst, Pan 69 had six or seven members and they
cinema clubs in Zagreb, Belgrade and Split, and from the very were able to shoot lms without any preliminary script-writing or
beginning, these three cinema clubs announced different approval, as the cine clubs did. This self-organized space (of liberty)
orientations, different authorial tendencies and technical solutions. allowed experimenting with a camera and lm tape, mainly 8 and
The structuralist inclinations of the Cinema Club Zagreb were 16mm, and for public/club projections of lms. The rst produced
marked by deliberation and experimenting with the medium, lm was screened at GEFF, and was screened at numerous (amateur)
intertwined with visual arts. These tendencies towards lm festivals.
multidisciplinary were already registered in the group EXAT 51, Cinema Club Split was formed in 1952, and it launched four
while the poetics of Gorgona with its main idea of the anti-group generations of amateur authors. The lms made in the Split club
and the anti magazine, and holding of New Tendencies (biennial were mostly distinguished by rigid visual and editing structures,
exhibition of kinetic and optical art from 1961 to 1973 with many precise rules of framing, a pronounced absence of narration, and
international artists) were an important inspirational model for the were characterized by the so-called lming in frame of Ivan
development and emergence of the term antilm itself. Its important Martinac. At the same time, Martinac is one of the central
to mention that in Zagreb in the 1960s we encountered authors who individuals that seduced generations of future authors gathered
introduced the critical and new-media approaches into the dominant around the Cinema Club Split and in some alternative circle there
artistic production. They negated art trends, expressed critical views was talk about the Split Film School.
and employed ironic and subversive strategies rarely used before in
the elds of visual and lm art. Those artists, during the 1960s, The Fauns structure was programmatic. It was like Jonas
reached out and delved into an almost nihilistic atmosphere of Mekas manifesto on the underground, like the Dada
anti-art14: the foundation of the Gorgona anti-group and the Manifesto to make something that would be a flag.16
publishing of anti-magazine, anti-painting of Julije Knifer, no-art of
Dimitrije Baievi Mangelos and consequently the antilm, which Tomislav Gotovacs The Forenoon of a Faun (1963), which won
nally resulted in the emergence of the so-called New Artistic multiple awards at the rst GEFF, was a structuralist triptych about
Practice, which from the 1970s onwards developed especially in the the idea of the xed camera on a tripod. The voyeuristically
students centers of former Yugoslavia. observed movement of vaguely delineated gures on the sun terrace
The Zagreb lmmakers were interested in lm for its of a hospital is followed by a Wols-like gaze at the texture of a
properties and structure, and for the possibility of deliberation and scratched wall and then, with all the erotic overtones of the rhythmic
experimentation via the medium itself. They promoted the values
of experimentation and innovation without narration, the
introduction of accidental and existential issues, or they focused on 14 anti-lm?, he answered, Everything was
the media itself. Anti can be understood, according to anti back then. Mihovil Pansini was also
We nd a range of direct interventions on the lm tape: from the dominant disposition of the group, either one of Gorgona`s adherents.
as a negation of ofcial art tendencies, or as
scratching, painting and cutting it, to a testing of the tone-negative
an awareness that their artwork is barely 15
picture like in Vladimir Peteks Encounters (1963). The anti-narrative acceptable or unacceptable as art. Lukasz Ronduda, ibid.
approach is emphasized by the use of the accidental as was the case Likewise, anti can be seen in the
in the lm Scusa Signorina (1963) by Mihovil Pansini, at the time one context of Gorgona`s emphasis on the ideas 16
of the chief ideologists of the antilm. Scusa Signorina was lmed of anti-art and anti-painting, as well as their Its All a Movie, interview of Goran
with the camera turned backwards, without supervision of what was afnity for the literature of absurd, Trbuljak and Shrove Turnover with Tomislav
being recorded, so the planned coincidence leads to the antidrama and antilm. Branka Stipani, Gotovac, Magazine Film, no. 10-11, pp.
Josip Vanita, The Time of Gorgona and 39-66, Zagreb, 1977, in: Tomislav Gotovac:
disappearance of the author. Lukasz Ronduda commented on the use
Post-Gorgona, Kratis, Zagreb, 2007. In a As Soon As I Open My Eyes I See a Film,
of the accidental in such lms of the time: By making use of conversation with Mihovil Pansini, to the Croatian Film Clubs Ass., Zagreb, Museum
coincidence and a prior decision in their lms, they sought to surpass question: How did you decide on the term of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2003.

52 53
back-and-forth, a zoom onto a tree-lined intersection, with passersby thus considers that its main point lies in its tendencies. Indeed, rather
and that consumer fetish of the era, the car.17 The term that would than being a specic genre or type of lm, experimental lm is about
have allowed this lm to be qualied as structural had not yet even taking a certain stance; its an orientation that avoids the lms most
entered into circulation in world experimental cinematography. standardized function of being a means for storytelling focusing
From his beginnings in the Cinema Club Zagreb, through the instead on its primary capacity to make things visible, creating
making of the Belgrade Trilogy from 1964 The Direction (Stevens- building blocks of perception. The concrete results can then, of
Duke), Blue Rider (GodardArt) (1964), Circle (Jutkevi-Count), to the course, be poetic or political, expressive or just narrative. He also
inauguration of anti-narrative features of contemporary artistic advocates that experimental lm introduces formal tendencies and
discourse, acting outside of any artistic context, Gotovac became also expressions, which are then accepted and absorbed by the mainstream
a predecessor of the new art from the 1970s. In 1967, Tomislav discourse. While in Gotovacs case this point could be arguable, it
Gotovac realized the rst happening in Yugoslavia Happ-Our nds more ground in the lms realised by the Belgrade lmmakers.
Happening in Zagreb. He was also the countrys rst streaker, running
naked through Belgrade in 1971. In his radical performances and For me cinema is an operation similar to guerrilla war, declared
provocative artistic expressions he tested the boundaries of public against all that which is determined, nite, dogmatic and
space within the socialist state. Many of his actions consisted of eternal. Such a war should also be fought in cinema. 20
simple but charged activities, such as begging, cleaning city spaces,
shaving and cutting peoples hair in public, all of which confronted The most political stance in the experimental lm in the former
the urban environment and the socialist-petit-bourgeois moral system Socialist Yugoslavia is denitely in the activity of the Belgrade cine
with his corporeal gure. Nevertheless, lm was the motto of club circle. From the Cinema Club Belgrade founded in 1951 and the
Gotovacs life and artistic philosophy: an object of genuine Academic Club Belgrade founded in 1958, as opposed to the Split
fascination, an obsession the lm experience formed a connection and School and Zagreb anti-lm tendencies, emerged lms of symbolic
a red line between works that do not disclose themselves in the and expressive cinematography. Under the influence of Russian
medium of lm, from collage to photography, and especially in his Expressionism, Polish Black Series and French New Wave, the rst
performances and actions. Asked what motivated him to watch a Belgrade lms from the end of the fties reflected human anxiety in
certain lm more than once when he was very young, Gotovac search for the surreal and the absurd. Variations on the theme of
replied: I knew even back then, that was my life. I did not make a innocence in flight from reality is a frequent subject of Belgrade lm
distinction between life and lm. I dont know if I can explain this. lovers of the time, as seen in the lms The Wall (1960) by Kokan
I am now watching, I am watching a movie18 Rakonjac, A Triptych on Matter and Death (1960) by ivojin Pavlovi,
Gotovacs whole activity is related to cinphilie. It is on the failure to escape and on existential anxiety, or in Hands of
embodied by the experience of the spectator, by the everyday feeling Purple Distances (1962) of Sava Trifkovi, about a girls flight through
of the lms as well as the lmic way of thinking art. In the lack of a deserted and bizarre landscape.
possibilities for realising lms Gotovac discovers a cinema with The Cinema Club Belgrade mainly gathered a group of lm
other means19. The deconstruction of its constitutive elements connoisseurs organizing for the members practical and theoretical
becomes an autonomous part of the artistic experiment. His classes, It was necessary to pass exams to enter the club as well as to
cinematic way of thinking penetrates far into the private realm and propose the script to the judgment of the rest of the members to get
explicitly incorporates private aspects into the lms. At the same the necessary equipment for lming. The participation to the lm
time, he is interested in the composition behind the narrative projects of other members was also required.
structure of Hollywood lm, creating his own system of references
and codes and using the structural means of experimental lm to 17 19
undertake his analysis. Thus The Forenoon of a Faun juxtaposes Georg Schollhammer Faun, Narcissus, Dejan Sretenovi, Cinema World of
ambivalent shots of human interaction with an almost abstract detail Silenus. Tom in One Needs to Live Self- Slobodan ijan in Slobodan ijan,
of a wall and a cityscape. This accumulation of images, registering Condentaly...Watching, Croatian presentation Around Film, Museum of Contemporary
without intervention, reduction and repetitiveness, cataloguing the at the 54 Biennale di Venezia, Antonio Art, Belgrade, 2009.
fragments of reality and nding systems in unexpected, unforeseen G. Lauer. A.K.A Tomislav Gotovac and Bad.
co, curators What, How and for Whom/ 20
circumstances, marks a personal standpoint that resists narration.
WHW, Venezia, 2011. Konrad Klejsa, Duan Makavejev:
Talking about experimental lm, Gilles Deleuze comments that The Paradoxes of a Subversive
one of the crucial tendencies of experimental lm is to recreate then 18 Imagination in Piktogram, nr 4, 2006,
to inhabit a concentrated shot of pure images in motion. Deleuze Tomislav Gotovac, ibid. Warsaw.

54 55
 The rst antagonism with the Zagreb circle in particular started Those Who Make Revolutions Only Halfway
already during the rst GEFF discussions, when Belgrade cinema Dig Their Own Graves
makers like Makavejev stressed their interest in researching reality
and taking a distance to pure experimentation. Moreover they started
to have they lm produced by the national production companies,
switched to lming on 35 mm, while the Zagreb-based author still
lmed in 16 mm or even 8mm, without being remunerated. Some of
them being unable to professionalize turned to visual arts, like
Mladen Stilinovi, or like Gotovac who developed his very specic
practice.
In the 1960s we witness the shift, as Stevan Vukovi has dened
it, from the amateur paradigm to the author paradigm21. The Cinema
Club Beograd gave rise to the new major lm paradigm of the 60s
and 70s, what would later be denoted as the New Yugoslav Film.
Namely, the cine club activity was a useful frame for the production
of professional lmmakers such as like Duan Makavejev, elimir
ilnik, ivojin Pavlovi, Aleksandar Petrovi, (Karpo Godina in
Slovenia). The disruptions that occurred in the amateur lms became
evident in mainstream lms, or in this case the professional lm and
caused a shift there.
Yet, for those directors the cine-club activity was a kind of
materiel dapprentissage. elimir ilnik, active in the Cinema Club
Novi Sad, very quickly saw lm as a tool of criticism. About the
advantages of amateur lm he posits: Very early I was forced to use
all the methods of movement of amateur lm. This environment of
amateur lm enabled me to rid myself of administrative labyrinths,
which were the only way to acquiring money to make a lm. It was a
form of freedom.22
While the amateur lms in Zagreb are characterized by
experimenting with the medium, and while in Split a unique lm
expression is developing, the amateur lm in Belgrade takes a step
forward and turns towards open criticism of the present and the
alienation of the modern socialist man, pointing to class and social
contradictions in socialism in Yugoslavia at the time, breaking
through the rarely disputed boundaries of state-socialist values.23

21 23
Stevan Vukovic, ibid, p. 53. Among the rst lms that were locked
away in a vault between 1958 and 1971,
22 were Duan Makavejevs Dont Believe
Marina Grini and Hito Steyerl, In in Monuments (1958) and The Parade (1962)
the Firm Embrace of Socialism, an while the amateur omnibus The City (1963),
interview with elimir ilnik, Zarez, nos. by Marko Babac, Kokan Rakonjac
134-135, Zagreb, 2007. ilniks lm and ivojin Pavlovi is one of the ofcially
Early Works had been realized in 18 days forbidden lms in the history of Yugoslav
and obtained the Golden Bear at the Berlin cinematography.
Film Festival in 1969. Anyway many of the
Black wave lms have been shown
during foreign festivals, mainly at the
Oberhausen lm festival.

56 Surng the Black Zine No. 2

 On December 13th, 2010 Dubravka educational and propaganda lms were made.
Sekuli, Gal Kirn and iga Testen met But in the 1960s the policy changed. Studios
and spoke with elimir ilnik in Berlin, invested 30-40 % of their time and resources in
following a premier of his lm Old School co-productions, 30-40% in partisan spectacles
of Capitalism... or popular comedies and the remaining time
was reserved for the production of so-called
SURFING THE BLACK contemporary lms. These lms were
Although you trained as a lawyer, considered independent productions of some
culture has always been an important kind. Independent in the sense that they were
part of your adult life. How did you end free from the topical and structural restraints
up in the eld of cinematography? that foreign co-productions had to deal with or
What was the atmosphere when you free from the complicated system of reaching
came into contact with the ofcial some political or ideological consensus
Yugoslav cinematography? necessary for producing partisan spectacles.

ELIMIR ILNIK It would be wrong to think that partisan

After initial experiences in the amateur cinema spectacles were mere propaganda. Actually,
clubs, where I made approximately ve short they were like a battleeld on which two major
lms, I ventured into the professional tendencies of interpretation of the Peoples
cinematography in the mid 1960s. The cinema Liberation Struggle (PLS) were ghting for
clubs were crucial for the development of the domination. However, what was
entire group of black wave directors and at stake in that battle was not necessarily
cinematographers. Before the invention of related to my generation. For us, this post-
home video democratized to some extent the Stalinist creativity brought along some
media, cinema clubs were the only places signicant advantages such as the openness
where access and knowledge about the lm of the country, economic growth, mobility
making technology and equipment could be of many of our experts and companies who
gained outside of the professional eld. The would at the time travel the globe creating
lms me and other cinema amateurs made large engineering feats such as the large dams
with the clubs and the media attention they in Africa as well as setting up lm
received were also crucial in order to approach infrastructure in the newly liberated territories
proffesional m studios with our proposals. of Africa and Asia.

Cinema clubs existed in most of the Returning to the topic of the cinema
major cities in Yugoslavia. They were clubs, the crucial fact was that my generation
connected into a network and presented an of cine-amateurs, including Karpo Godina
alternative to the centralized and more and Lordan Zafranovi, was fortunate enough
controlled lm studios based in each republic. to be close to the previous generation of
Film production companies in Belgrade and cine-amateurs, with fantastic lmmakers like
other republics, like Avala lm in Belgrade, ivojin Pavlovi, Saa Petrovi, Duan
Jadran lm in Zagreb, Viba lm in Ljubljana Makvejev, Kokan Rakonjac, Mihovil Pansini,
were, at the time, very professional, Botjan Hladnik, cinematographer Aleksandar
technologically well equipped fortresses that Petkovi or Duan Stojanovi, who was the
were formed as some of the rst cultural most prominent lm theorist in Yugoslavia at
institutions in socialist Yugoslavia. Why rst? the time. They were making their rst
Because of socialist, Soviet and Lenin professional lms and going from cinema
concepts and also because making lm clubs to lm studios. It is important to explain
documentation in the post-war period to the possibility for this new generation, roughly
record how the country had been destroyed 10 years older than I am, to enter the ofcial
and how the new regime was organizing its cinematography.
reconstruction was very popular.
The topics they were interested in had
Cinema was regarded as an educational nothing to do with the big partisan spectacles
tool and in the rst months and years many that were the preoccupation of the studios, nor

58 59
could they enter them on the basis of their do the research for his rst lm Man is Not a
experience as they were making mostly short, Bird that was eventually shot there. In Bor
amateur lms. It came as a surprise that the Makavejev could portray the enormous
studios all of the sudden opened to them. contrasts that existed in the country that was
The opening of Yugoslavias economic and quickly modernizing. On the one side, there
political communication with the rest of the were huge construction and reconstruction
world was followed by the opening of the works, mostly of industry, done by peasants
cultural sphere. And while the ofcial exclusively who came from rural places.
ideological rhetoric was manouvering between During the day they would build factories and
the claims that "Yugoslavia is realising a overnight they would get drunk and enjoy
humane socialism" and "the dicatatorship of music in kafana. In I Also Met Happy
the proleteriat should be strenghtened" the Gipsies for example, Aleksandar Petrovi
situation on the ground was yielding different tried to capture the reality of the Roma people.
results. I remember that in January 1963, at the The Roma people are the black spot in the
Youth Congress, Tito unexpectedly gave a reality of all Eastern European societies. These
speach on the "importance of culture, as well lms were aiming to present a part of human
as of its errors". I was 21 at the time, and, as destiny and a part of human reality. Neither of
an editor in chief of an organization called these lms were initially ideologically attacked.
Youth Tribune from Novi Sad, I was present They were representing reality. The nal
at the assembly. production of lm is always the question of
creativity. It is not something that can be
It was odd for Tito to speak at Youth imposed by the Party. But that made that new
meetings, but he did and his speech was about atmosphere.
culture. It has become one of his most famous
speeches. His rhetoric was very surprising to STB
us, as he, after pointing out that Yugoslavia Couldnt we say that this unprecedented
was getting increasingly recognized by people development of independent lm
everywhere, stressed how Yugoslav artists production (amateur, cine clubs) was
forgot about the people and the plight of the also the time, when the self-
working classes in favour of abstract paintings. management socialism was also taking
Although he didnt have anything against shape in the eld of culture?
abstract paintings, and he even mentioned
Jackson Pollock in his speech, he stated that
this was not what socialism had in mind. Around 1965 when I started collaborating with
He continued to utter some very frightening Avala Film the Yugoslavian system was in a
sentences, for instance, that he saw that many process of trying to prove its distinction
artists in Yugoslavia were taking the high against the Soviet Union. The organizational
modernist abstract direction and he compared structure of self-management, which until then
the effect of their art on the society and existed only in the industrial eld, was just
working class to the comprachicos. introduced into the cultural policies. The
All cultural organizers present left the system of self-management was extremely
gathering wondering was in which direction successful in the process of the reconstruction
this speech would take the cultural policy, and and industrialization of the country and this
although abstract modernism was defended success gave us a critical energy.
later by the text of Oskar Davio about the
anti-fascist cry of Guernica, some kind of a Workers, who were part of that system,
rupture did take place. really felt as the co-owners of the factories;
they believed they could really influence
Therefore, when the likes of Makavejev, decisions made by directors. But we,
Pavlovi or Rakonjac approached the studios lmmakers, were actually part of the free
with the proposal to make something on the market since we were not employed. We were
living conditions of the Yugoslav working class more outside of the system than in the system.
they were accepted. This is how it all began. We saw that all the benets of the system a
Makavejev went to the mining town of Bor to permanent safe job, good pensions, right to the

60 61
housing, i.e. workers would be given a flat in a Yugoslavia who lead the partisans were not over the place, pointing out for example that production by investing 60% of his directors
new housing compound and a permanent just outcasts struggling for survival and the independent lm production was only fee that will only be paid if the movie brings in
tenant were diminishing the revolutionary starving for food; many of them were highly focusing on the misery of the human condition prot.... This way, the actual money
potential of the workers and transforming educated intellectuals who after the war while socialism was trying to improve it. invested in the lm by the production house
them into socialist kleinburgers. The became influential in the cultural eld. So in They further argued that the focus was unfairly would be smaller and the risk would fall on the
transformation of the country from year to the 1960s this rst generation, some 10 years on the plight of man in the era of crew, who were working for free. Contracts
year we had been witnessing was huge. And older than we were, started this new cinema modernization and not on the improvement of would also stipulate how the prot, if there
this is what we drew inspiration from. movement. man. The reactions to these dogmatic were any, would be shared, and also when the
accusations that were looking for more control lm would become protable.
STB It is interesting to see who they had as actually gave the independent production even
Did state ideology of self-management screenwriters for their lms. Aleksandar more freedom. Avala lm had a policy to produce two
become crucial for work in lm studios, Petrovi, for instance, made his lm Three feature lms of debuting directors each year.
like Avala lm? How much the process based on a story by Antonije Isakovi, a writer Big production houses, based on the In 1968, as I was the author who had won the
of making lms was influenced by it who was also the president of a Commission new self-management legislation, started Grand Prix Oberhausen for my documentary
and general organisational structure? for Culture and Ideology of the Serbian requiring for all insecure productions to the "Unemployed", and a silver medal of
Censor Committee, a general director of the form independent lm associations that would Belgrade for my short lm "Little Pioneers",
publishing house Prosveta and, besides, also be partners to the major ones. Thus Avala, and it was my turn. As my idea for a lm, Early
When I was rst introduced to Ratko the president of the Serbian section of the other major ones could keep their hands clean Works, seemed too unfeasible, I was asked
Draevi, the notorious director of Avala lm, Commission for Reviewing Films (Yugoslav if ideological discontents arose. Makavejevs to take the risky road and I managed to make
his rst question was: ilnik, were you a man censorship body). For his excellent lms "Red second lm for Avala, Love Affair, or the Neoplanta the co-producer, knowing that
of sports? When I replied afrmatively, he Wheat" and "See You in the Next War" Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, this would give me more freedom as an
explained further: Thats good, you see, it is ivojin Pavlovi had engaged Ivan Potr and for which I was an assistant director, was author.
hard work the lm business. When I rst Vitomil Zupan, prominent intellectuals of produced as a type of co-production. ika
distribute assignments between the director partisan movement as his screenwriters. This Pavlovi, was one of the authors who worked STB
and the producer I hand them boxing gloves connection is intriguing and it cannot be said exclusively this way. His rst lm, The We speak a lot about Avala lm,
and watch how they ght it off. If the director that there was a distance between the new lm Return, was banned in the process of being as it was the major player in the lm
gets on the floor rst than I tell him that he is authors and the regime. made, so the producer, Avala lm, advised him production in Yugoslavia, but actually
not ready to direct yet. to nish the lm at his own risk. As his lms you made most of your lms at that
Naturally, when Karpo, Lordan, Bato were very well received by the audience, the time under the auspices of Neoplanta
Draevi, like others running lm engi and me, the third generation, came possibilities of this Semi-private production lm, which turned to be the most
studios, was an experienced pre-war unto the scene, we wanted to take some turned him into a relatively wealthy man in important production organization
communist who also proved himself in the distance from that lm practice. Some of just a couple of years. behind the whole black wave.
war, and right after the war he was a general in our unique inspiration we found with the How and why did this shift take place?
charge of setting up the import of "New American Cinema", the "New Brazilian STB
technological goods. When I came to Avala Cinema", old masters like Jean Vigo and What this risking and
lm, the rst generation of cinema-amateurs- Bresson etc. And although we didnt seek the co-production meant practically? Actually, the rise and fall, so to speak, of the
turned-authors was already working there. intellectual support of the "well established" It reminds us on the contemporary black wave can best be understood through the
The attitude was that Makavejev as a writers, we were nevertheless well received. It public-private entreprises? case of Neoplanta lm. Initially, major lm
psychologist and a passionate cinephile, was the prevailing atmosphere in those rst studios were established in the capital cities
proposed projects with non-linear narration, few years of establishing self-management in of each Yugoslav republic. After a while, the
with elements of collage, thus putting studios culture, in the 1960s. It was open. Of course Already engaged in risky international executive body of Vojvodina, the independent
in total confusion, but, given the experience that was not the main package of the produced co-productions, the major studios wanted to region, part of the Republic of Serbia, decided
pre-war communists had with surrealists lm in the country. All the time this new wave, share the risk of independent lms at the to establish a lm company dedicated to local
intellectuals before WWII who were influential later proclaimed the black wave, was taking no least. They rarely understood these lms topics. Therefore, Neoplanta was established
communists but also prone to confusion, they more than 15% of all the states investment entirely and most of them usually didnt have in Novi Sad, the city where I live and the
found it almost an inevitable part of the into cinematography. This independent lm a complete script when the production started. capital of Vojvodina. There were no
creative process. production, enabled by the self-management The implementation of self-management in professional lmmakers in Vojvodina at
system, hadnt even been fully legally culture enabled the organizational models of the time, so Neoplanta had to turn to us,
We could work on our lms, as they incorporated at the time and naturally exposed co-production, in which the crew would cine-amateurs, to propose the themes and
would always somehow work out. The only the dogmatism of the period. organize themselves into a lm work collective, start productions. It is important to note that
thing we had to pay attention to was not to and invest their creative labour while the with my involvement with Neoplanta my true
obstruct the production of partisan I am certain that Ratko and the likes of production house would invest the technical professional career as an independent author
blockbusters or big co-productions. It tends to him, the old guards, didnt care about this. But equipment. Our contracts would state started since all my assignments at Avala lm
be forgotten that pre-war communists in all of a sudden dogmatics started appearing all something like: elimir ilnik is entering this were as an assistant.

62 63
64 65
 The rst director of Neoplanta,
Svetozar Udoviki, was a wonderful person. Upon release the lm was on the one hand
Although he trained as an actor, his acting critically-acclaimed by the newly developing
career failed to materialize, so before international lm scene and on the other hand
Neoplanta he was manager of the theatre and accompanied by uproar and scandals locally.
performing arts department. Udoviki and two It was a lucky coincidence that at the time
secretaries were the rst employees of there was great interest in the Yugoslav lm
Neoplanta. At the time of the founding of production coming from the international
Neoplanta, I was already an established audience. For example German TV would in
cine-amateur, and Udoviki gave me the that year buy 10 perhaps even 15 movies
opportunity to make my rst professional short from the region to be screened on their
lm, Newsreel on Village Youth in Winter, channels.
one of the rst productions of Neoplanta.
My lm got noticed by a German lm
When I proposed him to make a lm critic from ARD who decided to buy it and it
documenting the lives of the people of my was this single purchase that paid off the
generation in the villages in Vojvodina, he whole investment in the lm. The production
agreed on it, but refused to pay me a fee in cost us approximately 3,500 DEM and all the
advance. He said he couldnt really imagine prot above that amount became our fee.
what would be the output of my idea.
So I made my rst lm via the risk it STB
method. I assembled the entire crew with In a way, that was a win-win situation,
people who were willing to work without being both for authors, who had more
paid up-front. Films considered as a safe freedom and for production houses,
investment had to have nished script and a as they were not risking to loose a lot
plan of shooting to get into actual production of money?
and budget would be allocated. I didnt
have a budget, I also didnt and couldnt
have a detailed script, so I had decided to It is questionable whether all these lms would
play it by ear. have been made if this production model did
not exist. However, in one aspect it was
When the whole pre-production process counterproductive, as I was later told by some
and the selection of the location were done I other directors from the period, like Puria
requested the actual lm equipment from orevi: the big in-flux of money would often
Neoplanta. I wanted the lm to be recorded stop or pause their urge to make more movies.
with an audio camera. At the time this request
equaled requesting to be flown around the Once I asked him why he put his
world in a Boeing 727. There were only two directing career on hold for three years after he
cameras of such capabilities available in Serbia made that fantastic lm trilogy Morning,
at the time. One was in use by Filmske novosti "Noon", "Dream". He responded that with the
to record Titos speeches and the Communist amount of money he had made he could afford
Party Congresses while the other was the one to go to Paris and live there for two years. He
used by Avala lms. Although the one from added that at present he regrets having done
Avala would have been easier to obtain, it was that, that he should have continued working.
too heavy for the floor of the village cafe where But here is the thing, in the late 1960s we were
we were shooting the lm, so Neoplanta certain that that production freedom would
eventually agreed to fetch the camera from last and increase. We were too optimistic.
Filmske novosti. This is how my rst
professional production came into existence. STB
Neoplanta, being the youngest of the
STB majors was giving the most space for
. and eventually you made the lm. this independent productions as it was
Did the risk pay off ? the least burdened with keeping up with
others in producing the partisan

66 67
 spectacles? Was it a happy coincedence in Belgrade, and it was shown in Berlin and
that you were from Novi Sad and that Pula where it won several awards, the
you could broker the deals between communist leadership of the Province and the
Neoplanta and the whole group of the City, Messrs. (then Comrades) Duan Popovi
new lmmakers. and Mirko anadanovi, organised an
ideological review. Using the rethorics of the
Soviet Communist Party of the 1930s, my lm
Neoplanta is a very interesting case, revealing was declared anarchistic, and "like everything
both the glory and misery of the Yugoslav anarchistic - anticommunist".
situation. At the time of its founding, it was
completely free from all the complications and What ensued was the whole year of
discontent resulting from the topics having to "probing" if their "action of correcting
do with the Partisan Liberation Struggle that ideological errors" would be accepted in other
were burdening the other studios. parts of the country. During that year,
Makavejev, whom I invited to Novi Sad,
The task of the productions was not succeeded to lm "W.R. - Mysteries of the
to portray the struggle as accurately as Organism". The premiere of that lm
possible; lms were used to solve the disputes provoked another "gathering of the conscious
between politicians, to prove who was a greater cadres", and on the public debate, organised by
Titoist, Communist, Partisan. All kinds of the same politicians, that lm was "sentenced"
mystication were present, which, in my to a bunker for ten years which effectively
opinion, had the exact opposite effect of what meant it was impossible to screen it in Novi
these lms were trying to achieve, and they Sad nor in any other place in Yugoslavia.
eventually managed to devalue the nature of However, as the lm was co-produced by
the anti-fascistic struggle that was precarious Bavarian television, it was successfully shown
and by its appearance and social position much abroad, rst, in Cannes in 1971 and then on
more similar to the French anti-fascistic other festivals and cinemas in the world.
struggle. Neoplantas director Svetozar Udoviki was
sacked, and Drako Reep was appointed in
Due to the epic portrayal in lms, it his place. He organised the removal of a few
soon became forgotten that the partisan of us, lm-makers, from the production
struggle was illegal, extremely scarce in its facilities and banned more than twenty lms.
means of warfare, highly risky and claimed
many casualties. None of these issues Drako Reep "controlled the
burdened Neoplanta and I managed to bring in situation" for the next fteen years. Together
other people that were established at the with politicians who supported and appointed
cinema club scene, Karpo Godina, Nako him, Reep made a monstrous partisan
Krinar, Prvoslav Mari, Bora ajtinac, Duan spectacle titled "The Great Transport", a great
Ninkov for example. Soon the lms that we historical falsication made in co-production
made became successful at international lm with Sherwood Productions from Hollywood.
festivals. Under the direction of Veljko Bulaji
international actors, such as Helmut Berger,
The golden years of Neoplanta lasted were hired and as the budget skyrocketed to
until the attack on the black wave. Although fteen million, Neoplanta was driven to
"the elimination of the enemy" happened in bankruptcy and in 1985 shut down. Reepi
1972, when many of the previously completed was prosecuted for nancial fraud, and to
and awarded lms were "withdrawn from the cover up the scandal, on the ruins of
public" and literaly put in a bunker, the Neoplanta, a new production company called
ideological verdicts commenced upon Terra lm was founded. Eventually Svetozar
completion of "Early Works", in spring and Udoviki was asked to return as a director in
summer of 1969. The local cultural scene in the late 1980s and with him I also returned and
Novi Sad became more dogmatic than in other made the lm The Way Steel Was
any other parts of the country. As the ban on Tempered, the "Kenedi Trilogy" and also
my lm "Early Works" was lifted after the trial several dozens of documentaries. Goran

68 69
 Markovi`s, "Tito and I" was also produced by STB
Terra lm. Today, Terra Film is up for How much were you influenced by
privatization, and we are claiming the building the Praxis philosophers, especially
back. Not to keep it for ourselves, but to make because Early Works are strongly
it ofcial that it was us, a group of lmmakers, influenced by the Early Works of
that earned that building. We would like to Marx and Engels, who are even quoted
donate it to the museum of contemporary art in the lm?
in Vojvodina and prepare an exhibition on the
history of the lmmaking in the region.
The quotes in "Early Works" are an integral
STB part of the lm dialogues, and that is even
It seems a bit too distant now to noted in the lm credits as "Additional
truly understand the impact occupation dialogues - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels".
of Czechoslovakia had on Yugoslavia. If you watch the lm, you will see that the life
That event and student protests left of the protagonists, the group of young
a clear mark on your rst lm Early people, the peasants and the workers all
Works. question Marx and Engels. The protagonists
are wondering whether the ideas and rethoric
of the classics of Marxism are adequate for
The moment of the occupation of understanding of the reality and conflicts of
Czechoslovakia was denitely more disturbing the state socialism, and even the military
for us than the occupation of Iraq was to the intervention of 1968. Whether these ideas stay
Western people, perhaps even more than 9/11. merely an ideological chatter, or do they
Czechoslovakia was trying to take the same contribute to the world at large.
path of Titoism and self-management and to
be independent from Soviet Union. We were As I was organizing debates at the
so sure of Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia Youth Tribune in the early 1960s, I had
coming closer to the similar concept of become acquainted with most of the praxis
socialism with a human face was a sign that philosophers as a young man. When I was 20
the whole (socialist) world would eventually or 21 I took part as an observer to their
transform this way. So when we were asked to Summer School in Korula. There Marcuse,
go to the borders and start digging the trenches Habermas, Bloch, Bauman and others were
in case the Soviet Union would occupy praising Yugoslavia as an ideal system that
Yugoslavia our dreams were shattered. liberated man completely, while we were
making lms which reflected the energy and
The hope that socialism and creativity of the ordinery people in their
communism would step by step realize itself struggle to survive.
disappeared when the tanks advanced in
Prague. In Yugoslavia, there were huge rallies Actually, we, the lmmakers, were more
with 100.000 people showing up in support of influenced by Camus and Sartre, who we found
Czechoslovakia and Dubcek to warn against much more in sync with reality, than by "the
rising Stalinism. This brought Tito and humanism imposed from above" of some
Yugoslavia a lot of international recognition marxists, as we wanted to speak about reality
from the West, as it reafrmed the image of itself, not its promise. Then, of course, for
the bold country that is against Stalinism and lmmakers, everything is about the lm in the
the domination of the Soviet Union, even at end its a matter of form and language. Film
the cost of war. As the reaction vis--vis the as a tool or medium is focused on individual
occupation was a sort of anti-Stalinist pledge, destiny, on emotions, love, or getting old, ill
it was really hard for us to realize the reaction and dying.
against this tremor was actually a stance of
re-Stalinization of the country. The student In my Early Works I play a bit with
protests and occupation had a big impact on this. It is ironic that something that was
me when I was making Early Works. inspired directly by something claimed by the
state as a good influence, can be afterwards

70 71
 They later pointed the nger at a specic phenomenon: the thriving
of capitalism under the guise of a socialist revolution, and depicted
the reality of precarious lives, mass unemployment, failed strikes,
crises, etc.
As a consequence of an ideological campaign led by the
cultural-political establishment, those lms become known as the
Black Wave. The article that introduced the term Black Wave was
published in the newspaper Borba in 1969. A journalist stated that
the Black Wave in Yugoslav lms presents a systematic distortion
of the present, in which everything is viewed through a
monochromatic lens. Its themes are obscure and present improper
visions and images of violence, moral degeneracy, misery,
lasciviousness and triviality. Thus started the process in the course
of which Makavejevs, ilniks and Godinas lms were banned from
local screenings while Lazar Stojanovi got a prison sentence for his
lm Plastic Jesus with Tomislav Gotovac in the main role.

New Artistic Practice

The deliberate use of formal stylistic innovations in experimental

lm, that is to say the invention of hitherto disregarded connections,
links, or interdisciplinary synapses between different forms of art,
leads to analogous innovation in other elds of art, and even to an
overlap in case of artistic standpoints of Gorgona, the New
Tendencies and Anti-Film. This parallel of somewhat implicit
chronology of influences can be drawn in both the artworks, videos
and lms from the 1970s, as well as with short lms of the then
cinema clubs.
The artistic production of the 1970s is characterized by the
radicalization of visual codes and the emergence of new art forms
from video art to the use of artists body, from redening the
exhibition strategies to interventions in public space, and even to
completely forsaking the boundary between life and art. In this
radicalization and search for new forms of artistic expression, lm
and visual art meet. New Art Practice24 is the umbrella term for the
various critical and radical forms of that new art that appeared in
Yugoslavia after 1968. Such activities emerged and developed quite
independently of each other, though they soon merged along a
common artistic mentality, based mainly on the opposition to
traditional and institutionalized forms of art and its presentation,
founding its bases in the Student Cultural Centres both in Belgrade
and in Zagreb.

24
New Art Practice was introduced by
the Croatian art critic Marijan Susovski in
the homonymous catalogue The New Art
Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978, Gallery of
Contemporary Art Zagreb, 1978.

72 73
 The hybridization of visual art and lm in the artistic practices initiated in the cine clubs, seems to be the most radical and critical
of the 70s was not particularly present; artists were more inclined to artistic expression, capable of revealing the mechanisms and side
use video particularly for documentation purposes. Still there are effects of Titoist socialism, of anticipating in a way the Yugoslav
examples of lms as work of art and not as mediator, interpreter or crises and of provoking political reaction. Why are they so
representative of some painterly, performative or other work, interesting today, especially from the post-Yugoslav and post-
establishing, according to Stevan Vukovi, the conceptual paradigm. socialist perspective?
In the lm NP 1977 (1977), Serbian conceptual artist Nea One of the intentions of the research is also to oppose the
Paripovi walks and runs through the city of Belgrade. His route is simplied and ideological representations of the (Yugoslav) socialist
not structured by the urban grid of streets and sidewalks, but past. The most popular version seems to be based on a dichotomy of
follows an imaginary trajectory. Miko uvakovi in his analysis of the brave dissident artist struggling for the freedom of expression in
Paripovis lm, raises several problems: the mythology of the a totalitarian regime. This vision takes the countries of the former
self-representing artist, the transformation of ordinary activity into Eastern Bloc for a homogenous entity and ignores the singularity of
exceptional acts, the reduction of lm to the mechanical action of the Yugoslav socialist Project. At the same time it is not about some
movement, the deconstruction of traditional narration, and the kind of Yugonostalgia , but about a critical research and reading of
speculation conveyed by cinematic discourse, concerning questions the common heritage of the socialist project and the positioning of
of action and production.25 art practices within the given socio-political constellation. Thus the
Zoran Popovi introduced lm as a medium in new art and goal is not to give an encompassing historical overview, but rather,
realised short experimental lms such as Head/Circle (1969) and he researching concrete artistic practices that can propose a new
managed to capture a diversied flow of information related to perspective of acting in a contemporary situation and to understand
artists, exhibitions and events, thus afrming the importance of the signicance of this heritage today.
documenting actions and works. By analyzing cinema clubs as extra-systemic spaces, that is
Mladen Stilinovi realised some 20 experimental lms before systems of culture autonomous from the ofcial one, we
starting his career as an artist. Already in his lms from the early demonstrated how the institutional framework has, therefore,
1970s Stilinovi is dealing with his future themes, the economy of shown itself as prone to reconguration, reinvention and
production and the economy of language, with verbal irony and adjustment, thus making possible the paradigmatic twists in the
verbal clichs, with speech as a sensitive indicator of the social and lm and artistic production.
political regime and occurring changes. Thus it is not surprising that When we read the documents on GEFF, it becomes clear
one of the artists rst books Watchers are Asked (1974) was that there were a number of controversies voiced in the
created via taking photos of separate frames of a 16 mm lm and conversations and the different perspectives of cinema amateurs
then linking them into a continuous whole and a recognizable (later professionals) from former Yugoslavia, but almost all of
accordion format. This book could be seen as a lm by using other them were in agreement on the importance of collectivity (reaching)
means, as if a lm were deconstructed into its constitutive elements, beyond program association, on the need to create a radically
becoming an independent work of art. different lm and then every other work of art, can be a catalyst
The phenomenon of cinema clubs and GEFF was at its peak of positive social changes. Amateurs are costless lm lovers.
in the rst half of the 1960s, but was never systematically explored This costlessness love gives them freedom and directs them toward
nor valorised within the cultural-artistic framework of the time, the avant-garde and non-conformity. They can ask forbidden
outside the strict discourse of amateur and experimental lm, and questions and give illicit answers.28
therefore never institutionalized within a broader history.26
New interpretations and readings of amateur experimental
lm are not comprised only of interpretations of formal innovations 25 28
negating media-specied coordinates, but they uncover new Miko uvakovi, Nea Paripovi, Mihovil Pansini, Recapitulation of
connections with the original intention and tendencies. The cinema Autoportreti, Novi Sad, Prometej, 1996. the Fourth Conversation, op cit.
clubs allowed for the opportunity of avant-garde experimenting, for
self-organization in the spirit of socialist self-management and for 26
We should certainly point out Hrvoje
some form of political engagement. They mentioned arts relation to
Turkovi`s systematic explorations
power, the possibilities and impotence, the distance from the of the framework of Croatian experimental
structures of dominance and their mutual collaboration.27 lm, which represented an important and
The phenomenon of the Black Wave, which was in a way precious source.

74 75
76
 Pavle Levi A clear diagnosis about the absurd senselessness
of reality is by itself an undisputedly positive reactant.
Even if it does not cure, it gives rise to an irresistible
The Raw Image urge to be cured.
Miroslav Krlea (quoted by ivojin Pavlovi)

The relationship between individual freedom and collectively

Excerpt from the dened social interests and norms is one of the key themes of ivojin
Pavlovis oeuvre, masterfully pursued in such lms as The Enemy
(1965), When I Am Dead and Pale (1968), and See You in Another War
book Disintegration in Frames: (1980). While some other Yugoslav New Film auteurs, notably Duan
Makavejev, worked primarily within the framework of Marxist-hu-
Aesthetics and Ideology in manist theory, invested in the idea of constructive socialism, Pavlovi
tended to consider the problem of freedom from a historically less-

the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav specied and politically less-optimistic perspective, which included hu-
manist ideals as themselves also an object of critique.1
His work developed along a trajectory that may be seen as a
Cinema
*
highly condensed version of the evolutionary path of the language of
cinema, as outlined by Andr Bazin in his seminal 1950s essay by the
same name.2 Pavlovis earliest lms amateur productions made
under the auspices of the cine-club Belgrade (Triptych on Matter and
Death, 1960; Labyrinth, 1961) and the rst professional shorts (Living
Waters, 1962; The Ring, 1963) are formalist, rhetorically driven
works, made by a critic-turned-lmmaker, who, heavily inspired by the
Soviet revolutionary cinema in general and Sergei Eisensteins theory
and practice in particular, invested himself in montagist fragmenta-
tions and reconstitutions of space, in visual symbolism and meta-
phoric modes of expression.
Gradually, however, Pavlovi began to discover the directorial
possibilities contained in an altogether different approach to cinematic
form: an approach grounded in a heightened authorial respect for the
integrity of the pro-lmic reality, in the use of lengthy camera takes,
and the so-called integral narration (the camera following the action,
subordinating its movements to the narrative content, rather than
seeking to realize a predetermined pattern of shots, of incomplete but
interdependent framings that, edited together, would create a synthetic
lmic space and a sense of unied action). It was some entirely
practical considerations having to do with the blocking and editing of

* 1
Stanford University Press, 2007 See ivojin Pavlovi, Jezgro napetosti
(Belgrade: BIGZ, 1990), 55, 59.

2
Andre Bazin, The Evolution of the
Language of Cinema, What is Cinema?,
vol.1 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996).

78 79
 certain scenes in his rst feature, The Return (1965) that initially they in fact are. Knowing neither what he wants, nor what he does
triggered this discovery. But what began in The Return as a brief and not want, Jimmy is, by contrast, envisioned as a representative of a
unplanned, instinctive departure from the expressionist abstraction state of mind that Pavlovi thought widespread among the Yugoslav
of space (as Bazin would have it) subsequently developed into youth in the mid-1960s (the period preceding the student uprisings
Pavlovis increasingly systematic use of deep-focus cinematography of 1968): an intellectual and moral apathy, an attitude of resignation
and elaborate staging of action across multiple spatial planes: it toward issues of ideology, provoked by an all-out exhaustion of the
developed into a distinct realist style. grand narratives of human emancipation, be they traditional
The lm that marked a high point of this style is Pavlovis (religion) or modern (Marxism).5
fourth feature, When I Am Dead and Pale. With The Rats Are Yet even if he is disoriented, Jimmy does not lack energy,
Awakening (made a year earlier, in 1967) and The Ambush (produced vitality: the force of life pulsates strongly in him. For lm scholar
in 1969), this piece of rough cinematic naturalism a portrayal of Neboja Pajki this suggests that he is not simply a character without
life on the margins of economic existence forms part of an any identity but a social outcast whose life is a trajectory without a
informal trilogy of socially engaged works, representative of the past or a future, a series of intense moments belonging only to the
directors obsession with what he termed poetics of viciousness permanent present.6 In the lm Pavlovi emphasizes this dimension
and aesthetics of the disgusting.3 of his character by presenting the viewer with a succession of scenes
When I Am Dead and Pale tells the story of Janko Bugarski, typically deprived, in the process of editing, of proper dramatic
nicknamed Dimi Barka (Jimmy the Boat) p. 123, a young man in exposition and resolution a technique inspired by Jean-Luc
his twenties who, having no permanent employment or regular living Godards elliptical approach to narrative in lms such as Breathless
habits, aimlessly wanders around the Serbian province, distin- (1959). Thus, Jimmy may also be understood as a local, Yugoslav
guished by impoverished, dilapidated workers settlements, collec- version of Godards Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) or as
tive farms, and village fairs all places evocative of harsh living something of an equivalent of such literary antiheroes as Saul
conditions and marked by an overall anti-aesthetic visual appear- Bellows Augie March (The Adventures of Augie March) or Jack
ance (ugliness). Centered around its protagonists journey through Kerouacs Dean Moriarty (On the Road).7
life, the lm has a loose, episodic narrative structure, akin to that Each stop on Jimmys journey is dened by a relationship
of a road movie. Jimmy is an ambitionless and disoriented with a different woman: rst Lilica, his pick-pocketing partner; then
character in the directors own words, a man without a compass Duka, a roadhouse singer; Mica, a postal worker; an unnamed
whose nomadic and, in no small measure, absurd life ends abruptly dentists assistant; and, once again, Lilica. All of these characters are
and in an equally absurd manner: in the lms memorable nal portrayed as more decisive than Jimmy and superior to him in their
scene, he is shot to death on a toilet.4 ability to economically sustain themselves. But their identities and
Jimmy is not particularly representative of the protagonists aspirations remain clearly formulated within the patriarchal
commonly found in Pavlovis lms and literature (besides being a framework: despite, or perhaps because of, Jimmys complete lack of
director, he was also an established novelist, essayist, and author of commitment, the women in the lm function as agents of his
short stories). Typically, his characters tend to be ideologically (potential) social integration. Partnership with Lilica (ever ready to
disillusioned individuals often disappointed communists (as is the fake pregnancies) is the best way to sustain the lifestyle of a social
case in The Ambush and The Red Wheat, made in 1970) who embody parasite. Duka begins to build Jimmys career as a folksinger
the gap between ideological idealism and practice/reality, the (despite his horrendous voice). Mica provides him with a temporary
discrepancy between how we would like things to be and how home (she is the clearest maternal surrogate in the lm) and gives a

3 4 5 7
The trilogy marked the peak of the Arthur Penn is said to have paraphrased ivojin Pavlovi, ovek i ivot and Critics like Pajki, Nenad Polimac, and
rst half of Pavlovis prolic career. this scene in his 1975 lm The Missouri Antiheroj, rat, moral, seksualna revolucija, Dinko Tucakovi also praised When I
Between 1963, when The Return was shot Breaks. John Schlesinger, who saw the lm in both included in: Pavlovi, Djavolji lm Am Dead and Pale as a work that thematically
(held back for release until 1966, for New York, also claimed that it inspired (Novi Sad: Prometej, 1996), 226-28, 240-41. and narratively anticipated the countercul-
painting too dark a picture of the his Midnight Cowboy (1969). tural developments in the New Hollywood
Belgrade crime world), and 1998, when death 6 cinema.
interrupted the completion of the project Neboja Pajki, Jaha na lokomotivi:
entitled The State of the Dead (released Razgovori sa ivojinom Pavloviem (Belgrade:
posthumously in 2003), he made fourteen SKC, 2001), 94.
feature-length lms.

80 81
further boost to his career by helping institutionalize him as a Makavejev) may be partially attributed to his burgeoning infatuation
singer in the military garrisons. The dentists assistant expects Jimmy with Italian neorealist cinema--Luchino Visconti (his Ossessione of
to stop wandering, marry her, and lead a life of social and economic 1942, in particular), Antonio Pietrangeli, and Mario Monicelli--as
stability. Yet, as some recent analyses of the lm have pointed out well as to his admiration of such older masters as Jean Renoir and
(Branko Dimitrijevi, Goran Goci), although the behavior of the Carl Theodor Dreyer. Yet Pavlovi never considered realism to be a
female characters seems to reinforce the standard patriarchal myth goal unto itself but rather a formal strategy, an instrument, in the
about the taming of the unbound male Eros, at the same time it is service of his cinemas central objective of confronting the viewer
Jimmy and not his female companions who is regularly sexually with the drastic or raw image an image capable of triggering a
objectied, fetishized.8 Thus, for example, he temporarily occupies powerful visceral reaction, commonly a mixture of shock and
the place of the young male game in Dukas busy sexual life, and disgust. How is it possible, he asked in Poetics of Viciousness, a
he satises ageing Micas fantasy about still being sexually desirable. series of theoretical essays written in the early 1960s, to bring the
But after his miserable failure at a singing competition in Belgrade, human being to the point of emotional catharsis by consistently
Jimmy responds to the dentist assistants complaint that his triggering in him repulsive reactions?12 Putting a naturalist style of
aimlessness is ruining her life by hitting her in the face. With this lmmaking in the service of the drastic images unpleasant associa-
aggressive manifestation of his frustration over a feeling of tivity seemed to Pavlovi like the most effective solution, so he
impotence (Do you think I wouldnt want things to be better? he strove to nurture the irrational while rmly respecting the laws of
asks, standing in front of a prominently displayed Yugoslav flag), cinematic realism.13 Thus, one invariably nds in his lms images
Jimmys wandering is also revealed as grounded in a crisis of depicting the uglier side or reality: images of decay (urban and
patriarchal masculinity. His persistent refusal to accept the societys rural), lth, social maladjustment, drunken brawling, people stabbing
rules of the game has, partially at least, been a refusal to assume each other with knives, defecating, excessively cursing, rolling in
those roles and duties that the decidedly patriarchal order he mud, engaging in violent sex in dilapidated barns and roadhouses,
inhabits has carved out for him. and more. The killing of Jimmy at the end of When I Am Dead and
Firmly situated at the forefront of When I Am Dead and Pales Pale-- culminating in the nal shot of the lms dead protagonist
visual register is the unobtrusive, anti-rhetorically conceived sitting on the toilet, while the camera slowly dollies in to reveal his
sequence shot, a stylistic device deemed most suitable for tracing the bloody face masterfully accomplishes what is perhaps best under-
complexities and the ambiguities of the multilayered pro-lmic stood as the channeling of an entire narrative trajectory toward its
reality. Often evocative--in its apparent absence of directorial inter- resolution in a raw image.
vention of documentarist factography, the lm largely realized It is through this desire to aesthetically nurture the impulsive,
Pavlovis (by then clearly articulated) ideal of creating an atmo- the irrational, and, ultimately, the destructive manifestations of
sphere that will by no means seem arranged, but rather as a conse- human existence that the formative influence of Eisensteins theory
quence of incidental occurrences.9 An acclaimed example of this and practice on Pavlovis work exhibits its enduring effects. For the
approach is found in the long panning shot set in a provincial drastic/raw image of ivojin Pavlovi is directly rooted in Eisen-
workers settlement, depicting Jimmy and an army ofcer walking by steins early theory of montage of attractions, which denes
a group of chatting peasants, then crossing paths with some protest- attractions precisely as intense, aggressive stimuli, as physiological
ing workers (who criticize the building of political factories), while
in the far background a platoon of singing soldiers is on the move,
followed by a group of playful children.10 Also frequently praised by 8 11
critics is the scene of the singing audition in Belgrade, in which the Branislav Dimitrijevi, Sufraetkinje, See Pajki, Jaha na lokomotivi, 94-95.
emerging urban youth culture of the mid-1960s is contrasted with the radodajke i lane trudnice, and Goran
Goci, Peva i pevaica: izazov i 12
thus far depicted culture of the provincial Serbia. Featuring the
restauracija poretka, both included in: Pavlovi, Dva surova lma, in
Black Pearls (one of the earliest Yugoslav rock bands), this scene is Kad budem mrtav i beo (Belgrade: Institut Djavolji lm, 82.
entirely lmed in the cinma vrit style. In its lengthy opening shot za lm, 1997).
the camera patiently focuses on the drummer awaiting his cue; once 13
he energetically begins to play, it embarks on a sideways track, 9 Pavlovi, Putevi mate, in Djavolji lm,
revealing the location and introducing other musicians.11 Pavlovi, Jezgro napetosti, 51. 128.
Pavlovis propensity for integral narration, for the mise-en-
10
scne driven organization and control of space (radically different
Srdjan Vuini, Barka koja nije Nojeva,
from the montage-based approach of his colleague and friend
in Kad budem mrtav i beo, 75.

82 83
shocks directed at the audience with the aim of provoking a formalist excesses through a docile reinstatement of the primacy
visceral reaction.14 Poetics of Viciousness is replete with references to of narrative logic? Writes Aumont, in his critique of Mitrys
the greatness, the genius, of Eisenstein: re-tailoring of Eisensteins theory:
Reality should not be betrayed, nor are we justied in
The foremost poet of brutality, the one who used strictly interpreting or taking advantage of it. Since Eisenstein pays
cinematic tools to extrapolate its overtonality its over- precious little attention to the rules of the lifelike, the concrete,
brutality (possible only in true art) was certainly S. M. or the implied, his crimes are almost complete, and Mitry scarcely
Eisenstein. Wherever he engages the piercing power of has time, particularly with October and Strike, to deal with all the
associative destruction, at whatever point in his work ways in which they deviate from his norms; there are whole pages in
whether as an element of a larger event (the raising of the which he invalidates most of the metaphors in October, positing
bridge in October); or, as the true sense of a state of being against their bad montage of attractions, a good reflex montage,
(the procession and the separator in The General Line); as by which he means a montage that uses only those symbols deter-
the amplitude of an event, its central axis of meaning (as in mined by the content. In other words, a montage of signicant facts
the Odessa Steps); or, as the climax of a tragedy (peons maintained and understood within the limits of the unfolding logic
death in Que Viva Mexico)--he manages to achieve its of the narrative action.17
maximum concentration, while also avoiding turning it into There is, however, something about the intended aim of the
a self-sufcient goal; instead, he enriches it with cine-poetry, raw/drastic image that makes it distinct from (and, therefore, not
a pure kinesthetic poetry aligned with the authors funda- quite reconcilable with) Mitrys project. Even though the formal
mental obsessions.15 means Pavlovi employs to induce the unpleasant associativity of
the image differ from those favored by Eisenstein, the primary status
But Eisenstein developed the theory of montage of attractions of such an image as the mediator of the viewers relation to the
within the framework of his famously anti-naturalist approach to art. diegetic world still remains squarely within the framework of the
He spoke of attractions as aggressive stimuli that are sufciently latters thought. That is to say, for Pavlovi, as for Eisenstein, attrac-
independent, even arbitrary, in relation to the works proper diegetic tions or raw images function as accentuated visual elements
content. In Pavlovis cinematic practice, on the other hand, the channeling or directing the process of spectatorial investment in the
intense physiological impact of the raw image crosses paths, diegetic reality. Eisenstein envisions this process as directed toward
coexists, with the declared Bazinian desire to maintain respect for the realm of the logical action: by causing intense visceral
the integrity of the pro-lmic reality. For him, attractions are an reactions, attractions provide the viewer with external points of entry
essential element of cinema, but they are truly effective only when into the lms dramatic and thematic content (this externality
interpolated into the pro-lmic continuum. (In this respect it is quite being a consequence of Eisensteins anti-naturalist foregrounding of
telling that besides Eisenstein, it was Luis Buuel who, in Pavlovis discontinuous montage). The viewers response to an autonomous,
view, excelled in producing drastic images, true cinematic attractions; independent attraction--a response that is initially physiological but,
but it was primarily those of his works unburdened by the surrealist as Eisensteins conception of montage develops, begins to incorpo-
caprice and [montage] articiality--Los Olvidados, El, and Land rate emotions, psychology, and, of course, intellect is carried over a
Without Bread--that interested the New Film auteur.) cut, transposed into (or onto) the narrative.
A question, therefore, has to be asked at this point: after Pavlovi, on the other hand, wishes to orientate the operation
attractions have been integrated into the pro-lmic continuum after of spectatorial channeling in the opposite direction: his drastic
they have been deprived of their fundamentally anti-naturalist images are intended to effect a denaturalization of the viewers
quality, as autonomous elements in the montage chain is there any comprehension of the logical action, to obstruct his or her percep-
reason why they should still be thought of as Eisensteinian? After
all, the Soviet lmmaker himself explicitly warned against an attrac-
tion being allowed to exist within the limits of the logical action, to 14 16
rest within, or to operate beneath, the overt dramatic content of Sergei Eisenstein, Montage of Attractions, Eisenstein, Montage of Attractions,
the work.16 Is, then, Pavlovis realist modication of lm attractions in Eisenstein, The Film Sense (New York: 231-32.
in the end any different from, say, Jean Mitrys proposed re-concep- Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), 230-33.
tualization of the same a re-conceptualization that, as Jacques 17
15 Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein
Aumont clearly demonstrated, so fundamentally missed the anti-
Pavlovi, Drastina lmska slika, in (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
naturalist character of Eisensteins cinema by seeking to tame its 1987), 149-50.
Djavolji lm, 80-81.

84 85
tion of the diegesis. To fully grasp what is at stake here, one has to unfolding logic of the narrative action. For their function is none
turn to the central philosophical problem at the core of much of other than to outline the limits of legibility of this continuum, of this
Pavlovis cinematic and literary oeuvre: the problem (posed in logic of action. In lms made by ivojin Pavlovi an attraction marks
rather Nietzschean terms) of human nature stretched between its the ultimate failure (denaturalization!) of the total comprehensibil-
two, ultimately irreconcilable, poles. On one side there is life as a ity of the signied. It permits the impulsive, the irrational, the
biological phenomenon: as a pulsating, irrational force, a series of non-symbolizable, to have its revenge in no less than the arena of
drives for food and sex but also for violence and destruction. On the cinematic naturalism on that carcinoma of nature that is the
other side there is the carcinoma of nature that distinguishes spectatorial cogito. An attraction prevents the image from being fully
humans from all other living beings: consciousness. Seeking to make consumed by what Eisenstein himself referred to as the retardations
human existence pleasurable, or at least tolerable, consciousness, in of conscious volition.20
the end, always either degenerates life itself or, its own efforts result Finally, it is only when considered against the backdrop of
in failure.18 such a conception of the lm image that the precise nature of social
Proceeding from such an understanding of the human critique found in a work like When I Am Dead and Pale can be fully
condition, Pavlovi assigns to art the function of socially destructive grasped. The lm offers a demythologizing portrayal of the Yugoslav
criticism: of expressing the paroxysms of existence, of tapping socialist everyday, a vision in sharp contrast to the ofcial, state-
into an unhealthy ground on which the affective, impulsive forces sponsored stories of general prosperity taking place under the sign
and the senseless acts manifest themselves in situations of suspended of an enthusiastic collective commitment to the communist goals.
or, at least, loosened consciousness. And it is precisely along those Specically, following on the trail of a large-scale economic reform
lines that he also interprets Eisensteins notion of attractions. introduced by the federal authorities in 1965, When I Am Dead and
Reflecting on his fascination with The Battleship Potemkin, the Pale takes the viewer on a tour of what may unambiguously be read
lmmaker points out: as symptoms of this reforms failure. Moreover, this diagnosis
revolves around the lms central premises stating that from any
I went to see it. And the lm literally crushed me. After- socially constructive point of view imaginable, the main character,
wards, I recuperated and began to think: what was it about Jimmy the Boat, cannot be seen as anything but entirely useless,
this lm that impressed me so strongly that I stopped liking pure waste. Not only is he regularly unemployed, but (much like
everything I saw before. That is how I arrived at montage. Accatone and other such protagonists of Pier Paolo Pasolinis
But this was merely an illusion For what fascinated me so borgata lms) he prefers not to have to work at all (at one point he
much about the lm was above all the Odessa Steps even openly boasts that he is too lazy to work). In a manner
sequence. And Odessa Steps are not merely about paralleling his induction of the perceptual indigestibility of the
montage. Odessa Steps are, rst and foremost, grounded raw image, Pavlovi uses this inassimilable dimension of Jimmys
in irrational directing not random directing, but directing personality as the key point of reference inside the narrative: in
given to foregrounding the force of irrationality; a force relation to it, the Yugoslav system of socialist self-management
which lms are only occasionally capable of attaining, which envisioned workers as decision-makers, as direct participants
but when they do, nothing can surpass this grandiosity, in the management of production comes across as a system perpet-
this power. Of course, it was only later that I realized: ually concerned with managing the appearance of productivity and
what allured me toward Eisenstein and his lm was not social prosperity. As lm critic Saa Radojevi lucidly observed,
strictly montage.19
all that is expected of the many characters in the lm who
For Pavlovi, then, the most signicant feature of Eisensteins constantly talk about work, but actually do not work, is
technique is that it supplements the lm image with outbursts of socialization. No one is desperate because there is no
irrationality, of the unaccountable. Attractions do not simply assist production, but because there is no socialization. Proletar-
or guide ones perception of the image; rather, they confront the
viewer (in a rather Bataillean fashion) with the unknowing of the
represented reality, with what might be described as a loss of 18 20
perceptual digestibility of the pro-lmic. Understood thus, attrac- Pavlovi, ovek i ivot, 229. Sergei Eisenstein, The Montage of Film
tions or raw images cannot but be integrated into the diegesis; they Attractions, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed.
19 Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), 47.
cannot but be presented in a Bazinian manner as visceral stimuli
Pavlovi, Reija je materijalizacija linih
interpolated into the pro-lmic continuum, existing within the opsesija, in Djavolji lm, 268.

86 87
 ians and soldiers are not supposed to enthusiastically fulll labeled as a black wave, put on trial and

their duties at work, but to endorse a spirit of friendship eventually banned. Even more ironic is that The judge concluded that the lm was slightly
and leisure, a castration of revolt that might bring down the Early Works was ofcially exempted in the anarchistic and contained elements of
court and then unofcially banned by just pornography, but it could not ruin the state.
glass-tower in which the foundational myths of the socialist
being put aside. Even square kilometers of This was June 1969, and lm went straight
society are piled up.21 marxist texts and analysis didn't convince the from the courtroom to the Berlin lm festival
state apparatus to notice the obvious thing - and won the Golden Bear. But the victorious
By the early 1970s, a politicized offensive against the New Films that the existing system of state socialism, was atmosphere was soon cut short in August
tendency toward overt social criticism was gaining momentum. Led based on the will for power and authority. thanks to the article that appeared in Borba.
by the dogmatic cultural watchdogs of the state establishment, the That, by the way it forms, governs and breaks Although it was becoming painfully obvious
offensive focused on the harmful, even subversively antisocialist, down, it resembled authoritarian tribal that things were about to change, we still
societies. As, in the case of the state socialism hoped that it cant prevail the ambience in the
views that have, supposedly, severely contaminated Yugoslav cinema,
of the USSR, when it turned eighty, it got state that was furiously against Stalinism and
giving rise to what would be labeled its Black Wave.22 According to terminally ill and eventually died. Stalinist threats.
some unfavorable opinions expressed at the time, directors such as
Aleksandar Petrovi, Makavejev, elimir ilnik, and, above all, Marxists generally didn't understand STB
Pavlovi whose ominous, unscrupulously destructive authorial "Early Works" and my other lms, nor the So, the production continued for some
vision proved itself a particularly fertile ground for frequent attacks whole "new Yugoslav cinema". They stayed more time uninterrupted?
on him as a paradigm of damaging social nihilism painted in "above" them. However, there was not a single
text on the black wave that wouldn't give itself
their lms a picture of the entire country as nothing more than one
a credit for "burying the black wave from the In 1969 and 1970 the production houses
big toilet.23 Consequently, a number of Black Wave lms encoun- standpoint of Marxist's principles". For continued to produce lms that would later
tered various sorts of ofcial and unofcial bans on their releases: instance, Praxis philosophers never wrote a be labeled as black. But there was an
ilniks Early Works, Pavlovis The Ambush (which, although never single text on the black wave, neither when the important change: the stories in the lms were
ofcially banned, was held out of distribution until the early 1990s), lms were screened, nor when they were not taken from everyday life anymore, rather
Petrovis Master and Margarita (1972; based on Mikhail Bulgakovs banned and their authors politically they turned to the mistakes from the Stalinist
novel by the same name), Makavejevs WR: Mysteries of the Organism persecuted. Of course, ve years later, Praxis past. For example, the story of the lm by Bata
philosophers found themselves in the similar engi, for which Karpo was the
(cleared for screenings abroad but not at home). Other lms, such as
position, persecuted, but also denied the Praxis cinematographer, The Role of My Family
ilniks Freedom or Cartoons (1972) ostensibly loosely inspired by of solidarity they denied to the black wave in the World Revolution, portrays how
Karl Marxs Das Kapital (which Eisenstein, much more famously, authors. ofcers after WWII still believed in Stalin
desired to put on the screen decades earlier) were never permitted and became disillusioned in him after 1948.
to be completed. The offensive against the Black Wave culminated in Today, when we are confronted with the
1973, when the controversy caused by the graduating student Lazar failures of the rst twenty years of capitalism Other lms tackled the topic
Stojanovis thesis-lm, Plastic Jesus, led to the lmmakers arrest. in the states of former state socialism we have of forceful collectivization that was happening
to examine both the past and present with in Yugoslavia just after the war under the
Petrovi and Pavlovi were declared morally, politically, and peda-
scrutiny we never before had. We readily admit influence of the Soviets. Collectivization
gogically inappropriate and were removed from their teaching that there were more emancipatory was abandoned in favour of peasants keeping
posts at the Belgrade Academy of Dramatic Arts. Pavlovi, however, achievments in the state socialism, than in smaller plots of land when it became clear
continued to direct lms in Slovenia, where he completed four neoliberalism, but continue to turn the blind that large-scale collectivization was too
features during the 1970s eye on the real reasons for the failure of problematic. At that time, Makavejev, whom
socialist project. It is ironic that, among all I brought to Neoplanta, was nishing World
intelectual gymnastics, the most precise Revolution and described it as a Titoistic
description of the methodology and network answer to all the Stalinist threats
of "engaged communists" in the project of with even some archival footage of Stalin
autodestruction is the testemony of Roman included. Actually, it was in 1971, when most
21 from Joviis nave and undocumented Abramovich at the London Court in the of the productions that ran in 1969 and 1970
Saa Radojevi, Smrt na poslu, in attack, see Milutin oli, Crni lm ili process with Berezovsky. were nished, that the most powerful series of
Kad budem mrtav i beo, 55. kriza autorskog lma, Filmska kultura 71 lms came out.
(June 1970). STB
22 The court case against Early Works, STB
Vladimir Jovii, Crni talas u naem 23 although you won, marked somehow Ideological questioning stayed, did this
lmu, Borba, Aug. 3, 1969. For a Quoted in Pavlovi, Djavolji lm, 260. the beginning of the end? What was the affect the lm language?
pronounced critique of the black wave, reaction of the judge?
which also seeks to distantiate itself

88 89

Not by the late socialist ideology, that would Already by the mid 70s, the neo-dogmatic
continue to encourage formal experiments attitude removed our lms, quickly began to be
hoping that this would deaden the social and compromised. When it was realized that it
political edge. Also, the classical classication didnt work, as if nothing had happened,
that "art formalism, dadaism, apstraction are a return came towards production models from
just hidden forms of petit bourgeois". The the end of the 60s. Especially in Belgrade, the
New Yugoslav lm that later came to be called whole production started relying on whats
Black Wave by its opponents, is much more in its name lm collectives that were organized
line with what was happening in the east, much independently from the large production
more than we might be willing to admit. New houses.
Polish and Czech lms appeared a few years
before the new Yugoslav lms and they were, Basically everyone could form lm
unlike Soviet lms, well known in Yugoslavia. work collective, all it took for an independent
lm work collective to get started was to have
But there is a big difference between an ofce address, register at the court and
them when you look at them closely. Polish make a stamp. As these were small
and Czech lms applied their type of organizations, some kind of service centre was
aesthetics to some marginal and modest formed in Belgrade that would help various
anti-fascist narratives set during WWII. For lm communities handle laws, administration
example, Czech lm stories the Czechs did and even bookkeeping. The majority of
not have a substantial resistance movement the interesting lms that were made in the
such as Closely Watched Trains (Jir 1970s and 1980s were produced through these
Menzel, 1967) or The Shop on Main Street types of organization these included
(Jn Kadr, Elmar Kos, 1965) were focusing on practically all the lms of the so-called
those elements during WWII and forced a Prague school.
breakthrough.
The most interesting of the collectives
In contrast to that, our author lms did was Art Film 80 that managed to realize 17
not have that war pretext. Makavejevs Man is Belgrade lms in ve years, among others the
Not a Bird or Love Affair, or The Case of most important lms by Sran Karanovi,
the Missing Switchboard Operator or ika Goran Markovi, Goran Paskaljevi. They all
Pavlovis When I Am Dead and Gone are worked there, no one went to the major studios
all about young contemporary men who feel as they focused on large international
lost in that socialism. Only later in the 1970s co-productions, or inter-republic
do the lms tell stories from the past, as I have co-productions based on themes that were
mentioned earlier. In this sense, our black of interest to the broadest audience, either
wave was more polemic, but it is absolutely in commercial comedies such as tece
line with the lm language of East Europe. Cvek u raljama ivota produced between
The Czech new wave, until 1968 and the Soviet Belgrade and Zagreb or some of the last
occupation at least, didnt cause any partisan epics.
ideological probes whereas our lms stirred
polemics from the beginning some lms went STB
on trials, some were banned. There is a clear Television also played an increasingly
tension. It would be absolutely untrue to claim important role in nancing the
that what was happening in Yugoslavia with productions, can it be said that the state
the black wave was an explosion of authentic had its stake in that? Or does it have to
expression. Absolutely not. do more with changing economic
production of the lms?
STB
The organisational forms of
lmmakers survived the ideological I was present when Art Film 80 was formed in
attack, didnt they? 1981 in Belgrade. At that time, television
programming reserved Mondays for

90 91
broadcasting drama programs, for which Czechoslovakia continued to shake the whole
original television lms were produced. This system of socialism. As a result government
was, almost by default, a source of an initial structures became both opportunist and
budget for a lm. It would go more or less like skeptical, but also rooted in careerism and
this: Goran Markovi would go to the existing hierarchies. The middle class was
television company with his producer and trying to live comfortably and aspiring to get
present an idea for a drama about the some connections and jobs in foreign trade.
correctional facilities for youth delinquents The class of the so-called red bourgeoisie that
and explain how it would t perfectly into the was invisibly for a while became visible to
Monday drama program. If they thought the everyone, bringing doubt into the system.
topic was interesting, television would take up
the idea and develop it and together with a lm Counter-revolutions slowly, but surely,
work collective would apply to the republic were becoming mainstream, designed by the
funds for more funding. disappointed apparatchiks, who didn't manage
to reach the high political position during
In addition, television broadcasting neostalinist period of the early 1970s. They
companies usually had their own laboratories seeked the support of the middle class, above
and other equipment, which could lower the all of the mediocre intellectuals, that found
costs of production. Most of the budget that diverse and extensive Yugoslav intellectual
came from television would then be spent on scene, too "challenging and modialist" - and
research and preparations. As the negotiation seeked local legitimacy. The new system of
process was not as long as with republic regional values that was established this way
funds or major production houses, lms would was embraced by the polticians who found
quickly enter the production phase. Still, "socialism too demanding, not feasible and
the larger part of the honoraria of the based on the risky premises of the dictatorship
authors would be invested in the production, of the proletariat".
hoping that if the lm became a success they
would not only get the money back, but also STB
earn some. You keep mentioning the word
independent about your productions
It is important to stress that the and productions of the generation that
Yugoslav lm market was huge compared to came after you, how much this
the present situation. Successful domestic lm independence was constrained by the
would easily gross between 120,000 and material and technological conditions
250,000 dollars. The costs of these costume- of the lm production?
less lms without large scenography and
production demands would cost 120,000 to
180,000 dollars, which was feasible for the This was the time when lmmaking was
domestic market. Another difference from the entirely dependent on lm technology and
present situation is that the international infrastructure. The latter was not only
market for Yugoslav lms was much larger at expensive but also extremely inaccessible. The
the time than it is today. First of all, that was process depended on huge laboratories,
before the boom of new cinematographies machines that not even all the federal republics
in Asia, China and the like. Also, Yugoslavia at the time had, and on editing tables. So,
had much better international cultural contacts although we were independent as lmmakers,
and the relevancy of the cultural production we were always dependant on these extensions
was higher. Authors of the generation after of the state mechanism the laboratories and
the black who started to work in the 1980s the editing facilities. Everything had to go
managed to have continuity and probably more through them.
individual young talents emerged than a
decade earlier. STB
One question always comes to the
What was actually happening in those fore in your lms, the fact that very
years? The aftershocks of the occupation of politically engaged critique, without any

92 93
 idealisation is always articulated
through the work on some marginal Film is always an intervention in public space.
group, lumpenproletariat, workers, The important benet that comes with low
Roma people...Is this the black in the budget productions is the speed with which
black wave as Boris Buden would coin you can respond to circumstances. Even when
it? How come it was not possible to I was working for television I was still regarded
structurally open the question of the and labeled as problematic so I would get
gure of the worker within the socialist assignments no one wanted to tackle and the
horizon (state ideology), and why was it shortest shooting slots. Even in those
not so much discussed in lms, but circumstances I made 15 lms for television, as
rather represented in ironic terms? the amount of production on television in the
1980s was amazing. Basically, it was my status
of underdog that enabled me to do more or
Its not easy for me to answer that because less what I wanted.
there were various factors that influenced both
me and my production. When Early Works The production aspect is crucial. To
was on trial, I could speak freely and defend make something you need to have a person in
my lm. The judge told me: You are right. front of the camera that will carry the story.
Socialism wont collapse because of your The story can be told in feature lms with
lm, we believe in the freedom of creation. articulate actors or in semi-documentary lms
I will not sentence it. But actually, my lm with people that are expressive enough, and
ended up in court because a group of workers more importantly, authentic enough to
from Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina communicate their personalities.
complained that lm was anti working class
and reactionary. The continuity of working with
so-called marginal people was that, to my
The working class in socialism was surprise, I found myself in ideologically
opportunistic and prone to manipulations. designed cultures with various elements that
Therefore the bureaucracy didnt have to be remained hidden from the public and I
openly against free art language, they could use discovered authentic characters who, despite
the working class to defend why they were everything, lead dignied lives. That was
against it. It was almost as if they were saying, always the greatest inspiration, and not only
the working class believes this is the best for me, but for the whole crew. The reason I
system ever, how dare you criticize it from the managed to make so many titles and not get
workers perspective. Although later I did depressed by the unfavorable conditions of
make a couple of lms in which workers were production probably lies in that fact.
the main protagonists: Vera and Erika and
Dragomir and Bogdan: Electricity. But I Furthermore, working on these types of
found at the centre of the Yugoslav working lm has always been a great learning process.
class marginalized people shoved aside by the My crew, for instance, cannot wait for a new
system that was hailing them as its core. lm to start, to meet new interesting people,
Ironically, although these lms were probably drink rakija, coffee and hang out with them.
the most explicitly critical, they were screened When someone tells you, you lm people,
on television without causing any problems as your life is swell, it is not difcult to nd a
they were about workers. way to communicate. Relationships like that
would not be possible in more comfortable
STB working conditions, as there would be a
Film here then asks a question of the distance between those in front of and behind
new sociality and where it can be the camera. Due to the way we worked, the
positioned. And lm becomes sort of a people in front of the camera understood that
public space in which this new that cant we would help them communicate something
be articulated nevertheless starts its to the broader public.
existence? This is often enhanced by the
fact that you use real people in your In the last decade we have been
productions. shooting mostly on video, so we can easily

94 95
watch the takes from that day together the earning. On the other side, the existing
same day. We dont mystify, so when we watch European funding for lms, Euro Image for
the takes, I explain to them what works on example, are structured, regulated and
screen and what doesnt. Another important controlled in such a way that it reminds one of
thing is that we promise people that we will the prescriptions for feature lms given to
give them the raw material for their Soviet authors at the time of Brezniev.
documentation. Thus it is clear from the start
that I make my version and that they can make So, although I made 10 lms in the last
a version of their own if they want. These ten years, I never applied for support for a
arrangements make the atmosphere relaxed feature lm. Occasionally I would apply for
and I have even noticed that being involved in funding for a documentary lm, one about a
the project enables people to gain more young generation born in Western Europe
condence. returning to Serbia because of repatriation for
instance. In the end, we made a half-hour
STB documentary on that topic, but the lm also
Thus you would frame this focus served as research for the feature lm Kenedi
and production marginality more as a Goes Back Home.
choice instead of a last resort?
STB
Although the terms black lm and
One can always question that aspect of my black wave, came from the attack
work, production marginality in continuity. initially, you seem to be the one that has
You ask me whether it is intentional or the internalised it in very productive way,
only option available. First, due to the at least the Black Film could be read
circumstances, I lost early on the possibility of in this perspective?
belonging to the ofcial cinematography.
The same thing happened to Makavejev after
Mysteries of Organism. However, this by all You are here referring to my short lm Black
means unpleasant experience was actually a Film that was done in January 1971. It was a
very enlightening experience, as it was only kind of ironical reflection on this new label
then that I started realizing that that had been formed. The fact that we could
cinematography is such an extensive part of mock this label reveals that its ideological
the power system in such small countries, and imposition was, to say the least, ambiguous.
countries adhering to state socialism at that. Simply, if it was a political proclamation that
black lms were anti-socialist, I wouldnt have
The lms depending on the state always been able to ofcially make something entitled
have to be in some degree of coordination Black Film and to put on the table the
with the state administration, and in line with aesthetic topic of the place and meaning and
the logic of the personnel policies. For strength of the lm experience.
example, a director cant get a lm every year,
there has to be some distribution. As a result The fact that I could mock the label so
of this rule, some of our most talented people easily also shows that the black movement
who stayed connected to the representation of never existed as a genuine movement. The
the mainstream state policy made a few lms differences between the authors who were
only. Another thing, once Yugoslavia fell apart eventually expelled under the same label were
lms with so-called decent budgets became substantial. For example, when I talked to
totally rude as the market couldnt return Karpo Godina, my cinematographer for Early
anything. Simultaneously, these lms Works and my crew, we were always saying to
generated big losses as they cost millions of each other that our lm should not look like
Euros and only made 50,000 Euros prot. mainstream lms do. It should also be distinct
from the lms by Saa Petrovi, ika Pavlovi,
Filmmaking in such a way is a totally and even Makavejev. The most encouraging for
parasitic activity, especially compared with the us youngsters bear in mind that we were 25,
amounts of money black wave lms were 27 at the time after the screening of Early

96 97
 Works was that both Makavejev and Pavlovi general optimism and development in
were stone-faced. They were saying, What the country?
have you made? This doesnt look like our
direct legacy. Pavlovi even said, Ah
elimir, that is a cul de sac. Where is the mans I think it is fair to say that art and lm at the
passion, his sexual energy? time were 20 perhaps even 30 times more
present in the media than they are today. There
For us, lmmakers, everything in the was almost immediate reflection in the media
end is about putting the lm together. When on new lms and books. Culture was much
you watch the lms that are now labeled as more important during socialism than it is
black wave, it becomes clear that each of us today. When I went to Germany in 1973, I was
had different ideas about what it means to put utterly surprised when I saw how little
a lm together. One could expect the same coverage excellent lms by Fassbinder or
style, the same type of lm tools, but they are Edgar Reitz received. There would be a short
really completely different. paragraph in some specialized magazine, while
we were getting pages and pages of coverage,
STB and erce debate.
But, there was a general atmosphere
that somehow connected these lms on And then in 1972, the general
a level that was beyond or behind the atmosphere in the country changed almost
lm language? overnight, and the rst to go were the lms.
The project of Yugoslav socialism, the way it
was practiced in the 1960s, was shaken initially
The situation was one of competitive freedom. by the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1969.
The biggest constraints were of course situated When the economic growth started to slow
in the domain of technology and as far as this down it brought insecurity and time to reflect.
aspect was concerned the state institutions As attacks on lms were increasing, optimism
could not be circumvented. The laboratory about the future was diminishing.
was highly important, as everything was shot
on 35mm. Materials had to be sourced through STB
ofcial state channels. Technically, this was the In the 1960s in Yugoslavia, culture got
time well before digital and even before beta, extremely good coverage in the media,
so cameras were huge, expensive and only big specially the press, there were numerous
organizations could afford them. Beside this, articles, discussions, even theoretical
the forms of production organization were essays. The lm was socialised. Did
quite open. It was impossible to produce a lm this backre when the newspapers
without any input from state facilities. became the major channel for attacking
the lms?
Doubtlessly the most inspiring for us
was the Zeitgeist, and the feeling that the times
were changing and improving at supersonic The banning and tabooing of the lms was
speed. We got to be part of that exciting period tremendously present in the media. Through
in which day by day we gained more freedom. this presence we can solve the big mystery of
Not in our wildest dreams could we imagine which lms were called black by the
that we would be so brutally stopped only a establishment. The new Yugoslav lm was not
few years after that splendid start. This feeling attacked as a whole, and even some lms that
of optimism was increased by the rm belief are now considered to be part of the black
that the themes we were putting on the table, wave, were not explicitly mentioned, although
both aesthetic and thematic, were crucial for they were put aside.
the future.
The simplest way to make the precise
STB list is to go through the minutes of the
Would you agree with the thesis that re-dogmatized party meetings, when they were
culture played important part, perhaps listed. Some authors, although much criticized,
even a crucial role in creating the would have only some lms labeled as

98 99
problematic they were consequently banned. editor told me not to worry, that it is just a
For example, Aleksandar Petrovis lms It party document, nothing more. I had already
Rains in my Village and The Master and left the party in 1969 and this was the moment
Margaret were stigmatized because they were when I decided to leave the country and work
seen as questioning socialist structures. Of all somewhere else as the borders were open. So I
the lms Makavejev made, only WR: went to West Germany in 1973. When I came
Mysteries of Organism was listed. I only had to Germany, there was simply no way that I
one lm listed and that was Early Works. could say that I was censored in Yugoslavia. It
From 1948, when the organized lm would be as if you came here now and claimed
production in Yugoslavia started, until 1972, you were censored in Monaco. Yugoslavia was
almost 560 lms were produced altogether. considered an ideal state and ironically our
The number of black wave lms blacklisted lms greatly contributed to the creation of that
amounted to roughly 30 10 feature lms and image.
20 short lms.
When I arrived in Germany, German
What was the impact of this lmmakers just started getting organized into
stigmatization of culture? For me personally, lmmakers cooperatives, very similar to our
the campaign was similar to McCarthys self-management system. Alexander Kluge
anti-communist campaign in America. The even told me they were organizing themselves
greatest problem for the attackers of black after our model. So, instead of saying that I
wave lms was to nd evidence for their claim came to Germany because I couldnt make
that these lms were against socialism and lms in Yugoslavia anymore, I had to say that I
anti-communist. How can you argue that had come to trace and research the lives of the
Makavejev is anti-communist when Makavejev Yugoslav guest workers. Eventually I did make
himself described WR as the most some lms about guest workers.
pro-Titoist lm ever, and explicitly against
Stalinism, which was one of the characteristics STB
of Yugoslavia anyway. We had become What was the immediate reaction on
outcasts, but it was difcult to nd a plausible the breaking of the black wave? In a
explanation why we were banned without even lm this would release a whole new
having contradicted the established Yugoslav revolutionary potential, but in reality
ideology. the event of banning just faded away?

Once we had become ofcial outcasts

the media became silent. In 1973 I made the Interestingly, the removal of the black wave
small lm Uprising in Jazak, about the and its authors from the scene didnt cause a
anti-fascistic and partisan struggles of the big disturbance in the country because of
inhabitants of a small village close to Novi the huge ideological pressure. There was
Sad, during WWII. The lm was openly shown almost no solidarity. Praxis philosophers never
at festivals and was well received, but the press wrote a single text in which they reflected on
did not mention it. that. So for all of us that was a moment in
which we felt uneasily that this country,
So I went to the editor of a large ideology and party that we had grown up with
newspaper and asked him why nothing was was regressing.
written about the lm. He showed me the
memo from the Committee of the League of When Boris Buden asked me at your
Communists of the City Novi Sad, which conference whether I ever felt like a victim, I
stated: Because some authors in the media of replied that I never had and that actually the
cinematography started exposing anti-socialist potential of the Yugoslav project was the real
tendencies, we advise you not to mention any victim of this new re-Stalinization. One could
work by Aleksandar Petrovi, ivojin Pavlovi, even be bold and wonder whether the
Duan Makavejev and elimir ilnik. You are dismantling of Yugoslavia was the result of
free to mention their names in case of the the black lm authors or the result of stopping
death of an author. I was frightened, but the the black lm authors?

100 101
 STB I realized that those workers were in a similar
You return to the theme of the situation to that of the students 40 years ago.
revolutionary potential of a group in They were exposed to threats, this time not
your latest lm Old School of only from the police, but also from a private
Capitalism. Is it possible to read that security company hired by the new owner.
lm as a sort of an epilogue of the They had nothing to lose, it was a matter of
Early Works? As a sort of a we told life and death.
you so... to the red bourgeoisie and
their inability to stay true to the Initially, there was no concept
socialism? beyond the feeling that their struggle had to be
documented somehow. At rst two
documentaries were made. One was a precise
To be honest, much more than a precise chronology of the union battle, their protests,
concept, the driving forces between both lms travel to Belgrade, strike at the House of
were particular experiences, pieces of Unions, where a man died overnight.
information, and even emotions related to For the other documentary, entitled The
lived events. Early Works draws a lot from Case of Bankruptcy Mass, I invited a team of
the strong emotions I experienced while young journalists to make three essays, to add
lming the documentary about the student a layer of data about manipulation, defrauding,
protests, June Turmoil, in June 1968. court cases...

Due to the limited amount of negative Atypical about this lm is that I

we had, most of the events we witnessed while managed to nish and tell this story only at the
lming on the various locations where protests third attempt. The initial two were doomed to
were taking place never made it in the lm. fail in the process of making. The rst idea was
We were also following some of the numerous to have a woman playing the tycoon who
delegations sent from faculties to factories to bought the factory. Preparing for the future, the
forge an alliance with workers. Together with tycoon has a Chinese assistant, teaching her
them we were stopped, harassed and children Chinese so they can be prepared for
apprehended by the police. The extent to the Chinese domination of the world. When
which the police, both in uniform and civilian the privatization has already happened, Lazar
clothes, were aggressively trying to prevent the Stojanovi, the heir, returns to the country
meetings was the biggest taboo surrounding after having lived abroad and tries to regain
the protests. I was still in shock by what I had ownership as the factory was being
experienced during the protests when the nationalized. I wanted to show that aspect, that
opportunity arose to make the rst feature lm many factories were nationalized after WWII
a few months later. I went back to my notes and sold without denationalization. When he
and to the conversation I had during protests meets the new owner, they realize they were in
with a young girl who was severely injured by love when they were children and they embark
the police. She told me about the absurdity of on a trip around the world, leaving the factory
the whole situation: I was shouting Long live to the Chinese assistant, saying how property
comrade Tito! I was writing an article about is just a dream. When the Chinese woman
Karl Marx and they were beating me up! realizes that the the factory workers are only
Imagine the confusion. That conversation really good in folklore, she decides to turn the
was the main input for the screenplay for factory into a performance company that mixes
Early Works. Serbian folklore with Chinese opera and to
travel the world with them.
Similarly, the work on Old School of
Capitalism started when I heard about the The lm was supposed to end with a
horrible injustice that happened to the workers spectacular performance. I wanted to shoot
of the privatized and then bankrupt factory for this with the workers occupying the factory in
railway repair inovoz from Zrenjanin. Zrenjanin, but after two days I realized that the
The workers occupied it to protest against its energy between the leading actress and the
closure. This story was banned from the media. workers was not working and decided to abort

102 103
the shooting. That is both a pro and a con of and almost toothless worker. Both
my method I actually dont have to answer to visually and symbolically that is
anyone for the production costs and I can a striking transformation of the image
allow myself to stop the crew and say doesnt of the revolutionary.
matter, we had our fun, 30 beers, but we have
to think of something better to tell our story.
This also relates to the changes in lm
The second try was a bit of a tragedy. language, aesthetics and focus that we
I found a perfect actor, Dragan Joki who was mentioned before. 1968, the year we shot
a refugee from Croatia and whose sons were Early Works was the year of the sexual
severely injured during the war. He was living revolution and the hippy movement and it saw
next to the open market where he was working. the rst nude woman in a Yugoslav lm.
I asked the Croatian writer Vedrana Ruden to The student rebellion was opposing dogmatic
play his wife who left him when the war taboos dominant in socialism, and the lm we
started. She is now married to an Austrian and made tied in with that idea. The critique of the
owns a villa in Opatija. They had an excellent red bourgeoisie seemed to be just one of the
chemistry together and everything was going small steps in the return to the authentic
ne until on the fth day of the production sources of socialism. The sources of socialism
I went to pick him up and his sons told me that as we understood them had to do with
Dragan had passed away during the night. freedom, individuality, the breaking of
classical class structures and establishing a
After those two failed attempts with communal society. Although exposed to
strong individual protagonists, I realized that Marxs ideas of the commune due to the fact
I needed to feature a group in which no one that Marxism was a compulsory subject at
would stand out. So I came up with the idea to school, it was the American hippy movement
introduce in a lm a group of real anarcho- that provided crucial inspiration to the young
syndicalists in whose papers I read some of the generation in Yugoslavia.
sharpest analyses of the theme. At the initial
meeting, they agreed to star in the lm, as a Forty years later, society has already
group that kidnaps the capitalists. lived through a few rounds of disappointment.
The whole shooting lasted two days. One The millions of women from East Europe who
of the strongest similarities with Early go to the West and earn a livelihood for
Works lies in the fact that in both lms there themselves and their families by prostituting
is no main individual character, but a whole themselves have completely perverted the idea
group instead. This continuity is more a of sexual revolution in post-communism. One
question of style, emotions even, than a should add also the permanent fear of STDs
conscious decision. Both lms were made at a and the rise of porn industry. So, having naked
time when the dominant model of social life girls in a lm today is actually a step towards
was rocked and most of its values were put in tabloid aesthetics.
question. Serbia entered capitalism in the year
2000, being optimistic it would return to the STB
normal world and feel the purication after Such beautiful women are now
Miloevi, only to have all hopes shattered a girlfriends or wives of the new
few years later. What came after was a horrible, capitalists?
depressing and deep disappointment, similar
to what the students were feeling after the
protests in 1968 had dissolved. Exactly! What was semantically knocking on
the closed door by means of the nude Milja,
STB was achieved with a bearded anarchist talking
The revolutionary potential in Early about the ideas of war the state as exploiter
Works is embodied in a young and tormentor of its own people and the
Jugoslava that had the best boobs of bureaucracy being part of the apparatus.
Balkan, while in Old School of The continuity in provoking taboos remains,
Capitalism we constantly shift between but it is the taboos that change.
the bearded anarchist and the bearded,

104
 Sezgin Boynik I. A New Science for Reading the Films

Amos Vogel, one of the most prominent popularisers and

On Makavejev, On Ideology theoreticians of the subversive lm genre, proposes an
epistemological origin for this cinema genre based on discoveries in
science, in particular discoveries in Quantum Mechanics and the
Theory of Relativity. The discoveries created such a conception of

The Concrete and the world that, according to Vogel, who is quoting Einstein, science
has become a version of religion, which then should be specied by
terms like the impenetrable and the incomprehensible. The
the Abstract in the Readings of opaqueness of this new science is a new state of being of the world,
which has immense consequences for our political, philosophical and
Duan Makavejevs Films artistic conceptions as well: to withstand these [changes] we need a
new breed of man: flexible, tolerant, innovative and questioning.1
This new man who is at the edge of the decline of Western
hegemony and bourgeoisie civilization (p. 18) accordingly needs to
dene modern art in terms of: dissolution, fragmentation,
simultaneity and decomposition. In sum, this is a denition of
subversion, which is the scientic, political, philosophical and artistic
replacement of the logical with the illogical in shaping the new policy
of ght against the growing international trend toward
totalitarianism (p. 1), which could be described as some kind of
kaleidoscopic world view.
The political and artistic consequences of this new
epistemology have clear effects on the practice of cinema, which has
to be subversive or not at all. This practice of cinema, similar to the
complexity of science is, as Alberto Toscano recently argued,
referring to the turn that is fashionable in contemporary social
science, based on the refusal of reductionism.2 This refusal, as
Toscano concisely described, suspends the criteria for
distinguishing between the ideal and material (p. 181), and could be
furthermore claried as the (re)turn to vitalism which at the last
instance of its theoretical operation suppresses the antagonisms
between materialism and idealism. Complex turns in social sciences,
as well in the aesthetics, are based on the assumption of the worlds
unpredictable and dynamic richness (p. 183) in which the cognitive
position becomes impossible. This ultimate indeterminacy (like
Vogel-Einstens impenetrability and incomprehensibility) of the
world is fully penetrated by the ideology of science which is
constituted by the denegation of the antagonistic contradictions. In
this beautiful and harmonious complexity, objects of knowledge are
in endless re-guration between idealism and materialism. This

1 2
Amos Vogel, Film as Subversive Alberto Toscano, Partisan Thought,
Art, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical
London, 1974. Marxist Theory 17:3, 2009, p. 181.

106 107
constant re-guration which suspends the decision between the the book Mortimer seemingly prefers the second material, there is
antagonisms is the core of this philosophy. What was once material no explicit tension between the two that would open the eld for the
might reappear as ideal, or vice versa. The philosophical effects of theory of contradictions. Again, antagonisms are not regarded as
this complexity turn are not the abstraction of thought, but the contradictions, and the complexity between the two materials are
disqualication of the singularity and the partisanship of thought stalemated in the utopian co-existence. Most clearly we can see this
that should be based, as Toscano writes, on the antagonistic in her interpretation of the end of the lm WR: Mysteries of
principles of materialism. Organism, where bewildered and confused Vladimir Illich who has
In reading the lms by Makavejev, Vogel is most explicit in just cut off the head of his lover Milena, following the irresolvable
describing their complexity. According to Vogel Makavejevs tension between the intellectual and emotional or the ideological
viewpoint is cosmic: fragmented, kaleidoscopic and multilayered.3 and real part of his consciousness walks through the woods and
This cosmos is completely different from the classical cosmos of nds the Gypsies sitting around a re, a scene that is accompanied
the 20th-century man. It is based on the most novel conceptions of by the soundtrack of Bulat Okudzhava. That is harmony with
scientic knowledge which [as his lms] express[es] time-space communal ethics, writes Mortimer and interprets the conclusion as
continuums, the absence of linear realities, the proven inability of our the Marxian ideal of creating a society that provides for each
sense organs to understand the world around us. The epistemology according to his or her need, one that respects all living beings.
which is based on the conventions of nitude, predictability, Finally Vladimir Illich joins the group of gypsies warming
narrowness, and order, as was the case with the linear and narrative themselves around the re in the snow. 5 The harmony that
cinema, no longer exists for Makavejev: the world is now seen as Mortimer sees in the last sequence of Makavejevs lm is
innite, more complex than ever imagined (p. 51). This inability is psychological because it appears as the post-traumatic solution to
ideological, not only because it enables to decide between the irresolvable tension of the psyche. Nevertheless, this harmony
antagonistic contradictions, but also because it is suspending the also has a more effective ideological function, as it is based on the
contradictions between the antagonisms. Vogel is dreaming of science co-existence of two antagonistic positions of the material; one is
(or of Heisenbergs principle or Schrdingers cat) and
retrospectively of cinema-science which would allow an entirely
different spectrum of antagonistic positions or conventions to 3 Parapsychology, etc.) and Reich also book
co-exist in one strange but nevertheless harmonious whole. This Amos Vogel, Makevejev: Toward the Edge includes translation of Mariguela and
utopia at the same time does have very social and political and the Real...and Over, Film Comment 9:6, Black Panthers manifestos, Situationist
consequences, and Vogel is drawing these consequences through the November-December 1973, p. 51. International pamphlet, Cuban Cinema
reading of Makavejevs WR: the lm is representative of a new Vogel employs the complexity and discussions, Anarcho-Feminist manifestos
the impenetrability criteria in many cases (SCUM) among the others. But this
breed of international subversion between the October Revolution,
of his lm criticism, but as far as I know complexity could be described with the
Consciousness III (in the USA) and Wilhelm Reich p. 185 (p. 53). The effect of pedagogical and didactical policy
he was most explicit and enthusiastic with
utopia of this tripartite is introduced as the ideological re-formulation Makevejev and Werner Herzog which he of Makavejev which is important part
of contradictions, as the complexity in which the antagonisms of the describes the latter as: working solely of his general cultural policy of what he
structure are held in the conceptualization of wholeness. This is with the materials of reality, Herzog, in a understood as socialism.
surely the philosophy of the New Age and apart from an cosmic pun on cinema vrit, recovered the
epistemological stalemate it also re-produces the politics based not metaphysical beneath the visible. It is only in 5
on struggle but on peaceful co-existence.4 such works that we achieve intimations Lorrain Mortimer, Terror and Joy: The
of the radical humanism of the future. Films of Duan Makavejev, University of
Writing on Duan Makavejevs lms in her book-length study
Amos Vogel, On Seeing a Mirage, in Films Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London,
thirty years after Vogel, lm scholar Lorrain Mortimer is also turning of Werner Herzog, ed. by Timothy Corrigan, 2009, p. 185. Bulat Okudzhava is under-
to the new and more complex science in order to understand the lms Methuen, London, 1986, p. 46. ground poet-singer which enjoyed
of this type of cinema. This science which Mortimer is hoping to popularity in Soviet Union at sixties and
develop as a guiding principle in the reading of Makavejevs lms is 4 seventies and as well in Yugoslavian lms.
based on the complexity of antagonisms where the peaceful Publication Revolution and Film: Materials for His songs can be heard among others in in
opposition is no longer between materialism and idealism, but Film Festival edited by Duan Makavejev and Aleksandar Petrovis The Master and Marga-
Lazar Stojanovic in 1971is also example of ret (1972) and in Milo Mia Radivojevis,
between the philosophies of two different interpretations of
this peaceful co-existence of conglomerate The Promising Boy (1981).
material. These materials have different natures. One is abstract, epistemology.
intellectual, sophisticated and cultural. The other is related to the Apart from October Revolution,
concrete, real, sensual, carnal and human. Even though throughout Consciousness III (Psychedelic Revolution,

108 109
an abstract material (the Marxian ideal) and the other is related to concluding that discursively produced and abstracted human
concrete material (the needs of human beings). But the Ideology of conceptions are repressing the real human existence consisted of
co-existence in Mortimers reading of Makavejevs lms is not fully flesh, blood and bones (pp. 51-53). Conjunct to this anthropology is
realized before this inner tendency toward the harmony is established the theory of Michael Jackson on re-enchantment, based on
at the natural setting of the Gypsies warming around the re. This libidinal and occult economies. They are not against reason, as
pattern of natural which is strictly ideological is crucial in most of Mortimer stresses, but against the fetishization of a logocentric
the readings of Makavejevs lms. We have to grasp this nature in notion of reasonthat has eclipsed our sense of the variety of ways
its full complications. In order to realize this, we have to understand in which human beings create viable lives emotional, bodily,
rst and foremost the epistemology of Mortimers cinematic theory. magical, metaphorical, practical and narrative (p. 54). With these
This epistemology, similar to Vogels, is based on the replacement of two elaborations we have arrived at the heart of the conception of
old scientic paradigms with new ones. Mortimer is very concisely nature in Mortimers reading of the world (of Makavejev), a
describing this new science as non-Euclidean. She immediately critique of over-socialized abstraction and an introduction of
emphasizes the political consequences of this knowledge as: sensuous magic. However, we have yet to describe the materiality
Euclidean mind haunting our thinking about utopia since Hitlers of this universe of the imagination, re-enchantment and the
Germany, Stalins Russia and Pol Pots Cambodia (p. 58). She adds concrete. We have to arrive exactly at the core of the philosophy of
to this also Titos Yugoslavia without Milovan Djilas in the pages the natural.
following the above quotation. This Euclidean mind, which is the Mortimer, in the very beginning of her book on Makavejev,
episteme at the heart of all the various totalitarianisms, is at the same writes: To talk about Makavejev and his context we need to talk not
time the scientic foundation of the classical thought. only of fruit and flowers, of animals, even rats and mice, but of the
The non-Euclidean mind, as the ontology of the 20th-century installation of a shower, the baking of strudel, a strongman hanging
man with its n-dimensionality, the Theory of Relativity and complex- from a plane by his teeth, a man singing to a horse in the snow and
ity combined are the epistemologies of the new science that addressing him as God, and the magic of the severed head coming to
Mortimer intends to evaluate in the readings of the art of Makavejev. life and speaking of its convictions (p. 7). All these small and big
Showing due respect to the complexity of Mortimers theory, we things, normal and paranormal, organic and inorganic are the
could reduce her system to two successive sources of thought. Firstly, materials of Makavejev. These materials are primarily alluding
to rational thinking that roughly corresponds to the rst or abstract to a concrete existence of things, but a more important and apparent
material of human knowledge. Secondly, to irrational thinking that allusion of this concreteness is that the material is related to
corresponds to the second or concrete material of human human nature. In many readings the materiality of Makavejevs
knowledge. This concrete and irrational mind is what designs the lms, as we will further see in examples yet to come, is concerned
cinema of Makavejev, but not in its absolute dominancy, it has to be with the human concreteness that has been described as the sensual
in the dialogue with the rational (p. 29). The resurrection of the or carnal. Mortimer is constructing from this materiality and
categories of co-existence and harmony is realised by the inclusion of concreteness a specic epistemology based on the ontology of the
the cinematic theory of Edgar Morin who in his book The Cinema, or body or the sensual. The carnal truth as she calls it, is the episte-
The Imaginary Man (1957) which he translated and introduced mology of the trans-cultural and directly related to a phenomenon
himself imagines the country where the animal, vegetable, and of man, which has its visible continuities through mans existence
mineral, the spiritual and material, are in some kind of mobile in history. This is why, as she explains, we are affected by old ethno-
continuity (p. 28). This continuity battles against the paradigm graphic photos of people from different cultures. Their laughter,
inherited by Descartes, of disjunction/reduction/simplication that anger, worries and happiness are the same as ours. Over the centuries
leads us to shatter and mutilate the complexity of phenomena (p.
29).6 This idealist irrationalism has a very special relation to thought,
and in the introduction to Morins book Mortimer is drawing further 6
political consequences from it: It was the mystical epileptic reac- As quoted by Mortimer.
tionary Dostoyevsky, rather than all the great secular thinkers, who
7
had more clearly seen the fanatical spirit of Bolshevism before it
Translators Introduction to Edgar Morin,
came into being.7 The Cinema, or Imaginary Man, transl.
Mortimer takes this thought further to the eld of by Lorraine Mortimer, University of
anthropology by elaborating on the early writings by Dennis Wrong Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London,
on a critique of over-socialized conceptions of human nature, 2005, p. xvii.

110 111
 and millennia nothing has changed, we are still what we have always sensuality are speaking of a truth that the discursive and
been men in this world. Knowledge of the carnal truth is nothing constructed elements of ideology (such as sociology and culture) are
more than the tautology of everyday obviousness. It speaks, as Louis distorting. The closer we are to our bodies, the lesser we are manipu-
Althusser said, with the ideological language of repetition and lated and distorted by ideologies. She takes social and epistemologi-
identity. Not only the idealist philosophies are infected by this cal approaches to this claim.
everlasting sameness of the human materiality that guarantees the Socially it is related to Makavejevs lm subject of the
continuous re-production of the trans-historical men or humans Eastern European real people, or to the place where the young
of ideology.8 are the most mad and mature, which is the exact opposite of the
Mortimer is so much concerned with this carnal truth that is lms and lives of the petit bourgeois free world, where young
based on the re-cognition of the obviousness of materiality (the bourgeois intellectuals in the crisis of post-pubertal leftism
sameness of the smile, cry or ght) that she is not even bothered if endlessly, dogmatically and abstractly discuss the revolution (p. 71).
this truth is in contradiction with the truth introduced by the These Westerners were so much under the influence of the politi-
sociological, cultural or political facts. The fact, for instance, that cal-theoretical anti-humanism of Althussers Marxist structural-
Frank Sinatra was a puppet of the Maa and a corrupted singer does ism, Mortimer argues, that they had not learned lessons from
not bother her, because Sinatra is speaking of carnal truth. As history or contemporary Realpolitik about the ways that the sover-
Mortimer puts it: whatever he said or sang, the layer of tenderness eignty of an idealized people could be used to bludgeon actual
in the grain of his voice [will always] gave him away (p. 31-32). We human beings, to legitimize tyrannies and maintain the domination
will soon see that in the theory of Mortimer, even if less explicit, this of those who loved wielding power (p. 72).
is also confusing the understanding of the carnality of Radovan As usual, humanism is on the agenda here with the strategi-
Karadis racism. Nevertheless, Makavejev is a master of carnal cally calculated position of disqualifying the politics of the Eastern
truth. His mice, acrobats, partisans, fascists, gypsies, hippies European left with the realm of their sensuality. In this trans-ideol-
everything in his movies and all his materials are telling this truth ogy, what matters is not the left or right, but the denitive truths
of human nature. which the bodies of these left or right men are reproducing in
Things in Mortimers cosmos become more complex when she their everyday lives. This is the concrete condition of the human,
confronts this truth with the concept of ideology. Considering the where they could appear in their existential plenitude, free from
proposal that this truth is obvious, spontaneous, idealist, trans- their ideological loading (p. 74). The epistemological relation of
historical and based on re-cognition we can easily conclude, carnal truth to the ideology in Mortimers book has been most
following the writings of Althusser, that this is not a truth or illuminatingly described in the passage where she compares the work
cognition at all, that this is based on the spontaneous knowledge of of Makavejev to the work of Jean Rouch. She claims that both men
ideology. But in confronting the concept of ideology with the carnal have the ethnographic dimension of knowledge in their movies, but
truth Mortimer is drawing two parallel conclusions in which this dimension would reveal itself only in unpredictability and
languages are used that are very different from Althussers. Even if mystery (p. 100). Apart from political and social circumstances of
in complete opposition to Althussers problematic, Mortimers socialist conditions which, as the dogmatic ideologies, prevent the
interrogation of ideology is in communication with Althusser. In truth from being practiced, there are also academic theories which
fact, she is trying to develop a counter-Althusser theory related to distort this truth or prevent it from being re-cognized. In the
truth and ideology. In principle Mortimer claims that the body and introduction to Edgar Morins book, Mortimer clearly species
which academic theories are obstacles in the realization of this
imaginary cinema that is stripped of flesh, poetry, scepticism and
8 by the fact that man as a biological being has imagination from lm studies. It is a theory of cinema inspired by
There are attempts too in Marxist theory, remained essentially unchanged from the Louis Althussers brand of Marxism, lm scholars advocated a kind
such as Sebastiano Timpanaros who in beginning of civilization to the present; and of surgical practice, one that tended to cut out the heart, soul, even
order to strengthen the materialistic theory those sentiments and representations which the guts of the lm experience to get out the cancer of ideology (p.
of human condition and the continuity of are closest to the biological facts of human xi). Here we have two Althussers, one that is the ideologue of the
its existence derives the theses on constant existence have changed little.
political dogmatism, and the other who is the surgeon of the sensual-
dimensions of aesthetic-cultural-biologism: S. Timpanaro, On Materialism, transl.
But we should not forget either that by Lawrence Garner, New Left Books, ity of real experience. We will in the following pages make more
this cultural continuity through which, as London, 1975, p. 52. explicit the philosophical and historical conjunctures of this denega-
Marx observed, we feel so near to the poetry tion of ideology from the cinema studies, but rst we are dealing
of Homer has also been rendered possible with the content of the truth which Mortimer recognizes in Maka-

112 113
vejevs carnality. This carnality is generally manifested as two In order to see the connection between Vladimirs ideology,
antagonistic elds of Makavejevs cosmos. One is sex and the his scientic postulates and politics with sex we have to look at
other is death joy and terror, in other words. Thomas Elsaessers early text on the Love Affair, or the Case of the
Missing Switchboard Operator published in 1968. Switchboard
II. What is Ideological in Sex? Operator, the second feature lm of Makavejev also deals with the
impossible relation between free-woman and rigid-man, which ends
Almost all the readings of Makavejevs lms link the sexuality with the madness of the man and the death of the woman. The
issue which is explicitly manifested in his lms with a certain mans name is Ahmed.10 In Elsaessers interpretation Ahmeds
ideological background. In these readings sex as the afrmative enthusiasm for Dziga Vertovs lm and Berthold Brecht/Hans
material of Makavejevs concreteness has a clear ideological Eislers music is not part of Makavejevian irony and pastiche.11 He
association. In this chapter we will try to make this relation between is fully aware of the euphoric and emancipatory roles these cultural
the Ideology and the Sex more explicit. According to these readings, products are playing in the minds of Ahmed (and of Makavejev),
if a sense of alienation from the sensual means that human beings but he adds that the real problem starts when euphoria and
are under the spell of ideology and abstraction, then the practice of emancipation are frozen in reality and reside only as an abstraction
sex has to have an automatic afrmation of the un-ideological. This in the memories of its believers, or its practitioners. The real
formula, as it operates in Mortimers conceptualization, could be problem is then that the revolution has lost its permanence or its
proscribed as: when there is sex, there shall not be ideology. But concreteness and is recuperated into the realm of ideals. This
things get their famous complexity when we apply the structural recuperation is most explicit in the elds of sex and love: due to
dichotomy familiar to the complex theories to the issue of sex. communisms backwardness in recognizing human emotional
According to this schema there has to be concrete, real and true sex needs and gender problems, together with a strong work ethic that
as opposed to abstract, intellectual and false sex. prevails in socialist countries, traumatizes the relations between the
The readings of Makavejevs work, including Mortimers, sexes.12 Elsaesser is adding a new nuance to the familiar pattern of
reproduce these dual sex experiences, as the dichotomies of alienated Makavejev as the lm maker of concrete versus abstract which
and non-alienated sex, or as the practices of xed ideological and has deeper historical and epistemological implications. The drive for
non-ideological positions. Many of these readings are related to the revolution, which went wrong, was an essential component of the
two different and antagonistic sexual orientations (Milenas and euphoria and emancipation displayed by the socialist countries. The
Vladimir Illichs) as the main forces of the dialectics in the lm WR: revolution as being made up of dense experience, vitality, vividness
Mysteries of Organism. These two orientations are strictly categorized of the concrete has disappeared during the course of scientic
with their political ideologies. Milenas orientation as the Reichian socialism and turned to a memory which became too impersonal,
whose ambiguity (She is dressed, but talks about fucking, or Shed too abstract and schematic (p. 323). The main reasons for this
rather talk about it than do it) reminds the policy of Yugoslavias recuperation are, according to Elsaesser, sexologists and
non-alignment or being in-between, whereas Vladimir Illich as the criminologists who during the lm Switchboard Operator are
determined communist with the Soviet origins has a more direct but explaining scientically the lms plot. Then, Ahmed as the true
Pavlovian approach to the sex. Milenas ambiguity will make her lose
her head (literally), but Vladimirs narrow-mindedness and simplicity
will cause him to lose his political beliefs. As we recall, at the end of 9 this song in lm thought, because of the
Raymond Durgnant, WR: Mysteries of German language, that it is a Nazi song.
the lm, Vladimir kills Milena and joins the natural state of being.
Organism, British Film Institute, London, He is adding that he deliberately chose this
Vladimir cannot survive real and concrete sex, because he is song in order to play with this association
1999, p. 47.
dedicated to the abstract and kitschy sex of his ideals, which is an in Michel Delahaye, Duan Makavejev:
obstacle for him to fully penetrate the materiality of the earth. 10 Ljubavni Slucaj [Love Affair], Filmske Sveske,
Harking back to the terms of the earlier discussion this would mean Durgnant is describing Ahmed as the number 1, January 1968, Belgrade.
that he was too academic and ideological to have sex with a liberated Communist with the Muslim roots and
Reichian woman. Raymond Durgnat in his full-length book on WR: derives the explanation for the tragic end of 12
Mysteries of Organism is most exemplary in his description of the lm from the afnities between Islam Thomas Elsaesser, Of Rats and
and Socialism (p. 88). Revolution: Duan Makavejevs The Switch-
Vladimir: [his] dominant ideology, rational, altruistic, Behaviourist,
board Operator [1968], in European
would construct his mind, his sense of self, in toto. Vladimirs 11 Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood,
dismissal of dying for love as brutishly zoological evokes a Marxist Makavejev is in interview for Cahiers du Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam,
dismissal of Darwinism, psychoanalysis, biology (and ecology).9 Cinema saying that many people who heard 2005, p. 323.

114 115
communist who loves Vertov, Brecht and the Revolution, loves them The promotion of free love is an opportunity to criticize the legacy
as ideas in his mind, and cannot see the real emancipation of the of Stalinism (p. 99).
revolution on a day-to-day basis, which is joy, euphoria, excitement, At the end of his intellectual elaboration the author has
and orgasm all together. reduced Makavejevs problematic to the Frommian dilemma of
The article of Constantin Parvulescu on the politics and frightened men that run away from freedom. Once again we have
sexual revolution in the work of three Eastern European lm arrived at the afrmative concept of the men with a wealthy and
directors is most explicit in its claim that the term sexual colourful nature endlessly reproducing themselves in the presence
revolution is a redundant one, since revolution always, necessarily, of the earth.15 This is the man of most of the readings of
is also a sexual revolution.13 Parvulescu is deducing this pleonasm Makavejev, the man for whom his own manhood is the sole proof of
from the works of Marta Meszaros as the contradiction between the the un-ideological nature of its concreteness, and materiality.
class origin and the love relations in the Socialist state (Hungary) or Nina Power in her brilliant recent article on sexuality in
from the conflict between the labour and the sex policies through the Makavejevs features rethinks the above-mentioned discussions on
work of Milos Forman related to another socialist state the relation between sex and politics from the materialist point of
(Czechoslovakia). The labour policy of the respective socialist states view, by querying the content of the materiality of Makavejevs
is in both examples the real cause of the sexual problems; dully and work.16 Her answer is direct and unconditional; it is the dark force
gauntly it is said that love and sexuality are distractions from the that lies beneath the surface of both everyday and the universal (p.
important things on the agenda of Soviet-style communism: 44). Here we have arrived at a completely different terrain than we
production and ve-year plan (p. 87). The inability to manage sex did in the previous readings where beneath the Makavejevs
issues will inevitably haunt the communist states and this repression earth lie afrmation and a positive life force waiting to be
will ruin the revolution. This has brought us to Herbert Marcuse emancipated. This dark material as a constitutive force in
who in his book Eros and Civilization developed the hypothesis on Makavejevs lms has also a visceral effect, but this is not linked
the political causes of socialized psychoanalysis; or the concept of with the celebration of sexual liberation. Power, referring to the
the popularized Freudianism adopted to the organism of the social materialism of Deleuze and Guattari, claims that the destructivity in
whole. Parvulescu is taking this tension between sex and revolution Makavejevs plots is due to the quick deteritorialization of this
to the ontological sphere by asking the crucial question related to desire [or material] (p. 47). Furthermore she suggests that at the
the problematic of Makavejevs lms: how much (sexual) revolution core of Makavejevs politics lies the gradualist policy of the step-
can man (and woman) endure (p. 92)? Considering the pleonasm of
the term sexual revolution we can easily claim that this problematic
of to what degree can man endure the revolution is also related to
13 Also he is adding that even at the time
another problematic of Makavejev, the one regarding the abundance Constantin Parvulescu, Betrayed Promises: of Switcboard Operator he was thinking
of corpses in his lms. Politics and Sexual Revolution in the Films through the problematic of Fromm, he
Raymond Durgnant rightly justied this conflict between man of Marta Meszaros, Milos Forman, and was subconsciously a Reichian.
and the revolution with the Beatles song Revolution from 1968 which Duan Makavejev, Camera Obscura 71, Christian Braad Thomsen, Lets Put the Life
he took as the parole in his reading of the Makavejevs WR: You Volume 24, Number 2, 2009, p. 77. Back in Political Life: Interview with Duan
say you want a Revolution/ well you know What is this Makavejev, in Art Politics Cinema: The
14 Cienaste Interviews, ed. by D. Georgakas &
revolution about? It is best described by Pavlevescu through the
The noise in this description shall not L. Rubenstein, Pluto Press, London &
character of Reichian Milena as the consciousness-thing based on
disconcert us; in many examples of lm, Sydney, 1984, p. 84.
the spontaneity, noise, and natural which supports the values of music or literature this noise is manifest-
diversity and originality (p. 100, 101).14 The complexity effect of ing as the criteria of natural. Recommend- 16
this revolution is an immediate task, even if we accept its ed reading would be Juan A. Suarez, Pop Nina Power, Blood and Sugar: The Films of
impossibility, or as Pavlevescu puts: No revolution is ready to have Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Duan Makavejev, Film Quarterly, Spring
these values as its ultimate goals (p. 101). We should not forget, as Everyday, University of Illinois Press, 2010, Volume 63, Number 3, p. 44.
this reading suggests, the catastrophic effects of repressed libido Urbana & Chicago, 2007.
and pleasure that millions of people of various socialist states
15
suffered. From Milenas neighbours who are chanting in the chorus Makavejev told in many interviews that
that life without fucking isnt worth a thing Pavlevescu is drawing during the making of WR: Mysteries of
far-reaching conclusions about the relation between sexuality and Organism he was completely Reichian and
fascism, especially about the (red) fascism of the Soviet republic: only 5% under the influence of Erich Fromm.

116 117
 by-step organization of liberation.17 Theoretically, for us, today, want to get blood, flesh, and bones in the picture, to bring back not
watching the lms of Makavajev it would mean that contrary to the body, the reied and abstracted one of much social theory, but
what is suggested in the agnosticism of the immediate flow of the the tortured, slaughtered, decaying bodies of people whose lives
uncontrollable force or the spontaneous expulsion of the were cut short, people loved and remembered by others (p. 189).
revolutionary drive, we have to deal with these forces on their own The famous lm critic and lm theoretician Cavell, after
terrain and in their own terms. This is indeed the most practical watching a lm experiment of Makavejev at Harvard University in
position. It allows possible theoretical and materialist readings of 1978, in which he compiled silent sequences from Ingmar Bergmans
Makavejevs work that are detached from the ideology of man, of various lms and produced a strange cinematic experience, wrote a
freedom, nature, the tendency of this nature, and from all kind of long article on Makavejevs lms which is still very influential and
spiritualisms. To put it in philosophical terms, using Althusserian often referred to. Cavells point of departure is that Makavejevs
terms, it is to avoid the abstract empiricism of confusing the lms are truly concrete works of art. Writing about Sweet Movie he
object of knowledge with the real object.18 claims that it is the most concentrated work that follows the idea
Alain Badiou, discussing sex as one of the passions for the that the way to assess the state of the world is to nd out how it
real in the 20th century through the reading of ve cases of Freud, tastes.20 Immediately after this methodological proposition, Cavell
argued that this insertion of meaning to the object of sex has ended adds that orthodox epistemologists established in Film Theory
up in culturalist and spiritualist formalizations: The enduring cannot penetrate this truth. Cavells proposal is a gustatory
aim of this ploy is to reintroduce meaning into the place of, and methodology of knowledge, or, as he expresses it with the language
instead of, truth, thereby injecting the cultural into libido. This is of exorcism, the method in which these things work themselves
hermeneutic ploy, and Freud immediately saw it as an insidious out (p. 18). According to him the lms of Makavejev are formally
negation of his discovery. Briefly, it was necessary to come back to and spiritually complex structures (for example, they are endless
bare sex and to its radical absence of meaning.19 variations between the documentary and the ctional form) which he
Otherwise we would end up with the constant misanthropy and describes as lms of excavation (p. 19). This method which would
nihilism of sexual politics, because as Power rightly warns that all possibly lead to the gustatory experience of the art work is in the end
politics based on desire will be [always] unfair (p. 47). a reconstruction of something lost or broken, which eventually
could contribute to a better understanding of ourselves. As Cavell
III. Corpses and their Times puts it: This search [the excavation] at once traces the integrity of
the individual strata of a history and plots the positions of adjacent
The dark forces that Nina Power has named as the materiality of strata (p. 19). This is not only important as the practices of
Makavejevs work are also a constitutive part of many idealist excavation popularized by the spiritualized psychoanalysis of
readings of Makavejev. Usually this dark force is related to death digging to unearth buried layers of the psyche (p. 19), but this
or corpse and apart from their concreteness being constantly methodology has at the same time far-reaching philosophical
underlined, another ideological effect of these readings is the consequences. According to Cavell this philosophy based on a
re-humanization of these corpses, which is either related to the principle of aligning the adjacent strata is directly related to the
processes of rehabilitation or reconciliation. As Mortimer wrote: I overall lm form of Makavejevs work. This is the principle of

17 18 20 Experiment) and the earlier version

This step-by-step is the part of Makavejevs Louis Althusser & Etienne Balibar, Reading Stanley Cavell, On Makavejev On Bergman, of Cavells text were published in the book
policy which he best described in a famous Capital, Verso, London, 2009, p. 148. in Cavell on Film, ed. by William Rothman, which Vlada Petric edited: Film & Dream:
interview for Film Quarterly as: State University of New York Press, 2005, An Approach to Bergman, Redgrave, New
we have to ght power with sponta- 19 p. 2005. This experiment (in the classical York, 1981.
neity and humour, but in a more organized Alain Badiou, The Century, transl. By Alber- sense of it, as the experimenting with the ef-
way than it is donekind of well organized to Toscano, Polity, Cambridge and Malden, fects of lm to peoples behaviour) was part
anarchy. 2007, p. 78. of the Bergman and Dreams conference
R. Sitton, J. R. MacBean, Ernest organized at Harvard University.
Callenbach, Fight Power with Spontaneity The papers of the conference together
and Humor: An Interview with Duan with the Makavejevs statement which he
Makavejev, Film Quarterly, Vol. XXV, no. 2, co-authored with M. Duda (Bergmans Non-
Winter 1971-72, pp. 3-9. Verbal Sequences: Source of a Dream Film

118 119
 Makavejev and this alignment has a different meaning than the Black Wave ABC
montage of Eisenstein and the collages of Surrealists.
Alignment of the history and plot in positions of adjacency is
possible only with the reintroducing of the historicist conception of
history. Historical time has its own tendency, linearity, integrity, and
homogeneity and is the history of ideology, a practical eld which
makes possible the similarity or adjacency between the moments of
linear development. Before dealing with the consequences of this
historicism for Film Theory we have to ask what the materials of
this adjacency are. Or we could ask: What constitutes the kinship
between the various materials (wars, plots, revolutions, fascisms,
etc) of the historicist development? A philosophical answer to this
would obviously, by the logic of its own schema, imply that the
absence of the contradiction between different materials is a
pre-condition for the alignment to be realised. But this move is not
sufcient to theoretically satisfy the adjacency between the
proximal materials. This thought would need one more step in this
operation to full the task of historicist application. It has to name
the historical materials as the concrete, as the real things,
which are beyond earth and history, which actually will reside for a
long time in their materiality beneath our conception.
These historical materials are, as Cavell puts the real bones of
the famous and infamous actors of the various plots of history. This
principle of historicism based on the materiality of the bones has
signicance as the intersection of nature and history, as a task of a
continuous and natural unfolding of interpretations, each felt as a
complete and each making possible the next, until a human form of
life ts together (p. 20). The same principle of alignment with
adjacency is also operative in the lm editing technique favoured by
Andr Bazin as continuous shooting, which Cavell compares to the
excavation method. Bazin primarily developed this principle in his
analyses of the lms of Orson Welles and has been described by
Andrew Dudley as the invisible montage. It is most clearly
explained in the writings of Bazin that are related to the technique of
sequence shooting as the new language of decoupage. Bazin describes
this technique as such: If, through a deliberate effort of attention,
we try to see the ruptures imposed by the camera on the continuous
unfolding of the event represented, and try to understand clearly why
we normally take no notice of them, we realize we tolerate them
because they nevertheless allow an impression to remain of
continuous and homogenous realitythis is universal psychological
experience.21 This is a very sensitive issue to deal with in the limited

21
Andre Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View,
tranl. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Elm Tree
Books, London, 1978, p. 77.

120 Surng the Black Zine No. 3

 Anonymous Flagship projects were partisan epic
lms and commercial comedies, but they
(Used as a mass noun) is a group whose were also involved in numerous co-produc-
members are geographically spread around tions of mainly German and Italian lms. In
the world but connected through the Internet, the 1960s they produced each year a feature
initiating active civil disobedience, while lm by a young author who had won an inter-
attempting to maintain anonymity. Originat- national prize for short lm, that is how they
ing in 2003 on the image board 4chan, the produced lms of Makavejev, ilnik, etc.
term refers to the concept of many online
community users simultaneously existing as See Surng the Black Zine No. 2, p. 157
an anarchic, chaotic, global brain.
It is also generally considered to be a
blanket term for members of certain Internet Barka, Jimmy
subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of
people in an environment where their actual Where can I go, but wander? On the banks
identities are not known. of the river and next to the train station left
alone for a time, but always with a compan-
See Troll, p. 191 ion. Jimmy Barka never questioned his
nature, and instead of driving headlong into
the future he preferred to stroll giving
AntiFilm himself enough time to take things in, to nd
strategies. He never drifted far from being
The concept of anti-lm was proposed by a that small boy, Janko Bugarski, the one that
group of lm amateurs led by Mihovil Pansini stole a boat with the purpose of undertaking
and Tomislav Kobija during discussions held a pleasure cruise. A cruise of escape that
in Cinema Club Zagreb, in 1962 and 1963. would never leave his mind. Barka never
They concluded that anti-lm was not a lm wished to take up an occupation, but instead
of conveyance, expression or communication would enlist his talents, whether they be
between artist and the viewer, but an act of talents or not, to get by.
disclosure, exploration and reduction. There We should not partake in any back
were multiple reductions: the reduction of story for Jimmy: to do so would be to offer
the author to his work, then the reduction of him excuses. And he would not want it
narration, of expressive means in the lm, or that way. Jimmy knew his place and he was
rational metaphor, traditional communication comfortable conforming to it. Things would
with the viewers, etc. just fall in line, and to think any differently
Anti can be understood according would be to offer one hope.
to the dominant disposition of the group NM
as a negation of ofcial art tendencies, but See Kad budem mrtav i beo, p. 134
also as an awareness that their artwork is
barely acceptable or is (?) unacceptable as art.
Likewise, anti can be seen in the context of Barka, Dimi
gorgonic emphasis on the ideas of anti-art
and anti-painting, as well as their afnity with A young man with no job and no real desire
the literature of the absurd, anti-drama and to work, without real shelter or real support,
anti-lm. he wanders around small towns while singing
at fairs and engaging in meaningless relation-
See GeFF, p.131 ships with women. He is a social outcast
whose life doesnt have any direction, past or
future, but just intense moments of present
Avala lm happenings. He chooses to have no purpose.
He does not choose even the women
Film production enterprise founded in who are with him; they rather chose him. The
Belgrade in 1945 that became the largest cheated and humiliated former warden of the
production house in Yugoslavia. construction site (where Dimi used to work)

122 123
 shoots him with a rifle while Dimi was Borba Constitution changes Vatroslav Mimica (Kaya Ill Kill You
and The Event)
using the wooden outdoor toilet. With his ivojin Pavlovi (Ambush and When
pants down and blood on his face his mean- Was the ofcial daily newspaper of the True to the concept of the withering away I am Dead and Pale)
ingless life comes to an end in the wooden League of Communists of Yugoslavia. It of the state, Yugoslavia opted for constitu- elimir ilnik (Early Works)
outdoor toilet. was founded in Zagreb in 1922, banned in tion changes after the break with the Soviet
BF 1929 and regular circulation continued only Union. The concept of the continuously Boro Drakovi, Duan Makavejev,
See Nikoli, Dragan, p. 161 after WWII, when the publishing was moved transforming society materialised most in the elimir ilnik, ivojin Pavlovi and Branko
to Belgrade. For a long time, pages in the frequent changes of the constitution. Ivada took part in the showings. On the
Cyrillic and Latin alphabets were alternated The Constitution was changed in occasion of that visit they were shown
Bie skoro propast in the same edition. 1946, 1953, 1963, and 1974, and minor lms by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey,
sveta The rst organised attack on what was changes were occurring at other times. Some and met with Jonas Mekas.
later to be called the Black Wave lms was of these changes brought also the change in
published in a special section of Borba the name of the state. The 1974 the Consti-
It Rains in my Village (1968) is a colour Reflektor in the issue of August 3, 1969. tution was the longest constitution ever in Cinema club
feature lm written and directed by Alek- A supplement written entirely by Vladimir the world. Ironical for a state that wanted to
sandar Petrovi. Cast includes Annie Jovii had the title Black Wave in Our make itself disappear. The cinema clubs offered opportunity for
Girardot, Ivan Palch, Mija Aleksi, Eva Film, which was the rst time the term avant-garde experimentation and self-
Ras, Velimir Bata ivojinovi, Dragomir Black Wave appears. organisation in line with socialist self-
Gidra Bojani. Produced by Avala lm, Les Consumerism management and some form of political
Productions Artistes Associs and nomi- engagement. In that regard, cinema clubs,
nated for 1969 Palme dOr. Buenje pacova Socialist society is actually per denition and later the student cultural centres, became
a consumer society, because it has to meet extra-systemic spaces of autonomy that bore
The Rats Woke Up (1967) is a black and the basic needs of the broad working witness to the development and coexistence
Black white feature lm directed by ivojin masses and to provide more of the results of of parallel systems of culture in relation
Pavlovi and written by Dragoljub Ivkov, material and spiritual culture. to the ofcial one. The institutional frame-
This publication was offset printed using Ljubia Kozomora, Gordan Mihi and work thus showed itself as being prone to
PANTONE Red 032U for the essay sections Momilo Milankov. Cast includes Severin reconguration, reinvention and adjustment
and all available iterations of Pantone Black Bijeli, Pavle Vuisi, Milivoje Tomi, Contemporary Yugoslav and enabled paradigmatic twists in lm and
for the rest of the publication. Tomanija uriko and Ljubomir iprani. artistic production.
Produced by Filmska radna zajednica it has
Cinema The cinema clubs at the time (prior to
won the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director home-video) were also more or less the only
Body in Early Works 1967 and the Silver Arena at the Pula Film Was a lm program curated by Willard Van way to gain access to the lmmaking technol-
Festival for Best Director in 1967. Dyke, Director of the Department of Film ogy and equipment. So it was mostly here
The whole lm is a physical performance, of MoMA in the Museum of Modern Art, that photographers or amateur lm enthusi-
a kinaesthetic version of body art, where See Essay by Owen Hatherley p. 179 which featured ten lmmakers from asts educated the people regarding the whole
everything revolves around the body and Yugoslavia and twelve feature lms. Van chain of production methods of lmmaking.
everything is done with the body the body Dyke described the new Yugoslav lm in Cinema clubs were organised within the
is exposed to view, beaten up, dragged engi, Bato the press release as inquiring, doubting, framework of Narodna tehnika.
through the leaves and mud, tortured by enigmatic and sometimes deeply critical of
burning, squeezing, being dragged by a car, (Maglaj, 1933 Sarajevo, 2007). the society from which it springs. Its heroes See Narodna tehnika, p. 157
fed and emptied, buried, caressed, pleasured, Film director and writer. are the defeated, the bewildered, and the
suckled, carried, poisoned, resurrected, unsatised savage young. The program
raped, nasty dirtied, carefully washed, See The Role of my Family In the World lasted for twelve days (November 13 Citron 2CV
exposed to coldness, killed, burnt. Revolution p. 193 November 25, 1969) and featured lms by
Early works are truly a proletarian (French: deux chevaux, literally: two tax
lm in unexpected literalness of the term Bato engi (Playing at Soldiers) horsepower) was an economy car produced
the only important investment of protago- Class Struggle Boro Drakovi (Horoscope)
Branko Ivanda (Gravitation, or the Fantastic
by the French car manufacturer Citron
nists in their adventure are their bodies. Youth of Boris Hervat, the Clerk) between 1948 and 1990. It was techno-
(Goran Goci) Yugoslavia proclaimed that class struggle Duan Makavejev (Innocence Unprotected) logically advanced and innovative, but with
was over, that the workers were victorious ore Kadijevi (The Journey) uncompromisingly utilitarian unconven-
See Rani Radovi, p. 167 and that there was no class division. Gordan Mihi and Ljubia Kozomara (Crows) tional looks, and deceptively simple Bauhaus
Kreo Golik (I Have Two Mommies
See Jugoslava, p. 134 and Two Dadies)
inspired bodywork that belied the sheer
quality of its underlying engineering.

124 125
 2
It was designed to move the French
In the country that is not quite sure in
peasantry on from horses and carts. It is its name, hymn nor government, at the moment
considered one of Citrons most iconic cars. when basic needs (bread, milk and dollars) are
In Yugoslavia it was nicknamed spaek and becoming increasingly expensive, the lm
was considered to be along with Citrons caste is narcissisticly enjoying in the elabora-
tion of the workers and peasants suffering.
Dyana the car of the 60s and 70s liberated
This enables them, as constitutive elements of
generation. It is prominently featured in the the part of civic structure that manipulates with
lm Early Works. society, an illusion of engagement and compas-
sion.

3
Commission for Foreign Everybody should be screwed, including oneself.
Cultural Relations Starting with scattering ones owns marital bed!
How would we feel if the wretches would really
start putting it up to our asses?
Luckily that is not going to happen.
Was a federal body that was coordinating all
ofcial representations of Yugoslav culture 4
abroad, as well as cultural co-productions I still need to make socially engaged lms
and collaborations. The jury for the selec- though. Because I am confronting two enemies
tion of lms for foreign festivals was part of Firstly, my petit bourgeois nature that transforms
my engagement into an alibi and a bussiness
the commission and would from the annual opportunity and secondly, the powerful manipu-
Yugoslav lm production choose lms and lators and structures of power who would only
send them to foreign lm festivals. benet from my silence.
Members of the jury were lmmakers
5
like Duan Makavejev and Aleksandar
Film weapon or shit?
Petrovi, who were both members in 1960s.
Black Wave lms, notorious for their success 6
at international festivals, were also chosen by Look again point 4.
the jury.

Culture (Market)
Crni lm
I would like to comment on something, the
Black Film (1971) is a black and white idea of communism and equal vages, it was
documentary short, written and directed by not in effect in this case. Market existed and
elimir ilnik. Cinematography is by Karpo Neoplanta, as a societal, and not a state
A. Godina, editing by Kaa Stefanovi and it company, had to be careful about investing.
was produced by Neoplanta, Novi Sad. And for his rst lm ilnik had to go to the
The documentary addressed the issue bank and sign a contract, a bank loan. He
of homelessness in socialist Yugoslavia and signed that he must return the money and
the inability of the system to admit and solve he did, as lm was successful and it returned
the problem. The name is an appropriation money ve times.
of the phrase that was given to all lms as an This is why Neoplanta was so success-
attack on the Black Film /Black Wave. ful, because it could earn a lot of new
See Homeless, p. 133 money and the company and directors could
invest this money into the new lms and the
Declaration on the Black Film
company was growing at that time. So, it
1 was not nanced by the state, as it was not a
You are observing the class structure of state company. It was something between - it
Yugoslav society. The lumpenproletariat is neither private nor state, it was societal,
and humanist intelligentsia. Instrumentalised something like public-private partnership
exploitation of the poor for lmic purposes.
A lesson to family ilnik regarding the hungry,
today. And all lmmakers were actually
the dirty and the stinky. The child needs to be freelancers. They didnt have xed wages, all
shown what life really is. of them earned different fees according to

126 127
success of the lm on the market. But almost Draevi, Ratko
all were quite successful.
This is just to think how in this First director of Avala lm that opened the
communist-socialist idea culture is really door of this big production house to Black
and already observed as a market. Cultural Wave lmmakers.
industry working under the conditions of
market. Of course, state was also responsible See Surng the Black Zine No. 2, p. 57
for all cinema theatres which were built and
where you could show lms and earn money,
but also media, reporting advertising, every- (Dutch) Squatters Movement
thing was functioning quite well, but as an
industry. (Boris Buden) Some of the prominent members of the
squatters movement in the Netherlands came
from the early 1960s anarchist movement
osi, Bora Provo. Squatting became legal in the Nether-
lands in 1971, when the Supreme
(Zagreb, 1932) Writer. His novel The Role Court ruled that the concept of domestic
of my Family in the World Revolution that peace (huisvrede) (which means a house
he adapted into a screenplay for the lm cannot be entered without the permission of
of the same title won in 1969 the Nin Book the current user) also applied to squatters.
prize, at the time one of the most distin- This meant that owner had to take squatters
guished book prizes in Yugoslavia. to court in order to evict them.
He was an editor of the magazine Once the building was squatted the
Rok about art and culture published in the police were invited to inspect to conrm that
1960s in Belgrade. building was indeed occupied by the squatter.
To consider a house occupied it has to contain
a bed, a chair, a table and a working lock on
ovek nije tica the door that the squatter can open and close.
Dutch squatter activists in the 1970s were
Man is Not a Bird (1965) is a black and white marking empty buildings by putting up a
feature lm directed by Duan Makavejev poster that read, Ik sta leeg, kraak mij!
and written by Duan Makavejev. The cast in English, Im empty (vacant), squat me!
includes Milena Dravi, Janez Vrhovec, Eva to invite people to move in. With the passing
Ras, Stole Aranelovi and Boris Dvornik. of the Squatting Ban Bill on October 1, 2010
Produced by Avala lm it has won the squatting has been made illegal in NL.
Silver Arena at Pula Film Festival in 1965 for
Best Actor. See Our Polite Society poster, p. 25
See also Homeless, p. 133
See Essay by Owen Hatherley p. 179

Dimi Barka
Dravi, Milena
Where can I go, but wander? On the banks of
(Belgrade, 1940). Actress, one of the most the river and next to the train stations, solitary
important Yugoslav actresses, established for a time, but always with a companion;
herself both in commercial partisan spectacles Jimmy Barka never questioned his nature, and
and experimental Black Wave lms. instead of driving headlong into the future, he
She collaborated with Duan Makave- preferred to stroll giving himself enough
jev, ivojin Pavlovi and Puria orevi. In time to take things in, and to strategies.
Makavejevs W.R. Mysteries of Organism she He avoided drifting too far from that
plays the role of revolutionary Milena. scrawny boy, Janko Bugarski, the one that
commandeered a boat with the purpose of a
See also Milena, p. 154 pleasure cruise. A cruise of escape that would
not leave him.

128 129
 2 Early Works (1969) by elimir ilnik 1 the possibility to resolve given
Barka never wished to take up an between 1959 and 1966. Beside interven-
3 The Ambush (1969) by ivojin Pavlovi questions/issues
occupation, instead he preferred to enlist 4 Plastic Jesus (1971) by Lazar Stojanovi 2 exercise in establishing a new tion into the art eld, their practice included
his talents, whether they be talents or not, to 5 When I Am Dead And Gone (1969) cultural cell/formation and running a gallery and publishing the anti-
get by. We will not partake in any back story by ivojin Pavlovi 3 a reflection of what will (or will not) magazine Gorgona.
for Jimmy; to do so would be to offer him be achieved during the production
processes.
an alternative, and hed not like there to be Bojan believed that this was the only way to See Anti Film, p. 123
excuses. Jimmy knew his place and he was be able to enter the historical narrative, to
comfortable conforming to it. Things would deal with his heroes and possibly thereafter Therefore, even when at the end of the
just fall in line and to think any different continue his career as a lm artist. shooting the addressed problems are not Gotovac, Tomislav
would be to offer hope. BF entirely solved, the shooting itself continues
NM to function as a signicant episode of social (Tom) (Sombor, 1937 Zagreb, 2010).
activism. (Pavle Levi) Avant-garde lm director and performer who
Film Newsreel See Crni lm, p. 127 combined visual arts, the avant-garde, experi-
Early Works ment, feature and documentary lms, perfor-
(Filmske novosti) Founded in 1944, following mance, body art and conceptual art. Won
(Marx and Engels) Were translated and the liberation of Belgrade. The basic activity GeFF Genre Film Festival prizes at GeFF in 1963, 1965 and 1970. Made
published in Yugoslavia after WWII and of FN was the recording, storing, producing Forenoon of a Faun in 1963.
were part of the curriculum for the subject and distributing of lm and video material Biennial lm festival established by lm He helped found the Belgrade Cinema
Marxism, compulsory in all secondary pertaining to social, economic, cultural life enthusiast and cine-amateur Mihovil Pansini Club and starred in the lm Plastic Jesus
schools. As a topic for his secondary school and sports in Yugoslavia. Initially it focused in 1963 in Zagreb that lasted until 1970. for which he was harassed and sued by the
graduation paper, elimir ilnik took the on documenting the work on rebuilding and The festival gathered lm enthusiasts and authorities in 1972. He studied lm directing
early works of Marx and his letter to Ruge. modernising the country after WWII. lms of the cinema clubs from all over Yugo- at the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio and
The screenplay of Early Works was FN was actively engaged in document- slavia. The GeFF Book documented the TV in Belgrade from which he graduated in
loosely based on this paper. Marxs quotes ing the activities of Yugoslav president Tito events and discussions at the rst festival, 1976. In 2005 he changes his name to Antonio
proclaimed by the actors in the lm come both nationally and internationally. During most importantly the so-called ve discus- G. Lauer. He is known to say, When I open
from that study. his sojourns abroad, lm crews of FN sions on anti-lm. It is the only document on my eyes in the morning I see lm.
recorded numerous stories about everyday the emergence of the concept of anti-lm.
life in the countries Tito visited. Blackwave
Fajfri, Bojan lmmakers used on some occasions the facili- Gratinirani mozak Pupilije
ties of FN to edit their short lms. Godina, Karpo Ferkeverk
An artist from Belgrade and very big fan of
the Black Wave, who moved to the Neth- (Skopje, 1943). Karpo Godina Acimovic
erlands at a young age pursuing an artistic Film work collective is a cinematographer and lm director, The Gratinated Brains of Pupilija Ferkeverk
career while the war in Yugoslavia was lenfant terrible of the Black Wave, whose (1970) is a short lm written, directed, shot
ending (the Dayton agreement was being (Filmska radna zajednica) After economic specic visual style marked many of the lms. and edited by Karpo A. Godina. The cast
signed). After a short but successful career reforms in Yugoslavia in 1965, when self- He collaborated closely with elimir ilnik. includes Oblak Bard, Manca ermelj,
in the world of commercial art galleries, he management was also implemented in the Similar to other lmmakers, he started his Milan Jesih, Matja Kocbek, Toma Kralj
made a career switch and became a video / eld of culture, it was possible for lmmakers career in a cinema club in Ljubljana, where and Ivo Svetina. The typographic intermis-
lm maker. and other workers in that eld, to self- he also graduate at the Academy of Theatre, sions are by Slobodan Mai. Produced by
His passion (for the Black Wave lms) organise in interest labour collectives and Radio, Film, and Television. Neoplanta lm.
influenced this change, but at the same time thus participate more independently in the
he believed that after the Black Wave there economy and production.
was not much left for him to say about art Gorgona Helvetica
and society, and how they influence each
other. Film-as-Praxis Named after the mythological creature of A widely used sans-serif typeface designed in
Finally, he decided to face his frustra- Gorgon, it was an avant-garde art group 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max
tion by taking over the roles of 6 major Black The lming is conceived as a kind of game. from Zagreb which consisted of artists, art Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann. It is often
Wave characters: Milena (p.15), Jugoslava Each new lm project functions as a continu- historians and philosophers such as Dimtrije regarded as the hallmark of the International
(p.15), Ivo-Vrana (p.15), Tom (p.15), and ation of a social experiment. Baievi-Mangelos, Miljenko Horvat, Typographic Style (also known as the Swiss
Dimi Barka (p.15). He re-enacted the execu- The problem is dened, the situation Marijan Jevovar, Julije Knifer, Ivan Koari, Style) a progressive graphic design movement
tions that took place at the end of each lm: is established, the process of shooting has Matko Metrovi, Radoslav Putar, uro derived from modernism.
started. The creation of the lm works Seder, Josip Vanita who were operating Although there is no physical evidence
1 WR: Mysteries of Organisms (1971) simultaneously as: along the lines of anti-art in the period to conrm this, it is a widely believed that the
by Duan Makavejev

130 131
 rst lead or metal Helvetica letter forms to be of enterprises owned by society. The rst
used in Yugoslavia were acquired by the issue of the architectural magazine ovjek i
Graphic Institute in Zagreb in the early 1960s prostor (Man and Space) published by the
at the request of Ivan Picelj, a Croatian Zagreb Society of Architects had this slogan
painter, sculptor and graphic designer and prominently printed on the cover. However,
founding member of the progressive EXAT the country became speedily modernised and
51 group. According to Picelj, Helvetica urbanised and many people migrated from
represented the face of modernity. the villages to the cities, so it was impossible
Another Yugoslavian graphic designer to build a sufcient number of flats. Further-
who has extensively used Helvetica is more, some of the enterprises were not
Slobodan Mai who has designed numerous protable enough to invest in flats so many
title sequences (see ilniks Early Works) as injustices in distribution occurred.
well as posters for the movies of the Black As the problem of homelessness was
Wave. His use of Helvetica differs from a not supposed to appear, there was a certain
strictly grid-based approach of the Swiss structural blindness of the system to
Style and is applied with a casual and loose acknowledge the problem and think of solu-
approach associable with counter culture tions. Forced to solve the problem of housing
and pop-art. themselves, people often resorted to illegal
T self-building in the outskirts of the major
cities on the arable land.

Henie, Sonia
Inflation
(Oslo, 1912 on an Oslo-bound airplane,
1969) was a Norwegian gure skater and lm (of Radical Phrases as Opposed to a Lack of
star. She started competing at the age of nine Radical Action) Poster project, part of
and in the course of her competitive career Surng the Black.
won more Olympic and World titles than any The title phrase was taken from
other female gure skater. Wolfram Schuettes review Critical and
When she ended her competitive Destructive: elimir ilniks Early Works
skating career, she started performing in originally published in German in Frank-
acting and live shows and moved to furter Rundschau on July 7, 1969 as part of a
Hollywood. At the peak of her acting report on the Berlinale festival.
career she was one of the biggest earners in
Hollywood.
Ivo Vrana
Homeless Eighteen years old Dalmatian who, having
lost parents in the war, goes to Serbia to live
After WWII Yugoslavia proclaimed the right with his relatives. He is a young man
to housing, claiming that it is the basic legal possessed by the spirit of the revolution and
institution providing the working man with he voluntarily participates in actions
one of the important means of life (Conclu- designed to eliminate Chetniks in eastern
sions of the First Yugoslav Forum on Serbia in 1945.
Housing and Construction, 1956). This effec- Ivo tries to use the ideology in
tively meant that society was responsible for everyday life and in this attempt experiences
providing housing for its citizens. A flat was the disintegration of ethics that leads to a
considered a right and not a commodity. tragic event; he is captured by the village
Flats were distributed through patrol that mistakes him for a Chetnick.
the work places and all working people Because it is impractical to take him to the
invested in housings fund by obligatory village since he is a suspicious person likely
deductions from their salaries. Additional to escape, he is killed on the spot.
money for investment came from the prots BF

132 133
 Jan van Eyck Academie We will not partake in any back story
for Jimmy; to do so would be to offer him
Post-academic institute for research and an alternative, and hed not like there to be
production in ne arts, theory and design. any excuses. Jimmy knew his place and he
On June 2829, 2010 the Surng the Black was comfortable living there. Things would
conference took place at JVE. The Surng just fall in place and to think any differently
the Black book would not exist without JVE, would be to offer hope.
as four researchers met and found common NM
interest in this topic at the institute and See also Fajfri, Bojan, p. 130
received support to make this project.
During the completion of this book,
in the summer of 2011, following the elec- Jovanovi, Jovan
tions, the Dutch cultural policy changed
and the Ministry of Culture decided to end (Belgrade, 1940). Film director,
the funding of JVE and other Dutch post- screenwriter and editor. Notable lms are
academic institutions, thus putting an end to Izrazito ja (1967) and Kolt 15 Gap (1971).
research and internationalism, which is what
the institute has been renowned for. Inevita- See also Mlad i zdrav kao rua, p. 154
bly, personnel changes ensued and the institu-
tion as we knew (and liked) disappeared. We
managed to complete our project, but JVE Jugoslava
ceased to be the place where projects like this
are possible to develop. Radical student, an activist travelling
Ironically, 40 years after the attack through rural Serbia with her 3 comrades.
on the Black Wave it seems that the Dutch Shaken by the political turbulences of 1968
constellation or affects of the new policies are (primarily the Soviet invasion of Czecho-
already taking a similar course. In the case slovakia) and disenchanted by the student
of Yugoslavia it led to the termination of the protests, this revolutionary group, inspired
massive experiments of the Black Wave and by the writings of young Marx, goes to the
Yugoslav art and the cultural production in country in the hope to assist workers and
general. peasants in their ght for emancipation.
Frustrated because their revolution
was not successful, the three young men
Jimmy Barka decide to eliminate Jugoslava, who witnessed
their impotence. They shoot her, cover her
Where can I go, but wander? On the banks with the party flag and then set her on re
of the river and next to the train stations, with a Molotov cocktail.
solitary at times, but always not to far from a BF
companion. Jimmy Barka never questioned
his nature, and instead of driving headlong
into the future, he preferred to stroll-- giving Kad budem mrtav i beo
himself enough time to take things in, and
strategies before skipping. When I Am Dead and Gone (1967) is a black
He avoided drifting to far from that and white feature lm directed by ivojin
little boy, Janko Bugarski, the one that Pavlovi and written by Gordan Mihi and
commandeered a boat with the purpose of a Ljubia Kozomora. The cinematography is
pleasure cruise. A cruise of escape that would by Branko Vukadinovi, it has been edited
not leave him. Barka never dared to take up by Olga Skrigin and the cast includes Dragan
an occupation, instead he preferred to enlist Nikoli, Ruica Soki, etc.
his talents, whether they be talents It has been produced by Centar lm,
or not, to get by. Belgrade and won the Golden Arena 1968 at
the Pula Film Festival of Yugoslav Films.

134 135
 scope of this essay, but we have to note that Bazin has underlined the
intelligibility and the abstractness of this process of the realization
of reality. In his philosophy this realization is too quickly happening
without taking a necessary detour for abstraction, which is based on
the postulates of revelation driven by the metaphysical conception of
history as propagated by Mounier or de Chardin.22
If the sameness of the concrete materials of the world consti-
tutes its nature and history through continuity, the lm art that
claims to be real will be structured on the editing table as a continu-
ous experience as well. Art has to regain its lost wholeness, to
reconstruct its break, or to claim its integrity. This mimicry of the
world by lm art is not a simple mimicry of the Aristotelian classical
schema; it is based on a complex set of elements. This would be clear
if we look at the thought operation of Cavell from the point of his
discovery of continuity. After this discovery Cavell expands his
philosophy with a claim that Makavejev uses a natural time of
continuity to such an extent that his lms could appear to us as being
a real world that can be tasted. This possible taste is acquired not
only by the historicist ideology used, but also through the ability of
these lms to reveal the hidden things, or the hidden history. In order
to achieve this, the lm work has to investigate its truth not through
the rational logic of its own discourse, but through the intuition
that would make the invisible montage of the world apparent. In this
case the lms of Makavejev are not about the conceptual
conguration of the world, they are directly related to the world.
They are lms that become the world.
This ideology is taken further by the lm critic Charles Warren.
Under the influence of Cavell, Warren described Makavejevs lms
as earth-like or a commitment to the body, a quality of earth, which
insists on the body and physical quality of what is before the
camera. Furthermore, according to Warren these are the moments
of history apprehensible as such.23 This apprehension to Cavell
happened at the moment of intuition of his thought which following
the feast-scene with Otto Muehls Commune in Sweet Movie that
associated him of Karl Marxs characterization of religion as the
heart of the heartless world (?!) arrived at Carl Gustav Jungs

22 23
Bazin described this retort and un-detoured Charles Warren, Earth and Beyond:
abstraction as neccesity: Obliged to exercise Duan Makavejevs WR: Mysteries of
his liberty and his intelligence, the spectator Organism, in Beyond Document: Essays on
perceives the ontological ambivalence Nonction Film, ed. by C. Warren,
of reality directly, in the very structure of Wesleyan University Press, Hanover &
its appearance (p. 80). For Bazins London, 1996, p. 206.
metaphysical origins see Dudely Andrew,
Andre Bazin, Oxford University Press, New
York, 1978, p. 66 -69, p. 106.

136 137
 archetype-haunted dream on the secrets of the earth.24 The massacred by the Partisans had haunted the minds of the Serbian,
missing heart of the world is compensated by the archetypes of Croatian and Bosnian men for decades, writes Mortimer. Referring
the collective unconsciousness; or the world of Marx is healed by the to an article written by Aleksa ilas in the early 1980s in which is
parapsychology of Jung. In the archetypal dream the secret of the argued that this resistance by the Communists to reconcile with their
earth is revealed to Jung as the bones resting in the trans-historical own horrors (not properly buried bodies) might have
time at the bottom of the cave. It is not surprising that Cavell in his implications for the future of the country is, as Mortimer has it, a
intuitive investigation comes to the same conclusion; the bones and prophetic statement. This is a prophecy of the carnal truth which
the corpses of history as the real earthiness of the world and of does not need sociology in order to justify itself. Actually, this
Makavejevs lms. His moment of history of this apprehension is the discourse on postponing the reconciliation (proper burial) was a
Katyn Forest massacre which he describes as the ultimate evil of crucial element in the ideological construction of the Yugoslavian
modern history. This sequence of the dark side of history is break-up and its devastating transitional aftermath.25
re-presented in the lm Sweet Movie as archival material. This This is no longer about the dead who bury the dead, as Marx
intuition, apart from establishing the materiality that is concrete in warned, but a step further from this, about the dead who bury the
the lms of Makavejev, is also describing this material with the terms living and capture them in their trans-historical immobility.26
of death and terror. By underlining the Katyn massacre as the
ultimate dark force Cavell proposes a political explanation for this IV. Abstract as Ideology, Concrete as Life
morbidity, which is Stalinism. We will in the following pages see what
this Stalinism stands for, but for now it is important to stay with the At the current philosophical cosmos where we have arrived, two
line of intuition of Cavell, which ends the story with a moral tale. dichotomous strata are determining entire readings of Makavejevs
Even if Sweet Movie is picturing the earth full of corpses, its world: an abstract world represented by the ideologies which its
ultimate lesson is that ght for freedom continues to originate in the ultimate expression reached with Fascism and Communism, and the
demands of our instincts, the chaotic cry of our nature, our cry to concrete which is the real material of Makavejevs world, viz. sex
have a nature (p. 26). and death. The complexity that this schema implies is actually based
Lorrain Mortimer took this intuition even further, and on the mutual re-conguration of idealist and materialist
developed the whole historicist explanation of the world through the philosophies; it is suspending any world that is either materialist or
lms of Makavejev. In this world the bones and the dead occupy a idealist. They are both at the same time. There is not a dividing line,
very crucial place. They do not rest in the memories of the people, which is essential in any philosophical intervention.27 The silent
but are at the core of our understanding of the world which is based assumption of this worldview is that of vitalism, which at the last
on carnality. The bones are the ultimate of carnal truth. They are instance reproduces the philosophies based on idealism. In this case
the guarantors of our nature that has yet to be reconciled with the the concreteness which is essential for Makavejevs world is not a
overly socialized and secular world. They are, according to
Mortimer, the imaginary, emotional and somatic part of our
knowledge that in many cases has more far-reaching consequences
25 language of the WR draws this conclusion:
than the economical, political or cultural realms. Not to listen to and Not only in Yugoslavia, but as Katherine the explosion in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
understand this realm will inevitably end in cataclysm, as was case Verdery tries to show in her anthropological may seem anticipated in a lm such as WR,
with Yugoslavia as Mortimer tries to demonstrate. The fact that study, proper burial and post-socialist tran- with its harsh juxtapositions, its tearing in so
the Communist authorities in Yugoslavia discouraged the villagers sition has direct link in many other countries: many diferent directions. p. 227.
from opening the sites and removing the remains of the ones Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and
Post-socialist Change, Columbia University 27
Press, New York, 1999. [Intervention] consist of drawing a
dividing-line inside the theoretical domain
24 director of Jungian soap-opera (in statement 26 between the ideas declared to be true and
Interesting comparison: in his lm Hole in Bergmans Non-Verbal Sequences: Source of This historicist view is clearing is off the ideas declared to be false, between the
the Soul (1995), Makavejev is quoting his a Dream Film Experiment co-authored with discursive terrain for many retroactive read- scientic and ideological, in L. Althusser,
friend and famous Jungologist of Yugoslavia M. Duda), furthermore his speech in ings on the break-up of Yugoslavia. Lenin and Philosophy in Lenin and
Vladeta Jerotic saying that his problem is Source series starts and ends with Jung It is not surprise that some texts are Philosophy and other essays, Transl.
having hole in the soul. (Duan Makavejev, Little Monkeys Crawling directly performing this retro-active reading By Ben Brewster, Monthly Review press,
There are considerable accounts of on My Shoulders, Source of Inspiration through the lms of Makavejev; there are New York, 2001, p. 37.
references on Jung in Makavejev, apart from Lectures, 6. September 1994, Sources, many examples for this, but probably most
his last lm, he is referring to Bergman as a Amsterdam, 1995). amazing is Warren who from the formal

138 139
material of the materialist philosophy. This materiality, as we have commitment to a just distribution among all citizens, but which
shown, has a very strange character. It is a concreteness of also touchingly evoke the personal plight of the individual, who, no
idealism, or the reality of ideology. It has a life, ontology, tendency matter how great his ideals may be, remains as frail and
and homogeneity of its own. Furthermore, this concreteness is the emotionally vulnerable to the lifes troubles as the rest of useven
merit of the ultimate truth, which has been labelled as carnal if his name happens to be Vladimir Ilyich (p. 252). This
truth. This carnality reveals its truth either as the real spatial humanism appears as social equality, of each according to his
performance as in sexuality or joyfulness (because fucking takes need (p. 253).29 Even the most strict materialist analyses based on
place) or at the level of the spatio-temporality of the dead and the the critique of Bazinian mystications in Makavejevs cinema are
bones (bones manifest themselves for a longer period of time). So letting their rigour loose and allow them to show emotions. Why is
concreteness as the idealist imagination can take place both in this the case with Makavejev? What makes him so appealing to the
space and time as the real continuums of our cosmos (the word concrete humanist Ideologies? I think that the relation of
which continuously reappears in these readings). Only those having Makavajev to two antagonistic communist gures, Stalin and Marx,
the real and sex and the deep feeling of history can live the life of would bring us closer to this Ideology of concreteness.
un-ideological.
This tautology is visible in almost all humanist ideologies, or V. Makavejev and Stalin
as Althusser has shown, humanism is constantly reproducing itself
in its absolute self-referentiality. Althusser in his famous article The emotionality of Makavejev as opposed to the intellectuality
Marxism and Humanism in which he developed his anti-humanist and the rigour of Godard is the most common comparison
hypotheses is primarily dealing with the humanist Marxism of the between the two directors. Nina Power, who very successfully
Eastern European thinkers. It is performed a theoretical reversal of de-mystied the Ideology of sexuality in Makavejevs
this situation by re-introducing the concept of the human (via interpretation, has always insisted on Makavejevs viscerality
concrete and real) at the lm studies where the theory of Althusser and has described him as the anti-Godard (2010: 47). Mortimer
was most effective. This reversal is most strongly performed in the has reproduced this difference with far-reaching political and
readings of the Eastern European cinema, especially with the religious consequences: Godards work is marked by a denial of
readings of Makavejevs lms. the actual and the sensuous in their own righthe is a Calvinist
The book by James Roy MacBean on Film and Revolution that whose passions are articulated in a cerebral, masculine, ascetic-
deals mostly with Godards political lms aims at the very rigorous religious mode akin to those of many revolutionaries in the past
Marxist analysis of the cinema based on the counter-Bazinian and present; Makavejev is principled pagan: hungers to
position of anti-mysticism and the critical reading of Metzs understand things as they are, his intelligence wedded to a passion
denegation of the concept of ideology.28 Especially dealing with for living in this, our only world (Mortimer 2009: 87-88).
Godards Althusser-influenced materialist lms of the break Raymond Durgnant contrasts the vivacity with which Makavejev
MacBean is aiming at the theoretization of the anti-humanism of portrayed Mao to the way Godard portrays leftist youth in La
Godards lms. For example, referring to the political conflict Chinoise who are reading Maos Little Red Books like Christians
between Godard the materialist and Glauber Rocha who has a would read the Guide to the Inner Light.30 This division can be
spontaneous approach does not fail to describe the position
favoured by the rst: Godard rejects the emotional approach as
one which plays into the hand of the enemy, and seeks to combat 28 realize his true essence, which is the human
mystication in any form, whether it comes from the right or the James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution, community communism,
left (p. 137). The book is devoted largely to the political-work of Indiana University Press, Bllomington and Is it Simple to be a Marxist in
London, 1975. Philosophy? [1975], in Philosophy and the
Godard. In the chapter that deals with the work of Makavejev (Sex
Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists &
and Politics: Wilhelm Reich, World Revolution, and Makavejevs WR: 29 Other Essays, Verso, London and New York,
Mysteries of the Organism) describes the formal similarity between It is exactly with this same words that 1990, p. 233. In which circumstances
the two directors (experiments with montage and collage) and Althusser describes the Ideological MacBeans anti-humanist hypotheses related
then repeats the famous comparison that Makavejevs lms have a novelty of Marxist humanism: to Godard throughout the book turns to its
greater emotional density than Godards most recent lms (p. it called on man nally no longer opposite of Okudzhavas communion
241). This emotional density re-appears in MacBeans reading of in the imaginary world of religion, in the humanism in case of Makavejev is probably
heaven of the State, or in the alienated one of the crucial question for us dealing
the famous end scene with Bulat Okudzhavas song as the
abstraction of Hegelian philosophy, but on with Yugoslav studies to thoroughly handle
invocation of the concrete humanisms of the Communist the earth, here and now, in real society to with.

140 141
summed up as Makavejev the lmmaker of emotions and sensuality, many problems at the time when the French Communist Party was
and Godard as the lmmaker of the intellect and the cerebral. overly Stalinist he is describing the Stalin of the Soviet cinematogra-
Makavejev as the artist of the concrete in contrast to Godard the phy as the kitsch person abstracted from the real contradictions of
artist of the abstract. This division of the concrete and abstract is the world, which could likely be compared to Tarzan of Hollywood.
further contrasted with Makavejevs relation to Stalin, which The one difference between Stalin and Tarzan is that the lms about
ultimately is described as one of freedom contra dictatorship. the latter do not pretend to be documentaries. 31 Mighty as he is
Stalin is ultimately evil, and theoretically represents the highest represented in the movies, without any faults or lacks, Stalin is
position of abstractness; of a total elimination of anything real, ontological rather than psychological. It is because he is no longer
concrete and human. It is the ultimate spectacle, and as such corre- human, Bazin argues, that even while he is alive he could be the
sponds to everything that is the opposite of truth. Stalin is the main character of a lm (p. 36). This is the Stalinism of Milan
ideology. Kunderas totalitarian kitsch where shit does not exist: the Ideologi-
We can approach this Stalinist ideology in relation to Makave- cal totalitarianism of absolute. The most important thing is that this
jevs work from many different aspects: Stalin is abstract, detached from real people, and from their pleasures
A - Stalin as the heir of Lenin: in the lm of WR there is a scene and bodies. This is also the Stalinism of Svetlana Boym who in her
where Vladimir Ilyich (who obviously represents Lenin) hits Milena article on the Soviet Perestroika documentaries detects a general
after their argument. Milena looks at him from a lower position form of the history of the Russian documentaries. They blur the
completely petried and sees his V.I. (Lenin) turned to Stalin. The clear division of the factual and ctional. Russian documentaries
Stalin that Makavejev uses is not a real Stalin, but the personied of the Stalinist period are staged and camouflaged. Echoing Bazins
one from the movie of Mikhail Chiaureli The Vow. This scene Tarzan she is stating that they are more like the docu-dramas on
according to many interpretations of Makavejev is directly proves American television and must be treated with caution.32 As a
that Makavejevs philosophy is based on the fact that Stalin is Lenin conclusion, nothing is true in the universe of Stalin. Makavejevs
who has gone mad. As Mortimer observes with her pop-psychoana- lms are principally anti-Stalinist because their subjects are occupied
lytic phraseology: Lenin was a true neurotic who wanted to change with their earthiness as can be read in the account of Charles
people and help them. His ascetism, nonetheless, paved the way for Warren. This earthliness is dened and structured with three
Stalins rule (p. 183). MacBean also describes Stalinism as the mutually dependent categories: of humour, people as people or
psychopathological domination which turned all of the Soviet bloc un-idealized people, and sex.33 This humanist tautology of people
into an enormous network of insane asylums (MacBean, p. 251). as people can be traced in many different Makavejev and Yugoslav
(N.B. He mistakes the Nazi Germany asylum footage which Marxist problematics. Warren juxtaposes the two and declares that
Makavejev uses in WR as originating from the Soviet Republic.)
He species the Stalin-Lenin juxtaposition as the attempt to
trace the authoritarian and repressive trends in Soviet Communism 30 31
to Lenin himself (MacBean, p. 248). Actually the scene where Raymond Durgnant, WR: Mysteries of Andr Bazin, The Stalin Myth in Soviet
Makavejev is juxtaposing the image of Stalin with an image of Lenin Organism, British Film Institute, London, Cinema [1950], in Movies and Methods
1999, p. 52. Or Makavejevs difference from Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols, University of
is based on Chiaurelis lm where Stalin is crying to the deceased
the post-modernist Godard (Andrew California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and
Lenin, or the Lenin who is no longer among us. The suturing effect Horton, The Mouse Who Wanter to F..k a London, p. 35.
of the ideological continuation from Lenin to Stalin is based on the Cow: Cinematic Carnival Laughter in Duan
absence, the absence of Lenin as the signier. Nevertheless this Makavejev, p. 225), Godard nds in 32
causality between Lenin and Stalin is not necessarily a political or everyday-trivial the lack of ral contact and Svetlana Boym, Stalin is with Us: Soviet
philosophical. For example, it does not always claim that seeds of communication that is reflected in the spatial Documentary Mythologies, in Stalinism and
Stalinist evil lay at the heart of Leninism. It is based on the vacuums and awkwardness of his visual Soviet Cinema, ed. By C. Taylor and D.
compositions, Makavejev discovers a means Spring, Routledge, London and New York,
dichotomy between the concrete and the abstract. Both Lenin as the
of expressing the essence of the intimacy 1993, p. 203.
ascetic, neurotic and idealist and Stalin as the dogmatic, stiff and (Martin Walsh, WR: Mysteries of Organism, p.
alienated are abstractions, in contrast to the actual persons concrete- 14), or Where Godard suffers from 33
ness. This will bring us to the second important aspect. constipation as Basil Wright has remarked Charles Warren, Earth and Beyond: Duan
B - Stalin as Abstraction, Abstraction as Ideology: one of the rst Makavejev irascibly liberates his floating Makavejevs WR: Mysteries of Organism, in
critiques of the image of Stalin, as represented in the cinema, is mystery (Yvette Biro, Pathos and Irony in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonction
written by Andr Bazin. This comes before Khrushchevs attack on Eastern European Films, p. 44). Film, ed. by C. Warren, Wesleyan University
Press, Hanover & London, 1996, p. 206.
the cult of personality. In now classical article which caused Bazin

142 143
Yugoslavia is not the USSR and it resists Stalinism. Milena tells to nor the Nazi picture as I have known them in the flesh, but rather
Vladimir that Yugoslavs care about personal happiness and do not the ctional and symbolic images created by such people as Orwell
blur that with State concerns (p. 227). Yet we have to bear in mind or Kafka or Koestler or the early Soviet satirists. The purest
that in the case of Yugoslavia this has been very much blurred, expression of the phenomenon, in other words, seems to me to have
especially the anti-Stalinist state policy which was also widely been rendered not in its physical reality but in its power as a dream,
supported by the dissident philosophy of Yugoslavian Humanist or nightmare. Not that it lacks the physical reality, or that this reality
Marxism known as Praxis. Praxis has based its critique of Stalinism is lacking in power; but it is precisely in the way it appears to people,
on the tautology of the human. This is how Gajo Petrovic, one of the in the impact it has on the subconscious, in the state of mind it
founders of Praxis, reflects on this philosophy: What makes man creates in its victims, that totalitarianism reveals most deeply its
man is the general structure of his Being, which Marx called meaning and nature. Here, then, we seem to have phenomenon of
praxis34. The way in which Praxis denes man as man is contra to which it can be said that it is both a reality and a bad dream, but that
Stalin, so their philosophy is contra Stalin. This anti-Stalinist its deepest reality lies strangely enough in its manifestation as a
Marxism in the case of Praxis is neither materialist nor idealist, it is dream38
consistent naturalism and humanism (p. 29), which they derived d - Re-Stalinization of de-Stalinized Yugoslavia: When Gajo
philosophically from the Erich Fromms version of authentic Petrovic discusses the encouraging developments in the eld of
Marxism. Apart from being positively dened, this concreteness of philosophy in Yugoslavia he does not fail to mention that there are
the people is at the same time far from grim and serious and is full of certain remnants of Stalinism in us opposing free discussions on
joy. This is how Andrew Horton describes the carnival laughter in philosophy (p. 30). This is similar to what Makavejev told Jonas
Makavejevs work in spite of the apparent Marxism in his lms: Mekas in interview in 1972: I feel that in my country Stalins ghost
laughter of the people, by the people, and for the people as indi- is living in different corners and comes out from time to time just to
viduals emerges as form of salvation.35 That is why Stalinism tell us we are not as free as we believe we are (Mortimer, op. cit., p.
cannot grasp irony, joy and pleasure. 169). How we could understand these statements, coming from the
c - Stalin the Hitler: He was a true Red Fascist! These are the philosopher and the artist of the country which ofcially declared its
last words of Milena, describing Vladimir in WR. Red Fascism as the socialism as non-Stalinist? We could understand this only as part of
merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image the observation that true de-Stalinization is possible only with the
of totalitarianism is a political terminology par excellence. It has arrival of the concrete and of polyvalence in socialist politics.
played a crucial role in post-WWII America, constructing the policy
of anti-communism which was paved through the troubled equiva-
lency of Hitler with Stalin. Apart from generating the discourse on
34 36
the acuteness of the task to ght communism, Red Fascism also Gajo Petrovi, Marx in the Mid-twentieth Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Peterson,
served the fantasies of what might happen. Century: a Yugoslav Philosopher Considers Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany
For example, we have to look at Hitler in the 1930s in order to Karl Marx, Anchor Books, New York, and Soviet Russia in the American Image of
avoid a possible coming of Stalins Fascism.36 This fantasy is 1967, p. 171. Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s, The American
somehow at the core of totalitarian ideology, as a bizarre Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4, April 1970,
psychopathological paranoiac state that confuses the abstract and 35 pp. 1046-1064.
the real. This is how Stanley Cavell in his article on Makavejev Andrew Horton, The Mouse who Wanted to
F..k a Cow: Cinematic Carnival Laughter in 37
describes the archive materials of the ultimate evil of Stalinism, or
Duan Makavejevs Films, in Comedy/Cin- Stanley Cavell, On Makavejev On Bergman
the Katyn Forest massacre shown in Sweet Movie, as a dreamlike ema/Theory, ed. by A. Horton, University [1978] in Cavell on Film, ed. by William
sequence and poses the great moralist question that a freedom of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/ Rothman, State University of New York
lover would: Isnt that forest a name for the region inhabited by Oxford, 1991, p. 232. Press, 2005, p. 30.
regimes that no longer know that there is a difference between In same volume article by Charles
dream and reality, acting out the one, wiping out the other?37 Stalin Eidsvik is picturing this concrete and 38
mistook the concrete for the abstract, and according to his critics it abstract dichotomies with more complex George Keenan, Totalitarianism in the Modern
and surreal terms: Eastern Europeans lived World, op. cit, Les Adler and Thomas
is this confusion that makes him so uncanny. The imagination of
in paradoxical, multiple and incongruous Paterson, ibid, p. 1062.
totalitarianism is best described by its principal ideologue and the realities. In such realities what is normally
architect of the containment policy Georg F. Kennan as: When I taken for humour is serious and seriousness
try to picture totalitarianism to myself as a general phenomenon, itself is comic, Mock Realism: The Comedy
what comes into my mind most prominently is neither Soviet picture of Futility in Eastern Europe, ibid, p. 103.

144 145
 The Yugoslavian socialism of self-management, which looking at them and the ocular regimes or ideological beliefs of the
necessarily brought with it the process of de-Stalinization, did not spectator who enjoys them. As Durgnant, referring to Hitchcocks
detach from the abstractness of the socialism which is a constitutive Strangers in Train noted, this cognitive polyvalence could be
element of the orthodoxy and ideology of Stalinism. Their proclaimed with the term the joy of perpetual analysis. This
detachment was false, it didnt imply the cosmic re-order of things, or polyvalence has been the constitutive philosophy of the entire New
it was never able to introduce the un-ideology of concreteness. Or, as Yugoslav Cinema, including Duan Makavejev who described this as
Herbert Eagle noted, the concern of Makavejevs lms, as was the a policy of multi-reading influenced by the psychological
philosophy of the group Praxis, was the failure of Yugoslavian investigations introduced by the Gestalt theories. These readings
socialism to foster individual development.39 Accordingly, Man is not could suggest that Makvejevs lms can be reduced to the primary
a Bird is a lm about un-freedom. As Eagle puts it, the central tension between the artist as individual and society as a collective,
conflict of all Eastern European societies is between Marxist where the role of the artist is to be the creative emancipator to
humanist praxis and repressive regimented institutions (p. 136). The represent the full potentiality of this individual and the subject.
possible emancipation that humanist Marxist lms might introduce is Everything said and done, this would lead us to the ideological
most clearly described by Daniel Goulding as [daily practice] of position of Makavejevs lms as the guarantors of the freedom
transforming a single collective mythology into a multitude of private despite the repressive socialist state. The re-occurring Stalinism of
mythologies.40 Goulding is quoting from Makavejevs essay on Yugoslavian ambiguity and the discourse of sexual emancipation as
another representative of the New Yugoslavian Film, Kokan part of political freedom could likely end up as the Marcuseian
Rakonjac. He says that the physiognomy of this new tendency is cultural policy of the n-dimensional man, where Makavejevs central
based on viewing the world as it is, without hierarchy and problematic would be labelled as Martin Walsh did in his text on WR
ideological intervention (p. 72). Since Goulding has based his idea as ultimate disparity between individual and the state: sex/the
of Socialist Yugoslavia on the fluctuating theory of the successive individual versus politics/the state.42 Since the potential ghost of
policies between the centralist (latent Stalinist) and liberalist (self- Stalin has been haunting Yugoslavia in the spaces of this politics/
managing) tendencies as developed by the Dennison Rusinow in his the state eld, this policy of the individualism is un-conditional for
classical book The Yugoslav Experiment 1948-1974, the liberated the emancipation from the constrains of society and ideology. It is
cinema of Yugoslavia was accordingly never truly liberated from the this philosophy of the personal is political that appeared before
constrains of Stalinist strata. According to this philosophy it should postmodernism which encouraged Durgnant to label WR as the
be declared that Makavejevs utopia of an un-mediated real society humanist postmodern (p. 69). Makavejev, before being humanist
(as it is) is a logical oxymoron in any state of affairs, because it postmodernist, was for a long time a cinematic representative of
categorically suspends the possibility of the spontaneous expression humanist Marxism. This cinematic Marxism, or cine-marxism is
of concreteness of human creativity. Probably it is something more counter to Stalin and it is in direct anti-thesis of Godards
than a matter of style to name this prevalence Stalinism.41 Althusserian Marxism.
What is Makavejev thought in relation to Marx? In what sense
VI. Makavejev and Marx is the principle of Makavejev based on individual freedom, the
sensual, carnality, emotions, sex, the cosmos and the polyvalence of
Another important pattern when reading Makavejevs lms is that all of these, connected to the Marxian theory and practice? It is
they could have very different meaning depending on the position of possible to grasp the Ideological discourses related to these
questions once we clarify Makavejevs Marxism as related to the
dichotomy between the individual and the state. Up until now we
39 was primarily developed by the theoreti- have seen many examples of how these discourses criticized the lm
Herbert Eagle, Yugoslav Marxist Humanism cian of the Yugoslavian New Film Duan
studies influenced by certain dogmatic brands of Marxism which
and the Films of Duan Makavejev, in Politics, Stojanovi.
Art and Commitment in the East European
repressed the concreteness of human being such as pleasure,
Cinema, ed. David Paul, Macmillian, Lon- 41 hedonism and sensuality. Durgnant, as many others did, called them
don and Basingstoke, 1983, p. 133. For example attack to the New Yugoslavian political correct lm studies underestimating the hedonistic
Film as Black Wave was interpreted by counter-cultures, and emphasising Althusser-style syntheses of
40 Goulding as Stalinist counter-offensive move
Daniel Goulding, Liberated Cinema: of latent nationalists, and the initiators been
The Yugoslav Experience, Indiana labelled following the style of Stalinism as 42
University Press, Bloomington, 1985, Jankovicevites (referring to a local Martin Walsh, WR: Mysteries of Organism,
p. 66. Actually this policy of polivalency Stankhovitevites [p. 83]) Monogram no. 5, London, p. 15.

146 147
 structuralism, Leninism, Maoism (p. 88).43 But still there is the fact subversive, as Amos Vogel calls it, as the eternal subversion:
that Makavejev himself was a Marxist, humanist or not, that has to essence of life, under all circumstances and in all societies, was
be dealt with by his appreciators. The polyvalence of his lms has eternal change, the constant transformation of all forms and
been the key for introducing the peculiarity of Makavejevs Marx. systems (Film as Subversive Art). We arrived at the main Ideological
This was most clearly agitated by the Marxist aesthetician and the pattern of the reading of Makavejevs polyvalence. It is referring to
founder, long-time international authority and the high the multiplicity, richness, multi-colouredness of the naked man
representative of the Naturist and Free Beach Movement, Lee un-mediated by any ideological abstraction with his concrete nature
Baxandall in his article on Eastern European Cine-Marxism. This in full bloom. Real concrete is evidence of polyvalence.
peculiar cine-Marxism differs from the original version by Godard, Marx is redundant here, as Durgnant, who is a non-Marxist
in the sense that this Eastern European version fully grasped admirer of Makavejev, observed: this ambiguity makes up the
Brechts rule of never failing to give the pleasure.44 Apart from socialist position, which is not, after all, among one mans vision, but
this local specicity, Baxandall is introducing the ontological a range of positions, and not a single statement, once and for all,
multiplicity of Marxism as: there has not been one Marxism, but but a progression of reflections, a network of changing ideas. Many
many (p. 73), with his open preference of the real one which has of which non-Socialist can share (p. 63).
full awareness of the value of subjectivity. This Marx is precisely
the opposite of Marx as scientist impostor concocted by such Conclusion: Concretely Watching Films
interpreters as the neo-Stalinist Louis Althusser, who was said to (of Makavejev)
have stifled the humanist in himself to go on to discover the laws of
scientic materialism (p. 83). The Marx of Makavejev is humanist, In fact, we have reached the main dilemma of the relation between
that much we understood, but how does this humanism correspond polyvalence, change, knowledge, arts and politics. The readings based
to polyvalence? Since humanism could be the signier of the project on the ideological conception of the concrete are not able to propose
of men initiated by the collective socialism of the Stalin, it is not so a dividing line between progressive and regressive politics and given
easy to connect polyvalence with humanism. this hibernation the carnal truth cannot generate any other thought
The usual answer is that Stalins humanism is based on the except the obvious knowledge abut its own nature or material.
abstract, ideological or kitsch concept of man, whereas real We can demonstrate this by showing the political implications of
humanism is based on real man, or the human genotype, the innate carnal truth in the case of Mortimer.
nature that undergoes socialization as Baxandall claries (p. 92). A Mortimers attempt to derive any correct political conclusions
crucial element here is the concept of human nature, as the eternal from the carnal truth ends with the ambiguous morality of confusion.
and complex reality of the concrete. This schema allows the She might call this confusion beautiful, as she did in the case of the
humanist Marxist to avoid the possible paradoxes of the indi- tenderness in Frank Sinatras voice, but things get problematic when
vidual versus collective dichotomy with the polyvalence of she links this carnality with the specicity of the subjects of Makave-
Makavejev. According to this schema, what has been labelled as the jevs lms. This specicity is the Yugoslavian people, with notable
collective in socialist countries does not have a polyvalent nature, it Balkan origins. She is very determined when explaining the emanci-
is abstract and stiff, or granite of univocal ideology. The nature of patory potential of these Balkan bodies in reading the immigrants
the individual is in its elements based on the complexity of the Dionysian joyfulness at the Zanzi-Bar in Makavejevs lm Montene-
concreteness, and it is truly a polysemic. This is why it is so distinctly gro: vitality of the immigrants, their genius for resourcefulness, the
obstinate and inveterate art of surviving, whether the circumstances
(Mortimer, p. 239). This inveterate capability of lasting might be part
43 44 of their special material, of their different and more enduring bodies.
The brand of Yugoslav Marxism known as Lee Baxandall, Toward and East European
Also these Balkan bodies are representatives of the different episte-
Praxis is usually linked, as in Herbert Eagles Cinemarxism?, in Politics, Art and Commit-
observation, with the Makavejevs lm- ment in the East European Cinema, ed.
mology that Mortimer is picturing through the character of Alex who
philosophy. By David Paul, Macmillian, London and embodies what serious ideologues nd hard to appreciate: an active
The fact that the journal of Yugoslav Basingstoke, 1983, p. 88. vulgarity that goes against too earnest and abstract a conception of
Marxists The Praxis in 1965 refused to the person on the wrong end of the immigrant worker/capitalist
publish Louis Althussers article due to exploiter, poor country/rich country continuum.
its Stalinist positivist theses is seen It is a vulgarity that is a part of human being (p. 232). The
as extra encouragment for the idea of
antagonisms of capitalist colonization and the antagonisms of the
linking lms of Makavejev with the
class struggle in this cosmos are done away with as political
philosophy of Praxis.

148 149
correctness by Mortimer, and furthermore posed the critique for this strictly based on self-referential and absolute truths, in the text
correctness as the theoretical reductionism of people to social desig- referred to as concrete or precisely as carnal, natural or
nations performed by the right-minded thinkers, which doubles the sensuous, which are strictly related to human nature. The readings,
already existing social diminishment (Mortimer, p. 233-234). The whose abundance is quite impressive, are in almost all cases repro-
political emancipation of the Balkan immigrants, according to this, ducing the ideology of the re-humanization of the theory, especially
can only be based on their own bodies, which is proof of their dura- lm theory. The lure of these theories are their insistence on the
bility, their resourcefulness. Throughout the article we have seen that concept of concrete, as material of our everyday, of our intimacy,
the carnal and sensual truths are based primarily on reference of its essence, obviousness and human nature which continuously hangs on
own resources. It is all about the concrete truth of concrete things; or our daily worries of bread, water, love, sex, wine or loss. These
the real knowledge of our bodies. But are there no antagonisms at the hypotheses are not nave; they are reproducing the most conservative
core of carnal truth itself ? Does sensual vulgarity contradict itself ? and regressive thoughts on society and politics if not handled with
How to explain the confrontation of two different concrete bodies? caution and reserve. Their obviousness is their lure, but at the same
What are the limits of their truths? time it might guarantee their succession, which considering the
Is there any dividing line between their truths? The most current state of affair in lm theory it would be fair to announce this
crucial question is this: Is there a possibility to divide right from theoretical caution as acute.
wrong in the carnal truth? In the end, how to explain the violence of As I mentioned earlier this text is not about the new proposal
concreteness? Mortimer in this case too re-produces two different of reading Makavejev, its sole purpose was to deal with the
types of violence: the hot one which is a direct, erupted and ideological origins and confusions which some idealist and
spontaneous violence; and the cold violence of the calculated, phenomenologist inspired readings generates. What is most striking,
opportunistic and analytical mind. For example according to her at to say it scandalously, is that Makavejev lms which supposed to have
the Srebrenica there were two kind of violences operating, the hot polyvalence of readings and patterns are always ending in the same
violence of Ratko Mladic and his pupils equally drunk on plumb pattern of identity, carnality, sensuality, and humanist tautologies.
brandy and ethnic paranoia and the cold violence of the liberal Are there not any other patterns which the polyvalence of
democracies of the Dutch ofcers (Mortimer, p. 181-182). Trying to Makavejevs lms could offer to us? There are signs of this; we can
explain the material of Radovan Karadzic himself, who is assumed mention the reading of Pavle Levi who clearly indicates the simplicity
as the representative of the hot part of the world, Mortimer is not of reduction of Makavejev to Herbert Marcuses essential
able to say the last word. At once Karadzic is a representative of the incompatibility between the notion of human freedom and the
abstractness that harks back to the Lenin-Stalin asceticism and various institutionalized and reied forms of social and political
alienation (p. 182-183); but at the same time he is the men of the life.46 Levi is instead proposing more active conception of
Balkan, with his grotesque of the carnality. He is, as Mortimer polyvalence, which could offer a possibility of debate for the
explains in the pages discussing the Montenegro movie, one of spectators of Makavejev lms, possibility accompanying the
Montenegros (referring to Karadzics Montenegrian origin) freedom granted to him or her, to choose a specic perspective, a
shameful sons (p. 250). concrete idea, he or she will stand for (p. 34). This is a full possibility
He is a Zanzi-Bar Dionysos gone mad, or went uglier and of polyvalence, or the possibility for cultural policy through the
more brutal. But still there is no possibility to divide this monster polyvalence, which according to Levi, does in the end, implicitly
from Dr. Frankenstein; neither the class or colonial antagonisms nor presuppose a basic leftist political inclinations of its viewer-
any other discourse of cold, politically correct and abstract world participants (p. 34). This reading is crucial in underlining under-
can help to make this decision. At the end there is only one perspec- estimated possibility of pedagogy of the Makavejev lms which is
tive for the carnal truth in order to operate in the world of politics:
its the trust, the trust in its own truth, or as Mortimer puts: in the
end it is the question of t r u s t (p. 178).45 45 46
Throughout the text I have deliberately based my arguments on Reffering to Wilhelm Reichs attackt to FBI Pavle Levi, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics
the examples of the ideological readings of Makavejevs lms in investigators approaching his property, a and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav
sequence also mentioned in the lm WR, Cinema, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
order to make clear their theoretical and political consequences. The
Raymond Durgnant writes that: this may California, 2007, p. 29.
consequences are the un-dialectical approach of sameness, ending well be left-wing direct action against
most of the time in the historicist interpretation of the development incipient Fascism, but it is also right-wing
(which consequently opens variety of regressive and retroactive anarcho autonomy, against democratic state
political positions). This process is grounded in the knowledge that is tyranny, p. 21.

150 151
 continuously de-negated in the idealist readings based on Kapi, vode, ratnici nists of Yugoslavia in order to reflect the
psychologization and personalism. transformation the state was going through
Another reading, but a less afrmative one, is based neither on Drops, waters, warriors (1962) is a black and the change in the partys role in society
and white omnibus feature directed by under the influence of workers self-manage-
policy nor culture is a recent elaboration on the Black Wave,
Marko Babac, ivojin Pavlovi, Kokan ment and the ongoing state reforms.
primarily referring to a work of another of its protagonists, elimir Rakonjac and written by Marko Babac,
ilnik, by Boris Buden as a practice of disengagement with the Slobodan Novakovi, ivojin Pavlovi,
representational identity policies of the Yugoslavian socialism. The Olga Vujadinovi, Duan Makavejev, Lipanjska gibanja
lms of Yugoslavian alternative cinema known as New Yugoslavian Kokan Rakonjac. The cast includes Stole
Cinema, or better Black Wave, probably for the rst time, has been Aranelovi, Ljuba Tadi, Janez Vrhovec, The June Turmoil (1968) is a black and white
interpreted in this reading with the non-representational politics, Sneana Luki, Petar Lupa, Duan Janiijevi, documentary short written and directed by
Olga Vujadinovi. Produced by Cinema club elimir ilnik, camera is by Duan Ninkov,
which is neither the critique of that system (the socialism), nor any
Belgrade and Sutjeska lm. sound by Bogdan Tirnani and Branko
engagement with this representation; the black stands for what it is, Three segments, originally shot Vuievi and edited by Miodrag Petrovi -
without any extrapolation of culturalism, or as we have said earlier as three short amateur lms produced by arlo. Produced by Neoplanta lm, Novi Sad.
on the sex, without any further additive meaning. It is this black the cinema club Belgrade, after an idea of The lm is documenting the student
which is the material of the Makavejev, and which is the driving force cinema-tographer Aleksandar Petkovi, were demonstrations in Belgrade in June 1968.
all the avant-garde arts, the negation; not the subversion, but the packed as an omnibus and with the help of It was primarily shot in the courtyard of
simple and concise negation. Or as Buden puts: Sutjeska lm from Sarajevo, presented at the Kapetan Miino Zdanje (Faculty of Philoso-
professional Yugoslav Film Festival in Pula. phy building) where students gathered and in
It was the rst ofcial stepping out of which famous artists participated, showing
[the black of black wave] is about where the society as amateurs into the professional eld. solidarity with the students.
society is absent and about what politics, however
democratic, cannot represent.47 See Interview with elimir ilnik, p. 57
Korula Summer School See also Student protests, p. 188
This position of negation is important in the case of Makavejev lms,
not only because his lms are constituted by the dark materials, but Between 1963 and 1974 the island and city
that this negativity is a theoretical partisanship for further
of Korula were a meeting point for critical Ljubavni sluaj, ili
leftist intellectuals from East and West. The
investigation of possibilities detached from humanist afrmations, local House of Culture would, for a brief
tragedija slubenice PTT-a
phenomenologist tautologies and spiritual communions. It is not period of time, become the centre of debates
exaggeration to claim that the negation is starting point for the on the position of critical philosophy, sociol- Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing
materialist reading that could bring us more closely to the concrete. ogy and political perspectives. Switchboard Operator (1967) is a black and
Henri Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse, white feature lm written by Branko Vuievi
Ernst Bloch, Jrgen Habermas, Zygmunt and Duan Makavejev. It has been directed
Bauman were, among many others, frequent by Duan Makavejev with assistance from
guests of the summer school. The Korula Branko Vuievi and elimir ilnik.
47 Sumer School was organised by the Yugoslav The cinematographer was Aleksandar
Boris Buden, Shot it Black! An Introduction philosophers gathered around the journal Petkovi, it has been edited by Katarina
to elimir ilnik, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Praxis. One can speculate that the experiences Stojanovi and the cast included Eva Ras,
Context and Enquiry, No. 25, Autumn 2010, at the summer school impelled Lefebvre to Slobodan Aligrudi, Ruica Soki, Miodrag
p. 47. In his earlier article dealing especially coin the term Dionysian socialism. Andri. Produced by Avala lm.
with Makavejev, Buden took a risk of socio-
logical explanation of this non-representa-
tive a-culturalist position. League of Communists Makavejev, Duan
This risk ended up in the of Yugoslavia
intensication of falseness of the Yugoslav (Belgrade, 1932). Film director and screen-
socialism; which materialized, as Buden writer. One of the most prominent gures
interpreted in the last words of Milenas In 1952, during the sixth Congress of of the Yugoslav new lm. Although psycholo-
in WR: Yugoslavia was already a capitalist the Communist Party it was decided to give gist by education, he entered the lm
when it claimed it was socialist. Boris Buden, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia a new world via the Belgrade cinema club, of
Behind the Velvet Curtain; Remembering name, which became the League of Commu- which he was one of the most prominent early
Duan Makavejevs WR: Mysteries of
Organism, Afterall: A Journal of Art, context
and Enquiry, No. 18, 2008.

152 153
 members. elimir ilnik started his profes- their beginning (Fest, 1971; Bitef 1967) and
sional lm career assisting Makavejev on his up until the mid-90s. He designed numerous
rst feature lms. title sequences as well as posters for the lms
of the Black Wave. He is the founder of the
See also Reich, Wilchem, p. 185 Independent Editions Slobodan Mai, a
small independent publishing imprint that,
according to Mai, never rejects any publica-
Marshall Plan tion proposals. Since its foundation in 1969 it
published numerous titles.
(Ofcially the European Recovery Program, Besides being editor-in-chief of
ERP) was the large-scale American program his own publishing house he has also been
to aid the reconstruction of Europe after credited as co-editor (with Bora osi) of
WWII. The US gave monetary support to Rok magazine, dedicated to literature, art
help rebuild European economies to diminish and aesthetic studies of reality. In 1969 it
the influence of Soviet Communism. The plan dedicated an entire issue to elimir ilniks
was operational for four years. feature lm Early Works. His bold and casual
It was named after the Secretary of graphic design language is a unique mix of
State George Marshall. From 1948 until the International Typographic Style, counter
1952 $13 billion in economic and technical culture and pop-art. Slobodan Mai lives and
assistance was provided to assist the recovery works in Belgrade, Serbia.
of the European countries that had joined T
in the Organization for European Economic
Co-operation. The same aid plan was offered
to the Soviet Union and its allies, but it was Milena
rejected. The goals of the plan were to rebuild
a war-devastated economy, remove trade Young Yugoslavian communist and feminist,
barriers and modernise industry. influenced by Wilhelm Reich, preaches the
By 1952, as the funding ended, idea of the liberating power of orgasm.
the economy of every participant state had She encounters the hard-liner Stalinist Soviet
surpassed pre-war levels; for all Marshall ice-skating star Vladimir Ilyich. They start
Plan recipients, the output in 1951 was at a romantic relationship while she attempts
least 35% higher than in 1938. The Marshall to explain him the advantages of revision-
Plan was one of the rst elements of ist Marxism in comparison to his orthodox
European integration. Stalinist ideas. Milena is killed when her
sexual encounter with Vladimir goes awry.
He, unable to fully experience his
Thesis on Feuerbach orgasmic urge, beheads her with his skate.
No.11 At the end Milenas head is displayed on the
autopsy table where she speaks her last words:
Comrades! Even now I am not ashamed of
The philosophers have only interpreted my communist past. BF
the world, in various ways; the point is to
change it.
Mlad i zdrav kao rua
Mai, Slobodan Young and Healthy As a Rose (1971) is a
color feature lm written, directed and edited
Architect, graphic designer and publisher. by Jovan Jovanovi with cinematography by
Has been almost an in-house graphic designer Petar Lalovi and cast including Dragan
for Bitef (Belgrade International Theatre Nikoli, Aleksandar Gavri, Danilo Bata
Festival) and Fest (Belgrades annual lm Stojkovi, Mara Baxa. it has been produced
festival), designing their visual identity from by Dunav lm, Belgrade.

154 155
 The lm was publicly screened twice of common life, from which they again and
in 1971, at the Pula lm festival and in some again emerge, like toads.
cinema in Belgrade. After that its permission Borges once wrote, Nothing is
for screening was revoked and it was kept in built on stone. All is built on sand, but we
a bunker. As it was made in the same period must build as if the sand were stone. He is
of the last Black Wave lm, it shares the same right. Only, instead of sand, all is built on
main actor with some of the most prominent mud. Mud is the interface between nature
Black Wave lms (See also Nikoli, Dragan and culture. Mud is what separates our feet
p. 161), and shares the fate of these lms. It from the earth. Even as a sound, the word
often is categorised as a Black lm by some mud floats between mother and modern:
authors. between the past and the future. All creatures
evolved from the Darwinian puddle of life,
the primordial mud. Everything will eventu-
Mud ally return to that same mud.
Mud and aesthetics are strongly linked
Man is born of lth, and wades a little together. In psychoanalysis, theres a lot
while in lth, and makes lth, and rots down
written about the relationship between lth
again in lth, till at the last he is no more
than the muck that sticks to the soles of his and creativity, but lets not get too scatologi-
great-grandsons shoes. cal. Instead, let us just consider the simple
fact that paint and ink are basically forms of
Friedrich Schiller mud and that painting, drawing, designing,
writing and printing are nothing but different
Underneath the narrative, we think Rani names for the same act mastering mud.
Radovi is primarily a movie about mud.
Already in the rst second of the lm, we Thinking of the above, we wanted our poster
see a man digging in the mud, intercut with a to refer to the concept of mud. We thought
scene of a woman covered in soap (to wash the technique of mono-printing would t this
off the mud). Further in the movie, a car is theme really well, especially since both the
dragged through the mud, food is harvested name of the lm and the name of the direc-
from the mud, the main characters are beaten tor can be expressed through specic initials:
in the mud, and theres even the suggestion of RR and ZZ. Initials that can easily can be
rape in the mud. Mud is showered off, mud translated into a mono-print composition.
is turned upside down, mud is set on re, and The poster is in fact actively printing
nally, one of the characters is murdered in itself, referring to the act of self-reflection.
the mud. The narrative might be the super- But at the same time, it is referring to mud
structure, but the base is mud. and, through mud, to creativity, culture and
In a recent television interview with modernism. In the short time that we walk
elimir ilnik, mud is a recurring theme as on mud, we should try to control it, master it,
well. Duan Makavejev recalls that during shape it, before we return to the mud again.
their rst meeting, in 1961, ilnik was
covered in dirt and cement. A lm critic Experimental Jetset
mentions that mud is the perfect prop for a 12/05/10
lm noir. And even the script for Rani Radovi
was muddy: Branko Vuievi recalls that the
script for the movie was created by cutting Narodna tehnika
and pasting, and because there was a shortage
of glue, the writers used flour and dough to (Peoples techniques) The organisation was
stick the document together graphic mud. managing a variety of amateur clubs
Further in the TV documentary, mud is and organizing workshops ranging from radio
mentioned even more explicitly, as a young making to photography to more practical
Marx is quoted: A despot always sees man workshops. The organisation was ideologi-
as degraded. He sees man drown in the mud cally unmonitored and corresponded to the

156 157
socialist idea of modernising society and tion of short lms. Through elimir ilnik,
people mastering technology and the perma- who was from Novi Sad, a lot of established
nent education of the workers. The phrase authors, such as Duan Makavejev, started
of the practice was Tehnika narodu, making their lms for Neoplanta. PORTRAIT OF A PRODUCTION Part 1/2
tehnika u narod (Technology to the people, As a small production house, it was
Neoplanta (Novi Sad, Vojvodina, SYugoslavia) 1966 - 1971
technology for the people). a good counterpart in co-productions to the
much larger Avala lm. After the attacks on
the Black Wave lms, Workers council of SOURCES OF FUNDING
Nedostaje mi Sonja Henie Neoplanta rejected the black authors and 1) Fund for Cinematography - Socialist Republic of Serbia
Udoviki, and turned towards production of 2) Fund for Culture - Socialist Autonomous Province
I Miss Sonia Henie (1972) is a color short partisan lms and comedies. The goal was to Vojvodina 2 feature, 6 short and 2 animated lms per year
directed by Karpo A. Godina, Duan produce the ultimate partisan lm The Big 3) Prot from feature lms produced by Neoplanta
Makavejev, Puria orevi, Milo Forman, Transport about Vojvodinas engagment in 4) Honorariums for commissioned lms
Tinto Brass, Paul Morrissey, Frederick PLS, and Veljko Bulaji was invited to direct 5) Production of lm documentation (about construction of
Wiseman and Buck Henry. It has been it. The lm became one of the most expen-
large scale objects, urban development of the cities, and
written by Snoopy while the concept is by sive lms and the whole venture turned into
Branko Vuievi. Cinematography and
other lm archival work in Vojvodina)
a asco, bringing Neoplanta to the brink of
editing is by Karpo A. Godina and the cast bankruptcy. 6) Collaboration and work on projects for Television
includes Dobrila Stojani, Buck Henrie, At the end of the 1980s Udoviki was Belgrade - II program, and future TV Studio Novi Sad
Milo Forman, Catherine Rouvel, Tinto Brass asked to return and recreate the magic of
and Sonia Henie. It has been produced by Neoplantas beginnings. Udoviki invited SHORT FILMS
Neoplanta lm, Novi Sad. ilinik to make a feature lm. author .................................................. 50
During the second Belgrade Inter- However, when it became obvious that commissioned ............................................ 32
national Film Festival Fest 72, Branko Neoplanta was beyond repair, it was shut
Vuievi and Karpo Godina challenged down and, making use of the property and
TOTAL: 82
some of the international and local technology, the new production company
lmmakers to come to an attic in the centre Terra Film was formed. The rst lm that
of Belgrade and lm a scene. The lmmakers Terra Film produced was ilniks The Way PRODUCTION COSTS
had four constrains, two related to the lming Steel Was Tempered in 1988. author ......................................... 3,732 831.-
technique (master shot and xed optics of commissioned ................................... 3,266 560.-
the camera), one related to the content (a See Surng the Black Zine No.2 p. 57
sentence I miss Sonia Henie had to be TOTAL: 6,999,391.-
uttered in the lm), and nally the length of
time was limited to 3 minutes. Nevinost bez zatite REVENUES (author short lms)
1. sales in the country .......................... 218 525.-
See also Schulz, Charles, p. 185 Innocence Unprotected (1941/1968) is a
2. sales abroad .................................. 166 741.-
black and white feature lm written and
directed by Duan Makavejev with poems 3. awards to producer ............................ 770 000.-
Neoplanta lm by Aleksandar Popovi and cinematography 4. recourse - fund of SR Serbia .................. 768 000.-
by Branko Perak. It was edited by Ivanka 5. recourse - fund of SAP Vojvodina ............ 1,220 000.-
Was founded after it was realised that Vojvo- Vukasovi and the cast includes Dragoljub 6. neoplanta resources ........................... 705 600.-
dina had the most advanced and developed Aleksi, Ana Milosavljevi, Vera Jovanovi,
cinema network in Yugoslavia and a very Bratoljub Gligorijevi, Ivan ivkovi, Petar net income (author short lms)................... 637 053.-
active amateur cinema club scene, but no Milosavljevi and Stevan Mikovi. It was net income (commissioned short lms) ............ 764 375.-
professional lm production and that some produced by Avala lm, Belgrade and won uncovered cost (author short lms) .............. 474 957.-
lms produced dealt with issues important for the Silver Berlin Bear 1968 - Special Jury
Vojvodina. Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize 1968 at the
Although ofcially established on June Berlin International Film Festival.
TOTAL net income (all short lms): 926 471.-
29, 1966, it started operating only in Septem- This is a compilation lm that uses
ber, due to technical difculties. Svetozar archive footage of the lm Innocence
Udoviki was appointed as the rst director. Protected shot in Belgrade in 1941 during
Initially, Neoplanta focused on the produc- Nazi occupation. The lm was meant to

158 159
 be the rst sound feature lm in Yugoslav However, the fact that he was so prom-
cinematography. It was never released due inently cast in these lms did not obstruct the
to Nazi censors, and after WWII it was development of his career after the lms were
considered to be pro-Nazi. Makavejev banned. He played the role of Jimmy Barka.
PORTRAIT OF A PRODUCTION Part 2/2
found the footage and complemented it with
Neoplanta (Novi Sad, Vojvodina, Yugoslavia) 1966 - 1971
interviews with the surviving members of
the cast, including the writer, producer, Non-Aligned Movement
FEATURE FILMS* Sveti pesak, Lepa parada, Rani radovi, director and the star of the lm gymnast
Samrtno prolece, W.R. Misterije organizma, Dorucak s Dragoljub Aleksi. Founded in 1961 in Belgrade, gathered decol-
djavolom, Sloboda ili strip onised African, Middle East, Asian
and South American countries that wanted
* Neoplanta in this period was registered only for Nezaposleni ljudi to stay neutral to the polar division of the
production of short lms, so all feature lms were (i ene) world during the Cold War. Yugoslavia, the
produced through co-production. founding member, was the only European
country in the movement.
The Unemployed Men (and Women) (1968)
TOTAL: 7 was written and directed by elimir ilnik
with camera work by Petar Latinovi and O ljubavnim vetinama ili
FUNDS INVESTED edited by Milica Polievi. It has been lm sa 14441#
1) from Fund of Province .............. 1,900 000.- 26.84% produced by Neoplanta Film, Novi Sad
2) from co-production funds ........... 2,008 800.- 29.60% When the lm was produced, its
3) from Neoplanta ..................... 2,510 001.- 35.70% second half, dedicated to unemployed About the Art of Love or a Film with 14441
4) still needed for completion of lms women, was censored and never screened. Frames (1972) is a documentary short
sveti pesak and sloboda ili strip ... 655 000.- 7.86% While we were making this book (in 2010) written, directed, shot and edited by Karpo
some reels re-surfaced in the Cinemateque A. Godina. Typographic intervnetions are by
in Belgrade. The lm presents a series of Slobodan Mai and the soundtrack by Pea
TOTAL: 7,074 809.- 100.00% portraits and situations people found them- and Bata Vraneevi aka Laboratorija zvuka.
selves in after being made redundant during Produced by Zastava lm.
the time of the economic reforms that were to The army asked me to make an
ANTICIPATED PROFIT ............................. 2,641 792.- establish a market economy in Yugoslavia. ofcial military lm. Instead I made one that
ANTICIPATED LOSS ................................. 599 799.- In the interviews, people speak about said: Make love, not war. The military liter-
their doubts and confusion, because they had ally chopped it up with an axe, but I was able
ANTICIPATED NET INCOME ........... 2,041 993.- expected socialism to give them more social to save one print. (Karpo Godina)
security. They criticise the parasitic bureau- The lm is set in Saramazalino, a
cracy, they sign in to leave for Germany and village near tip, Macedonia and explores the
work there, since Yugoslavia has signed an fact that there was no interaction between
Neoplanta lm - the production enterprise for short lms,
agreement on taking over workforce around some thousands of girls, workers in a textile
produced or co-produced the majority of black wave lms, both that time. factory, and some thousands of soldiers
short and feature, in just 4.5 years. stationed in a garrison nearby. The lm is
"Portrait of a production" was a title of a See also Unemployed, p. 193 a visual collage of steady master shots and
special showcase of Neoplanta's short lms on the Oberhau- the whole narration of the lm is in the
sen short lm festival in 1971. The data in this "portrait of soundtrack.
a production" comes from a 500+ page long recapitulation of Nikoli, Dragan
Neoplanta's production in 1971, published when it became
evident that it would become impossible to continue with
(Belgrade, July 23, 1943). Actor, featured in Partisan Art
some of the most remarkable Black Wave
production of such critical lms.
lms (When I am Dead and Gone, Young In these extreme circumstances and given the
To precisely grasp the context in which black and Healthy as a Rose, The Role of My specic guerrilla warfare of Yugoslav parti-
wave lms (at least the ones produced by Neoplanta) were Family in the World Revolution, etc.) sans who were always on the move, we would
produced, one has to look at the numbers, and these numbers Primarily due to his role in When I am Dead be tempted to paraphrase Cicero: During the
show, how the most steady and the most permanent funder of and Gone he is considered to be the poster war, art is silent. Indeed, most commentators
Neoplanta's productions were the Republic and the Province. boy of the Black Wave lm. treat partisan art as mere war propaganda or

160 161
not very relevant for the struggle. However, testied: they were involved in military
Miklav Komelj succeeded to show through a work and ghting, they were nursing and
detailed documentation not only that partisan caring for the wounded or being engaged in
art existed, but that we can only understand politico-cultural work, education and cultural
it once we take into account the unfavourable organisation. It was not merely the educated
circumstances. communist elite that was leading the people,
According to Komelj, the novelty of instrumentalizing art. Rather, it was the rst
partisan art lies in its gesture that re-invents time in the history of Yogoslavia that masses
the material conditions of art itself. During of anonymous poets, music band and choir
the occupation ofcial artistic institutions did members, theatre groups, sculptors, painters
not give legitimacy to what was art and how and cultural workers took the historical stage
it had to be practised, or even who make art. outside of the established institutions.
The task of partisan art was to invent a new Komeljs analysis refers to the tremen-
artistic autonomy, with new institutions and a dous force and eruption of cultural works
new canon. Partisan art emerged from its very among the masses. It was not necessary
impossibility: it created its own conditions that masses who spoke up for the rst time
from their very absence. This conception of formulated revolutionary slogans; they were
art is radically different from the liberal idea included in the revolutionary process simply
of autonomy, which is always presupposed, or by the very gesture of speaking up. The libera-
is afrmed by spontaneous artistic ideology. tion struggle brought also the freedom of
The liberal conception of art is accompanied expression, that is, to people that were denied
by a set of presupposed aesthetic criteria, the right before. They fought for it and started
which legitimize what is art and what it is not. exerting it.
Nevertheless, the conception of GK
partisan art comes closer to Sartres concep-
tion of engagement than merely defending
the novelty of artistic form. Partisan art was Partisan Cinematography
from the beginning political. Art inseparably
linked its own freedom to the peoples libera- Historical archives, documents and testimo-
tion. This political dimension of art was not nies that show us the existence of the real
only declaratory, or blindly instrumental- partisan lm and even rudimentary lm crews
ized by the General Command of partisans. that started appearing during the war. Three
Partisan art cannot be understood in pure periods of partisan cinematography can be
propagandistic terms, as a simple means in the distinguished
struggle. Quite the opposite, partisan I Spontaneous partisan cinematog-
art became an end in itself. It would be other- raphy (1941-1943), when PLS did not have
wise difcult to explain why the General any ofcial policy regarding the lming and
Command nanced and supported the expertise and materials for production were
printing of thousands of copies of avant- scarce;
garde partisan poets such as Karel Destovnik II Beginning of organized partisan
Kajuh and Matej Bor, or developed a very cinematography (1943-1944), that started after
ornamented graphics and large collection of October 1943 when the General Command
France Preeren? of partisan forces issued the directive to
Why this support for the avant-garde document on lm and photography all sorts
art, if it was much wiser to use the time and of material evidence on the partisan struggle,
material means to spread propagandistic both for archival purposes, but also for the
material, or simply to distribute food and international recognition of the partisans,
real weapons to help the partisan struggle? which took place some months late;
The creative and complex nature of partisan III Institutionalized partisan
activities is well situated and explained by a cinematography (1944-1945), that starts in
historical account of partisan women. the autumn of 1944 when, on October, 7th
When they joined the partisans there 1944, the Executive Council of the Libera-
was no more spare time, as the women tion Front in Slovenia ofcially formed the

162 163
 Section for Film and Photography, headed by destroy the partisan units, when the Partisan
France Brenk. General Command and Units, together
The rst partisan lm document with 4500 wounded and typhoidal patients
of WWII is the recording made by Rudi were surrounded in the valley of the river
Omota, a pre-war lm worker, during the Neretva by an enemy that was roughly seven
anti-occupation concert that took place in times stronger.
Ljubljana on December 12, 1941, organised The director of this lm was
by the Academic Choir France Marlot under Veljko Bulaji, the most prominent name in
the guise of a celebration of Italian culture. the genre, and the cast consisted of some of
He recorded the very last song performed the most famous actors in the world of that
that night, Lipa (Linden) during which the time, Yul Brynner, Hardy Krger, Franco
occupied Italian forces realised what was Nero, Sylvia Koscina, Orson Welles, Sergei
going on and dissolved the choir and banned Bondarchuk. The lm was nominated for the
any cultural events. 1970 Academy Award for the Best Foreign
Rudi Omota continued to lm short Language Film. Another notable lm is
lms of actions in Ljubljana and joined the Battle of Sutjeska (1973) in which, famously,
PLS. The rst systematic lming was Richard Burton was cast as Tito.
done by Antonio Peraica, who worked for the
Italian Cinecitta before 1943, while General
Command was stationed in Drvar in 1944. Pavlovi, ivojin
The materials from the third period were the
most preserved and documents show there (abac, 1933 - Belgrade, 1998). Film director
were even some partisan cinemas established and writer. Studied decorative painting at
in liberated territories. the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade.
Valuable documentation material was After several years of writing about lm and
also made by the lm documentation units of art in newspapers, which he took up at the
the allied forces. age of 19, he ventured into the lm medium
GK via cinema club Belgrade. Initially he strug-
gled to t in, but he soon became one of the
amateurs that in no time tuned professional.
Partisan Film Spectacles His lms were successful at lm festi-
vals, and during the course of his career he
Synonym for popular Yugoslav cinemas. won four Golden Arenas for best lm and
They were large-scale epic spectacles and best director in Pula, as well as prizes in
demanding productions that, in time, became Venice and Berlin. He was equally successful
too focused on representing the partisan as a writer and for the novel Death Wall
struggle through Rambo-like heroes who he received in 1985 the Nin prize, one of the
were capable of attacking an entire platoon most renowned prizes in Yugoslavia. In the
of German soldiers by themselves. aftermath of the attack on the Black Wave,
While in the history of PLS it was he had to quit his teaching position at the
usually the case that partisans were many Academy for Film in Belgrade.
times outnumbered by the axis soldier, the
acts of partisan were usually much more See Pavle Levi Essay, p. 77
collective and sacricial than was portrayed.
The most lavish production was the lm
Battle of Neretva produced by Avala lm Peoples
in 1969, the same year that many of the Liberation Struggle
Black Wave lms were produced. Battle of
Neretva tells the story of one of the crucial
battles during WWII in Yugoslavia, code- Also referred to as partisan struggle. Mainly
named Fall Weiss by the Axis powers (and organized by the communists, except in
in Yugoslav sources often called Battle for Slovenia, where the Liberation Front
Wounded). The battle aimed to completely gathered various antifascist forces that

164 165
joined the communists in their struggle Firstly, national liberation was Pioneer and/or Praxis School
for national liberation. The partisans did conceived as a manifestation of solidarity of Union of Pioneers of
not only ght against Nazi and Fascist the masses as part of the international anti- Marxist humanist philosophical movement
occupation (Yugoslavia was divided between fascist struggle. Yugoslavia that originated in Zagreb and Belgrade during
Italy, Hungary, German Reich, Romania Secondly, a social revolution, which the 1960s. Some of the most prominent
and Bulgaria), but had to ght the political entailed the introduction of new class rela- Pioneering organisation whose members gures of the school and its founders were
authorities of the old Yugoslavia, the tions and a transition to a communist, social- were elementary school children (aged 7-14) Gajo Petrovi, Milan Kangrga (Zagreb) and
collaborators, Ustaa, Chetniks, Domobranci ist Yugoslavia. in Yugoslavia. Founded during WWII in Mihailo Markovi (Belgrade). From 1964 to
and other bourgeois forces. Thirdly, there was a cultural revolu- Biha on December 27, 1942, by the Commu- 1974 they published the journal Praxis, at
The formal recognition of partisans tion, which meant the break with the bour- nist Party of Yugoslavia after the Soviet the time considered to be one of the leading
as the sole antifascist forces in the coalition geois canons and art autonomy and the pioneer organisations. The organisation was a journals in Marxist theory. It had both inter-
came quite late, in 1943, which is why the masses nding their way to the sphere of member of the League of Communist Youth national and Yugoslav editions and featured
partisans had to rely on their own capaci- culture. GK of Yugoslavia. authors from both East and West. They (in)
ties. This historical situation forced them The pioneers were often called Titos famously rejected to publish a text by Louis
to practice autonomist politics. The goal pioneers. The Union published newspapers Althusser because of his anti-humanist,
of the partisans was to organise the peoples Petkovi, Aleksandar and organised workshops, eld trips and Stalinist tendencies.
armed struggle against the occupation, but competitions for pupils.
already during the war a social revolution (Belgrade, 1929 - Belgrade, 2000). Although membership was voluntary,
took place. The partisans had a program- Cinematographer, one of the most impor- most children would become member during Rakonjac, Kokan
matic vision, which demanded a transforma- tant members and driving force between the ceremony held in all schools on the Day
tion of social relations and it was inscribed cinema club Beograd. Slightly older than of the Republic, November 29. Pioneers were (Struga, 1934 - Belgrade, 1969). One of the
in the planetary socialist revolution. In the most of the cine-amateurs, he oversaw their wearing a uniform consisting of a white shirt, founders of cinema club Belgrade. Author
temporary liberated zones, as in large parts development from amateur into professional navy skirt/trousers, red scarf and specic of a series of short lms and considered to
of Serbia (the republic of Uice was the lmmakers and continued to work with them navy cap and had to pledge the pioneers be one of the most talented authors of his
rst liberated zone in Europe, in August as a cinematographer until the end of his oath generation and one of the rst to deal with
and September in 1941) and parts of Bosnia and their careers (and lives). He collabo- melancholic urbanity and alienation as topics
and Slovenia, local committees of liberation rated mostly with Duan Makavejev, ivojin Today, as I become a Pioneer, I give for lm.
my Pioneers word of honour That I shall
struggle were formed. These committees Pavlovi, and Aleksandar Petrovi. He spent
study and work diligently, respect parents
as new political forms practiced popular the decade after 1972 mainly working for and my seniors, and be a loyal and honest
politics and organised educational infra- television as a director of photography. comrade and friend. Rani radovi
structure, cultural events, political meetings
for the mobilisation of the masses and basic Early Works (1969) is a black and white
economical conditions. Petrovi, Aleksandar Saa Plastini Isus feature lm written by elimir ilnik and
It was in these impossible condi- Branko Vuievi with additional dialogues by
tions that art flourished; partisan poetry, (Paris, 1929 - Paris, 1994). Film director Plastic Jesus (1971) was written, directed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
graphic art, theatre and painting were the and screenwriter. In two consecutive years, and edited by Lazar Stojanovi. Cinematogra- It was directed by elimir ilnik with
most important forms of artistic production 1966 and 1967, his lms were nominated for phy is by Branko Perak and the cast includes cinematography by Karpo A. Godina and
with massive involvement of non-intellec- the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Tomislav Gotovac, Vukica ilas, Ljubia the cast included Milja Vujanovi, Bogdan
tuals. The partisan struggle produced new Language Film. The lms were Three Risti, Adolf Hitler, Ante Paveli and Tirnani, edomir Radovi, Marko Nikoli.
modes of thinking, which entailed a specic and I Even Met Happy Gipsies. His lm Josip Broz Tito. Produced by FDU, Centar Typographic interventions are by Slobodan
revolutionary articulation of mass art and It Rains in My Village was nominated lm, Beograd. Mai. Produced by Neoplanta, Avala Film it
communist politics. Yugoslavia was one of for the 1969 Palme dOr at the Cannes Film Produced as a graduation lm has won the Golden Berlin Bear, Youth Film
the few states in Europe that was liberated Festival. He was considered to be one of the by Lazar Stojanovic, this lm stirred an Award - The Best Feature Film Suitable for
from the Nazi occupation by its own forces. most prominent protagonists of the Yugoslav already electried atmosphere between Young People - at the Berlin International
When Belgrade was liberated in 1944, the new lm, who greatly influenced a younger lmmakers and the state, mostly because Film Festival.
Soviet Red Army had to ask the partisans generation of lmmakers. of the use of archival footage of Hitler, Tito
for permission to enter Yugoslav territory. He was teaching at the Academy for and Paveli in the lm, which was considered
The international recognition and autonomy Film in Belgrade in the late 1960s until the as a provocation because Tito was believed Rani radovi, special issue
of the partisan struggle was signicant for attack on the Black Wave in 1973 had both to be linked with totalitarianism. The lm of Rok magazine
the events that would follow WWII. We can him and ivojin Pavlovi expelled from their was banned and Lazar Stojanovi was
distinguish at least three referential points teaching positions. His 1973 lm Master jailed. The lm was publicly shown for the
of this event that were essential to the new and Margarit was banned and Petrovi lived rst time in 1990. Dedicated to the lm, published in 1969,
Yugoslavia and partisan subjectivity. in Paris for a few years. edited by Bora osi and designed by
Branko Vuievi.

166 167
 'Sexuality'
A scene from Duan Makavejev's W.R. - Mysteries
of the Organism

168
 Boris Buden Its not easy facing up when your whole world is black.
The Rolling Stones, Paint It Black, 1966

Shoot It Black! It is usually said that elimir ilnik is one of the most prominent
directors of Black Wave, a tendency in Yugoslav lm that emerged in
the wake of the political and economic liberalisation of the country
in the 1960s and 70s, and presents the best that Yugoslavia had

An Introduction to produced culturally in its short-lived history.1 But what does it

actually mean to be a protagonist in this cultural story from the
Communist past? To what does black concretely refer in the famous
elimir ilnik phrase the Black Wave? Let us start with this simple question.
The newspaper article from 1969 in which the notion of the
Black Wave was rst introduced opens from a curious perspective.2
The author looks at the reality of Yugoslavia from the future of

Republished with permission several decades on thus from todays present and argues that this
future will not be able to nd our true picture. That is, the authentic
picture of Yugoslav society of that time is not in the yellowed
from Afterall No.25 yearbooks of the contemporary daily press, for this informative
level stored in the archives and computer brains will fade into
oblivion, but instead in the art made at the time. The future, as he
states, will not believe those who had directly witnessed the actual
reality but rather the condensed and suggestive artistic story and
picture that this reality produced.3 In his view, this is why the future
will have a black picture of Yugoslav society of the 1960s and 70s
because Yugoslav art, and above all Yugoslav lm, painted this
society black.
Isnt it interesting? In a society ruled by Communists one
would expect the voice of the Party to be at the same time the voice
of the history itself which Borba, the newspaper where this article
appeared, undoubtedly was4 and not to tremble before this history
helplessly expecting its nal judgement. What will the future think

1 2
Inspired by Italian Neorealism and various Vladimir Jovii, Crni val u naem lmu,
new waves in European cinema, the authors in Borba , 3 August 1969, pp. 1724. All
of Black Wave rejected the norms and ideals translations are the authors.
of an optimistic, self-congratulatory ofcial
culture, and openly exposed the dark side 3
of socialist society above all its Ibid., p. 17.
ideologically hidden capitalist truth that
emerged with the implementation of 4
market economy and its devastating social For this reason I do not mention the name
consequences like unemployment, massive of the author of this particular article
migrations of workers both within the explicitly in this text. His personality is of
country and abroad, poverty, crime, etc. secondary importance since his personal and
The most prominent directors public opinion at that time was immediately
along with ilnik were: ivojin Pavlovi, identied as the opinion of the Party itself.
Bata engi, Duan Makavejev and
Aleksandar Petrovi.

170 171
of us? This is not the question of those who are supposed to know Yugoslavs [] you are so vital [] you know how to look at women,
the course of history and legitimise their rule precisely from this very you can laugh from the heart, you are open, there is an original joy of
future. Moreover, no law of historical materialism, no Marxist life in you. Why then are your lms so bitter, so dark? What is the
concept, however undogmatic and creatively enlightened, would truth? You as I have seen you, or you as you present yourselves in the
endow art, that superstructural phenomenon, with the power to give lms? [] Or is this all in your lm a temporary fashion of
the only true picture of society and even to be the last word of pessimism which, with a certain delay, comes to your authors from
history itself. And yet this is the logic on which the argument against abroad?6 Thus we have the ofcial position of the Party on cultural
the Black Wave lmmakers relies. Borbas critic accuses them of issues at the time drawing its arguments from an identication with a
betrayal. But betrayal of what exactly? Not, primarily, of reality: they Western-Orientalist gaze that imagined Yugoslavia as an exotic realm
are not so much blamed for having unfaithfully represented reality in of authentic enjoyment of life and natural vitality.
their lms for painting it more black than it really is but rather But the question of representation becomes even more
their real crime consists in misrepresenting the society they belong dramatic from the perspective of the future, or in relation to
to. So when the critic uses the notion of a true picture of our posterity. Again, at stake is the picture of the society that will survive
society, it is not so much the truth that is at stake here that is, a it in works of art, or as Borbas critic writes, a picture of us that is
realistic representation of social life but the picture of the society going to be bequeathed to the future. He insists that we shouldnt be
that he is actually concerned about. He complains that society, in the indifferent to this sort of recognition, for if the art is now painting
Black Wave lms, dresses in drags before taking pictures of itself. this picture black, the future too will have a black picture of us.
But by that he obviously doesnt mean that it should take off its Writing from a contemporary perspective, this all is to suggest
clothes and expose itself in full nakedness, as it really is. that we must necessarily abandon our post-communist perspective if
This apparently slight shift in accentuation from truth to we really want to understand what that blackness ascribed to a
picture has far-reaching consequences. The real conflict between the great deal of Yugoslav lm production at the end of the 1960s really
critic and the traitors doesnt take place where we usually project it was about. Not only because of all those unbearable clichs about
from our post-communist perspective: between Communist ideology the communist past (whose real ideological effect is not so much in
on one side and the autonomy of art on the other. The case of blackening the utopia of the past but rather in brightening the actual
Yugoslav Black Wave is denitely not that of ideologically stubborn one about liberal democracy and capitalism as the only exit solution
communist apparatchiks who try to impose the dogma of (socialist) of world history), but there remains one more, even better reason:
realism on freedom-loving artists. Moreover, it is not even the the notion of the Black Wave was coined from this post-communist
socialist cause that the critic insists upon: the well-known discourse perspective itself.
on the social function of art, of its programmatic role in building a Black Wave is obviously a concept forged in struggle, and
new society, of its educational duties, for instance, in boosting implicates a certain instrumentalisation of art in that struggle. But
optimism. A classical discourse of socialist realism is totally absent what struggle? Not the one for a better for instance, a just, classless,
from this polemical text.5 Rather, he argues that the problem with the in short, communist society. Here we are denitely not dealing with
pessimism of which he, and through his voice the Party itself, a story about art being (unjustly) caught in a social struggle. From
accuses the Black Wave lmmakers is not that it spreads defeatism the point of view of the critic who introduced the slogan Black
and so disarms the progressive forces of society, but rather that it Wave, the social struggle was already over, or more precisely, the
spreads an unflattering picture of Yugoslav society. This is what the social cause of the struggle had become obsolete. However, the
whole drama is about: how the society represents itself to the Other,
both the Other abroad and the Other of posterity. Specically, the
authors of black lms are blamed for clownishly presenting the
5 Zhdanov in 1946. Moreover, he openly writes
nation and the society for the sake of a cheap and ephemeral Indeed, the author explicitly distances that he would have some understanding
mundane fame. In the eyes of the critic they are guilty of submis- himself from any concept of an educational for the blackness of Yugoslav lms only if
sion to the fashionable taste of the international market. function of art. For him it is didactically it would stay within the art for arts sake
In support of his criticism he naturally calls on authorities. old-fashioned to ascribe any functional concept of art. Ibid., p.19.
However, these are not Marx, Engels or Lenin, nor any of the attribute to art.
Yugoslav Marxists or leading Party intellectuals. It is Bosley The idea that a work of art should 6
deliver some sort of message he also puts Ibid., p. 20.
Crowther instead, legendary lm critic for The New York Times and at
aside as Zhdanovism, or the party doctrine
that time art director of Columbia Pictures, who is quoted from an on Soviet arts and culture developed by
interview he gave at that time to a Yugoslav magazine: You the Central Committee Secretary Andrei

172 173
struggle went on, but in another form, on another battleeld and for the only form in which social experience is still available to us
another cause. Now it was the struggle for recognition that was today, in retrospect of course. The Party knew this in 1969.
fought exclusively on the eld of culture. What was at stake in this Now we could probably answer the introductory question: to
struggle was now identity. what does black refer in the notion of the Black Wave of
It sounds paradoxical, but the position from which the voice Yugoslav cinema? It refers primarily to the end of society, to the
of the Party announced its jaccuse against the Black Wave experience of the abyss that opens up at this end, to that bottomless
lmmakers was the position of an already dead societya society contingency one encounters after a social experiment or, better,
that had exhausted all its utopian potential and had reached the after the human experimentation with the social has been
limits of its further expansion in terms of social justice and an historically exhausted. It is the blackness that has absorbed all the
overall social prosperity. It was a society that was facing its historical utopian light that had hitherto clearly illuminated societys path to
end, a society with no future whatsoever. It literally didnt see itself the future. In its subjective dimension it is the darkness of the fear
in the future, or better, it saw only an alienated picture of itself we are lled with when we face, existentially, the terminality of
there, a picture that had been already appropriated by art, by the society that is, when we become aware of the possibility of its
Black Wave lms. This is why our understanding of the Black Wave total absence, in short, a social fear in its ontological dimension.7
cannot be reduced to a post-communist clich about art struggling This is best expressed in words of one of the most famous actors of
with society for its freedom. On the contrary, it is about a society the Yugoslav Black Wave, Bekim Fehmiu, who acted in European
struggling with art for the true picture of itself, a society in the nal and Hollywood productions as well. In Borbas article Fehmiu is
struggle for its cultural survival. In launching this struggle in 1969, quoted saying: We have never lived better and yet, everything is
the communist critics of the Black Wave precisely proved to be black before our eyes.8
post-communists long before all those democrats who would replace However, to calm this fear and to pacify this ambivalence, a
them later. They knew very well that they were no longer in fetish was introduced: the fetish of cultural identity that also
command of history, but were still able to anticipate its implied, within the political concept of sovereignty, national
development. Moreover, by occupying themselves exclusively with identity. At that time the end of the 1960s and the beginning of
the question of cultural representations they had already the 70s in the former Yugoslavia there was a major shift in the way
accomplished that notorious cultural turn which would be later Communists legitimised their rule. The narrative of class struggle
ascribed to postmodernism as one of its main features. Yugoslav was essentially abandoned. The Party stopped conceiving of itself
communists of that time already looked at the society they were in as the vanguard of a universal history that would lead it to its
charge of from the point of view of its cultural afterlife. classless end, communism. Instead it began to legitimate its rule
Of course, politically the Party was still identied with its within the history of a particular nation by identifying itself as its
historical mission to radically change the society for the better political elite, which, after having nally accomplished the goal of
and still saw itself as being able to achieve this goal. But this, to use national liberation and achieved full national sovereignty, was
Lacanian terms, existed only on the imaginary level of their leading the (nationally framed) society into progressunder the
identication. In short, this was how Yugoslav communists identied given historical conditions of a socialist regulated market economy
with the ideal picture of themselves, with their ideal-ego. However, at and open participation in international Realpolitik and global
the same time, but on a symbolical level, they identied with the gaze capitalism. In short: the communist leaders of this era did not aim
of history itself i.e. with their ego-ideal in which they saw the to adapt society to the communist utopia. Rather they adapted the
society they had built surviving only in a cultural translation that communist utopia to a society that had fully identied itself with its
fully escapes their control. They ruled society, but only in an nation. Of course, this fundamentally changes the situation on the
imaginary realm. Symbolically they had already lost it, they had so-called cultural front. The communists were no longer ghting in
surrendered society to culture. For them, in 1969, the challenge was the trenches against the traditional bourgeois culture that was
no longer to build a new, better society, but rather to properly
represent the dead one. Thus, a true picture of social reality still
seemed to be possible, but only in an anticipated cultural 7
retrospective. This also marks a move within realism itself: from its In terms of Heideggerian Angst that
socially prospective dimension (the concept of socialist realism makes a subject experience societys being-
toward-death.
deployed in the service of society as a utopian project) to a culturally
retrospective realism. The latter is no less ideologically dogmatic 8
than the former. The name of the dogma now is cultural memory Ibid., p. 20.

174 175
 devoted to creating essentialist identities of the Yugoslav nations, problem of homeless people in the city. Neither the passers-by nor
Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrinians, the ofcials have an answer to this question. The lmmaker himself
Albanians, etc. Rather they made a non-aggression pact with it doesnt have it either, for these stinky people, as he calls them in the
you leave politics to us, we leave national culture to you (with a lm, cannot stay in his flat forever. So, nally, after telling them that
few clearly dened exceptions) and so even strengthened their no solution to this problem has been found and that he is running out
identitarian, that is, national legitimation. To stay in the saddle they of tape, ilnik asks those people to leave his home.
had to remount a fresh horse of identity politics, and were now Again: what is black in this Black Film? The reality it depicts?
riding it blindly into the catastrophe of the 1990s.9 The failure of communists to solve social problems? The notorious
To sum it up: it became identity or, in a slightly broader gap between a utopian promise and reality? No! It is the lm itself,
sense, cultural identication, that offered a perspective of a life the very idea of art, especially lm art, claiming power to change
after the end of society. No wonder almost all grasped for it. But social reality this is what is really black in Black Film. In fact it
not all indeed. Some preferred not to. begins with the author saying to the camera: I used to make these
The most prominent among those who entered the darkness lms two years ago, but such people [the homeless B.B.] are still
at the end of society with their eyes and the lenses of their here. The lm is a radically honest self-reflexive critique of the idea
cameras wide open was and still is elimir ilnik, the most and practice of so-called socially engaged cinema. ilnik openly
important author of the Black Wave, whose entire lmic opus, considers Black Film being his own tomb. In a manifesto published
extending over almost half a century, represents the most radical on the occasion of the 1971 lm festival where the lm premiered, he
and consistent expression of its blackness. calls the whole festival a graveyard.12 p. 190 Black here refers to the
Moreover, ilnik is the only one of the Black Wave misery of an abstract humanism and of the socially engaged lm
lmmakers who explicitly responded to the ofcial accusation: You that has become a ruling fashion in our bourgeois cinematography;
are blaming me for making black lms. So be it, then. In 1971 he it refers to its false avant-gardism, social demagogy and left-wing
shot a documentary, which he titled literally Black Film.10 p. 127 phraseology; to its abuse of a socially declassed people for the
ilnik picked up six homeless people from the street and brought purposes of lm; to the lmmakers exploitation of social misery,
them to his home, not only to share the warmth of a middle-class etc.13 But, what is even more important, black doesnt refer at all to
apartment (it was January), but also to actively participate in a lack of freedom, which is usually presented from todays post-
making a lm about their problem. (This would become typical of communist perspective as the worst blackness of the communist
ilniks documentary drama: allowing his amateur actors, whom past. In the 1971 manifesto ilnik explicitly states: They left us our
the lm story is about, to consciously participate in its making, or, freedom, we were liberated, but ineffective.14 Black refers to a
in other words, to play themselves.)11 The next day on the streets of chasm that no freedom can bridge, a chasm that will survive the fall
Novi Sad he used his camera to enquire about how to solve the of communism.

9 Condition, New York and London: position to it as efciently as they can, 13

With the new constitution of 1974 Routledge, 1997, p. 2: it demonstrates a shift and they help me to create a lm about them Ibid.
multiculturalism has become the ofcial away from a socialist political imaginary, in the best possible way. ilnik in an
ideology of Yugoslav state. The discourse in which the central problem of justice is interview in Dnevnik, Novi Sad, 14 April 14
on social justice didnt simply disappear redistribution, to a postsocialist political 1968. Quoted in Dominika Prejdov, Ibid. Reporting from the festival in Belgrade
from Yugoslav politics. It was translated into imaginary, in which the central problem of Socially Engaged Cinema According to the same German critic, Heinz Klunke,
the new language of identity politics, which justice is recognition. elimir ilnik, in Branislav Dimitrijevi et criticises ilnik for seeing the situation too
dominated political public not, however, as al., For an Idea Against the Status Quo, Novi darkly and for underestimating the freedom
an intra-social cause but rather as an inter- 10 Sad: Playground Produkcija, 2009, p. 164. that lmmakers in Yugoslavia have been
national one. Black Film was recently featured in the granted, a freedom that ilnik, as Klunke
The question of an (un)just lm program of Documenta 12, curated by 12 writes, equates with pure complacency.
redistribution is now posed not in relation Alexander Horwath. Z. ilnik, This Festival Is a Graveyard, From H. Klunke, Leute, Filme und Politik
of one class of society to another, but rather manifesto to the 18th Yugoslav Festival in Belgrad, Deutsches Allgemeine
in relation of one republic one nation of 11 of Short Film, Belgrade, 1971. Sonntagsblatt, 28 March 1971.
Yugoslav (con)federation to another. This is I do not hide from the people I am Published in XVII. Westdeutsche Kurzlmtage
clearly a post-socialist turn as it was dened shooting the fact that I am making a lm. On Oberhausen (exh. cat.), Heinz Klunker (ed.),
by Nancy Fraser in her Justice Interruptus: the contrary. I help them to recognise their Oberhausen: Westdeutsche Kurzlmtage
Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist own situation and to express their Oberhausen, 1971.

176 177
 For ilnik a lm, and in a broader sense culture, however
liberated from totalitarian oppression, will never provide a remedy
for social misery. For him the emancipatory promise of culture is a
bluff. In his mocking the authors of the socially engaged lms from
1971 who search for the most picturesque wretch that is prepared to
convincingly suffer, he already makes fun of the liberal inclusivism
that twenty years later will impose its normative dogmatism on the
cultural producers of the new (and old) democracies. We know that
picture very well: one discovers somewhere on the fringes of society
the victims of exclusion, those poor subaltern creatures with no face
and no voice. But luckily there is an artist around to help them show
their faces and make their voices heard. How nice: what bad society
has excluded, good art can include again. For, as one believes, what
has been socially marginalised can always be made culturally central,
that is, brought to light to the transparency of the public sphere
from the dark fringes of society. The rest is a democratic routine: a
benevolent civil society, sympathetic to the suffering of the poor and
excluded, makes a political case of the social darkness; and as soon
the party politics is involved, a political solution searched for and
nally found, a low is changed, a democracy is reborn, now more
inclusive than ever before.
Not with me, answers elimir ilnik, already in 1971. He, who
has been working his entire life with different kinds of so-called
marginalised people from street children, unemployed, homeless
people to transvestites, illegal migrants, Roma, etc. knows well
what their blackness is about. It is about where the society as
society is absent and about what politics, however democratic,
cannot represent: a blackness, which is rapidly swallowing that light
we have historically gathered around.

178
 Owen Hatherley Spaces of Socialism

Is it really possible to speak of socialist space? In some areas,

Marxism and Mud writers on post-communism in the last decade have spoken about
little else. This is the primary material of what we could call the
hauntological take on the legacy of actually existing socialism,
inflected consciously or otherwise by Derridas Spectres of Marx

Landscape, Urbanism work such as Susan Buck-Morss Dreamworld and Catastrophe,

Charity Scribners Requiem for Communism, Svetlana Boyms
Architecture of the Off-Modern, to mention just three. These writers
and Socialist Space in the have concentrated on space - the domestic spaces of communal
apartments, the public space of housing estates and workplaces,
Black Wave often in an ambiguous, if slightly depoliticised way, torn between
the futile celebration of micro-resistances against power and
ideology or towards attempts to salvage something genuinely
emancipatory from the (for want of a better word) socialist states
of 1917-89. Yet how true is it to even class these spaces as
coherently socialist? The cinema of (again, for want of a better
phrase) the Black Wave is notable not so much for the familiar
move of nding something repressive and anti-individual in the
notion of socialism itself, but more for holding the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia up to its socialist principles and
nding it wanting.
It does this to a large degree through exploration of the
social spaces of the SFRY, predominantly nding a place undergo-
ing a depoliticised process of industrialisation and modernisa-
tion, with little concern for egalitarianism or solidarity. Most of
all, it looks for this not so much in the direct centres of modernisa-
tion and modernism the Corbusian town planning embraced in
post-earthquake Skopje, in the huge ensembles of New Zagreb and
New Belgrade but in the spaces of combined and uneven devel-
opment, in the interstices, in the places where people fall through
the cracks. It nds in that process of modernisation a very specic
landscape, one of peasant shacks selling Pepsi, of advertising and
dilapidation, and most of all, of mud.
However, should we consider the spaces of the SFRY
socialist purely because of the states self-description? If we do,
we fall in line with a certain, extremely limited, denition of what
the socialist project actually is. For instance in the rst serious
attempt at building socialism, in the Soviet Union of approxi-
mately 1917-32, commissars, unions, architects and planners came
up with numerous denitions of what a socialist city would entail.
Initially, the Constructivist architects grouped around OSA (the
Organisation of Contemporary Architects) favoured a space they
called the social condenser workers clubs and housing schemes
that would, in a sense, attempt to engineer solidarity, by providing
communal spaces and facilities and spatial organisations that

180 181
 favoured public, rather than private space; one built example of Soviet autarchy and state ownership of property = socialism. More
this is the Narkomn Dom Kommuny or collective house on generally, socialist urbanism is usually considered to refer to one of
Novinsky Boulevard, Moscow.1 two things rst, the hyper-Hausmann planning, all vast boulevards
In 1930, in ambiguous response to the rst Five Year Plans and stepped, New York-style skyscrapers, that was favoured in the
hyper-urbanising bent, they suddenly changed tack, favouring USSR and its satellites between 1932 and 1953 (with a brief resur-
instead the sociologist and former Left Oppositionist Mikhail gence in Romania and the USSR in the 1970s and 80s) and, more
Okhitovichs dispersed, disurbanist notion of the socialist city, famously, a modernist gigantism based on prefabricated towers in
which, influenced by Marx and Engels call in the Manifesto for geometrical arrangements on the outskirts of cities, based at second-
dissolution of the gap between city and country, imagined hand on the ideas of French architect and syndicalist Le Corbusier,
socialism entailing single-family houses dispersed along practically which can be found on the outskirts of practically all socialist
endless transport, electrical and telecommunications networks, cities4. For anyone who considers that the socialist project still has
with industry connected to it along ribbons; this vision of a emancipatory potential, these denitions are obviously inadequate.
verdant, anti-urban but hardly peasant socialism was, perhaps However, the SFRY had better claim to the word than most.
unconsciously akin to William Morris News from Nowhere, one of Partly this is because Socialist Yugoslavia, unlike, say, the
the more influential late 19th century socialist utopias. Okhitovichs DDR, Hungary, Poland or Romania, (but like the USSR, Cuba and
ideas were briefly favoured and then comprehensively condemned, China) was founded in popular revolution, in direct partisan struggle
and replaced with an interesting rhetorical move. Lazar Kaganov- rather than solely through the ministrations of the Red Army.
ich declared in 1932 that debate over what a socialist city was or Arguably it is this partisan event, as Ozren Pupovac calls it5, as
could be was closed, because the legal public ownership of land much as the split with Moscow in 1948, that leads to the attempt to
and property meant that the city was automatically socialist, found forms of socialism that did not rely on the ethically and
irrespective of what happened in it2. The result was a chaotic politically crippled denitions of a Kaganovich or a Morrison. The
primitive accumulation, a re-run on an enormous scale of the self-management of industry introduced in 1950 is one of the most
enclosures and traumatic encounters with the city that were obvious instances of this; the attempt to regard socialism in terms of
attendant on industrialisation in early 19th century Western direct popular participation rather than revolution from above.
Europe.3 In so doing, the cities were to an extent ruralised, with However, from the 1965 Economic Reforms onwards Yugoslavia,
the importation of an insecure, formerly peasant proletariat and which had after all already been the recipient of US Marshall Aid,
the replacement of the social condenser and the Dom Kommuny began to integrate itself closely into the world market, allowing
with the overcrowded, atomised kommunalka. foreign capital to own up to 49% of a given self-managed enterprise,
Kaganovichs strikingly circumscribed denition of while state subsidies were gradually being withdrawn from industry,
socialism persisted to a large degree in the various forms of and even from social provision.
actually existing socialism, and not only then. It can be found in More pointedly with reference to the Black Wave, Yugoslavia
the British Labour Party, whose one-time chairman Herbert suffered from combined and uneven development to an especially
Morrison opined that socialism is what Labour governments do, sharp extent. In a 1970 study, British trade unionist Roy Moore
and in the analyses of post-1989 Sovietologists, such as Stephen found a strikingly unequal situation, where in 1966 per capita income
Kotkin, whose Magnetic Mountain, a Foucauldian history of the in Slovenia was 8100 dinar, and 1610 in Kosovo6; income differen-
foundation of Magnitogorsk, rests on the contentious premise that tials had risen from 4:1 in 1959 to 8:1 in 19697. Efforts to redress this

1 2 4 6
On these debates, and on the lived experi- On Kaganovichs role on ending early For an eclectic exploration of these Roy Moore, Self-Management in
ence of the Narkomn in particular, Bolshevik dreaming, see Richard Stites two spaces and their neoliberal successors, Yugoslavia (London: Fabian Society,
Victor Buchlis An Archaeology of Socialism Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford: Oxford Uni- see Alfrun Kliems and Marina Dmitrieva 1970), p. 8.
(Oxford: Berg, 2000) is interesting. versity Press, 1991). (eds), The Post-Socialist City (Berlin:
The OSAs journal, Contemporary Archi- Jovis, 2010). 7
tecture, has recently been reprinted, and is 3 Moore, p. 11.
essential reading (Moscow, 2010). For an account of this process of ruralising 5
hyper-urbanisation, see Moshe Lewins The See Gal Kirns essay in this
Making of the Soviet System (New York: The volume.
New Press, 1994).

182 183
 were administered through the Fund for the Financing the Develop- Red Bourgeoisie of Fascism. Reich worked with Sigmund
ment of Less Developed Republics and Regions. Moore noted that Freud in the 1920s and was a respected
the fund has fallen short of its planned target every year since the The reforms of the Yugoslav economy analyst for much of his life, focusing on
leaning towards more economic liberalisa- character structure rather than on individual
economic reform In a sense, the 1965 Economic Reform committed
tion and market socialism were a fruitful neurotic symptoms.
the SFRY to developing the already (relatively) wealthy areas of the ground for a re-emergence of the classes in He tried to reconcile Marxism and
country, with the less developed areas offering both internal and Yugoslavia, especially the red bourgeoisie. psychoanalysis, arguing that neurosis is
external Gastarbeiter. p. 193 Moore notes, for instance, the claim that There is a saying in Yugoslavia that goes: rooted in the physical, sexual, economic
there is no intention in holding anywhere back to assist the undevel- the snow falls on the hills, not to cover them and social conditions of the patient, and
oped areas has found expression in the general preference for but to show the tracks of the animals. The promoted adolescent sexuality, the availabil-
external nance as opposed to any distribution of Yugoslav funds.8 June [1968] version of this saying was: The ity of contraceptives, abortion and divorce,
barricade is not there to block the street but and the importance of economic independ-
Self-management itself was not exempt from this process; for
to show who is on the other side. For the ence for women. Reich took on the idea that
instance, research by Professor Rudolf Biconic into the agendas of students, workers and peasants of Yugoslavia Freud rejected, that the libido represented a
workers councils showed that in the less developed republics the importance of the June insurrection was physical energy, further arguing that he had
questions of canteen, toilet and working conditions predominated, precisely in unveiling their class enemies. [...] discovered a primordial cosmic energy. He
whilst in more advanced republics general plant policy, issues such as It would be mistaken, however, to limit called it orgone, and the study of it orgonomy.
expansion and prices formed the agenda items.9 From this its easy the results of the liberalization measures to Reich fled Germany following the Hitlers
to gather that exploitation was harsher in some areas than others. these negative phenomena. The fact is that to rise to power in 1933 and ultimately settled in
carry out their economic reforms, the League the USA, where in 1947 he had a fallout with
So we can see that the Yugoslavia of the late 1960s was marked
of Communists was forced to institute FDA because of his orgon theory. He died of
by inequality, an imbalance between country and city, and integration democratic reforms. What the League called heart failure in prison.
into the global market. In this sense, it certainly doesnt t Kaganov- self-management, i.e., the decentralization
ich or Kotkins denition of socialism as state autarchy. But does the of low-level economic decisions, was in the
SFRY in these lms t a wider denition of socialism as solidarity, beginning interpreted by the working class Saint-Just
communality, collective life and labour? It seems more likely that the as a giant increase in their responsibility and
Black Waves main interest was with certain major exceptions - in freedom in comparison with their earlier The revolutionaries who perform the revo-
Stalinist experience. lution only half-way are digging their own
presenting a Yugoslavia that t neither denition. Its arguable that
The working people of Yugoslavia graves. as quoted in Early Works
this pit it against the iconography of previous socialist lm of, say, could not help but hope that self-management
the afrmationist montage-symphonies of labour and technology in meant that they, and not a particular clique,
Dziga Vertovs The Eleventh Year (1928) or Enthusiasm, Symphony of would take the basic social and economic Schulz, Charles M.
the Donbas (1931), or Joris Ivens Magnitogorsk lm Komsomol Song decisions.
of the Heroes (1932) but it is equally clear that the critique is made Out of this hope was born a new (November 26, 1922 February 12, 2000).
from socialist premises. These lms are essentially about the absence political current in Yugoslavia. Within the Cartoonist. Author of Peanuts, one of
Workers Councils and particularly at the the most iconic and most influential comics in
of truly socialist spaces in the socialist republic, but some come close
University this current began to take the form the history of the medium, still reprinted
to proposing what a socialist space might actually look like. But given on a daily basis. One of the recurring panels
of a political action programme for the reali-
the striking absence of certain socialist spaces from the Black Wave, zation of socialism in Yugoslavia. In June in the comic portraits Snoopy, one of the
we must begin with a lm that is outside its corpus, even given the the students of Belgrade rose up, marched main characters, is lying on the roof of his
terms capacious denition. and fought for this programme. In June the dog house, sighing I miss Sonia Henie.
enemies of socialism were unveiled for all to
The Process see. Who was on the other side of the barri-
cade? None other than the red bourgeoisie, Sexuality
the League of Communists.
Probably the most famous lm made in Yugoslavia in the 1960s was
It is well known that the sexual revolution
neither a patriotic epic by an ofcial director or a subversive or from the late 1960s and early 1970s found
black Novi Film, but a turn to the arthouse by a Hollywood exile, Reich, Wilhem its theoretical reference in Wilhelm Reichs
fusion of Marxian and Freudian ideas.
(1897 1957). Austrian-American psychiatrist Bringing together sexuality and revolution,
8 and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most Freud and Marx, in certainly not illegitimate.
Moore, p. 8. radical gures in the history of psychiatry. But what the 1960s movement for the
In 1933 he published The Mass Psychology liberation of sexuality and this is where
9
Moore, p. 16.

184 185
 Deleuze and Guattari, with their rather naive State property was transformed into social
critique of psychoanalysis, get caught in the property, the property of the entire society,
same trap as sexual revolutionaries with their where nobody was owner. Many new politi-
theoretical guru Reich overlooked was that cal institutions were formed, which mediated
the revolutionizing of sexuality is in the end between different political levels of state and
a capitalist project par excellence. It is indeed would be accelerating Lenins conception of
the historical development of capitalism that withering away of the state.
demonstrates the invalidity of the so-called Yugoslav self-management was a social
repression hypothesis (criticized by both formation which combined elements of both
Freud and Foucault). communism (introduction of different social
The tragedy of the 1960s movement relations, different types of properties, aboli-
would therefore consist in the fact that they tion of private land property, domination
did manage to produce a true act. To use of labour over capital, establishment of the
Lacans words, they showed that structures basic health, social, educational infrastructure
are not rigid (opposed to classical structural- and more access to all people) and capitalism
ism). By literally walking the streetsthey are (introduction of market elements, managerial
internally dynamic. But as every true act, this domination over workers).
one also misperceived its consequences. It was only after 1956, after the intro-
The liberation of sexuality did not duction of market reform (4-Ds: Depolitisa-
put them outside of capitalist reality. It tion, Decentralization, De-etatization and
successfully installed them at the very core Democratisation) that the capitalist elements
of the capitalist mode of production, in the started being dominant over the communist
libidinal economy. Or to use Lacans chal- and the path towards capitalist restoration
lenging remark to the revolutionary students was paved.
of Universit VIII Paris: it turned out that GK
sexual revolutionaries were merely the islands
of the very regime that they were tending to Socialist
subvert. While they were revolting, the regime SelfManagement
commented: Regardez-les jouir! (Look how
they enjoy it!). A failure, without any doubt,
but one we can learn from. Introduced in the eld of culture with the
ST economic reform in Yugoslavia in 1965. It
enabled the organisation of interest collec-
tives in the eld of culture.
Socialist SelfManagement
in Yugoslavia
Street Kids
A rst major rupture in the international Yugoslavia was not always capable to success-
workers movement. It practiced a specic fully tackle all the structural problems of the
development of socialism, later compared society. Although a good support system was
to the Chinese way. It was a critique of the established to take care of the children who
Soviet bureaucratic type of socialism. Yugo- were orphaned during the war, some children
slavian socialism claimed to politicize the were not caught by the systems safety net.
whole society and invent new political forms ilnik tackles this topic in his 1968 short lm
of participation. 'Little Pioneers'.
Despite being introduced top-down,
by ofcial ideologues and functionaries
of the League of Communists, it started Stojanovi, Lazar
with the decentralization and dispersion of
political power into smaller self-management (Belgrade, 1944). Film director, scriptwriter
units, where in the last instance workers and publicist. In the late 1960s he was an
had the formal possibility to take decisions. editor of the progressive student magazine

186 187
Vidici. His student lm Plastic Jesus hard to obstruct the communication between
was banned and he spent three years in jail students and especially between the workers
because of his anti-Titoist tendencies. and students (see interview p. 57).
The students demanded a return to
the more equal socialist path, actions against
Students the red bourgeoisie, reappearance of the
class society, and increasing inequalities, the
In the 1960s Yugoslavia was one of the most establishment of a real democracy and self-
progressive societies. Education was free, management relations, and the real autonomy
supported fully by the state budget, with of the university. Demands were commu-
special scholarships available for poor and nicated via large banners hanging from
undeveloped areas. At universities the social the faculty buildings bearing slogans such
mobility introduced by socialist Yugoslavia as: Students, workers and peasants unite
was most visible. Until the 1968 protests, it against the bureaucrats, Tomorrow without
was assumed that students should take up those who sold yesterday, Down with the
an active role in the everyday political and red bourgeoisie, Show a bureaucrat that
cultural aspects of society. LCY as well as he is incapable and he will quickly show you
many student and youth organisations were what he is capable of, More schools, fewer
present at the faculties. cars, and Brotherhood and equality for all
Studying from employment the people in Yugoslavia. The League of
(continuing the education in order to advance Communists of Yugoslavia promptly started
professionally, while already employed) was organising reactions to prevent students from
also supported, as it was well in line with the gaining popular support. Some days into
paradigm of continuous education that was the unrest, on June 6, students addressed
one of the corner stones of the social policy. the following open letter to the workers of
Yugoslavia: We are not ghting for our own
material interests. We are enraged by the
Student protests, June 1968 enormous social and economic differences in
society. We do not want the working class to
Started on June 2, in the student quarters be sacriced for the sake of the reforms.
in New Belgrade, following the commotion We are for self-management, but against the
about a lm screening that was not open to enrichment of those who depend on and
all students. The next day, June 3, three to control the working class. We will not permit
four thousands student began a 10-km march workers and students to be divided and
to downtown Belgrade, where the faculty turned one against the other. Your interests
buildings were situated. About midway and our interests are the same, ours are the
the students were halted by the police and real interests of socialism. They hoped that
clashes ensued. some broader unity would be established
However, during the following days, between students and workers.
students managed to cross the river and On June 10, when the crisis reached
occupy some of the faculty buildings, most its tipping point, president Tito surprised the
notably the faculties of Philosophy and nation by supporting the students Action
Sociology. From the occupied faculty of Programme. Students celebrated their victory
Philosophy the occupation of other faculties by storming out of the faculties, as their
was organised and coordinated. Committees movement had suddenly gained a semi-legal
for the elaboration of students demands, status. Titos move effectively de-activated
political agitation and propaganda, and for the possibility of the mass movement and
the construction of student-worker unity most faculties followed the instructions given
were established and a students Action by the authorities that they should focus
Programme was drafted. Students at the other on student organisation at faculties, except 'Student Protests, June 1968'
universities in Yugoslavia also started joining the students of the faculties of Philosophy Riot police on the streets of Belgrade in elimir ilnik's
in the protests, but the police were working and Sociology, that continued, together with June Movements

188 189
interested students from other faculties, to Our documentaries practically dont have any
audience other than the ones in festival halls.
Tom Segment of pop culture was not
construct a radical critical position towards Making for that audience lms on socially weak existing; media were poor, newspapers
society as a whole. They justied their claim groups is malice, because they cant relate to Experimental, rebellious lmmaker and one channelled, TV program informative.
for a new type of critical university linked to them in any other way than as a good fun. artist from the bottom of the social ladder. Attempt to build one Yugoslav cultural
the working class by disputing the role of the We reject to continue making and supporting In constant conflict with the ruling system space that would be thrilled by different
lms that will ideologically relax the audience; it
League of Communists as the avant-garde of socialist Yugoslavia. Travels without a ideas, disturbed local buearocrats who
needs to be scared, annoyed, spat at. And that
of the working class. They claimed that the can be possible only when/if in front of the lens penny from Zagreb to Belgrade in pursuit of entailed internationalism of communist
League of Communists was restoring capital- is put the new emerging civil class, its exploita- lmmaking. Somehow manages to survive ideology from one side, and anti-fascism from
ism in Yugoslavia. tive role and moral misery. with the help of women. Film material is the other. Those structures started to close
Afraid of the effect of these claims, the Only those lms can today be a Toms only passion in life. Yet he is being themselves in the frame of regional-social-
barometer of freedom and creative range of our
police closed the faculties on July 20 and the lm. Our goal is to show that those who bear
watched by the people in power. In the end ism, that ilnik perceives as one of causes
faculties were expelled from the LCY. As a responsibility for our future dont have anything he moves in with a girl, which ends tragically. of future breakup of country.
result of the protests, universities were given with quasi-ideological fanaticism of our social She kills him in a t of jealousy.
the autonomy students were seeking, and the lms they cleared away with ideological BF
space for more autonomous student culture consciousness long time ago and they are guided
by the principles of power, principles of prot,
Troll
was established, most notably through student principles of success. Tri (1965)
(cultural) centres. However, during the 1970s dear general,
and later, students became isolated within 3 Three is a black and white feature lm
their institutions and had a diminished impact The newest manipulation of our lm directed by ivojin Pavlovi and written by dont worry were from the internet. from the
situation is also the thesis on the young Yugoslav
on the transformation of society, that was, lm. There is no such lm. Those who are
Antonije Isakovi. Cinematography is by future. anonymous advisers.
especially after the bureaucratic revolution declared young are already way passed into Tomislav Pinter and it has been edited by our consultancy is direct and unrelent-
in 1972 and re-Stalinisation of the country middle age, but much worse than that is their Mirjana Miti. The cast includes Velimir ing. you will not hear what you yearn for. you
that ensued, increasingly becoming techno- total afliation to the existing production rela- Bata ivojinovi and Stole Aranelovi. are rigid. and you dont have sense of humor.
tions and obedient identication with the
cratic, consumerist and market driven. Produced by Avala lm it has won the 1965 you have power.
surrounding they come from.
On this festival there is neither an
Golden Arena for Best Actor and Best your power and rigidity turn you into
author nor the lm willing to take and bear the Director at Pula Film Festival of Yugoslav the material suitable for sculptures. sculptors
This festival is a cemetary risk greater than the risk allowed. In a relation to Films and was nominated for the 1967 Oscar are invaders. and like sun tzu teaches us: you
the world young lm our, so called, young cine- for the best Foreign Language Film at the must use the path of an invader.
matography is directly reactionary and repre-
Title of an open letter addressed to the Academy Awards. let me tell you story about barbra stre-
sents only continuous reproduction of the old,
lmmakers and festival visitors and signed by evil well known relations in Yugoslav non- isand. rst, a little bit of history, in your case:
by elimir ilnik, Bogdan Tirnani, Slobodan selfmanaged cinematography. a little bit of future. soon, people will be able
Mai, Prvoslav Mari and Petar Volk. Tribina mladih to send texts, images, sounds and videos to
4 each other without any delay all around the
If we dont want to continue enjoying in our own
1 rot, that is already seriously starting to stink, the
(Youth Tribune) Founded in 1954 as the world. thats what we, from the future, call
Attacks forced and organized from the outside Youth Department of the Peoples Univer- internet.
next festival must be organized by completely
on the loyal-critical lm experienced a total
different principles. sity that was established in the same year. in 2003 barbra streisand will try to
moral collapse, and today, in a situation that is
Beside projections in this hall, we Tribina mladih was the rst open, cultural, stop kenneth adelman from publishing a
just seemingly different, everyone rushes to
demand for projections for the people. Alongside
become a protagonist or a proponent of the so youth center in territory of Yugoslavia, where photo of her house. at that moment in reality
the lms of producers that for short lm get
called engaged lm that is becoming dominant
social subvention and are not interested in were organized diverse debates, lectures and just few hundred people would see the photo.
fashion of our always civilly constituted cinema- exhibitions. That was the place where, for soon after that, due to her celebrity status,
making any breakthroughs, a works of independ-
tography. From all sides we are flooded with
information about how the lowest strata of our
ent, personal and informal production, lms on the rst time, were challenged some ques- many will publish the news about her attempt
16mm and 8mm should be shown. tions about ideologically rigid society, which and as a result more than half a million
society lives, but no one wants to explain us why
they live that way, as in that case, one would have people were living in. people will get to see the photo in the follow-
5
to face the question: who rules our lives.
This festival is a cemetery. On this festival every- The main idea of Tribina mladih was ing month. she didnt use the path of an
New wave of this quasi-engaged lm is contained in its own title - open Tribina,
thing is a tomb next to a tomb, including of invader, of anonymous sculptor.
only satised when, in a search for the details of
life that would formally conrm its fake social
course signatories of this declarations. discussion versus academic, ex-cathedra, one that is why when the sculptor wishes
7. III 1971. channeling principle. Because of its critical for cannons facing each other during the
courage, nds that more picturesque wretch
willing to convincingly languish in front of the discourse, Tribina mladih was derogated lming: use the path of invader. calm down.
camera. We are refusing to understand this many times, but one fact remains that it and youll be ne.
sudden concern of the lm caste as anything
other than the new type of faking.
Tirnani, Bogdan created unique ambient in Novi Sad these dont feed the art with rigidity and
years. It was meeting point for intellectuals power. get the sense of humor. or in the
2 (Belgrade, 1941 - Belgrade, 2009). from Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade future history will mock you.
Films want to continue resembling Journalist, essayist, lm critic. Acted in and Skopje, especially when magazine Polja
the eld reports. But reports to whom? Early Works. was in question. anonymous

190 191
 Udoviki, Svetozar educated engineers or other professionals;
2) in Western Europe, usually Germany and
First director of the Neoplanta lm produc- Switzerland, in various positions ranging from
tion house who opened the door of the young factory workers to nurses, often referred to as
production house to the Black Wave lm. gstarbeiters (German for guest worker).
Following the attack on the Black
Wave and the shift of Neoplanta's production
towards partisan spectacles in 1972, he ceased Ustanak u Jasku
to be a director and was subsequently red
only to return a decade later to attempt to Uprise in Jasak (1973) A documentary short
solve the problems the company has ended up written and directed by elimir ilnik with
in while producing the failed partisan specta- cinematography by Milivoje Milivojevi
cle 'Large Transport' that turned out and edited by Kaa Stojanovi. Produced by
to be a flop as well as a completely misman- Panlm, Panevo.
aged enterprise. In the lm the inhabitants of Jasak, a
village in Vojvodina, Serbia, narrate how they
contributed to the anti-fascist struggle during
Uloga moje porodice u the second world war. The lm was ilnik's
svetskoj revoluciji response to the partisan spectacles of the
time, more specically to the partisan spec-
tacle the 'Large transport' being produced by
The Role of My Family in the World Revo- Neoplanta at the time.
lution (1971) is a colour feature lm written
by Bato engi, Bora osi and Branko See essay by Owen Hatherley, p. 179
Vuievi, directed by Bato engi with
cinematography by Karpo Godina and edited
by Vuksan Lukovi. The cast includes Milena Vidovdan
Dravi, Dragan Nikoli, Milivoje Tomi,
Danilo Bata Stojkovi and Mija Aleksi. The Surng the Black conference was held
Produced by Bosna Film, Sarajevo. at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht
on June 28, 2010 and that cannot have been a
coincidence. Anyone who has lived in Yugo-
Unemployed slavia will immediately know that this is a
(Men and Women) mythical date, the date generally referred
to as Vidovdan, St. Vitus day, the date that
condenses the entire Yugoslav history and the
The self-management and market socialism fate of this ill-doomed country. St. Vitus was
that Yugoslavia chose meant that it was not a Christian saint from Sicily who died in 303
possible to solve unemployment by articially during the anti-Christian purges conducted by
raising quotas as happened in socialist coun- the Roman Emperor Diocletianus.
tries with a planned economy. Already in the His day is celebrated on June 15 acco-
mid-1960s, after the economical reforms in ording to the Gregorian calendar and on June
1965, unemployment had become an acute 28 in the places, such as Serbia, where the
problem. To solve it, the state had to open the old Julian calendar is still used as far as the
borders and export the unemployed. Special orthodox church is concerned. So let me give
ofces were established within ofcial state you a brief history of Yugoslavia in eight
employment bureaus that would help people quick and easy lessons, all centered around
nd work placement abroad. this simple leitmotiv.
There were two types of work place- Lesson one. On June 28, 1389 the
ment available: 1) in friendly non-aligned Serbian army suffered a great defeat at the
countries, usually in Africa and the Middle battle of Kosovo. The battle was fought on
East, in government institutions as what was Kosovo Polje, a eld only a few miles away
called technical assistants, usually highly from Prishtina, the present capital of Kosovo.

192 193
The Turks were at the time making their hitherto divided between two empires, the Lesson seven. On June 28, 2001 music, that plays a really important part in
progress through the Balkans, encircling Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian one. For Slobodan Miloevi, having lost the elections this lm, they were awarded at the Belgrade
Byzantium, Constantinopolis, which they better or worse. the previous year and toppled from power, Festival of Short and Documentary Film,
would eventually capture half a century Lesson four. On June 28, 1921 the was extradited to the Hague Tribunal for which motivated them to continue compos-
later. The Serbian feudal lords had then some newly formed country of Yugoslavia proudly war criminals. The date was most carefully ing for lm and, later, television. They also
swerve and independence and the biggest of passed its rst constitution, generally referred chosen. continued to collaborate with Karpo Godina.
them was prince Lazar who was leading the to as the Vidovdan Constitution. Its central- Lesson eight. On June 28, 2010 the In 1977 they formed a band, Laboratorija
Serb army and was famously killed during ist provisions, in a multi-national country, Surng the black conference at the Jan zvuka (Sound Laboratory).
the battle, as was the sultan Murad I who led already announced the troubles to come, and van Eyck Academie started. This is the
the Turks allegedly he was assassinated by a the troubles didnt wait long to come. The celebration of, and the reflection upon, one
young Serbian nobleman, Milo Obili. constitution was short-lived. In January of the great things that Yugoslavia should Vuievi, Branko
It was a erce battle, with huge losses on both 1929 king Alexander annulled the constitu- be remembered by, something that falls
sides, and Serbia did not recuperate from the tion which installed him as the monarch and into an entirely different category than the (Belgrade, 1934). Author, translator and
defeat. introduced dictatorship to set things right. gory history of calamities epitomized by scriptwriter, man in the background of many
This defeat was immediately turned Only to be assassinated in his turn a few this date. The courageous and lucid movies of the Black Wave lms and creative advisor
into the stuff of myths, folktales and songs, years later. that a bunch of young Yugoslav lmmakers for many authors. He collaborated closely
extolling the bravery and the martyrdom of Lesson ve. On June 28, 1948 the produced in the sixties and the early seventies with Duan Makavejev, Karpo Godina and
the Serbs, so that Kosovo was retroactively Cominform, the body which after WWII took are as far removed from the great histori- elimir ilnik both on developing ideas for
seen as the cradle of Serbia and its loss relay from the Comintern (dissolved during cal events and their glorication as possible. the scripts and also behind the camera. He
came to epitomize its doom and sacrice, the war), proclaimed the notorious resolution If anything, they blatantly de-glorify. They can be seen in lm 'I Miss Sonia Henie' as
the trauma around which the Serbian cause which banned the Yugoslav Communist party rather offer us a tool through which to undo the main interlocutor between the local crew
was formed. Indeed what followed was 500 from the community of Soviet led communist this calamitous history of heroes and victims, and international directors.
years of Ottoman rule during which the parties. The Cominform leaders must have and if there is a claim to history, then only He refers to himself as a kind of
Kosovo battle was seen as the inspiration for fully realized the symbolic value of this date through the keen view of harsh realities, the sleeping member of Fluxus, and he should
the rebellion and the movements of national to make their impact, and they must have intelligence, the wit, the subtle reflection, the be credited for spreading the knowledge
renewal, the mythical motor for the strife for hugely underestimated and misunderstood its formal invention, the will to experiment and about the movement in Yugoslavia. In the
political independence, with Serbia as the ambiguous message. This was a virtual decla- the courage. This is Yugoslavia at its blackest 1990s, during the wars in Yugoslavia, he
grand hero and the grand victim in one. The ration of war on Tito, a ruler deemed too and its brightest. coined the (deeply disturbing) term Serbian
Turkish rule only ended in the Balkan wars independent for the Stalinist view, but who MD cutting refering to the special type of editing
preceding the WW1. The core of the Kosovo would not concede defeat. Thus Yugoslavia used in Serbian lm.
problem, which caused so much havoc in the at that point was forced to start on its own Village Fair
past decades and continues to ignite more, way to socialism, under constant threats from
stretches back to that date. the Soviet bloc countries and walking the thin The villages did not experience the fast Vujanovi, Milja
Lesson two. As fate would have it, on line of a balance act. This was the beginning modernisation and urbanisation processes
June 28, 1914 a young Serbian called Gavrilo of what was to be the Yugoslav path, with that Yugoslavia was undergoing. While in (Belgrade, 1945 - Belgrade, 2005). Actress
Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz the emphatic twin slogans of workers self- urban surroundings much attention was and the most beautiful woman in Yugo-
Ferdinand, the heir to Austrian throne, in the management and the non-alignment in the paid to the development of cultural life and slavia in 1967. She was the rst actress
streets of Sarajevo. This event notoriously foreign policy. For the better for the worse. infrastructure, villages were left to make do to appear nude in Yugoslavia, in the lm
triggered WWI, it is the date which symboli- Lesson six. On June 28, 1989 there with the more populist forms of entertain- Early Works. In interviews after the lm
cally inaugurated the bloodbath of the twen- was the celebration of the 600th anniversary ment and the village fair became a symbol of she proudly claimed I will bare all in lms
tieth century. This was another empire, and a of the Kosovo battle. That was the biggest a non-urban surroundings and culture, often again!. Allegedly, the prize for the best
new incarnation of Milo Obili in a re-enact- mass rally in Yugoslav history, and the man looked down upon by the cities. actress was not given at the 1969 Berlinale,
ment striking at the core of the empire. This presiding over this colossal commemora- because the jury couldnt decide to award it
time it worked, the empire eventually indeed tion was Slobodan Miloevi. He presented to her or to Geraldine Chaplin.
crumbled. himself as the man who would now vindicate Vraneevi, Predrag
Lesson three. On June 28, 1919 the the fateful history of that day, even more, the and Mladen
Versailles Treaty was signed, exactly on man who would now nally win the Kosovo W.R. Misterije
the fth anniversary of the Sarajevo assas- battle, lost 600 years ago, and thus set things Organizma
sination. This was the treaty that nished right. He staged himself as the hero who will Brothers from Novi Sad who started working
the WWI and one of its consequences was at long last unite all the Serbs and straighten together in 1971 when they wrote the
the creation of this new country, Yugoslavia, out Yugoslavia. The celebration in Gazimes- soundtrack for Karpo Godinas short lm W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism (1971) is a
gathering for the rst time in the same tan, on Kosovo Polje, was his nest hour, his 'Litany for Happy People' with lyrics by the feature lm written and directed by Duan
state the Southern Slavs who have been claim to historical grandeur. poet and musician Branko Andri. For the Makavejev with cinematography by Predrag

194 195
 Popovi and Aleksandar Petkovi and edited the much needed public infrastructure (roads,
by Ivanka Vukasovi. The cast includes railways) necessary for the countrys modern-
Milena Dravi, Jagoda Kaloper, Ivica isation. Public buildings and industrial infra-
Vidovi, Zoran Radmilovi, Miodrag Andri, structure were built as well.
Tuli Kupferberg, Jacke Curstis, ivka Mati, YWAs were organised on local,
Nikola Mili, Dragoljub Ivkov and Milan republic and federal levels by the Young
Jeli. Produced by Neoplanta. Communist League of Yugoslavia. The youth
The lm was banned in Yugoslavia was organised in the youth work brigades.
upon its release and was one of the triggers They worked hard, but a lot of cultural activi-
for the big shift in artistic direction of ties were organised also. Although more
Neoplanta. common after the war, the rst YWA were
organised during WWII in the territories
liberated by Yugoslav partisans.
Warsaw Pact Invasion on
Czechoslovakia
Yugonostalgia
Took place in the night of August 2021, Comes from below and could be seen as a
1968, when the Soviet Union and its main form of passive resistance to the capitalist
satellite states (Bulgaria, GDR, Hungary and transition, extreme nationalism and the
Poland) invaded CZ in order to halt Alexan- recent wars in the Balkans. Yugonostalgia
der Dubeks Prague Spring political liberali- adheres to the idea of the good old times, a
zation reforms. Happening just after the May positive image of socialist Yugoslavia in the
68 student protests, this invasion had a world and of the idealized great leader Tito.
poignant resonance, especially in Yugoslavia. Instead of demonization of the past we
encounter the nave idealization that invents
the past that did not really exist. This type of
Youth in 1950s memory is much more polyvalent and critical
and 1960s than anti-totalitarian memory, it is not an
ofcial state ideology.
Yugonostalgic motivations and forms
The generation born during or just after are multiple, but they do not always exclude
WWII was seen in Yugoslavia as the most the nationalistic memory or remain on the
important part of the population and should level of lamentation. Most often Yugonostal-
be given an opportunity to develop in ways gic practices are placed under older patriotic
its parents generation never could. The ideas claim of brotherhood and unity, or
of social equality and the communitys demand a more authoritarian politics. None-
engagement in everyday life was enhanced theless the political effects and the cultural
through various common activities and translation of Yugonostalgic accounts most
education. often turns into escapism and
There was infrastructure, culture commodication of memory.
houses, camps and workshops. However, they GK
were much more present in urban than rural
areas, and village youth was often forgotten Yugoslavia
and left to fend for itself, which increased the
gap between those who decided to move to When mentioned in this book, Yugoslavia
the cities and those who stayed in rural areas. usually refers to the second Yugoslavia, that
was formed during WWII and the peoples
liberation in 1943. During the course of
Youth Work Action its existence, the second Yugoslavia bore
three names: Democratic Federal Yugosla-
Organised voluntary labour activities of the via (1943), Federal Peoples Republic of
youth of Yugoslavia, usually used to build Yugoslavia (1946), and, the most commonly

196 197
198 199
known, Socialist Federal Republic of Zdravi ljudi za zabavu Orson Welles. In his adaptation of Kafkas The Trial, largely shot in
Yugoslavia (1963). Yugoslavia consisted and around Zagreb (with some excursions to Paris) and released in
of six republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Litany of Happy People (1971) is a color 1962, Welles created some of the most striking images of the tower
Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and documentary short written, directed, shot
block landscapes now regarded, somewhat contentiously, as
Slovenia) and two autonomous provinces and edited by Karpo A. Godina with a
(Vojvodina and Kosovo). soundtrack by Pea and Bata Vraneevi aka
typically socialist and eastern.10 Anthony Perkins Joseph K lives
Laboratorija zvuka. Produced by Neoplanta. in a typically neat and ordered open-plan apartment, with deck-
The idea to make this lm came up access outside, where he has unnerving, nervous amorous encoun-
Yugoslav lm industry when Godina and ilnik were location- ters with his drunken neighbour. The concrete and steel architecture
scouting for ilniks rst feature lm Early erected around the outskirts of Zagreb, particularly along the
Inspired by the early period of the Soviet Works. frequently renamed postwar boulevard now named after the town
Union, soon after the war Yugoslavia started
of Vukovar, provided Welles with an alienating new landscape to
to found and invest in lm production. See Essay by Boris Buden, p.169
One of the motivations was to document
play with, a particularly thorough and unadulterated essay in
and show the process of modernisation that Corbusian planning, the equal of anything else in Europe, providing
the country was undergoing. Due to that ilnik, elimir a mute, threatening backdrop to Perkins plaints and panics.
ideological decision rather soon a network of The most memorable of these location shots takes place in a
well-equipped lm studios was established in (Ni, 1942). Youth spent in political Zagreb housing estate, where K, leaving his flat, walks along the
the capital cities of all republics, as well as an work, edited Youth Tribune and paths between massive, long Unites dHabitation, to nd an old
amateur network of cinema clubs. Polja and made amateur lms. Made
woman dragging along a clearly cripplingly heavy suitcase, scraping
ve documentaries and one feature
lm. Tried but never convicted. Military
along the asphalt paths and the expanses of edifying greenery. She
Yugoslav training successfully accomplished, often angrily rebukes all his attempts to help her, as if they were
commended. Loves life. Lives in Novi Sad. somehow impertinent. In this brief scene, Welles sketches out, not
Peoples Army
(Biography from 1971. Promo material for without wit, some of the stereotypical ideas of what the kind of
Black Film) Modernist planning favoured by the Socialist Federal Republic of
Has its origins in the Yugoslav partisan Yugoslavia does to people. The buildings are looming, baffling,
struggle during WWII. They were part of the
with the spaces between them indeterminate and treacherous; even
antifascist Peoples Liberation War of
Yugoslavia and came into being in the town
simple acts of human kindness are distrusted here. What makes
of Rudo on December 22, 1941 under the this critique of a modernist landscape so interesting as a contrast
name Peoples Liberation Army of Yugosla- with the black wave is the conspicuous absence of these spaces
via. After the Yugoslav Partisans liberated from most of the works made by the Novi Films directors. Rather
Yugoslavia from the Axis Power, PLAY was than dwelling on the problems created or otherwise by socialistic
renamed the Yugoslav Army, and in 1951 the rehousing programmes, the lms of Makavajev, ilnik, Petrovi
qualier Peoples was added.
and others concentrate on collapsing villages, overcrowded early
20th-century tenements, homelessness or shanty towns, with mud
Zastava lm rather than concrete assumed to be the main source of social ills.
Perhaps this absence is political, an omission dictated by a
Film production department of the Yugoslav refusal to assent in the propaganda showcases of the regime,
Peoples Army. Filmmakers serving obliga- stressing the embarrassing persistence of grinding and usually
tory army duty would often be appointed to rural poverty in the context of a massive modernising project. Its
Zastava lm and produce lms during their
also just possible this depiction of picturesque Balkan misery is
military service.
what endeared them to awards judges in Berlin or Cannes, who
always enjoy local colour and folksy proletarian grotesques. In the

10
For further reading on Welles Trial, see the
articles by Mladen Dolar, Alexander Garcia
Duttmann and Peter Szendy collected in the
Zagreb journal Frakcija, issue 53/4.

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most politically and historically self-conscious of these works in the original is the best known of these lms, an occasionally
Makavajevs Switchboard Operator and WR Mysteries of the shocking, unrelenting and partially ethnographic depiction of a
Organism another modernist, socialist project is remembered and Romany community in Sombor, Vojvodina. First of all, this is
ambiguously continued, the attempts to transform what the early clearly an economy untouched by anything which could be
Soviet avant-garde called Byt, or everyday life, considered in its described as socialism, based on fairly desperate small-time
most grimly mundane form, as a hard to eradicate remnant of trading and graft. This isnt due to this being some sort of enclave
pre-revolutionary moralities and conformities. Many of them of petty capitalism, though as one of them comments, a crooked
considered architecture as a means of transforming Byt, gypsy or a crooked worker, whats the difference? The state exists
something which, as we have seen, was attempted especially mainly to reprimand the characters though here the gypsies have
seriously in the collective housing briefly popular in the late 1920s good proletarian instincts, responding to a police visit with a curt
- which provided an obvious architectural precedent to the refusal to give any evidence. In terms of the landscape, we do see
Modernism of Welles Zagreb. The lms of the black wave show glimpses of small-town Hapsburg elegance and a skyline of factory
an attentiveness both to a modernising but far from modernist chimneys in the distance in Sombor, but mostly the depiction is of
landscape, and the extremely ambiguous attempts to eradicate Byt tiny, practically prehistoric shacks, with minuscule windows and
from this landscape, which frequently condemns or patronises thatched roofs, just a few decades and a lot of money short of
rather than attempting to seriously engage with the legacy of what becoming theme-park tourist attractions when their residents are
Marx and Engels called rural idiocy; but what they do not appear swept out; and then theres the utterly ubiquitous mud, through
to critique is the socialist project of modernisation as such. which the characters trudge, often fully aware of the grimness of
their fate; as one peripheral character exclaims, here there is
I am entertaining myself in this wasteland! practically nothing but mud!
Belgrade, as a dream and reality of the big city, is not much
To catch a particularly relentless and unnerving glimpse of the better for the lms protagonists. They may dream of it, watching it
kinds of spaces that Welles Zagreb tried to replace, the mid-1960s on the televisions that one character is reduced to recurring, comic
lms of Aleksandar Petrovi are particularly instructive. Here, both attempts to pawn at one point we see it on screen as a swinging
the built and natural environment are brutally unforgiving, without 60s utopia of skyscrapers, beat groups, twanging guitars, girls on
being brutalist in the architectural sense. This can be found as Vespas and fresh-faced dancing youth which Petrovi quickly cuts
early as Three, Petrovis 1965 panoramic Second World War in with locals bouncing around cheerfully in the mud-tracks between
drama, although naturally it deals with a pre-revolutionary the houses. Yet for the young woman who does briefly escape, the
landscape, but one which, as the site of partisan struggles can be capital is a shanty town even worse than the shacks in Sombor, and
considered as the crucible in which a socialist consciousness was in one brief scene, a carceral tenement block whose staircases she
formed. The rst and second of the three vignettes are especially attempts to serenade with gypsy songs for cash. Aside from the
interesting in this regard in the rst, we have a peasant mob who likelihood that the gypsies shacks would have by now become a
rst show enough bravery and solidarity to raid and loot a tourist attraction, there is nothing in this lm that suggests we are in
consignment of military supplies, and then minutes later they anything other than an entirely capitalist, developing country.
wilfully condemn an innocent man to death by ring squad solely In the subsequent lm, released abroad as It Rains in My
because they noted he wasnt from round here and hence was Village but best rendered literally as The End of the World Is Nigh,
obviously the fth column. In the second and central part of the questions associated with the 1920s Communist avant-garde are
lm we nd an awesome and terrifying landscape of rocky investigated in a very different way to the lms of Duan Makavajev,
outcrops, marshland and ubiquitous slurry, which two lost as we shall see later. The landscape is centred around a ruin, a large
partisans attempt to traverse, followed by a far better equipped SS gutted church, and we see a remarkably Edwardian looking wedding
brigade. The landscape is as much their enemy as the Nazis, and in the introduction yet this time-warp appearance is supercial,
Petrovi frequently uses dazzling aerial tracking shots to depict it, a and a couple of minutes later we nd someone wandering around in
Luftwaffes eye view, of something vast and bitterly inhumane. front of a Pepsi insignia. So far, we could be in 1960s Greece,
This becomes much more pointed in the slightly later colour Turkey, anywhere else in southern Europe that exports Gastarbeiter.
lms of rural life in the Socialist Federal Republic, their titles And again, there is mud, mud everywhere, and picturesque
usually rendered in English as I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) and folksiness in this case via the bitter, apocalyptic songs sung with
It Rains in My Village (1968). Happy Gypsies or The Feather Buyer, gusto by the local band.

202 203
 This changes when a real city girl enters, a painter, special- ilniks Early Works (1969), where the young Communists are
ising in vaguely Latin American magic realism with a line in flying literally dragged through the mud, beaten and abused, for their
pigs, a mannered peasant style, who arrives to teach in the village rather less immediately patronising, but equally disconnected
school. Her rhetoric, or at least her phraseology, is socialist shes attempts to bring revolutionary culture to the peasantry. I am
the rst person in the lm to call anyone comrade, and straight- happy, comments one, that peasants will no longer exist after
away gets her arse ogled for her trouble. She soon takes a pictur- Communism. Accordingly, for all their moments of solidarity
esque peasant lover, the pretty but unsophisticated Trisha, who against outsiders, there is no sense that these rural spaces could be
she jilts as soon as he becomes serious about her in the no doubt remotely socialist and any Party visitors begin with that
somewhat simplied English translation, she curtly says you assumption.
peasants are interesting, but not for long. Although in another A later lm of ilniks challenges this in an only partly
directors hands her frank sexuality would be vitalised into an parodic fashion. Uprising in Jazak (1973) asks the surviving villagers
earthy, rustic life-force, here it is something rather malevolent, a in an area whose partisans were especially committed and success-
nihilism that accords with Alexandra Kollontais (misattributed) ful in the antifascist struggle to, in the contemporary parlance,
Glass of Water theory of sexual intercourse, later referenced in re-enact their actions, which the now-ageing partisans embark
WR. This is soon reversed, as the painter receives her comeup- upon in a gleefully untrained, yet theatrical fashion its Socialist
pance at the hands of another character fond of vaguely socialistic Realism of a particularly warped sort, an upbeat lm about heroic
rhetoric. In this sense, for all its surrealism, the lm is rather close revolutionary deeds, but which prioritises real people describing
to Stalinist orthodoxy, for all its ostensible non-conformism a real events, and takes its power and pathos from that, evoking both
sexually honest woman is perdious, her politics a mere cover for Eisensteins use of non-actors playing themselves in his collectivi-
her wantonness, and any meeting of intellectuals and peasants is sation lm The General Line, and the Proletcult promise of
necessarily exploitative; though in this, it is at least more unex- workers creating their own forms; except the directorial eye is more
pected than Makavejevs Marxist-Feminist heroines. quizzical than that suggests. Like the villagers of The End of the
A pilot who flies a crop-spraying plane crashes in the village, World Is Nigh, they speak in amazed terms about their amazed rst
bringing to it the dynamism of modernity later, an increasingly encounters with aeroplanes, though this time its the planes of the
unstable Trisha tattoos a plane onto his chest. The pilot is explic- Nazi occupiers, and their task is to shoot them down. The villagers
itly embarking on a war upon nature, an attempt to subjugate it to are clearly enormously excited by the task of describing their
human will; he and the painter share some contempt for the earth deeds, which makes their actions and re-enactments, on a tiny
and all it entails, and have a brief affair, which here soon ends in budget and with inadequate props, feel sometimes absurd.
much the same cynical manner as she does her previous dalliance. One question that comes to mind, though, looking at this
What is interesting here is that the villagers problem with the pilot village, is what has the revolution done for them? Were still in
is not that he is disrupting their age-old life, altering their crops, mud and dilapidated dwellings (the former is referenced by one old
worrying their sheep and so forth; but the fact that he gets to fly woman as a soft place to hide from the Fascists), and the fact that
around and they do not. the only people we see are the ageing, poor villagers means that
In a pivotal scene, Party representatives, carrying pictures of Jazak appears as a place from which all young people have disap-
Che, Tito and Lenin, turn up to literally remind them of their peared, a place condemned to die. That said, the lm ends in
vanguards existence; after the initial query of what are you doing ambiguous afrmation, with socialism symbolised in ambiguous
here in this wasteland? the villagers demand that every village socialist realist style through a tractor, expropriated from the Nazi
should have a plane! and mutter angrily about the red occupiers. This is surely (albeit affectionate) parody, with ilnik
bourgeoisie they dont fear modernity, they desire it, and are visibly grinning from behind the camera. The solidarity of Jazaks
bitterly discontented by its absence. Much as Petrovi revels in the partisans is still very palpable, and in that sense it is a socialist
customs, songs and general local colour, he shows a relentlessly space but whether the village has really been transformed by
miserable landscape in terms both of the buildings and the socialism is another, less easily answered question. Nonetheless,
countryside they sit in and a people desperate to leave, itching to Uprising in Jazak is a frankly endearing reminder that, as Raymond
escape. Yet as the farcical election that ends the lm makes clear, Williams put it, contra the anti-peasant strains in Marxism, the
they remain entirely peripheral. The contempt for the peasantry rural idiots and the barbarians and semi-barbarians have been,
and for the muddy wastes of the countryside recurs in elimir for the last forty years, the main revolutionary force in the world.

204 205
 Eliminating the Vermin through, largely unobserving, is one where privileged bosses cajole
workers out of strikes via promises of entertainment (against
Vermin, almost as much as mud, is a recurring motif of these lms, whom are you striking? This is a workers state, he reminds them),
most obviously in the personal cataclysm catalogued in ivojin where new flats exist, but where we only see their interior, private
Pavlovis ttingly named The Rats Woke Up (1967), where, as in spaces, and where army manoeuvres and socialist rhetoric are both
Makavejevs The Switchboard Operator the same year, the dispatch of largely for show. Money is paramount in one scene, he meets his
rodents flirts with political allegory. The lm depicts an urban, but estranged anc, now a thief, on the outskirts of Belgrade. She
still decidedly dilapidated and corrupt environment; and again, one hands him some money she has lched, and he rubs it longingly
whose socialist component is conspicuous by its absence. The lm against his cheek.
documents a crumbling early twentieth century tenement urbanism, What is particularly clear is that Jimmy Barka is treated by all
and its characters live in sweatily close proximity to each other, levels of society as a peasant, and hence as a useless element in the
giving them a means of prurient sexual surveillance a little reminis- new society, his status as a lumpen remnant stressed through the
cent of Welles Corbusian Zagreb; in one especially striking scene, a folk songs he tries to earn money by singing (badly). The workers
Piranesian communal staircase replete with Victorian ornament and disapprove, snapping at him derisively play a song for workers, not
criss-crossing washing lines is the scene of a prostitutes transac- farmers workers, you cretin, proletariat and so do the
tion. Elsewhere, there is a grimly peri-urban hinterland of factories metropolitan consumer audience. At a talent contest, he comes on
and slaughterhouses, of pornographic photos hoots in singularly after various pop turns renditions of the Monkees Daydream
depressing industrial spaces. The central character is an ordinary Believer, Chuck Berrys Memphis Tennessee and his out-of-tune
citizen on a descent into the underworld, a man who was taught folksy attempt gets him practically thrown off stage, to racialised
something for twenty years until he had to forget it in 24 hours, calls of enough with these Turks! His eventual fate, being shot in
and again, this descent takes place in a landscape which is mean, low an outhouse as a football game among the mud and barracks of his
and traditionalist, rather than dominant, large-scaled and modernist. home village takes place around him, is not presented so much as
In the telling concluding scene, we see a line of commuters wading tragedy as grim inevitability the gunshots dont even stop the
across thick mud underneath a shiny, dramatically cantilevered new game. As a portrayal of those who fell through the cracks of society,
road bridge, the modernity of which doesnt seem to have trans- of those that were superfluous waste products for both ofcial
ferred to the space below. socialism and the new incipient consumerism, the lm is horribly
Pavlovis later When I Am Dead And Pale takes a sweeping convincing. But as a panoramic picture of a society, When I am Dead
view across Yugoslav society, starting from another muddy village and Pale is so relentlessly bleak that the Party ideologists case that
and progressing through industrial sites and new flats to the the Black Wave would efface the actual achievements of socialism
capital. Its protagonist, Jimmy Barka, has a Beatle hairdo and later from the historical record by showing only its flaws seems more
a moustache, and is caught between consumerist modernity and an sympathetic. There must surely have been more than this.
older world, and is regarded with suspicion by both for his Slightly more hope is held out in Makavajevs Man is not a
unwillingness to work. Early on, for instance we see him trying to Bird (1965), which is nonetheless the lm of his which most
get his anc a job in a laundromat (whose pristine whiteness is a resembles these trudges through muck and misery. There is much
vivid contrast with the dark wastes all around), but he himself glass smashing and folk singing, but here it is mingled with a
moves from unemployment to a semi-accidental attempt to heroine who, at least in one handbag-swinging scene, seems a
become a singer, initially of folk songs. He uses his sexuality to get Yugoslav version of Julie Christie in John Schlesingers Billy Liar, a
by, as does his partners, one of whom manages to procure him an young and effervescent woman clearly bent on escape from her
article as the hot new singer by sleeping with a newspaper critic. provincial, industrial town. But were also very far from the
Sex is strikingly commodied in the lm, a means to an end Northern English city of Schlesingers lm, as here were dealing
used by both men and women, seemingly equal and unromanticised with an industrial revolution in progress, where the monumental
but far from emancipatory several leagues away from the Reichian processes of mining and smelting take place in what is still
Sexpol of Makavajev. It takes place in a landscape of dirty rooms essentially a village, and a startlingly stunted one at that. An affair
and barracks with pornographic pictures pinned to the wall, of between her and a seemingly heroic, self-effacing and much older
shanty towns and wastelands in one especially striking scene, his socialist engineer initially promises much, but is stopped in its
anc gets dressed in a shack surrounded by old tyres, piles of tracks by proprietorial and traditional sexuality specically, in this
wood and scrap metal. The Self-Management society he moves case, the sense of the house and the family as something inviolable.

206 207
 The engineer is staying at the guesthouse owned by the 1920s; will man be remade? This then sharply cuts to an (actual)
heroines parents, and not long after they enter into an entirely lecture by an ageing, diminutive sexologist, giving what will become
consensual relationship, he is thrown out for, in a metaphorical sense, the New Left orthodoxy of the naturalness of sexuality, to be
misunderstanding a monetary transaction we let you stay in our demolished by Foucault a few years later with much glee. With a tone
house, but our daughter was not part of the deal! Throughout, this that suggests the discussion of the ner points of flora and fauna as
blasted landscape of heavy industry and flimsy housing is one of much as it does human sexuality, we are told of the freedom from
deceptive surfaces, where the heroic workers that schoolchildren are repression of other cultures, who even have a place for sex in their
shown on a tour turn out to be vicious, drunken wife-beaters, and religions, of how sexuality has always been a subject for artists, not
where a factory performance of the Ode to Joy and a coupling in a out of pleasure, mind, but out of an interest in mans environment
car are seen as equally valid means of escape. Again, we have no cut to a montage of pornographic engravings and Roman phalluses.
socialist spaces here even the factory floor-cum-concert hall Were now in the heart of mid-60s consumer urbanism,
remains a space of ceremony and a not only sartorial class divide. listening in on two fashionably dressed young women, working in
The lms title appears to be derived from Brechts poem The Tailor the centre of communications technology that is the switchboard,
of Ulm, a catalogue of initial failure and eventual success, and facilitating technologically the old stories of amores and interrupted
accordingly Makavejev would go on to sketch out the tentative dialogues. The two girls walk around gossiping about their sexual
outlines of a more socialistic space. history, in a city marked by trafc noise, glass and steel, noticeable
only as non-western when the girls see a poster of Mao having his
Forwards in Time tie put on by some adoring children, then a huge banner of Lenin
being unfurled over a building. While over the soundtrack a
Socialist Realism was a doctrine stressing the need not to show life deafening Party anthem plays, we see an odd parade, the street being
merely as it is, but as it will be something shunned by the Black lined with floats of consumer goods, the camera catching a giant
Wave, for obvious reasons. Yet there is one major attempt to hold out tube of toothpaste. The focus shifts again, this time to one of these
some sort of viable future space, and as much as it is a lm of the young women being pulled naked from a well, then to a criminolo-
late 60s Zeitgeist, it delved back into the 1920s for inspiration. The gist, whose manner, though somewhat more swaggering, evokes that
decline of bourgeois sexual mores via Sexpol and communalisation of the sexologist the same list of data, the same collections of
was perceived by Wilhelm Reich in the late 1920s to be tentatively curios in the service of the argument. So we already know what is
creating in the USSR the economic outlines of a future sex hygiene going to happen to one of these women, and we are asked to make
of the masses, sexually matter of fact without prurience, which he the assumption that their obvious sexuality is in some way the cause
argued was halted by Stalinism.11 The Switchboard Operator (1967) of their demise.
and WR - Mysteries of the Organism (1971) consciously resurrect this Particularly, we begin with a mistrust of the lover she takes,
Reichian spectre along with the techniques of the Constructivist Ahmed, who is a shy Bosnian Party member and former partisan
avant-garde. The two lms were sporadically banned, with the latter now working of course - as a ratcatcher; we see him piling up rats
having the rare honour of suppression in both communist and on a pyre, in front of a large modernist government building,
capitalist countries (as did Reich himself ) and is still only available in implying that the struggle against nature and vermin continues. Our
the UK in a bowdlerised version. immediate suspicion, and association of sex and death, become more
The earlier of the two lms is coldly striking in its combination and more difcult to sustain in the calm serenity of the lms sex
of perversity and sobriety. Given the cumbersome but telling original scenes, depicted with an undemonstrative slowness, the two
title Love Dossier the Tragedy of a Switchboard Operator, it plays suspended from the bombastic Party festivals going on outside. In
constantly with ofcial discourse, be it police or medical but it the scene where Isabella, who we know is imminently going to be
opens with the question, asked again after its abandonment after the killed, seduces Ahmed, she uses a wonderful old Soviet lm being
shown on television as bait of some sort. The lm is in fact Dziga
Vertovs monumentalisation of coal mining, Enthusiasm Symphony
11 of the Donbas, and specically its montage of the destruction of
On this connection essentially Makavejevs churches. While we know the two are fucking in the background, the
reuniting of Eisenstein and Reich, lm plays and we see the steeples of churches, pointing at phallic
who were themselves briefly interested angles via the vertiginous camera angles, shaking until being torn
in each others work - see Raymond Durg-
down to huge cheers, punctuating until the nal hoisting of a red flag
nats WR Mysteries of the Organism (Lon-
over the church and the lovers, sated.
don, BFI, 1999).

208 209
 Makavejev uses Vertovs own methods of defamilarisation apartment block agitprop, private space is, for her, always convertible
and disjointed montage, his marshalling of fact into obviously into public space, whose inhabitants can be marshalled into those
formed works, but here in the sections of society Vertov himself lusty versions of Party chants.
didnt quite mention. Our couples domesticity, in cramped, The argument in WR is as spatial as much as political it is
pre-modernist circumstances, is what is especially noticeable, telling that Milenas demise occurs in the muddy countryside, rather
such as in the rather touching scenes of quotidian life that make than the apartment block where she agitates. In all cases its a debate
up much of the lm cooking, showering together, and memorably between socialists. Milena and Vladimir Ilyich argue with each other
pottering around alone in a courtyard to the sound of Ernst Busch in quotes from Lenin; she throws at him the famous lines from The
declaiming a Mayakovsky poem, set by Hanns Eisler. The strident State & Revolution that when freedom exists there will be no state, he
and swinging music and the declarations that the movement is going retorts with the line that listening to the Appassionata makes one want
forwards in time! sit disjunctively but appropriately with the carnal to pat on the head ones enemies rather than destroying them. WR
idyll set up here. The collective space of the courtyard contains only is a total presentation of the internal debate within Marxism and the
the two of them. Marxist avant-garde itself, against its repressive proponents and for
its original promises. As such, it presents a space which resembles
I Still Dream of Orgonon neither the ultra-modernist paranoia of Orson Welles Zagreb or the
rustic chaos of Aleksandar Petrovis Sombor. In Milena and her
In WR, the critique is widened to the totality of late 60s society, in friends apartment block there is a communal space, where ferocious
particular in the USA and of course Yugoslavia, which nonetheless and hilarious political debates flare up in stairwells, and where
provides the lms centre - the gure of the declamatory Reichian highly skilled workers crash through the walls to make their points
prophetess Milena, who we rst see reading a party paper, dumping rather than muttering at the back of meetings; and where someone
her unreconstructed proletarian lover (remnant of our glorious reads communist theory as her flatmates copulate in the corner. The
past!), and benignly noting her flatmate fucking a young conscript spaces in Welles, Pavlovi and Petrovis lms could to greater or
crying forward, peoples army! We see the consumer communist lesser extents have been replicated in any other 20th century capitalist
society of The Switchboard Operator tottering, as said ex-lover builds time and place, but both are dead spaces when set against WRs
barricades against the red bourgeoisie, ghts police, and she turns a throwing open of spatial and social possibility.
walk round her apartment block into a Reichian sermon against
Stalinist sexual oppression. Dressed in a uniform, she calls at a
growing crowd free love is where the October revolution failed
politics attracts those whose orgasm is incomplete! The tenants link
arms and sing ribald versions of party anthems and she is carried
aloft as Communist heroine.
Then we have a romance. Milena meets a peoples artist. His
name is Vladimir Ilyich, and hes a Russian dancer. Though her
friends dont approve of his revolutionary art in the costumes of
Tsarism she is smitten. So we see her and friends try and convert
him to their self-management sexpol, in the licentious space of their
shared apartment. Milena tries everything to shock Vladimir Ilyich,
she compares Reich and that other Soviet unperson Leon Trotsky:
W.R is World Revolution as well as Wilhelm Reich. Her naked
flatmate waves her legs in the air. He calmly says this sounds like the
theory of Alexandra Kollontai that revolution does away with
marriage, implying that the USSR has transcended such frippery.
You want permanent revolution and permanent orgasm. Her
ex-lover crashes through the wall and locks Vladimir Ilyich in a
cupboard, which we soon discover is in fact an Orgone Accumulator.
Milena is blithely unconcerned at this violating of the walls of her
apartment by highly skilled worker Radmilovic: as weve seen in her

210 211
 Bibliography
Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism
(Oxford: Berg, 2000)
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000)
Svetlana Boym, Architecture of the
Off-Modern (Princeton: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2008)
Raymond Durgnat, WR Mysteries ofthe
Organism (London: BFI, 1999)
Alfrun Kliems and Marina Dmitrieva (eds), The
Post-Socialist City (Berlin: Jovis, 2010)
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997)
Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet
System (New York: The New Press, 1994)
Roy Moore, Self-Management in Yugoslavia (London:
Fabian Society, 1970)
Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003)
Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Alasdair Whyte, New Cinema In Eastern
Europe (London: Studio Vista, 1971)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
(St Albans: Paladin, 1975)

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 Surng the Black Published and distributed by
Jan van Eyck Academie
Yugoslav Black Wave
and its Trangressive Moments This publication was made
possible with the support of Jan van
Edited by Gal Kirn, Dubravka Eyck Academie
Sekuli and iga Testen.
With contributions by Sezgin Post-Academic Institute for
Boynik, Boris Buden, Mladen Dolar, Research and Production
Owen Hatherley, Ana Janevski, Gal Fine Art, Design, Theory
Kirn, Pavle Levi, Nicholas Matranga,
Peter Rauch, Dubravka Sekuli, iga Academieplein 1
Testen and Samo Tomi. 6211 KM Maastricht
Proofread by Petra Van The Netherlands
der Jeught, designed by iga Testen
and set in Times NR Seven. At the very end, we would like to
Produced by Jo Frenken and thank rst of all Pietro Bianchi, who
printed by Drukkerij Tielen bv, was the one who approached us with
Boxtel on Munken Print White the idea to do something with those
90 g/m and Royal print 100 g/m in weird Yugoslav lms and Maja
an edition of 300 copies. Krajnc who helped us introduce this
theme to the JVE.
Many thanks to the editorial
board and the staff of Jan van Eyck
Academie, Stevan Vukovi, Karpo
Godina, all contributors to the book
and last but not least, to elimir
ilnik. Without his support this book
would have been looked completely
different. He taught us to always pay
equal attention to both radical
practices and radical theory.
Thank you!

214
216
The Yugoslav black wave cinema
of the sixties and the seventies is
one of the grand, though hidden,
chapters of cinema history, so
outstanding by its social and
political engagement, its formal
invention and its courage.
This volume makes its black
shine. This is Yugoslavia, and the
modern cinema, at their blackest
and their brightest.
Mladen Dolar