Humans, Train, Nature. (Not Only) Documentaries and the Reconstruction of Post-World-War-Two Yugoslavia

The paper discusses select documentary films and literary thematisations of the material and symbolic (re)constructions in post-war Yugoslavia. It focuses on the transformation of the relationship between humans, nature and technology in the documentary film production of the first ten years after World War Two (1945–1955). The chosen sources are understood as both documents of the time and historical sources that, through visual-textual mechanisms and images, open a view into the past and at the same time carry it into the future. This allows for a reading, analysis, and consideration of the material, productive and ideological and political aspects of post-war reconstruction, which are more or less overtly inscribed in the analysed sources and thus allow us to also analyse the in-built ideological-political conditions and ambitions.

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