More than Comrades: queering Slovenian cinema in Yugoslavia

Abstract

This article explores the forgotten queer pasts of Eastern European cinema under socialism and highlights the queer cinematic histories of Yugoslavia, specifically its former Republic of Slovenia. Through visual, substantive, and contextual analysis, the article focuses on the selected films with queer undertones made post WWII, arguing that the relationship between queerness and Yugoslav society and cinema was more complex than previously thought. The examples demonstrate that Yugoslav cinema reflected the country’s ambivalent attitudes towards queerness: on the one side, the analysed films featured numerous unhappy queer people and sad endings, on the other, they portrayed images of different non-normative sexualities and gender expressions rebelliously and more openly than is currently acknowledged in queer cinema scholarship.

Keywords:

• Queer cinema
• LGBT+
• Yugoslavia
• Slovenian cinema
• Tovariši/Comrades
• Dečki/Boys
• Maškarada/Masquerade
• Ubij me nežno/Kill Me Gently

An overview of existing literature on queer film in Eastern Europe under socialism shows a contradiction much like the one Andrea Weiss (2010, 1) describes in her study of lesbian representation on (American and West European) film. She refers to a tension between the absence of lesbian images in cinema and the faint traces of repression of lesbianism that both the viewers and the researchers of queer cinema histories must work with. While studying Eastern European queer¹ cinematic histories, the researcher is, however, soon faced with another problem: the absence of queerness does not only have to do with the lack of queer images – contrary to initial expectation, a few interesting traces of queerness can be found in cinemas beyond the Iron Curtain –, but with the invisibility of the topic in queer film research (see, e. g. Griffiths 2008). In his 2012 article, My own private Yugoslavia: František Čap and the socialist celluloid closet, Nebojša Jovanović similarly points out: ‘The queer aspects of Eastern European cinemas from the socialist era remain chronically under-researched.’ (2012, 212). Jovanović highlights the absence of queer cinematic histories of socialist Eastern Europe in Western academia, which has taken a dominant role in defining queer film theory and queer cinema. He also emphasizes how scholars from the region in question have themselves contributed a great deal to ‘this social amnesia’ (ibid.). He writes: ‘Despite some precious exceptions² […], we generally persist in reluctance to foreground queer experiences during socialism, thus obliterating them more fully than any homophobia or criminalization of homosexuality in the socialist countries could do’ (ibid.).

Image 1. The party at Gantars’ house. Used with permission from the Slovenian Film Centre and the Slovenian Cinematheque.

The discussion on queer film history is thus still disproportionally focused on Western cinematic images. This implies an open-minded West and a homophobic Eastern Europe and reinforces how the West is seen linearly progressing towards greater tolerance, acceptance, and public visibility of queerness, while the East is always lagging behind due to its socialist past. In this progressive model, queer rights and visibility are connected to notions such as democratization and liberalization (see, e. g. Kulpa and Mizielińska 2011). As the article will demonstrate in the case of Yugoslav, specifically Slovenian cinema, the idea of a homophobic past and a more liberal attitude towards queerness post-transition does not always hold true. That is not to say that the past public discourse on LGBT + issues in Eastern European countries was not riddled with stereotypes, violent homophobia, censorship, and discrimination that persist and intensify even today (see, e. g. Kuhar 2001; Kuhar and Takács 2007); however, Eastern European LGBT+ (mostly gay and lesbian) images did exist, often in an ambiguous relation with the public attitudes towards homosexuality.

This article accepts Jovanović’s challenge to dive into the erased queer pasts of Eastern European cinema under socialism by analysing four Slovenian films, which were previously unexamined through a queer lens. Even though the cinematic images of queerness were present also in other Yugoslav republics, often in ambivalent ways (see, e. g. Lazarević Radak 2017), this article will limit its inquiry to Slovenia in the period from 1945 to 1991 (when Slovenia gained independence). Through archival work at the Slovenian LGBT Film Festival, I have identified films with queer undertones and (queer) directors making queerness visible. This article does not analyse all the identified films but highlights the more explicit examples and/or works of queer authors, with which I argue that the relationships between queerness and Yugoslav cinematic production, politics, and reception were more complex than previously thought. My main research focus is on the 1970s – before or right after the legalization of homosexuality in certain regions of Yugoslavia, including Slovenia³ –, mostly because it was the most prolific decade for queer images on Slovenian cinematic screens. Methodologically, the paper goes beyond ‘homo-spotting’ (Jovanović 2012) when describing chosen works, and analyses formal and narrative aspects of the selected queer films, as well as, when possible, the context of their production and reception at the time of release.

A cinematic room of one’s own: Slovenian film and attitudes towards queerness

In his historical overview of Slovenian film, Peter Stanković (2013, 78–80) claims that the Yugoslavian Party initially saw cinema in accordance with Lenin’s view of film: as an effective propaganda and as such the most important among the arts. Therefore, the post-war regime invested heavily in cinematic production and infrastructure, establishing several republic film directorates with limited autonomy under a centralized film institution, Film Company of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Its objective was to organize and control the Yugoslav cinematic output from Belgrade. However, the republic directorates strongly opposed the idea of centralization, and the republics soon gained greater power – in film and in other socio-economic matters. This does not, however, mean that the republic had foregone the basic functions and aesthetics of film decided by the Party’s central committee: the films had to be politically engaged. Therefore, it is not surprising that the socialist realist partisan films were the norm of early post-World War II years. The aim of early Yugoslav films can easily be described as ‘ideological’ (even though often in complex ways), but, with a few exceptions – like France Štiglic’s first feature, a partisan film Na svoji zemlji/On Our Own Land (1948) –, the often-amateurish early works lacked quality as well as success among the audiences to be worth the authority’s investment. The Party soon decided to cut a significant part of its film budget forcing the studios and filmmakers to survive on the market as early as the late 1950s. To invigorate Slovenian cinematic output, Branimir Tuma, the head of the Slovenian Triglav Film studio, was trying to find foreign film talent, and invited a promising young Czech director František Čap, known for his international hits, to come to Yugoslavia (more on Čap in the next section).

Image 2. Adam watching himself in the mirror. Used with permission from the Slovenian Film Centre and the Slovenian Cinematheque.

The intermingling of film and state ideology begs the following questions: What was the attitude towards queerness? and When visible, in what ways were queer people, desire, and/or ways of life portrayed on the screen? In his informative chapter on queer film in Eastern Europe, Kevin Moss writes: ‘Queers and queer desire are virtually invisible in feature films from Central and Eastern Europe before the eighties.’ (2007, 249). A foray into Slovenian queer film history shows an interesting divergence that somewhat contradicts this claim: even though pre-independence LGBT + film images were scarce, they were nevertheless mostly made before or around 1976–77 (decriminalisation of homosexuality) and were often more radical than the post-independence images. Again, this does not mean Yugoslavia was not homophobic, but the attitudes towards queerness were not always clear-cut or monolithic. Homosexuality was ‘being constantly redefined, discussed and valued at different social sites and by many social agents in early Yugoslav socialism’ (Jovanović 2016, 133) and cinema played an important role in imagining and constructing sexuality and gender. In his overview of queerness in Yugoslav socialist realist cinema, Jovanović postulates:

Far from merely reflecting the gender order of the socialist country, Yugoslav films imbued the public imaginary with a relentless streak of celluloid femininities and masculinities of different class backgrounds, locations, ages and ethnicities; of romances that led to happily-ever-after unions or to fatal dead-ends; of narratives of marriage, family and kinship as historically shifting yet ever-fundamental social tenets; and so on. In both propelling and questioning manifold ideas, fantasies, values, and norms about gender and sexuality, cinema figures as one of the royal roads to Yugoslav socialist modernity and its gender order (2016, 134).

As Jovanović clearly demonstrates, the films did not function as an ideologically closed-off texts. This means that some, at first glance ideologically faithful representations – for example of virile socialist masculinites building a new society – could well be read against the grain of heteronormativity, through an oppositional gaze (hooks 1992). Conceptualized in the context of black female spectatorship faced with dominant images of blackness and gender, it describes ‘the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it’. This in turn ‘opens up the possibility of agency’ (ibid., 116). Hooks’s description of the relationship between marginalized spectators and cinematic images, a relationship in which the spectators resist the dominant depictions and stories of blackness (ibid., 117), are also relevant to queer film studies and readings, not because of a shared historical experience, but because of the shared logic of marginalization and opposition. In the context of queerness, the oppositional gaze can be seen as a defiant and often critical tool of the marginalized in the (Yugoslav) society. Moreover, in the late 1970s and the 1980s, making queer bodies and sexualities visible and reimagining Yugoslav visual landscapes in queer ways became an explicit part of revolting against the Yugoslav socialist system in Slovenia, especially in video and performance art (see, e. g., Gržinić 1997; Gržinić et al. 2009).

In the next section, I take a closer look at a selection of Slovenian films in Yugoslavia in which queer persons, desire, and/or relationships can be found. Moss claims that ‘while there no doubt were gay and lesbian directors, screenwriters, and actors, they do not appear to have smuggled much if any covert gay meaning into their films’ (2007, 249), at least not in Eastern European cinemas before 1980s. This, however, fails to capture the case of Yugoslavia: not only were there openly gay directors, they were also the ones making most of the queer films. Therefore, I start my inquiry with the Czech emigree František Čap, the prolific Vojko Duletič and his film essay Tovariši/Comrades (1964) and the amateur director Stanko Jost and his feature Dečki/Boys (1976).

Queer authorship: Čap, Duletič and Jost

When the Yugoslav Party decided to cut a good portion of film funding forcing the film production to commercialize, Branimir Tuma, the then director of Triglav film, started inviting foreign talent to Yugoslavia. Among them was František Čap, a young Czech director, who had made a series of popular films at home and in Germany. In 1953, Čap accepted the invitation to come to Slovenia, where he remained until his death in 1972. He made several films in Slovenia and other Yugoslav republics, the most successful of which are still among the most beloved Slovenian films – a feel-good romantic comedy Vesna (1953) and its sequel Ne čakaj na maj/Don’t Whisper (1957).

Čap was, as claim Mozetič (2009) and Štefančič (2005), an open homosexual. And he was not alone; among openly gay Yugoslav directors working in Slovenia, there are also Vojko Duletič, known for making films based on important Slovenian literary works, for example Na klancu/In the Gorge (1971; based on a book by a well-regarded Slovenian author Ivan Cankar), and Stanko Jost, the amateur director of the first Slovenian openly gay film Dečki/Boys (1976). According to various interviews with the directors and archival data, at that time ‘openly gay’ meant a variety of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ attitudes. František Čap, Stanko Jost, and Vojko Duletič apparently never hid their sexual orientation, even – in Duletič’s case – living and working with a male partner for decades. Everyone knew about their sexuality, some talked about it behind their backs, but no one ever explicitly asked them about it (see, e. g. Mozetič 2009; Ozmec 2004; Štefančič 2005).

The context of Čap’s, Duletič’s or Jost’s lives and filmmaking opens the question of LGBT + authorship, or rather the question of if and how the director’s queerness affects their film expression. Not surprisingly, authorship is an ambivalent concept in queer film theory. Firstly, because in classical film theory the author (or rather auteur) was usually associated with white heterosexual male genius, and auteurism a concept paired with authority and fixing of interpretations (e. g., Chaudhuri 2006, 10), less with the multifaceted and open meanings relevant to queer film studies. And secondly, the concept of authorship associated with a fixed label of homosexuality or a universal queer sensibility (without acknowledging its social and temporal variations) is counter-effective to the objective of queer theory (see, e. g., Dyer 2002, 32–33). At the same time, a reformulated concept of authorship is, however, undeniably important to queer research and activism as it is a tool of discovering hidden queer cinematic histories and reappropriating directors as queer, as well as a sign of queer political agency (e. g., Staiger 2004; Doty 1993). Doty notes a change of focus in cultural studies from discussions on auteurs and auteurism (the influence the auteur has on the text) to a more open concept of authorship which, in queer studies, is concerned with how queer authorial discourses are established ‘by negotiating a range of textual meanings caught somewhat between auteurist considerations of director (or star, writer, etc.) intentionality and cultural studies considerations of reception practices’ (1993, 50). The film theorist Richard Dyer, similarly points out that it makes sense to view authorship as a performance (similar to the performativity of sexual identity), always embedded in the discursive modes available to queer authors as a result of their social inclusion (e. g. access to subcultural queer discourses). The study of queer authorship is thus a study of these modes and the specific ways in which they were played out in the text with an acknowledgement that the author’s queerness is not all-defining to the film (2002, 32–33).

Framed this way – acknowledging its usefulness and limitations –, authorship can be a very helpful concept to start excavating hidden queer cinematic histories of Yugoslavia, as Jovanović clearly demonstrates in his article on Čap and his Bosnian film Vrata ostaju otvorena/The Door Remains Open (1959), seeing the director as ‘the epitome of a queer film-maker whose nomadic career defies the historical accounts that look at queers in cinema only on the western side of the Cold War divide’ (Jovanović 2012, 214).

To analyse Čap’s Slovenian films through a queer lens would be somewhat far-fetched. At first glance, his Slovenian romantic heteronormative classics contain no queerness, only rumours and clues, which are, after all, an important part of queer ephemeral archives (Cvetkovich 2003) and nevertheless offer potentially subversive readings. In his analysis of the history of homosexuality in Slovenian cinema (2009, 24), Brane Mozetič notes that, at the try-outs for Vesna, Čap asked his actors to audition in swimsuits. Their muscular bodies can be seen in one of the film’s scenes of summer bathing by the Ljubljanica River. This small historical anecdote could be read as a hint of the director’s queerness and a nod to the hidden Yugoslav queer community. Whatever Čap’s intentions, the mainstream public never noticed anything out of the ordinary and Vesna became an essential work of Slovenian cinema.

The same does not apply to the homoerotic images of working male bodies in the centre of socialist Velenje, which caused widespread discomfort only a few years later. Directed by Vojko Duletič, the film Tovariši/Comrades (1964) about young male mining-school students in the newly bult socialist city of Velenje was meant to be a half-hour propaganda for the mining profession. Although the film uses socialist realist aesthetic elements (imagery of a young proletarian masculine collective labouring towards the future), the film’s stylized shots of young semi-naked male bodies working and living together was far from what the Velenje Coal Mine ordered.

The first image of the film is a low-angle shot of a mighty muscular statue of a miner. He is the symbol of the mining town, an embodiment of the socialist ideology of building a new economy and society; a construct of a new man, a proletarian hero, who is creating a socialist utopia. The film then cuts to a close-up of a young man’s face. The framing lingers on his face, captures his blue eyes and blond curls, and personalizes him – he is the hero of the film. The camera then slides from his face to his hands in which he holds a letter. He is on the train to Velenje heading towards his new school.

On one level, the film is about young miners learning their trade. In that sense, it could function as an ideological text, a propaganda for the society’s values, engaging youngsters into proletarian collectives. However, cinema is rarely completely ideologically closed. It is rather inscribed by gaps and ambiguities (Comolli and Narboni 1971). And this also holds true for Comrades. After a few minutes, it is apparent that there is something ‘queer’ about it: it is neither a film about building a future socialist society nor is it really a story about the immersion in the normative collective. Rather, it portrays the ambiguities of growing up through a personalized story about loneliness, the slow weaving of intimate bonds between young men, and the final push to adulthood that marks the end of a period. Without dialogues, the film depends on a highly stylized setting; it takes place mainly in the common room where the young men sleep and in the mine where they work. The camera’s focus travels from the men’s faces to their muscular bodies, and then zooms out to remote shots of the collective choreographed in a characteristic pose of socialist realist art – a collective of eroticized masculinity staring somewhere behind the camera, into a better future.

Though what strikes the viewer most is that the collective of young future miners is not portrayed only as normatively homosocial but also as unmistakeably homoerotic. Nor does it take a particularly skilful reading against the grain to see the film’s queer potential. When it was screened – and received badly – in Beograd, the Velenje Coal Mine’s management soon decided not to use it as they deemed it inappropriate (Mozetič 2009, 2013). What did they find so unfitting? In an interview with Vojko Duletič, conducted by Brane Mozetič for the catalogue of the Slovenian LGBT Film Festival, where the film was screened again in 2009, the director says:

It is true that I filmed the boys with a kind of love. You can see a lot of nudity. When I talked to them, they also told me that it was sometimes so hot in the cave that they completely undressed … and had a nice time. […] Perhaps the resistance to this film also stemmed from some vague feelings about it (2009, 26).

Firstly, Comrades cut into the idea of ​​a socialist propaganda film when they expose the mining school as a potentially homoerotic environment. Secondly, they do so by focusing on an individual hero who is not subordinated to the collective force, indistinguishable and fused with the crowd that creates History, but rather embodies individual searching and ambiguity. This is indicated by the protagonist’s emotional distance and exclusion demonstrated through the spatial setting of his physical distance, e. g., in a party scene where everyone is dancing while the protagonist is separated, leaning against the wall, watching his comrades and the action. He is an embodiment of a ‘sad young man’, a queer image of a (queer) youngster who somehow does not belong although the origin of his alienation cannot be determined with much precision. The image of a sad young man as a potential homosexual has a rich cultural history. Dyer (2002) claims the stereotype of the sad young man is ‘a combination and condensation of many traditions of representation’ (2002, 118) and associates the characteristics of the figure with melancholy, alienation, Freudianism, Romantic poets, Bildungsroman, and other literary traditions that talk about the transition of men into adulthood and may have subtle homoerotic hints. Adolescence is associated with a specific discourse on homosexuality as an infantile sexual phase that one must outgrow through ‘proper’ (heteronormative) development (see, e. g., Bond-Stockton, 2009). Therefore, transitional anxiety is related to sexual development, and the narrative structure of the transition contains tension: What will happen to the hero, will they succeed in the desired social transition towards heterosexuality or not? As Dyer (2002, 128) points out, the youth of the hero plays another function: it is also an important element of attractiveness.

In Comrades, youthful beauty is emphasized with the use of lighting. When the hero gets up in the morning, takes a styled pose and is illuminated by the sun, he reminds us of a young Adonis. Then he descends underground where, in the dim light of the mine, the iconography of the proletariat and the homoeroticism of half-naked bodies moving in unison mix. The choice of the mine as a kind of a socialist closet evokes two associations: firstly, that homoerotic attraction is hidden on the surface but intensifies underground and, secondly, that homoeroticism can be found in the most masculine collectives, albeit in subtle traces. It is precisely this intangible sensibility – a hint of queerness that could be lurking everywhere – that can be used to explain the confusion of the Velenje Mine about what to do with the film – even if the film ends with a successful transition: the young protagonist meets a girl with whom he walks around the city, incorporated back into the heterosexual order. We are left with the last stylized shot of comrades standing in front of the school with suitcases in their hands, this time departing towards (straight) adulthood.

Duletič’s specific homoerotic sensibility and aesthetics can also be seen in his film Doktor/Doctor (1985), a war drama in which the male protagonist lives with an unnamed man who strides around their flat in a stylish robe. That is, until he becomes jealous of the protagonist’s affection towards a woman and denounces him to the German occupation army as a spy. The basic camouflage trick of introducing a female love interest, seen both in Comrades and Doctor, was Duletič’s strategy of avoiding censorship. Unlike his contemporaries Stanko Jost and Boštjan Hladnik, he never really tackled the topic of homosexuality directly, but disguised it by introducing a woman who functioned as a cover and established a heterosexual order, at least for the mainstream viewers and the censors. The author himself confirmed this strategy and his films’ queer intention in an interview: ‘As for the films, all my films are homo’ (Mozetič 2009, 25).

Suitcases, sad young men, and a temporary suspension of the social order, which enables the emergence of homoeroticism, can also be found in the first explicitly gay Slovenian film Dečki/Boys. Directed by Stanko Jost in 1976, this amateur film was based on a 1938 novel by France Novšak and was fortunately rediscovered in 2004 right before the director, disappointed in the erasure of his work and lacking the storage space, almost burned it (Ozmec 2004). A technically rather clumsy teenage angst story of two boys falling in love at school has familiar narrative elements of other similar international queer works (e. g., the marvellous German film Mädchen in Uniform/Girls in Uniform, Leontine Sagan, 1931). It also repeats the themes of Comrades, the difference being that Boys is openly gay from the beginning. It tells a story of Zdenko and Nani who meet and fall in love within a queer heterotopia (Foucault 1984) par excellence, a boarding school where they live as roommates. The connection between them is established relatively quickly and is indicated through awkward amateur camera movements: the use of shot/counter-shot of their faces and alternating focus on the eyes of both characters somewhat naively implies a queer gaze and a gaydar as a constitutive link between an erotic encounter and subcultural sensibility. Although homosexuality is something that has no name – Zdenko and Nani always talk about their ‘great friendship’ – we see several explicit images that leave no doubt about the nature of their relationship: showering and kissing, holding hands, etc. Especially Zdenko is unmistakably coded as queer and as yet another embodiment of the stereotype of a sad young man: visually reminiscent of a physically weak romantic hero, he is emotionally and spatially alienated from his peers as he spends most of his time in a hospital room due to an unidentified illness. His illness and spatial isolation can be read as metaphors for queerness as well as the structural position of LGBT + people on the periphery of Yugoslav society (before the development of an open Yugoslav LGBT + scene in the 1980s). In the end, heterosexuality is reaffirmed; Zdenko introduces Nani to his sister Vlasta with whom Nani eventually falls in love. But at the same time, the film opens a space of queer ambivalence and (non)consensual sexuality: firstly, through a parallel story of the boarding school’s security guard, whose stalking, harassment, and violence towards Zdenko throughout the film turns out to be a part of his own internalized homophobia and unsolicited desire; and, secondly, through Zdenko’s persisting queerness that solidifies in the face of societal violence towards non-normative sexuality. The guard eventually confesses his attraction towards Zdenko by offering him an orange, which is a symbol of sexual desire throughout the film. When the boy rejects him, he commits suicide. Zdenko is left in a hospital room, where now there is a female nurse who tries to impose the fruit on him. He does not take it and eventually collapses on the floor, which indicates a rather bleak future for this young queer boy.

For the authorities, the film’s theme was problematic from the beginning, which made access to film funds almost impossible. Jost therefore self-funded the work and engaged amateurs as well as professional actors from the Celje City Theatre, where he was employed as a sound engineer and an archival custodian. Before he began shooting, the local authorities first banned him from filming in Celje; however, this should not be interpreted as a clear-cut case of state homophobia. As Ozmec (2004) writes, the local authorities eventually got a call from the state’s political headquarters that they should leave comrade Jost alone. The director was able to resume the production of the film three years later. Stanković describes this contradiction:

At that time, no one talked about homosexuality and generally the government did not display a particular understanding towards it, but this event nevertheless shows that the Party had at least some tolerance […] (or maybe someone at the ‘top’ was a homosexual?) (2013, 463).

During the 10 days of filming, the police visited the set every day. They supposedly mostly came to check if everything was going as planned (Ozmec 2004), however, their visits could still be interpreted as invasive since police presence was not the norm for film productions of the time. Boys was screened twice, in Ljubljana and Celje, where it was seen and appraised by important Slovenian film directors such as France Štiglic and Boštjan Hladnik. After the screening in Celje, which was attended by a well-known politician, the film was banned (ibid.) and forgotten until it was recovered and shown at the 2004 LGBT Film Festival in Ljubljana. The Festival also digitized it for its YouTube channel.⁴

Enfant terrible of Slovenian cinema and the sexual revolution the Yugoslav way

The seventies were a fruitful decade for queer cinematic images in Yugoslavia. At that time, two more films containing queer images were made, but they were quite different from the pessimistic portrayal of sexual (non)emancipation in Boys and the subtle hints of queerness in Comrades. The first film was Maškarada/Masquerade (1971) – the most thoroughly censored Slovenian film – and the second a playfully camp work, Ubij me nežno/Kill Me Gently (1979). Both were directed by Boštjan Hladnik, an unconventional Slovenian filmmaker, whose previous films frequently referenced the French New Wave and popular culture mixing them with – at the time – shocking amount of eroticism (Stanković 2013, 211; Vrdlovec and Nedič 2001).

Based on a literary work by Vitomil Zupan, the script for Masquerade was written by Boštjan Hladnik and Vojko Duletič. According to the latter, even in this case – Hladnik was by all accounts a cis heterosexual director – the film’s theme and the question of author’s personal inscriptions are importantly connected. As Duletič describes in his interview with Mozetič:

I remember we all went together to Bled for a few days, me and Tone,⁵ Boštjan and his future wife. Boštjan was regularly reading what I was writing and was very enthusiastic. But later everything changed, and I stepped away. The dialogues were written by Dušan Jovanovič, but Boštjan kept changing them, he added the paedophilic part, which was his personal problem, to which he kept returning in his movies (2009, 26).

Film critic Zdenko Vrdlovec claims that Masquerade – a story of a middle-aged businessman’s wife, bored and having an affair with a younger lover – is a continuation of Hladnik’s erotic opus, a radicalization and grounding of his previous film, Sončni krik/Shout of the Sun (1968) (Vrdlovec 2001, 35). Undoubtedly, Masquerade has a special place in Slovenian cinematic history not just on the account of its explicit eroticism which verges on soft pornography, but also because it fell victim to the most extensive censure cut in the history of Slovenian film. Before shooting, the script was already heavily mangled by the censoring hands of the dramaturges, but the taped and finished version of the film still suffered interventions: before screening, the censors cut 300 m of film (Vrdlovec 2001). The film was restored only a decade later. However, Masquerade is also important as a Slovenian cinematic work in which queer sexuality becomes explicitly visible for the first time.

The period before and after 1971, when Masquerade was released, is important in at least two aspects: in 1968/69, a historical rupture took place in the form of cultural and sexual revolutions (even though in Yugoslavia both fully bloomed only a decade later). This wider social context is important for understanding the Masquerade as it includes the rise of a new generation, new values, ​​and aesthetics; the political critique of the Vietnam War and, behind the Iron Curtain, the rigid systems of party elders; feminism and contraception that liberated sex from reproduction and cut into institutions of heterosexual monogamy, marriage, and patriarchy, etc. At the same time, this was the period of important shifts in Yugoslav cinema towards specific authorial experimental works classified under the rubric New Yugoslav Film (see, e.g., Levi 2007). Several subversive films eventually earned the title ‘Yugoslav Black Wave’ and, due to their critique of official ideology,⁶ they fell victim to strict censorship.

Nevertheless, Masquerade itself is a rather intimate affair. At its core, it is a film about erotic relationships, desire, and rejection as the primary motivations for the protagonists. If it were not for the hippy imagery and the indicators of the sexual revolution, it would be difficult to determine its time; and if pressed to determine where it takes place, Yugoslavia would not be the first choice. With its focus on an extramarital affair, the secrecy within the family, and alienation, the narrative is timeless. Moreover, Masquerade destabilizes expectations by portraying two images that are not typical for the 1970s Yugoslavia – a high-class family and hippy youth. Given that the decade in which the film was made was the peak of the ‘communist years of lead’ (Vrdlovec 2001), Masquerade functions as a foreign film, more akin to a New Wave melodrama, which is not a coincidence as Hladnik had lived in Paris and worked with New Wave directors like Claude Chabrol. Why then, was Masquerade a problem for the Yugoslav officials? One possible answer is that, even though the film is not explicitly political, it nevertheless promotes a liberation of sexuality and emotion (Vrdlovec 2001, 41) that could dangerously destabilize the collective values propagated by the government. ‘Despite its declared progressiveness, the Socialist Slovenia of that time was in many respects still very much committed to the usual petty bourgeois morality in the field of sexuality […]’ (Stanković 2013, 373). Similarly, Štefančič (2013) claims: if it were not for the Masquerade, the Slovenians and the Slovenian cinema would never have taken notice of the sexual revolution. The Party’s instinctual fear came true only a decade later when alternative movements (among them the LGBT + movement) played a prominent role in destabilizing the regime through activism.

Middle-aged Dina watches a basketball game with her adolescent son. The star of the game is Luka, her young lover. The trouble is that this bored housewife is married to Matija Gantar, a wealthy businessman, politician, and hunter (an embodiment of the Party elite). Gantar is coded as a virile pursuer and his wife is no different from his hunting trophies for which he soon loses interest, so Dina frequently sneaks out of the house to engage in a steaming (and visually explicit) affair with Luka. The plot thickens when her 13-year-old son struggles in school, and she introduces her lover as a math instructor in order to get him in the house unnoticed. With the family and the young lover under one roof, desire and masquerade become a part of a game everyone plays. The suspicious husband soon starts hunting for evidence of the affair and the young son becomes jealous of his mother and Luka. However, the film does not take the Oedipal narrative route; the son does not really care about his mother as much as he does about her young lover whom he not only admires but also sexually desires. His desire becomes obvious when he observes the muscular basketball player by the family pool. Later, when the son goes to his room, the film takes a step towards queerness: he is sitting on his bed naked, his hand on his crotch. The camera then pans away and, off frame, there is a moan: ‘Luka!’

A turning point – not the last one in the film – happens when Gantar, now certain of his wife’s affair, sets a trap and invites Luka and his friends (the ‘wild horde’ as he calls them) to throw a party at his family’s modernist villa. The ‘wild horde’ is a group of naked flower children and an embodiment of different, queerer ways of being and loving; it contains cross-dressers, kissing lesbian couples, gay men, and threesomes. The party functions as a catalyst for our protagonists: Gantar rapes his wife and destroys her relationship with Luka, while their young son is seduced by a male party guest. Through this juxtaposition – free and consensual love on the one hand and the harmful family love rectangle on the other –, Hladnik highlights how, under the heteronormative bourgeois decorum, there can lie a force more destructive than queer or free love could ever be.

Possessive love and desire bring no happiness to any of the characters, not even to the young son who manages to draw attention to himself for the first time when he (non-fatally) shoots Luka and says to his mother: ‘I don’t care about you and father! Have you ever noticed that I am also having a hard time?’

Even though the film’s execution is uneven in places, it managed to provoke the Yugoslav society of the time and make its sexual taboos – among them homosexuality – visible. That is why, even before the Masquerade was finished and censured, it became the object of various false rumours, one of them being that the young actor playing the son (Bojan Šetina) had to masturbate in front of the camera sixteen times and was then taken to the hospital (Stanković 2013, 372).

Far from being as serious, Ubij me nežno/Kill Me Gently (1979) is a comedy that promises the most bizarre and campy experience from the beginning. The film is a parody on the pulp fiction stories popular at the time – the genre itself features in the plot as these are the books translated by the protagonist, an elderly but lively woman (called ‘aunt’ throughout the film). Even though she is a translator, she is extremely rich (Hladnik again chooses to portray a class not typically associated with socialism): she lives in an opulent seaside villa decorated with tropical flowers, drives a Porsche, and is adventurous. She takes frequent trips across the border to the West and, when at home, hosts camp disco parties with young leather-clad men. When she gets a visit from a married couple Julija and David – they both call her aunt, but their relation remains unclear – travelling with Adam, Julija’s young lover, the villa becomes a sort of a commune of free love. Julia and – as it is implied throughout the film –David both have an affair with Adam, while Cita – the aunt’s book editor – has sex with both men and Julija. Death and sex are the two main themes of Kill Me Gently: everyone sleeps with everyone and then they die in the most bizarre ways – they get eaten by piranhas, are poisoned by tropical flowers, or break their necks on the few steps leading to the villa. The only survivor is the aunt herself and the film reveals the campy world is merely a figment of her imagination, a way to escape her tragic reality of poverty and loneliness through the novels she is translating.

Kill Me Gently is probably the only example of camp in Slovenian cinema and a herald of postmodernism. Camp, here, is referring to the film’s aesthetic (an eclectic scenography, vivid cinematography, and humorous sound effects) and the form of mannerism or performance of characters that connote queerness (e. g., Sontag 1964; Babuscio 1999). Even if camp is notoriously hard to pin down, the viewer can find many of the characteristics described by Sontag and Babuscio in their classical essays on camp in Kill Me Gently: irony, play, parody, artificiality, performativity, humour, etc. What camp – in general and in Kill Me Gently specifically – achieves is that it opens a potentiality of deconstructing the heteronormative matrix (Butler 2001) and gives the usually invisible queerness room for expression and recognition. In this regard, camp, contrary to Sontag’s claim to its apolitical nature, can be a potent political tool (e. g., Ross 1999, 324–325). Several scholars (see e. g., Dyer 2002; Muñoz 2009) have shown how, for queer people, art and films have been a form of escapism as well as agency, and the screen usually one of a few places in which their desires and potential visions of a different world can come true. And it is no coincidence that, in its excessive kitsch form that deconstructs the – for queer people sometimes sad – reality, fiction can be a powerful ally of the marginalized.

The aunt’s campy fantasy is importantly connected to queer reading strategies. In her fictional world, there is excessive performativity and artificiality typical of camp aesthetic. This can be seen both in the setting – the luxurious villa surrounded by a tropical garden full of exotic animals and strange murderous plants – and the stylization of young bodies in leather and feathers engaging in various sexual encounters. Stable sexuality and gender are ironicized throughout the film’s performances and narrative. The best example of an exaggerated performance of gender that somehow unveils the construction of masculinity is the character of Adam. He is constantly trying to pose as a virile man, watching himself in the mirror, flexing his muscles and comparing himself to antique male statues that decorate the villa, yet he always fails to embody his and the society’s ideals of masculinity. Hladnik parodies this excessive performance with framing and the use of sound (e. g. synchronized high-pitched moans) so that Adam’s posing always tips into the direction of a campy pretend. Moreover, the bond between both men – the husband David and the lover Adam – is eroticized on various occasions, for example on their boat ride where a naked Adam reminiscent of a Raphaelite youngster lounges in front of David who later reveals: ‘Why would I lie? I love him.’ Lastly, the aunt herself is an embodiment of camp femininity, playing the glamorous female icon with the highest level of enthusiasm, especially when she creates a gay club in her own villa and dances to popular disco tunes with muscular men. Her whole world is built around a fantasy and what the characters lack in depth (remember her inspiration is pulp fiction) they make up in the intensity of their performances. Kill Me Gently is not a film of subtle implications, but an embodiment of the sexual revolution taken to its marvellous absurd.

Kill Me Gently is certainly not completely unproblematic. One of its issues is that its faming could be seen as an exemplar of the male gaze (Mulvey 1989). Most of the time, sexual relationships are portrayed through passionate kissing and moaning, or hinted at with various subcultural signs (e. g., flirting between Adam and David). The lesbian sex scene between Cita and Julija, however, is the most explicit. The film’s portrayal of lesbianism could be likened to the stereotypes that can often be found in other cinematic representations of lesbian desire, especially in the exploitation films of the decade (see, e.g., Zimmerman 1981). During their sex scene, the two fully naked women are positioned symmetrically (an image implying a narcissistic look in the mirror, or homosexuality as narcissism), are rather comically gently stroking each other’s breasts and whispering nonsense (embodying a discourse of an impossible or infantile lesbian sex), and are framed for the viewer’s voyeuristic pleasure. However, it should be noted that this portrayal happens in a camp framework, thus functioning both as an excessive construction and a humorous deconstruction of the images of lesbianism in popular culture. It is not just the representation of lesbianism that Kill Me Gently does not take seriously, nothing avoids being laughed at. Although some of the film’s visual and substantive choices have not necessarily aged well, it nevertheless opened a place for gender and sexual ambivalence and queer viewing pleasures at a time when they were still marginalized topics among the Yugoslav public. With its strategy of parodic repetition which brought gender and sexual cliches and stereotypes to their limit, Kill Me Gently deconstructed labels. In that sense, it was not just a bizarre apolitical camp comedy but an attempt at queering the Yugoslav imagination. This is an aspect that gives the film a more serious character than initially perceived.

Conclusion

This article highlights queer cinematic histories of Yugoslavia, specifically its former Republic of Slovenia. When looking at European film history, it becomes apparent that there is much work to be done to account for the cinematic images of queerness and their contexts in the former East. The examples used illustrate that, under socialism, Slovenian cinema reflected the country’s ambivalent attitudes towards queerness: on the one side, the analysed films featured numerous unhappy young men and sad endings, on the other, they were a source of rebellious pleasures.

However, the more or less subtle images of queerness have started to gradually disappear from cinematic works after the 1970s and/or were usually not the focus of the films’ narratives.⁷ The 1990s brought not only independence from Yugoslavia, but also a revival of nuclear family glorification and a re-traditionalization of Slovenian society (Kuhar 2001, 101). In Slovenian films post-independence, queerness is thematized rarely and, when it is visible, it often comes with a series of tragical endings and monstruous plots. Duletič describes the new times as follows:

It was only after independence that something changed. As if Čap’s line [referencing Čap’s homosexuality] ended, and the Christian influence decided we won’t have any of this anymore. I submitted many more screenplays, but I never got a chance to make a new film (Mozetič 2009, 27).

Štefančič (2013) similarly points out that every Slovenian film made after the independence could have been made during socialism. But the same cannot be said the other way around: Masquerade, which he sees as the most radical Slovenian film, could never have been made today. He further highlights the case of Masquerade’s censorship at that time, which complicates the clear-cut division between the ‘totalitarian’ socialism and the ‘liberal’ new state even further:

Masquerade has been censured! Totalitarianism! Stalinism! The dark side of the Moon! But as early as 1982, a time of deep socialism, a time more gray and lead as in 1971, the Masquerade saw the light of the film projector – in its original, uncut, uncensored version. And yes, in 1971 Hladnik was terribly punished for his heresy – for his punishment he could make another film, The Lion is Coming, in the same year (Štefančič 2013).

The case of Slovenian queer film images in Yugoslavia illustrates that the progression from less to more visibility is not necessarily the trajectory one could easily apply to this region. I demonstrated how, under socialism, queer cinematic histories and social attitudes towards them were more complex than previously presumed. Therefore, a further inquiry into Eastern European queer cinematic histories could well give a new perspective: not just on the connection of film and queerness under different socialist/communist regimes, but also on the idea of what constitutes queer cinema in Europe.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and generous suggestions for improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jasmina Šepetavc

Jasmina Šepetavc holds a PhD in Gender Studies and is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana), a film critic and a film festival selector. Her research interests include film-, popular music-, feminist- and queer theory.

Notes

1 I use queer as an umbrella term for persons, lives, and ways of desiring that do not fit into a heteronormative and/or gender binary moulds. As most of the analysed films in this article portray male homosexuality or bisexuality, queer is here often aligned with cis gay/bisexual. However, some films also open spaces of uncertainty and indefinability of their characters which can best be described as queer.

2 Jovanović mentions the work of Ewa Mazierska (2010). At this point, a few other contributions to the topic should also be mentioned, e. g. Moss (2007); Mozetič (2009); Mazierska, Mroz, and Ostrowska (2016); the 2020 ASEEES Conference panel titled Cinematic representations of queerness (Ozolins 2020; Moss 2020; Grujić 2020), etc.

3 In 1976 (with the law coming into effect a year later), male homosexuality was decriminalized in the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, the province of Vojvodina, and Montenegro. In Serbia and Kosovo, it was not decriminalized until 1994, in Macedonia until 1997, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina until 1998. Female homosexuality was never criminalized, which was not due to greater tolerance, but greater invisibility (see, e. g., Kuhar 2001, 86–87).

4 Available at the LGBT FilmFest Slovenia YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brl9Qt1m9t8&t=1764s

5 Duletič’s partner with whom he was living and working for more than five decades.

6 In the same year that Hladnik made Masquerade, Dušan Makavejev released W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (W.R. – Misterije organizma) which was banned for its exploration of the relationship between power, Party politics, and sexuality.

7 In his article on the topic, Gusti Leben (1990) highlights films like Krč/Spasm (Božo Šprajc, 1979), Ovni in mamuti/Rams and Mammoths (Filip Robar-Dorin, 1985), Kormoran/A Cormoran (Anton Tomašič, 1986), Ljubezni Blanke Kolak/Blanka Kolak’s Love (Boris Jurjaševič, 1987), Hudodelci/The Felons (Franci Slak, 1987). In these works, homosexuality is mostly only hinted at: e. g., in Spasm, two (heterosexual) female intellectuals living in the countryside are accused of ‘licking each other’, in Blanka Kolak’s Love, the female protagonist tries to seduce a male gay friend, etc. These works were not a part of our analysis but, in general, they could be used to argue that homosexuality was becoming increasingly marginalized in national cinema. As LGBT+ identities were becoming publicly visible for the first time in the 1980s – during that time, the first gay and lesbian organizations and the LGBT Film Festival were established – this is a rather perplexing paradox. However, such a claim would demand further analysis and would also need to consider Slovenian queer films post-independence.