Non-Aligned Spies: Secret Agents in the Yugoslav 1960s Cinema

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Yugoslav cinema
• film genre
• war film
• spy film
• Cold War
• ideology

Introduction

In the history of Yugoslav cinema, the 1960s are often described as the ‘golden’ decade (Kirn 2012, 5; Levi 2007, 15), the period when auteur film flourished and consequently led to an affirmation of the national cinema on the modernist world stage. Already within the 1960s period itself, and almost to the present day, this development was perceived by film critics as beginning with two movies, both appearing in 1961: Boštjan Hladnik’s Ples v dežju/A Dance in the Rain and Aleksandar Petrović’s Dvoje/And Love Has Vanished (Čolić 1967; Munitić 1966; Novaković 1967). However, the decade was not marked solely by auteur film, it was also a period of intensive reception of (mainly American) popular culture in Yugoslavia (Vučetić 2018), a period whose beginnings were marked by a ‘commercialization’ trend (Boglić 1963; Crnovršanin 1963) in the country’s cinema—which reached its peek with the scandalous musical comedy Šeki snima, pazi se/Šeki Is Filming, Watch Out (Marijan Vajda, 1962)—and a period in which the Yugoslav variant of the war film genre—the partisan film—developed into a spectacular form. In the context of this intensive commotion, and with regards to popular culture and genre patterns, the decade’s beginning was marked not only by the two early modernist oeuvres by Hladnik and Petrović, but also by an intensive interest in spy film. Already in 1960, two exemplary spy films were produced in Yugoslavia: X-25 javlja/X-25 Reports (František Čáp) and Kota 905/Point 905 (Mate Relja). In 1961, they were followed by Fadil Hadžić’s Abeceda straha/ABC of Fear.

Although these three films largely share in motivic as well as narrative structures, so far they have not been studied as a distinct group within the history of Yugoslav cinema. It is important to fill this interpretative blind spot for two reasons: on the one hand, Hadžić’s, Relja’s and Čáp’s films are exemplary for the process of genre proliferation and interplay within Yugoslav cinema; on the other hand, they rely on a specific ideological matrix which is related to the articulation of the spy genre against a geopolitical position of ‘non-alignedness’ within the Cold War context.

Taking film genre theory as its issuing point, this article will attempt to fill the aforementioned interpretative gap through an analysis which could be divided into three steps. In a first step, the question will be posed of whether X-25 Reports, Point 905, and ABC of Fear were recognised as appertaining to a specific genre by film critics (the communicative function of genre) and what were the possible reasons for their (un)recognition; this question will laterally touch upon the specificity of genre structures within Yugoslav cinema. In a second step, the films will be analysed through a semantic/syntactic approach towards film genre (Altman 2003). It can quite easily be demonstrated that all three films work with semantic elements typical of the spy genre; however, an underlying syntactic structure, in which they all share, introduces certain modifications into the spy genre pattern and, as will be shown, necessarily pushes the analysis towards questions of ideology. In a third step, the ideological operation of the Yugoslav spy genre will be scrutinised in detail. Through this threefold analysis, a rather exhaustive insight should be acquired into the functions and properties of Yugoslav cinematic spies.

Genre under Cover

An almost commonplace proposition of film genre theory is that genre classifications are tools taking part in the communicative process between ‘filmmaker, film and audience’ which rely on specific ‘sets of cultural conventions’ (Grant 2003, 7). However, to the filmmaker-film-audience triad the position of the critic should be added, for s/he offers supplementary genre-definitions which at the same time witness to how films are perceived and how they are mediated to the audience. A brief overview of how Point 905, X-25 Reports and ABC of Fear were classified by Yugoslav film critics is therefore a good starting point for the analysis of the roles Yugoslav cinematic spies acquire.

What can be noticed right away is that the three films were not exactly defined as spy films by the 1960s period’s critics. In her review of Point 905, Mira Boglić claimed: ‘With his film Point 905, Mate Relja contributed to the enrichment of the action drama genre’. (1988, 53). Branko Belan described ABC of Fear as a war film which did not hesitate to make use of ‘elements of the thriller’ (1966, 297). Milutin Čolić wrote reviews on all three films and described X-25 Reports as well as Point 905 as ‘thrillers’ while ABC of Fear was named a ‘detective movie’ (1984, 556, 559, 563). Petar Volk was in fact a rare exception when he claimed, with regards to X-25 Reports, that ‘František Čáp affirmed his filmmaking skill through a spy film’ (1983, 62).

Now, Volk might have been rather lonely in his stressing of the spy element, but his remark about ‘filmmaking skill’ is rather typical for the a posteriori reception of all three films. Contemporary critics have in fact largely overtaken this opinion: Ivo Škrabalo describes Point 905 as a ‘well-made action film’ (2008, 66) while Nikica Gilić claims that ABC of Fear is an ‘impressive urban war thriller’ (2011, 60). Jurica Pavičić, in his turn, adds an important nuance to this reading when writing that Point 905 and ABC of Fear contributed to a trend which modernised the war film genre in Yugoslavia while pushing it away from ‘hard socialist realist epics towards western (mainly Anglo-American) genre patterns’ (2017, 33).

At this point, two things might be noted: genre attributions are an important part of the critical discourse on the aforementioned films, but they are rather vague, ranging from ‘action film’ or ‘action drama’ through ‘thriller’ or ‘detective movie’ to the quite arbitrary ‘Anglo-American genre patterns’. Secondly, the concept of a ‘well made film’ is either used openly or at least evoked. This is not only the case with Volk or Škrabalo; to take another example, Čolić explicitly stresses that Point 905 is an ‘attractive’ film which, in its use of genre patterns, has no pretentions to be ‘deep, transcendental’ (1984, 559). Finally, in Pavičić’s reading, genre patterns are a water-shed not against ‘depth’, but against ideological art, against ‘hard socialist realist epics’.

Within this system, genre film is therefore associated with filmmaking skill but, through the very same gesture, dissociated from ‘deep’ and/or ideological contents. And the vagueness of genre attributions as well as the reluctance to use the term ‘spy’ in relation to these films might be seen as strictly connected to this double presupposition. Whereas ‘action movie’, ‘detective movie’, ‘action drama’ or ‘thriller’ do not necessarily presuppose overt (geo)political preoccupations, the spy film does: the spy is a rather problematic figure working in the field of political conflict.

A further striking example of the problematic relation to spies can be found in the film ABC of Fear itself: when the young communist illegal who infiltrated a Croatian collaborationist family during WWII is confronted by two spies working for the Gestapo at the end of the film, she vehemently claims that what she was doing was not espionage; rather, it was simply a ‘fight against fascism’. On the one hand, the reference to spies is explicit in the film itself (the under-cover member of SKOJ evidently is a spy), on the other hand, it is also refuted by the protagonist (although she is at that point no longer trying to conceal her activities), as if espionage were something dishonourable which cannot exactly be part of the antifascist struggle.

So the Yugoslav cinematic spy is facing a double suppression: to inscribe her into the model of the well-made, entertaining genre film, critics have to at least partially disavow the ideological kernel of her activity; but this activity is also represented as problematic within the film ABC of Fear itself, as if the spy were not a fully legitimate figure of the People’s Liberation Struggle. In order to fully grasp this problem, critic’s positions will now have to be confronted with semantic/syntactic properties of the three films themselves.

The Semantics of Yugoslav Spy Films

In his seminal essay ‘Film Genre: A Semantic/Syntactic Approach’, Rick Altman made the proposition that each film genre is made recognizable through two distinct features: firstly, it needs to contain a set of ‘semantic’ elements or, quite simply, motifs typical of the genre. Secondly, it has to rely on a fundamental syntactic, or logical structure (Altman 2003). These seemingly abstract postulates become easily comprehensible when applied to a particular genre. According to Altman, the semantics of the western, for example, encompass the space of the American West between 1840 and 1900 and its decorum (horses, the saloon, etc.), a set of stock characters (the soft/hard cowboy), a certain ‘ambience’ with the focus on basic elements such as earth, water, leather, etc. (p. 32). These ‘lexical’ elements are then linked through the fundamental syntactic structure of the genre which relies on a ‘dialectic between the West as garden and as desert (between culture and nature, community and individual, future and past)’ (p. 32).

A relatively problematic aspect of Altman’s model is that one is not always sure where to ‘draw the line between the semantic and the syntactic’ (Langford 2005, 16). Altman’s theory discreetly draws on structural linguistics’ distinction between langue and parole, introduced explicitly into film genre studies by Thomas Schatz who claimed that genres should be regarded as ‘a specific grammar or system of rules of expression and construction’ while the single film should be regarded as ‘a manifestation of these rules’ (1981, 19). However, the ‘grammar’, or syntax, is within Altman’s theoretical model already a semantic element: it is a binary opposition based in semantics—that between garden and desert, to return shortly to the example of the western—but it is also the binary opposition which governs the distribution of all other semantic elements (decorum/iconography, stock characters, ambiance, etc.) and in this way it acquires a ‘syntactic’ role.

Altman’s syntax could therefore be compared with Jurij Lotman’s insights on semiotic space. On the one hand, space-constructs are part of the text’s semantics and endowed with meaning; to take one of Lotman’s examples, in a text space can be divided into a space of the living and a space of the dead (1977, 237). On the other hand, however, this distribution, which relies on a semantic opposition, is a fundamental element of plot-building, as it allows for an event, famously defined as the ‘shifting of a persona across the border of a semantic field’ (p. 233), to take place. In other words, the semantic opposition between the two spaces allows for the plot to develop from balance to disbalance (crossing of the border) to modified balance and is in this sense a syntactic element.

Surely, from a rigorous theoretical perspective, the border between Altman’s syntax and semantics remains somewhat blurred. This might be one of the reasons why in his later writings on film genre, Altman himself, although never fully abandoning the semantics-syntax opposition, turned towards audience-construction and a ‘pragmatic’ approach to genre (1999). Notwithstanding these relative theoretical shortcomings of Altman’s ‘semantic-syntactic approach’, his distinction between semantics and syntax could be regarded as quite a useful tool for recognizing and organizing different layers of meaning when interpreting a genre film. In this essay the opposition will therefore be used heuristically as a means for segmenting the analysis, without pretentions to an absolutely clear division between syntactic and semantic elements.

The two-fold, semantic-syntactic articulation of genre can without great difficulties be applied to the spy film. In the centre of its semantics evidently stands the spy. Now, the spy has some key properties: s/he works alone amidst enemy ranks (Von Hallberg 2015, 151), s/he is a master of observation and information gathering (Drügh and Mergenthaler 2005, 25) and is highly skilled in camouflage. Another necessary element of the spy genre is the motive of information itself, which is always confidential, usually coded and highly valuable (p. 14). To these basic elements, others can be added: the genre usually accentuates technology (especially communication technologies); since the spy’s identity needs to be fully concealed, personal and romantic relationships are not desirable and usually become part of the espionage game (p. 15); the genre usually relies on a space-structure comprising a clear border which only spies are able to cross.

The articulation of space typical of the genre leads towards its fundamental, syntactic structure. As Heinz J. Drügh and Volker Mergenthaler note, the figure of the spy would be perfectly superfluous without the existence of two spheres which differ in national, political and/or ideological characteristics; it is the tension between two geopolitical entities which gives sense to the spy’s activity. This is why the crown metaphor of the Cold War—the ‘Iron Curtain’—is also an extremely fruitful motif for spy movies (Drügh and Mergenthaler 2005, 24); for this reason, the spy genre flourished during the Cold War (Britton 2005; Schwarz 2006) with the James Bond series being the most evident example, but with the motif of the Iron Curtain fuelling other classics of the genre as well, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) or Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965).

If the classical science-fiction film relied on a fundamental syntactic structure of ‘intrusion’ and offered ways of dealing with an ‘other’ (Wright 2003, 43) (as is most evident in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), quite the opposite could be said of the spy film: it is no longer the ‘other’ intruding, rather it is the spy intruding the ‘other’. And this intrusion, the fundamental syntactic element of the spy-genre, happens through the crossing of both a spatial and a political/ideological divide. However, what makes the spy film potentially uncomfortable is that the spy’s identity is somewhat ‘precarious’ (Drügh and Mergenthaler 2005, 35): s/he has to enter enemy ranks while fashioning herself as one of them. A schematic depiction of those standing on the other side of the political divide therefore becomes almost impossible within the spy genre.

If we now apply the above-sketched semantic/syntactic structure of the spy film genre to Point 905, X-25 Reports and ABC of Fear, it can quite easily be demonstrated that all three films are exemplary members of the spy genre. At this point a brief recounting of the three films’ plots will be necessary, out of which the above-enumerated semantic elements can then be subtracted.

X-25 Reports’ beginning is situated in the Croatian capital Zagreb at the beginning of the German occupation of The Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941 and the establishment of the quisling Ustasha regime. A university student named Mirko is approached by his friend Gregorić who is a member of the Communist resistance and offered to join in on the fight. Mirko has a partially German ancestry—therefore he has a good mastery over the language—and an uncle who became a high functionary under the new regime. By using his uncle’s influence, Mirko manages to become a secretary in the German military headquarters in Zagreb and after several trials as well as extensive training advances to become a German spy. However, he is in fact playing the role of a double-agent. After being sent to spy on partisan divisions on spot, he kills his colleague spy and reports false information on the resistance-fighters’ plans to his headquarters. Afterwards, he returns to Zagreb, blames the dead spy for the falsity of the information and manages to retrieve a full list of fascist collaborators infiltrated into the partisan ranks. Finally, he escapes the city in the company of a German secretary who decided to switch sides herself.

Point 905 is situated in 1946, after the war’s end. However, bands of Chetniks (Serb nationalist collaborators) have not yet been fully eradicated. After one such group led by a major named Momir executes several terrorist attacks, the Yugoslav secret service intercepts a message reporting that an operative from abroad will join the terrorist group and give them instructions. They arrest the real agent and infiltrate one of their own operatives named Vladimir into the enemy ranks. This operative needs to lead the group, hiding in a thickly forested mountain, to the hilltop 905 where they should get arrested. After several complications the operative succeeds in his task and delivers the whole group to Yugoslav military authorities.

ABC of Fear is situated in 1943, once again in Zagreb. Vera, a university student and member of the SKOJ (Savez komunističke omladine Jugoslavije/League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia) receives the task to infiltrate the bourgeois Bolnar family while acting as if she were an illiterate maid. The father in the Bolnar family, namely, poses as the general director of the Croatian Bank but is in fact a high-ranking Gestapo officer and spy. Vera needs to retrieve from his office a list ‘provocateurs’ infiltrated into partisan ranks. After several vain attempts at finding the list, her cover is busted during an air-raid on Zagreb by Bolnar and a colleague of his who arrived from Ljubljana and remains nameless throughout the film. However, since she managed to inform her co-fighters that the two spies would be meeting that evening, probably to exchange the list, they rush into the apartment, overpower the two Gestapo officers, retrieve the list and escape with Vera and the unconscious man from Ljubljana who should offer them further information in later questionings.

Now, what can be seen already from these crude descriptions is that all three films heavily rely on the motive of coded and/or hidden information. In X-25 Reports the information gathered by the opponent spy is kept hidden in a safe behind a portrait in his flat. Another trope related to spy coding is the X-25 from the film’s very title: quite in the vein of 007, it is the code-name of the good double agent himself. In ABC of Fear, appearing one year after X-25, the trope of the spy’s hidden safe is already mocked: Bolnar also has a safe behind a portrait, but only to keep high-school memories in it, for it is a hiding-place worthy of a school-boy. The real list is in fact hidden inside the speaker of his phone. Here one can observe not only a reliance on genre tropes, but also the fact that they have become ironized. Finally, in Point 905 the infiltrated agent manages to get hold of codes which allow for the deciphering of messages coming from the abroad Chetnik leadership, which allows him to distribute fake messages among the terrorists.

Secret information is also systematically, and quite typically, put in relation with technology. Although the technology these spies use is not exactly bleeding-edge from a contemporary perspective, it is specific and systematically accentuated. It is not by accident that the secret list is kept within a telephone in ABC of Fear; both Point 905 and X-25 Reports emphasise the importance of portable, military radio-stations which can be both a source of information and its abuse: in X-25, the good double agent uses the fact that the enemy spy’s transmitter has broken down, which makes him the only one capable of communicating with the German headquarters. Skills at intercepting transmissions are what allows for the OZNA agents to infiltrate their man into the terrorist unit where he is once again the only one who can report to the alleged headquarters (in fact he is emitting messages to his fellow agents) for being the only one who disposes of the secret code.

As for the portraits of the three Yugoslav spies (Mirko, Vera and Vladimir), they quite perfectly fit the genre pattern. In the case of Vera, the secret agent’s ‘precarious’ identity gets accentuated explicitly: at the very beginning of the film, a voice (the film never shows the speaker) informs her of her mission and warns her that she will, for the time being, have to stop being everything she is. Vera is shown in this sequence under dim light, smoking a cigarette. She is informed that this is another habit she will have to give up (an illiterate girl coming from the country-side is not supposed to smoke). After she extinguishes the cigarette, the next shot already shows her in the infiltrated family’s apartment in which the main part of the narrative will take place and where she will never be allowed even to show that she can read. In the final scene, while escaping in a car, she is then seen lighting another cigarette—through this seemingly banal marker, her identity has thus been restored.

X-25’s (Mirko’s) identity is not only precarious, he suffers the stereotypical spy’s fate which implies that ‘espionage is often unrewarded labour undertaken in self-sacrificing patriotism above and beyond battlefield valour’ (Britton 2005, 4): he is not only despised by his own mother (who thinks he is really collaborating with the occupiers), but also has difficulties proving his loyalty to his co-fighters when joining the partisan unit (at first, they do not believe that he is a double agent working for them). Finally, Vladimir’s mock-identification with the terrorist group is stressed in the film when he reports to his base that the terrorist group counts 9 members, including himself; his commanding officer then expresses his ironic surprise to this manner of counting.

X-25 and ABC of Fear also make use of the schematic distinction between ‘mercenary’ and ‘patriotic’ spies (Britton 2005: 3). When discovered by the Gestapo agents, Vera is offered to work for them and to be paid not with words (the idealism of socialism) but with money; naturally, she refuses. When reporting to his colleague, X-25 brings him an envelope with his pay from the German headquarters, once again stressing the moral difference between the two: one—the traitor—works for money, while the other—X-25—works out of idealism.

Whereas in ABC of Fear there is not even a hint at a romantic plot (rather, the younger daughter in the family stands in for a very specific romantic surrogate), in both X-25 Reports and Point 905, the romantic plot is being hinted at but never fully developed, with the spy’s romantic partner, once again quite typically, becoming a pawn in the espionage game: in X-25 Reports, it is the German secretary who decides to change side while in Point 905 it is Momir’s fiancée who decides to help the good agent. As these side-characters play a both similar and important role in the ideological mechanism of all three films, they are going to be analysed in depth a little later; for now, it suffices to remark that the spy never really enters an intimate relationship in the films and that even hints at such a relationship almost immediately become part of the game of espionage.

In X-25 Reports the spy Mirko also disposes of other abilities quite typical of the secret agent—he develops advanced combat skills and even performs a parachute jump—while ABC of Fear exploits another trope of the spy genre, namely scopophobia—time and again, Vera notices neighbours who might be watching her from other apartments and whose allegiance is fully unclear.

The accent on a spatial border typical of the genre is also present in all three films: Mirko’s initiation into the spy world begins with his waiting at the tollgate which demarcates the zone of the centre of Zagreb which only the occupiers and their high-ranking collaborators can enter—his entry into espionage is therefore quite explicitly connected to an entry into a forbidden space. The very first shot after the opening credits of ABC of Fear is Vera’s point-of-view shot through the peephole of the infiltrated apartment’s door; her seclusion from the outside world upon entering the spy game is thus accentuated. Finally, Vladimir’s entry into enemy territory is marked by code: upon arriving at a provincial train-station, he has to address a coach driver with the words ‘Can one find a place to sleep somewhere around here?’ and receive the coded answer ‘Yes, but only in the woods’. Upon the successful exchange of passwords, Vladimir’s point-of-view shot shows the wooded hill, while the coach driver informs him that ‘our own are over there’: the passage into enemy space has therefore been opened for him.

As has already been noted, the spatial distribution typical of the spy film leads to its’ syntactic properties which are quite indistinguishable from political/ideological concerns. Before boarding this aspect of the three films, it should be noted that their semantic elements quite clearly and firmly inscribe them into the spy genre: from the agent and his/her problematic identity to the encoded secret information to tropes of paranoia and space distributions, X-25 Reports, Point 905 and ABC of Fear are exemplary spy films on a semantic level. This being at least partially demonstrated, the analysis can now cross from semantics to syntax.

The Syntax of Yugoslav Spy Films

As has been noted above, the fundamental ‘syntactic’ element of the spy genre—the element which governs the distribution of all the enumerated typical motifs—could be defined as one of intrusion over a spatial and political-ideological divide. Two things can be noticed right away with regards to this fundamental motif in all three films. Firstly, the spy plot is tied to the period of World War Two and its immediate aftermath; it is therefore not contemporary to the films, appearing at the beginning of the 1960s. Secondly, it fully relies on the concept of an enemy within. In all three cases, the spy infiltrates groups of indigenous traitors: the Ustasha and the Chetniks respectively.

This prevailing pattern could be explained through an interplay of genre patterns and geopolitics. As has already been noted, the beginning of the 1960s was a time of intense reception of predominantly American popular culture in Yugoslavia. These trends were then often ‘domesticised’ by being grafted upon the genre most prominent in Yugoslavia, namely that of war, or more specifically, partisan film. A famous example of this procedure, analysed in depth by Nikica Gilić (2015), are films by Žika Mitrović in which the conflicts of WWII and their aftermath are coded through a semantics typical of the western genre. As has been demonstrated in the opening segments of this essay, this grafting process was then interpreted teleologically as a mechanism pushing Yugoslav cinema towards the well-made film and away from crude socialist-realist ideological constructs.

However, the grafting of the espionage plot upon the partisan genre at the beginning of the 1960s might also be contextually motivated. Yugoslavia occupied quite a peculiar position within the Cold War distribution: after the famous ‘Informbiro’ conflict of 1948 and Tito’s split with Stalin, the country broke diplomatic relations with the USSR and approached the Western Block, after which relations with the USSR were only gradually restored towards the middle of the 1950s (Luburić 1999; Rajak 2011). Additionally, in 1961 (the year ABC of Fear appeared) the first conference of the movement of non-aligned countries was held in Belgrade (Jakovina 2011, 33), making Yugoslavia one of the leaders of the countries refusing full allegiance to either of the blocks.

The ‘Iron Curtain’ was thus quite a problematic metaphor out of Yugoslavia’s perspective, for the country did not really stand on either side. The spies on the Yugoslav screen could therefore not exactly make use of its semantics: if the Cold War was a fruitful structure for the proliferation of spy movies, and if genre patterns were strongly influencing Yugoslav film at the beginning of the 1960s, the only way to incorporate the spy plot within the national cinema at the moment was to articulate it against a conflict other than that of the Cold War. It was World War II which then provided the model.

However, the grafting of the spy plot upon the Yugoslav war film is not as unproblematic as it may seem. In fact, the hybrid genre had to break away from some of the fundamental mechanisms typical for partisan movies and, by doing so, to modify their fundamental ideological structure.

At this point, a short methodological digression might be needed. To claim that the three spy films (as well as Yugoslav partisan films) comprise ideological mechanisms is not at all to claim that they are ‘socialist-realist’. Here a critical bias hinted at in the section on reviews of Yugoslav spy films becomes apparent: in opposition to Western genre criticism, which largely recognises that film genre is inherently ideological, criticism on Yugoslav cinema will interpret the use of (Western) genre patterns as at least partially emancipatory from ideological contents. But this move is in fact based on a discrete conflation of ‘ideology’ with ‘socialist realism’: if a movie coming from a socialist country contains elements typical of Hollywood genres, it will not appertain to an aesthetics of socialist realism and will, consequently, not be ideological. However, this discreet argumentative structure is troubling for at least two reasons: firstly, it needs to more or less openly and rather uncritically postulate that Western art and popular culture are not ideological for its opposition to work; secondly, it operates with a concept of ‘socialist realism’ which is most often applied in a perfectly vague manner (Jovanović 2015) and is in fact used to support a schematic (ideological?) distinction between communist and capitalist art.

It is also worth noting in passing that there is a wide critical consensus on the fact that Yugoslav cultural politics had definitely broken away from ‘socialist realism’ already in 1952 with Miroslav Krleža’s famous exposé at the Congress of the Yugoslav Writer’s Union in Ljubljana (Petranović 1988; Šuvaković 2008; Wachtel 1998). However, due to the aforementioned tendency to conflate ideology in art produced in socialist countries with a vague concept of ‘socialist realism’, an ideological analysis of Yugoslav cinema always runs the risk of being viewed as (re)discovering discrete traits of socialist realism in films. It should therefore at this point be explicitly stated that the three chosen films encompass ideological mechanisms not because they were produced in a society which radically forced ideology upon art, but because all symbolic activity at least tangentially touches upon questions of ideology.

As Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek demonstrated, it is hard to envisage any discursive position which would simply escape ideology (Laclau 1997; Žižek 1994) and the same could be applied to film (the distinction between an ‘ideological’ and a ‘mythological’ approach towards film genre—the first claiming that genre films reflect audience desires, while the second postulates that film genres impose ideological constructs—is pertinent only as long as one envisages ‘audience desires’ as spontaneous phenomena standing outside ideology, which is a more than dubious proposition). To attempt at an ideological reading of Yugoslav spy films and to demonstrate how their ideological mechanisms differ from the classical model of partisan films is therefore neither to claim that Yugoslav spy films are in fact ‘socialist realist’ nor to claim that they are not ‘socialist realist’ in opposition to the dominant model; rather, it is an attempt at defining their peculiarity within the necessarily related genre-ideology matrix.

Now, it has been shown that X-25 Reports, Point 905 and ABC of Fear rely on the fundamental syntactic structure of intrusion into enemy ranks. It has also been noted that the intruded other is another within, the Yugoslav collaborator rather than the occupier. However, and quite in accordance with the laws of the genre, this intrusion is made possible by the precarious, ‘chameleonesque’ identity of the protagonist who has to be able to fashion him/herself as one of the others. This narrative mechanism has a major consequence: through the eyes of the intruder, a nuanced look is made possible into the world of the other while the monolithic border between ‘us’ and the ‘them’ become porous: only through the exploitation of certain common traits can the intrusion be functional.

This mechanism at least partially goes against one of the main traits of Yugoslav partisan cinema. As Miranda Jakiša claims, a key property of partisan cinema is that it produces an ‘unambiguous face-off situation’ while relying on an ‘imagery of irregular and individualised partisan fighters from the narod (people) confronted with an amorphous mass of foreign fascist invaders’ (2015, 10). Although the difference between friend and foe is never really conflated within Yugoslav spy films, at certain moments it is ironically questioned: the Chetniks hiding in the forest explicitly state that they have now overtaken the role of the partisans and Vladimir has no problem in keeping up with them exactly because he was a partisan (as has been noted, he even mock-identifies with their troop); Mirko has to go through almost identical beating-ups by the Gestapo and the partisans before he earns their trust.

But what is certain is that the fascists in spy films are neither fully foreign nor amorphous. And it is exactly through a differentiation within the fascist groups that the three spy films create their ideological effects. Firstly, in all three films the collaborators are shaded by further nuances. In X-25 Reports the betrayal is fashioned as a predominately national question; while lacking in any reference whatsoever to a rhetoric of class conflict, the film relies on the semantics of national belonging: X-25 is reminded time and again, or reminds himself, that he is Yugoslav, not German (although he is in fact partially German as well). In Point 905 in the background of the conflict quite clearly stands a socialist agrarian reform and the collectivization of land; the main supplier (a gazda or rich peasant) of the terrorists is reminded several times that if the communists stay in power, he will loose his property. In ABC of Fear the Bolnar family is not only pronouncedly bourgeois (as can be seen from the entire decorum of the apartment in which the film takes place), they are also the last offspring of a noble lineage, as several members of the family repeatedly stress.

So the enemy within, the collaborator has several guises: s/he is either a national traitor (the half-German uncle) or a rich peasant (a gazda) or a class enemy (the nobleman/bourgeois). Quite evidently, these three figures are in high accordance with a Marxist ideological matrix. However, the three films’ ideological mechanism does not stop at identifying the enemies, through a nuanced representation, it negotiates the distance separating ‘us’ from ‘them’.

In this respect, the sketched-out romantic plots are exemplary. Let us start with X-25 Reports. Early in the film, Mirko is left alone in the German command’s headquarters; he uses this opportunity to rummage through the office of a general and to try to open his safe in search for the list of infiltrated collaborators. While doing this, he is surprised by the general’s German secretary Miss Kramer. He is convinced that his cover is busted, but surprisingly enough, she does not report him.

Towards the end of the movie, Mirko manages to steal the list with the names, but the co-fighter whom he gave it to gets arrested and the list ends up back in the office: in this way, it has become evident that there is a mole in the German headquarters. Since he is called to an urgent meeting, the ranking officer has to leave the office once again, but before doing so he orders Miss Kramer to stay in home-prison until he can consecrate his time to her case (she has become a potential suspect). However, Mirko then comes in. Miss Kramer informs him that the list is back in the office and proclaims that she knew all along whom he was working for. So he steals the list one more time, delivers it to the resistance movement and makes plans to escape. But, as a voice-over lets the viewer know, he cannot leave before finding out why Miss Kramer helped him. So he rushes to her apartment, tricks the two Gestapo officers watching over it and finds Miss Kramer preparing for suicide. Miss Kramer then refuses to escape with him while proclaiming that she is German. In other words, she is desperate because she committed the exact same national betrayal which shaped the movie’s main conflict, only from the opposite direction. The shock of this betrayal is so strong that X-25 has to make her join him in his escape by force; finally, they do manage to leave the city together while at least a shadow of a romantic development is hinted at.

Through the figure of Miss Kramer the main conflict of the film—that of national betrayal—is therefore accentuated, but also negotiated: there are cases in which national betrayal is acceptable, for example, when loyalty to one’s nation would also presuppose allegiance to the Nazi regime. Within the ideological mechanism of the film, Miss Kramer and X-25’s collaborationist uncle occupy exactly the opposite positions: one is a national traitor because he is a servant to the Nazi regime while the other becomes a national traitor exactly because she does not want to serve the Nazi regime. Since the amorphous group of fascists is broken down and nuanced in this way, the film also suggests that not all of those who found themselves on the wrong side of the national-ideological divide are irredeemable. It should also be taken into account that the question of national betrayal is not an easy one for X-25 himself: his mother reminds him that although his grandfather was German, his own name is Simić (an evidently Slavic name); however, when he audiences by the Wehrmacht officers who are going to employ him, they explain his good demeanour exactly by his being German. So both a Yugoslav and a German identity get projected upon X-25 and it is this projection that makes him capable of playing the role of a double agent. But it also demonstrates that his loyalty depends to a certain extent on a non-essential choice: he is choosing the Yugoslav projection instead of the German projection. So the concept of treason becomes quite intricate in the film: there is the traitor and collaborator uncle, then there is Miss Kramer who chooses to become a traitor because she refuses to collaborate and finally there is X-25 who at the same time is and is not a traitor—he is a traitor to the Germans, but within the film’s system residing on the semantics of national belonging, also a partial traitor to himself, for he is partially German, only because he is not a traitor of his own people and of himself as Simić.

By multiplying and nuancing its system of treasons, X-25 Reports therefore makes national betrayal into a slippery terrain: although such treason is in the beginning fashioned as absolutely unacceptable, it can be justified on the one hand (as is the case with Miss Kramer); on the other hand, it can be avoided through a personal choice with X-25 (Mirko) using and at the same time fully discarding his German identity.

It can therefore be seen that through the interplay of characters in X-25 Reports a) the national criterium as an essential one is relativised—national loyalty is not predestined but a matter of choice and b) that the border between ‘us’ and ‘them’ becomes porous through the very same gesture: a member of ‘them’—Miss Kramer—can become one of ‘us’ as soon as the concept of national identity as destiny is overcome: this is exactly what happens after her final cry about her being German: after this last outburst, she can cross the border towards the resistance fighters.

The film therefore relies on a double system of borders: firstly, there is the border between fascism and anti-fascism; secondly, this border is nationally codes as a border between the Germans and the Yugoslavs. But through the film’s narrative mechanism and disposition of characters, it is then suggested that the national border is a non-essential, transgressive one; the film would thus suggest that one cannot even-out the national and the fascist/anti-fascist border.

As has been noted, in ABC of Fear, the fascist/antifascist border is over-coded through class distinctions: the collaborator is distinctly bourgeois. Now, a romantic plot is almost fully absent from the movie, but its surrogate is Saša, the younger daughter in the Bolnar family. She is fifteen and in almost every sequence in which she appears, she elaborates on her miss/adventures with boys. But she is also a representative of education: she is the one who endeavours in the project to make the (presumably) illiterate maid (in reality the spy Vera) learn the ABCs. And this education obtains an explicit bourgeois shading when Saša mockingly attempts to teach the illiterate peasant girl not only to write, but also to play the piano.

Towards the middle of the movie, Vera has to sneak out of the apartment to meet her fellow resistance-fighters. Accidentally, Saša wakes up and goes to search for her, only to find her room empty. When her older sister then decides that she will wake Vera up, Saša prevents her from doing so, in order for Vera not to be discovered. So Saša has become Vera’s accomplice. But from a dialogue between the two, which takes place next morning, the viewer finds out that this is due to Saša’s misinterpretation: she presumes that Vera had snuck out only to meet with a lover.

However, the very same morning, two policemen come into the apartment to look for a young female illegal who has almost been caught during the night and is probably hiding somewhere in the neighbourhood. As nobody else in the family knows that Vera had left the apartment during the night and since the policemen find no incriminating evidence in her room, she does not get arrested. But during the sequence, several close-up shots accentuate Saša’s face, suggesting that she realised which secret she in fact is hiding while deciding not to give the spy away.

Saša is also the character who confronts her older sister’s Antisemitism and who stresses on several occasions that Vera, the presumed servant, is being exploited. So she is fashioned as a stereotypical bourgeois girl on the one hand (playing the piano and dreaming of romances), but on the other hand, she is a character of enlightenment, she pronouncedly opposes Antisemitism and is sensible towards exploitation.

What should also be taken into account is that Saša is the youngest member of the family. In opposition, the man from Ljubljana stresses the fact of Bolnar (the father) being the offspring of an old, noble lineage. And if the old Bolnar is irredeemable, the young Saša is not: although bourgeois, she decides to at least minimally collaborate with the resistance. So the border between fascism and anti-fascism is now being supported by a class border (between the bourgeoisie and the servant), but through the character of Saša the bourgeoisie itself gets split both generationally and ideologically: the youngest member shows that not all members of the old dominating class are irredeemable.

As was the case with X-25 Reports, the border between fascism and anti-fascism is therefore an essential one in the film. This border then gets supported by another distinction—that of class allegiance—but this distinction is then once again fashioned as a non-essential, porous one: Saša is the symbolic representative of the fact that the bourgeoisie is not necessarily collaborationist.

Almost the same structure can be found in Point 905. As has already been noted, the movie’s terrorist band led by the major Momir relies on an old gazda (rich peasant) for provisions. The gazda figure could be seen as a rural complement of the bourgeoisie in early Yugoslav socialist discourse. So once again, the now ex-collaborators (the film’s plot takes place after the war’s end), rely on a class enemy. Now, this gazda has a daughter named Jelka who is Momir’s fiancée, but who moved to a nearby city to find work. At the beginning of the film, she had been struck by a car in the city street by Vladimir, at that point still wearing his uniform. Jelka did not get hurt badly during the accident, but she did take a good look at Vladimir’s face. When she returns to her father’s village house for a couple of days, she finds Momir there, in the company of Vladimir, now fashioning himself as the Chetnik major Miloš. She recognises him right away and a coded dialogue develops between the two of them in front of Momir: she calls Vladimir captain (his actual army rank) and then ironically apologises when he corrects her by stating that he is a major, she warns him that he must feel very uncomfortable in his current position (a reference to him being recognised as a spy which Momir interprets an a reference to him having to sleep in the forest), etc. However, she decides not to betray Vladimir, for she is aware of the fact that the Chetniks as well as gazdas are becoming historic residues. Towards the end of the film, Momir forcefully recruits the gazda and Jelka’s younger brother Boško into his unit. Upon this event, Jelka runs to offer the authorities further information on Momir while in the final showdown, Boško manages to rescue Vladimir’s life.

The structure is therefore very similar to the one in ABC of Fear: the conflict between the collaborator and the anti-fascists (at this point no longer a resistance movement but the official army and government) is articulated against the semantics of gazda as class enemy. But the gazda position is split into two generations (the father/Jelica and Boško) with the younger generation choosing the anti-fascist, socialist side. It is thus suggested once again that the class distinction is a relevant, but non-essential one.

At this point, it becomes apparent that the ideological mechanism of Yugoslav spy films from the 1960s is an ambivalent one: in turning to the constitutive conflict of WWII, the spy film in Yugoslavia relied not only on the fundamental distinction between fascism and anti-fascism, but also, it overdetermined this conflict through national and class distinctions (the bourgeoisie, the gazda, the Volksdeutscher). However, through a detailed insight into enemy ranks, typical of the spy’s activity, this second set of attributes was relativised through the films’ narratives, showing that the appertaining to neither class nor nationality are essentially irredeemable properties: there are always segments of the ‘other’ which can cross to the right camp. Paradoxically, the spy genre in Yugoslavia is therefore at the same time conservative and liberal: on the one hand, it does create a rather schematic link between the ‘bad guys’ and national/class distinctions; on the other hand, it calls this very same schematism into question.

Conclusion

To sum up: elements of the spy film were quite present in Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1960s, as has been demonstrated through the analysis of the three chosen films. Although the genre was not fully recognised by critics at the time, it can be seen as part of the trend of grafting multiple genre influences upon the pattern of Yugoslav war film. A peculiarity of the Yugoslav spy film, however, is that it did not draw on the Cold War divide, presumably due to Yugoslavia’s non-aligned position, but that it returned to the conflict of WWII. In doing so, it became the genre which does not use the pattern of a simple ‘face-off’ situation, since the spy has to be deeply infiltrated into enemy ranks. This property of the genre allowed for the Yugoslav spy film to exercise a rather peculiar ideological function: it was able to question which markers are pertinent for the definition of inner enemies and which are at least partially contingent. Starting from a rather conservative position (fascist equals national and class other) it negotiated between these markers to show that a conciliatory position with regards to the national and class other is at least partially possible.

Finally, it should be noted that the connection between spies and ‘inner’ enemies established during the 1960s can also be found in later (ex)Yugoslav films. The most evident example would be the spy comedy Balkanski Špijun/Balkan Spy (Dušan Kovačević, 1984) where the ideological border divides ex-Stalinists from the Yugoslav post-Informbiro society. Another example of spies working against ‘inner’ enemies can be found in Kad mrtvi zapjevaju/When the Dead Start Singing (Krsto Papić, 1998) with an aged UDBA agent hunting down Croatian political migrants. However, if one allows oneself a little bit of generalization, it could be claimed that in these later examples the mediating mechanism characteristic of the 1960s spy plots got lost in favour of borders which do not allow for a happy synthesis.

Filmography

Abeceda straha/ABC of Fear (YUG 1961, D: Fadil Hadžić)

Balkanski Špijun/Balkan Spy (YUG 1984, D: Dušan Kovačević)

Dvoje/And Love Has Vanished (YUG 1961, D: Aleksandar Petrović)

Kad mrtvi zapjevaju/When the Dead Start Singing (CRO 1998, D: Krsto Papić)

Kota 905/Point 905 (YUG 1960, D: Mate Relja)

Ples v dežju/A Dance in the Rain (YUG 1961, D: Boštjan Hladnik)

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (UK 1965, D: Martin Ritt)

Torn Curtain (USA 1966, D: Alfred Hitchcock)

X-25 javlja/X-25 Reports (YUG 1960, D: František Čáp)

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.