New Yugoslav Film: Filmic Response to the Label of “Black” and The Emergence of Cinematic Political Aesthetics

The contribution sketches the major contours of the emergence of new Yugoslav film in the 1960s. In order to understand such a vast film production, author draws on two key areas: firstly, emphasis is made on the self-managed infrastructure (cinema clubs), and secondly, somehow paradoxically, what seems at first glance a repressive move by the socialist authorities to label films as “Black Wave” should be actually understood as permeated with the “modernist” understanding that made those films “immortal”. The author discusses two answers by filmic means to the stigmata of “black tendency” (Želimir Žilnik, Krsto Papić), and in second part, puts forward a few theoretical insights into the filmic method of three directors: Žilnik, or how to make a film in a partisan way; Makavejev, or how to internally subvert the image; and thirdly, Pavlović, or how to construct self-management realism around the negative sides of socialist modernisation. These three directors form a core of the new politics of aesthetics.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!