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Through an analysis of three films (X-25 javlja/X-25 Reports, František Čáp, 1960; Kota 905/Point 905, Mate Relja, 1960; Abeceda straha/ABC of Fear, Fadil Hadžić, 1961) the article inquires into roles spy movies acquired within the Yugoslav cinema of the 1960s. On the one hand, spy films witness to a process of 'genre-grafting' highly symptomatic of the developments in the Yugoslav cinema of the period; on the other hand, however, they also introduce specific problems into this process: with Yugoslavia occupying a nonaligned position in the Cold War context, the metaphor of the 'Iron Curtain', largely fuelling the international spy genre of the 1960s, remained inaccessible to Yugoslav spies. Consequently, Yugoslav spy films not only systematically (re)turned to the context of World War II, but also, the 'enemy within' became the fundamental neuralgic point of their symbolic strategies. Through the spy's infiltration, this enemy was then represented in ways which cannot be found in earlier war (partisan) films. The generic structure of the spy film combined with a position of non-alignedness therefore produced specific ideological effects within Yugoslav cinema. Taking film genre theory as its issuing point, this article attempts at offering an insight into this cluster of problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses film festival practices related to the Trieste Crisis, the diplomatic struggle over the Northern Adriatic borderlands between (capitalist) Italy and (socialist) Yugoslavia (1945-1954). It explores how different forms of festival activities, from film selecting to establishing of film festivals, have shaped conceptions of national identities in the region, by symbolically labeling disputed territories as “national”. Focusing on the way the local populations have been presented in films on this topic that circulated in major film festivals, it demonstrates the changing role of film festivals as playgrounds for political propaganda, from the early Cold War to contemporary post-socialist, nationalist and populist societies.

Velimir Bata Živojinović boasts a body of work which traverses 350 motion pictures from Classical Yugoslav Cinema over The New Film to Contemporary Serbian Cinema, historical epic to film noir, family comedy to radical avant-garde. A legendary actor and one of the most significant personalities of Yugoslav cinema, he is best remembered as the archetypal hero of the Partisan film. This research examines the ways in which Živojinović's popular figure was constructed through the genre of the war film and the brand of Partisan film distinct to Yugoslavia. By situating Živojinović's star image in the context of his oeuvre, defining Partisan aesthetics and closely analysing three different periods in the actor's career, with respect to the films which are central in developing his image as the archetypal hero, namely Kozara (Veljko Bulajić 1962), Valter brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo (Hajrudin Krvavac 1972), and Lepa sela lepo gore/Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Srđan Dragojević 1996), I demonstrate how the indestructible partisan figure embodied by Velimir Bata Živojinović was established in on-screen cinematic space, and how this figure continued to develop, transform, and evolve across films, and, finally, through off-screen public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on sources found in the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article examines Sarajevo studio Bosna Film's postwar attempts to co-produce a film about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Duchess Sophie Hohenberg. Yugoslav filmmakers' celebration of Young Bosnia's resistance to Austro-Hungarian imperialism and colonialism is juxtaposed to the official condemnation of the assassins' 'terrorism'. I investigate how the Yugoslavs confronted their partners' purported exploitation of Yugoslav production resources and inclination toward narrative modifications of history as promising to attract a larger international audience. Examples of Bosna Film's collaborations demonstrate the uneasy balance between memory production, socialist state-building, international cultural promotion and sustainable business development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The depiction of political movements or politicized groups through cinema too often emphasizes their material demands and current social reality, neglecting the subconscious, internal desires of the group. To outline the effectiveness of "neo-documentary" films in portraying collective struggle, this essay will examine Dušan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) which focuses on Wilhelm Reich and the loose movement for sexual liberation inspired by his ideas. This movement had collective subconscious desires and motivations which manifest themselves externally through lifestyle choices, artistic or political actions. The members of the movement also had internal realities, repression, and trauma for example, that they wished to avoid or fight against. For a holistic cinematic representation, both the internal and external realities must be represented, and ultimately synthesized. Matsumoto Toshio's "neo-documentary" theory solves this problem. "Neo-documentary" is a spiritual successor to surrealism, but with an expanded notion of the internal-external synthesis that the surrealists outlined. Using surrealist techniques to depict internal realities, and documentary form to depict external realities, Matsumoto described a new kind of cinema which would encompass both worlds, destabilizing the boundary between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The characters of Živojin Pavlović's seminal film The Rats Woke Up (Buđenje Pacova, 1967), regularly discussed in the context of the Yugoslav Black Wave cinema, offer significant and very intriguing figures of dissent. The film depicts misfits, bottom-dwellers, and dissidents living on the margins of society in the largest and capital city of Belgrade at a time when Black Wave authors have been breaking some new grounds for Yugoslav cinema and influencing artists well after the movement became a part of history. This essay concentrates on the characters and their interaction, the complexity of which suggests the complexity of Pavlović's criticism of everyday life and institutions in the 1960s Yugoslavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the editing career of Radojka Tanhofer, which can be divided into two main phases. The first covers Tanhofer’s years in editing (1940s - 1960s), learning and honing her craft, her work in numerous feature films with a number of domestic and international directors. The second covers her teaching at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, Croatia (from the founding of the Editing Department as a two-year programme in 1969, until its development into a four-year full university study programme in 1977). The aim of this paper is to outline Tanhofer’s significance in the context of Croatian and Yugoslav cinema through the use of existing literature, analysis of significant works of classic Croatian cinema, as well as my own insights into the history and current practice of the Editing Department at the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, as a former student, and now assistant professor.

Edward Alexander`s review of the book Modernizam u hrvatskom igranom filmu by Tomislav Šakić

The article explores Jovan Živanović's youth melodrama Čudna devojka/Strange Girl (1962). I discuss why a particular genre configuration (melodrama qua coming-of-age story) becomes notably relevant in the time of Yugoslav conflict between socialist economic reforms and patriarchal/paternalist social patterns, and how Živanović's film responds to this concern. Reading the film through this genre configuration illustrates the unfair world of Yugoslav socialism, where the only way for the young heroine to be integrated is to renounce her mondain emancipatory practices. I argue that love, which drives the action in the film, resides on the idea of sacrifice which transforms the young heroine from emancipated modern girl into a working wife and mother. The film's love ideology is thus explained through the larger sociocultural context of Yugoslav self-management reform, and the beginning of a genuine consumerist society. The two opposing tendencies, which also transformed into Yugoslav intergenerational and intra-social clashes of the time, are interpreted as the ideological background of the heroine's patriarchal maturation in a socialist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a critical reading of two documentaries that tackle Yugoslav socialist past: Mila Turajlić'sCinema Komunistoand Marta Popivoda'sJugoslavija, kako je ideologija pokretala naše kolektivno telo/Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body. Both films maintain what we deem the ‘anti-Communist hypothesis’: the assumption that the socialist Yugoslavia was first and foremost an ideological construction, used by the Communist Party to manipulate the consciousness and the body of the people. Using theoretical lenses of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, the article analyzes thematic differences and similarities of the films. In our reading, for all their differences, the films have a common contradiction: both Turajlić and Popivoda criticize the illusionary and ideological nature of the Yugoslav socialism, while simultaneously indulge in a nostalgic view on the country's past. Caught in-between condemnation and fascination, the documentaries fail to problematize their own retrospective post-socialist look into the socialist past and legacy, remaining silent on some of the main specifics of the Yugoslav context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article tackles the relationship between gender and work as screened by classical Yugoslav cinema. It focuses on a string of films produced from 1948 to 1958, set in the context of the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and socialist society. Relying on the thesis concerning the dwindling of revolutionary morale in the 1950s, the analysis explores the ways in which the devaluation of work in the name of consumption, and the re-domestification and objectification of women correlated with a telling divide between the male and female protagonists in the ‘construction cycle’. While the films privileged the man as a natural born worker, they designated the woman first and foremost in terms of her love for the man. In this respect, the gender politics of the classical Yugoslav cinema were more indebted to Hollywood melodramas than to the socialist-realist celebration of gender equality, as manifested in Eastern European cinemas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as the queering of the western cinemas helped us to discern the complexities lurking under the 'hetero vs. homo' dichotomy in the western socio-political milieux, similar enquiry into the Eastern European cinemas during socialism can help us to more fully explore the history of the 'socialist closet' in different Eastern European countries and societies. Problematizing the chronic non-existence of representations of queers in Eastern European cinemas during socialism, this article tackles the issue in the context of Yugoslav cinema. Enquiry into the relation between Yugoslav cinema and queer sexuality so far has been mainly conducted as an exercise in homo-spotting: the authors would more or less catalogue gay and lesbian characters sporadically appearing on-screen. Important and necessary as it is, this approach should be supplanted by the analyses that go beyond the pinning down of overt homosexual identities, and explore their very stability. Arguing for employment and testing of queer theory with regard to the history of Yugoslav cinema, this article looks at Vrata ostaju otvorena/The Doors Remain Open, a 1959 film by Czech emigre director František Čap, and treats it as a showcase of the 'socialist celluloid closet' that encompasses several strategies of both displaying queer desire, and avoiding the standard happy ending based on the formation of heterosexual couple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary critically engages with a description of the Yugoslav 'Black Wave' elaborated by Greg DeCuir, Jr. In contrast to DeCuir, the author argues that the group of film-makers usually labelled as the 'Black Wave' are by no means a movement with a single ideological outlook, let alone with the one that DeCuir brands and defines as Methodical Marxist. The author draws on writings and interviews by the film-makers and the Yugoslav cinema scholars who are symptomatically absent from DeCuir's article. Although criticizing it for recycling the 'Artist versus Regime'dichotomy, the author nevertheless maintains that DeCuir's article is at odds with the totalitarian paradigm that dominates post-Yugoslav film criticism and historiography on Yugoslav cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in Croatian and Yugoslav cinema (and Eastern European cinema in general) traditionally organize the subject according to a great master narrative. That narrative explains the history of Croatian/Yugoslav/Eastern European cinema as a long and liberating voyage from Soviet-style dogmatism of the post-war era up to a complete emancipation in the heroic era of the 1960s modernism. Most of the scholars who studied the history of Yugoslav cinema (Skrabalo, Volk, Goulding, etc.) narrate film history according to this narrative. The intention of this text is to question that narrative, and offer a possible alternative methodological approach. Our starting point is Croatian cinema, in which the late 1950s and early 1960s were not just a transition period toward the full liberation of the modernist movement. On the contrary, for Croatian cinema that period was almost a 'golden era' in which Croatian cinema produced most of its masterpieces, including four to five evergreen classics, two Academy Award nominees, and a certain number of mature and challenging genre works. All of these films perfectly fit into a stylistic and ideological model of 'classic narrative style'. This paper revisits some of these films (Branko Bauer's Don't Turn Around, Son (1956) and Three Annas (1959), Branko Belan's Concert (1954), Nikola Tanhofer's H-8 (1958), Franci Stiglic's Ninth Circle (1960), Fadil Hadzic's Alphabet of Fear (1961)). By examining these Croatian films (and some other films from the Yugoslav 1950s, including Zika Mitrovic's Captain Leshi (1960)), this paper offers an alternative approach for understanding pre-modernist Yugoslav cinema. The paper argues that the master narrative which explains the Yugoslav 1950s in general is a story of a gradual achieving of the (mainly Western) technologies and know-how within the political framework of communist society. It demonstrates how this process worked in the field of industry, media, everyday life and the entertainment industry. It further examines the Yugoslav film industry of the 1950s as part of that process. For the Yugoslav cinema of the 1950s, the technological model which had to be domesticated was a model of American and Western European classic narrative style. Most of the films that we discuss in the paper consciously use Western cinema classic as a model. By using motives, dramaturgy and type of characters of American/Western European cinema in their classic works, Yugoslav directors had to deal with the implicit ideological content of the Western classic narrative style cinema. Within the new frame of the communist society, that ideological content mutates in an often unexpected way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]