‘Dreary and sarcastic images under the Marshal’s Baton.’ The Yugoslav 1960s Cinema, the Canon and the International Gaze: from subversion to Balkanism and popular-cultural re-evaluation

Abstract

The article inquires into how an international success of the 1960s auteur films influenced the Yugoslav cinematic canon. Through scrutinizing an array of reviews and articles appearing in the Yugoslav press of the period, it reconstructs an ‘international gaze’: a semi-imaginary, yet authoritative instance for which the Yugoslav film-maker, the Yugoslav critic and the Yugoslav film historian needed to perform. This ‘gaze’ encompasses three mutually intertwined gestures: it deals in political ‘subversion’ and makes it into a means of cultural self-­fashioning; it is underpinned by Balkanist exoticizations, and it severs what it regards as modernist-critical works from their popular-cultural context. The article claims that an analysis of the effects which the ‘international gaze’ produces changes the perspective on the ‘dissident’ Yugoslav auteur as means of canonization. Furthermore, it inquires into how the ‘international gaze’ can create blind spots in the critic’s perspective and how the period’s non-canonized films (a privileged example being Dragoslav Lazić’s popular comedy Sirota Marija/Poor Mary, 1968) can fill-out these blind spots by turning the tables and making both the canonized works of the 1960s and the ‘international gaze’ that helped canonize them into objects of their own critique.

Keywords:

• Yugoslav cinema
• subversion
• Balkanism
• the international gaze
• the canon
• popular culture

The Yugoslav 1960s: A Very Brief Contextualization

The 1960s were a time of rapid change and development in Yugoslavia. More than a decade had passed since Josip Broz Tito’s¹ historic break with Stalin in 1948; the country was gaining confidence in following its ‘own way into socialism’ based in self-management and decentralization; major economic reforms were in full sway. The general cultural climate was one of openness and plurality, even of avant-garde aspirations. Yugoslavia’s split with Stalinism also meant a split with what was at the period referred to as a ‘Zhdanovist’, dogmatist, ‘socialist-realist’ cultural politics. It is wide consensus among cultural scholars and historians that this split had taken place already in 1952, with Miroslav Krleža—one of the major figures of Yugoslav literary modernism—decidedly refuting ‘socialist realism’ in his address at the Congress of Yugoslav Writers in Ljubljana. After this decisive break, Yugoslav cultural politics did not only tolerate modernism, certain critics claim that a moderate, ‘socialist’ modernism had become the mainstream of Yugoslav cultural production (Denegri 2003; Lukić 1972; Šuvaković 2008). Furthermore, during the 1960s, neo-avantgarde intellectual and artistic movements rose to prominence. Kal Kirn thus claims that the Yugoslav 1960s cultural context was defined not only by the highly influential ‘Praxis’ school of Marxism that proclaimed a merciless critique of everything and a return to Marx’ ‘early works’, but also by neo-avantgarde movements such as the OHO-Group, the experimental cinema of Tom Gotovac, new trends in memorial architecture as represented by Bogdan Bogdanović, Vojin Bakić and Dušan Džamonja, etc. (Kirn 2012, 15–16).²

It is in this context that a modernist trend rose to prominence within Yugoslav cinema. Already in 1961, two films announced a turning of the tide: Aleksandar Petrović’s Dvoje/And Love Has Vanished and Boštjan Hladnik’s Ples v dežju/A Dance in the Rain. Towards the end of the 1960s, this new trend in film-making—initially labelling itself as ‘New Yugoslav Film’—started attracting negative attention from the authorities, with some of its proponents being accused of introducing a radically critical, nihilistic ‘Black Wave’ into Yugoslav cinema. Parallel to this growing critique grew the international success of Yugoslav films: to take but one example, Želimir Žilnik’s Rani radovi/Early Works won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 1969.

This double bind that combines international success with the aura of subversion led to the 1960s auteur cinema holding an extremely prestigious position within the canon of both Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav cinema to the present day. This article’s main proposition is that the two—international success and subversion—are interdependent and that the analysis of their interplay discloses several problematic mechanisms of canonization still at work with regards to Yugoslav cinema. I claim that, within the Yugoslav 1960s cultural context, the figure of the subversive (if not dissident) auteur was, at least partially, programmed for and by an ‘international gaze’. Furthermore, this ‘international gaze’ does not only search for political provocation, it also pairs the subversive auteur figure with pronouncedly Balkanist tropes. Finally, the authority of the ‘international gaze’ creates an artificial breach between the allegedly provocative, internationally successful films and the allegedly conformist popular culture that surrounds them.

My argument is going to develop in the following steps: in a first step, I will demonstrate how an ‘international gaze’ was created already during the Yugoslav 1960s as a semi-­imaginary source of authority. In a second step, I will briefly revisit the Yugoslav cinematic canon and the forces that shaped it. In a third step, I will show that these categories of canonization were pre-programmed by the ‘international gaze’ created already during the 1960s. Finally, I will demonstrate that behind the rhetoric of political provocation characteristic of a canonization through the ‘international gaze’, there always lurk stereotypes of Balkanization. These stereotypes were recognized as such and had become an object of critique already during the 1960s. However, in order to recognize this vein of critique, one has to abandon the dichotomy separating provocative, modernist films from popular entertainment films characteristic of the canonizing narrative. As will be shown, non-canonized films can turn the tables and launch their own critique of the ‘subversive’ canon. In the final section of this paper, I am going to trace out this process through a brief analysis of the popular comedy Sirota Marija/Poor Mary, directed by Dragoslav Lazić in 1968.

Towards a Definition of the ‘International Gaze’

By the end of the 1960s, Yugoslav cinema had undoubtedly stirred international attention. In 1970, the Pula Film Festival—the biggest national film manifestation—was accompanied by a booklet bearing the simple title Festival Pula: Bulletin. This Bulletin offers quite an impressive list of Yugoslav films’ successes on international festivals during the season of 1969–1970, which comprises Rani radovi/Early Works (Želimir Žilnik, 1969) winning the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Horoskop/Horoscope (Boro Drašković, 1969) winning the UNICRIT award at the same festival, Zaseda/The Ambush (Živojin Pavlović, 1969) winning the CIDALC award at the Venice Film Festival, Kad čuješ zvona/When You Hear the Bells (Antun Vrdoljak, 1968) winning the Grand Silver Award in Moscow, Podne/Noon (Puriša Đorđević, 1968) winning prizes at festivals in Rio de Janeiro and Naples, etc. (Anon 1970, 10)

The Bulletin also comprises detailed information on the sales of Yugoslav films abroad and on their advertising campaigns. Considering the fact that the booklet was published in English, this listing of sales and successes in all probability had a distinctly commercial purpose: by accentuating Yugoslav cinema’s international accomplishments, the Bulletin aimed at soliciting the attention of foreign professionals who were attending the festival.

Distribution abroad was in fact an important source of foreign currency for Yugoslav producers and was debated quite vigorously in the period’s Yugoslav press. In 1969, the critic Drago Tović attacked the allegedly subversive ‘Black Wave’³ movement for having estranged film audiences, and his attack went in two directions: firstly, the ticket-sales rate is going down in Yugoslavia itself; secondly, and more importantly, exports are no longer working either: ‘Producers […] turn to the international market, for export is the only way to gain at least something. But one launches in vain bombastic news on foreign clients’ interest on the pages of our newspapers’ (Tović 1969, 3). To support his claim that the aforementioned ‘bombastic news’ do not fit reality, Tović then quotes at length devastating shortcomings in international sales of films such as Early Works, Vrane/Crows (Gordan Mihić and Ljubiša Kozomara, 1969) and Zazidani/Walled-in (Kokan Rakonjac, 1969). Upon the appearance of Tović’s article, The Presidency of The Association of Film Workers of Yugoslavia (Predsjedništvo Saveza filmskih radnika Jugoslavije 1969) issued a polemical response, which was largely based in the following argument: Tović faked the numbers with regards to international sales and our films are earning decent money abroad (1969, 8).

Surely, the debate was at least partially one on commercial matters, but behind these matters loomed another question: what can make Yugoslav cinema interesting for international audiences? Yugoslav cinema’s breakthrough into the international arena was received with great enthusiasm in the domestic press. The newspaper Borba reported meticulously, and, one might add, quite bombastically, on every international success of Yugoslav film. To take an example, in 1969, a short notice bore the title ‘The Yugoslavs Dominate Cannes!’ (1969, 6). Critics did not fail to triumph over these new successes either: to take but two examples, Bogdan Kalafatović noted in 1969 that Yugoslav film had ‘breached’ into the world through a sudden onslaught (1969, 6), while Mira Boglić noted that it was ‘flooded with compliments’ (1969, 1–2) all over the world.

If one returns to the question posed at the beginning of the previous paragraph and if one considers which films accomplished most (I Even Met Happy Gypsies, Early Works etc.), it becomes apparent that the international onslaught was predominately performed by modernist, auteur cinema. To shortly return to the ‘Black Wave’ polemics: as the debate around the movement started heating up in 1969, Dragan Marković (an editor in the prominent journal NIN) published an article in which he claimed the following: ‘Lately, our film has been receiving worthy artistic affirmation in the world. So why exactly now: a fear of the “Black Wave”!’ (Marković 1969, 1) Slightly expanded and paraphrased, Marković’s argument would thus go as follows: the films that are now being attacked as ‘black’ are exactly those that led to international affirmation; since this affirmation was both strived for and is proof of quality, one should not fear such films, for they contribute to Yugoslavia’s cinematic production’s reputation within an international context.

That international success was systematically used as proof of one’s own quality can be seen from the following procedure as well: Yugoslav journals systematically published foreign critics’ affirmative views on Yugoslav auteur cinema. In 1969, the film-specialized journal Sineast thus featured an article by Horst Dieter Sihler (a film critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) in which Yugoslav film was described as ‘having reached superb positions on an international level’ (1969, 127). Similar articles by Bolesław Michałek and Willard Van Dyke can be found on the pages of the journal Filmska kultura.

It should come as no surprise that this international attention led to a canonization of the period’s modernist, auteur films, which lasts to the present day in both studies specialized in the country’s cinema and broader reviews of film history. What is highly interesting, however, is that through a complex process of translating foreign critics’ reviews, through interviews with curators and film professionals as well as a meticulous reporting on the reception of Yugoslav films abroad, a discursive construct was fashioned within Yugoslavia, which I would like to term the ‘international gaze’. As demonstrated by the above-analysed discursive fragments, the ‘international gaze’ is a relatively heterogenous product that can encompass the opinions of foreign critics themselves (as in the case of Sineast publishing Horst Dieter Sihler), claims based in the authority of a presumed, yet somewhat abstract international success (as in the case of Dragan Marković’s argument), euphoric estimates on one’s own relevance (as in Borba’s reporting), etc. The ‘international gaze’ can be regarded as a semi-imaginary,⁴ yet authoritative instance for which the Yugoslav film-maker, the Yugoslav critic and the Yugoslav film historian need to perform.

As has been noted previously, this authoritative instance has played a decisive role in shaping the canon of Yugoslav cinema: almost no survey of the country’s film history fails to mention the international success of the 1960s auteurs. In what follows, I am going to analyse several effects that this call to the authority of an ‘international gaze’ produces. The dynamics of the ‘international gaze’ disclose three problematic elements of canonization still at work in relation to Yugoslav cinema: firstly, the concept of the subversive, politically provocative or dissident artist, a figure challenged with regards to Eastern European cinema studies already by Anikó Imre (2012), is at least to a certain extent a function of the ‘international gaze’ itself. Secondly, a privileging of the aforementioned figure often blinds critics with regards to the fact that the discourse of the ‘international gaze’ relies on a discreetly Balkanizing rhetoric. Finally, the authority of the international gaze snatches its objects away from their surrounding popular cultural context through regarding the group of internationally successful films as an avant-garde that stands in opposition to its ‘conformist’ popular cultural context. As will be demonstrated through the analysis of Lazić’s Poor Mary, this reading lens is a rather crude simplification.

The ‘Golden Age’ Revisited: The Shape of the Yugoslav Cinematic Canon

It is almost indisputable that the 1960s still rule not only the Yugoslav, but also the Post-Yugoslav cinematic canon. In his enormously influential study Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience 1945–2001, they were described by Daniel Goulding as ‘the richest and most complex’ (2002, 64) period in the history of Yugoslav cinema, later to be labelled by quite a few prominent scholars a sort of ‘Golden Age’ (Kirn 2012; Levi 2007) of film-production in Yugoslavia.

The period’s extremely high status within the canon finds its expression not only in studies specialized in the country’s film industry, but also in broader surveys of film history. To take but two examples: in his monolithic overview of cinematic modernism between 1950 and 1980, Ándras Bálint Kovács (2007) quotes only the films of Dušan Makavejev—a prominent auteur of the 1960s—as Yugoslav examples. In their Film History, An Introduction Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell (Bordwell and Thompson 2003) engage in the analysis of developments in both Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav cinema; however, the authors whose names they quote are once again a narrow selection of the 1960s modernists: Aleksandar Petrović, Krsto Papić, Živojin Pavlović, Dušan Vukotić (due to him winning an Oscar) and, surely enough, Dušan Makavejev.

This way of looking at Yugoslav cinema (and possibly more broadly, Eastern European cinema in general) has been described by Jurica Pavičić as relying on a narrative model similar to that of the nineteenth century family novel: ‘Like the family dynasties […] Easter European Cinema—according to film history—has followed a three-step path: an early, painful rise, followed by unprecedented blossoming and—after that—a slow (or sometimes a dramatic) decay’ (Pavičić 2008, 20). The ‘painful rise’ period would encompass the establishment of film industry, its struggle against a ‘socialist-realist’ dogmatism and its battle for liberalization. In the case of Yugoslav cinema, this period would stretch approximately from 1945 to the mid-1950s. The ‘unprecedented blossoming’ would, evidently enough, encompass the glorious modernist, auteur 1960s, while the slow decay would set in after the year 1972, when some of the most prominent Yugoslav directors (Žilnik, Pavlović, Petrović, Makavejev, to name but a few) had started facing severe difficulties due to a political campaign being led against the ‘Black Wave’.

This master-narrative discreetly relies on the following logics: the status of an author—or even that of an epoch—in Yugoslav cinema gets determined by the level of alleged political provocativeness ascribed to them. The 1950s still being relatively conformist (and the 1970s returning to political conformism), the 1960s are not only, or not even predominantly, a ‘golden age’ of formal experimentation, they are the ‘golden age’ of political subversion.⁵ To shortly return to Dušan Makavejev: his status of an indisputable star of Eastern European cinema was established long before Goulding, Kovács or Thompson and Bordwell had published their histories. Already in 1983 David W. Paul claimed that ‘Makavejev is the most radical filmmaker to have emerged in Eastern Europe’ (1983, 10). Now, this alleged radicality surely enough resides in formal and stylistic traits of his films, but it is foremost based in their political subversiveness. Makavejev is the director who could juxtapose Hitler and Stalin through associative montage in a socialist country, a fact rather fascinating for the ‘international gaze’. That this sort of fascination has not at all lost its force with the end of the Cold War can be seen out of the fact that for Thompson and Bordwell one of the most important traits of the Yugoslav directors they do mention in their overview is once again their ‘political outspokenness’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2003, 554), whose most scandalous champion is, once again, Dušan Makavejev.

Another explicit example of how the ‘international gaze’ gets paired with a claim to subversion is Greg DeCuir’s influential study Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema in Socialist Yugoslavia (1963–1972). On the one hand, DeCuir does not fail to call to the ‘international gaze’s’ authority repeatedly: he notes that the directors whose work he is going to engage with—those ‘controversial artists’ (2019, 25)—had won the most important prizes at the most prestigious international festivals (2019, 29), that their films had toured the whole world (2019, 11), etc. On the other hand, the most pronounced characteristic of these (at least to a certain extent) world-renowned films is their subversive potential: like the ‘Praxis’ school of philosophy, they offered a merciless critique of Yugoslav society (2019, 15), they were in constant struggle against the regime’s ‘apparatchiks’ (DeCuir 2010, 86) and their ideological dogmatism.

DeCuir’s hypothesis that the ‘Black Wave’ was a homogenous, unanimously critical movement heavily influenced by the Marxist humanism of the Praxis group has been widely disputed. Nebojša Jovanović dismantled his argument in claiming that it resides in the ‘Artist versus Regime’ cliché (2011, 167); both Jovanović (2011) and Kirn (2012) stressed the heterogeneity of ‘New Yugoslav Film’ and the impossibility to regards all its proponents as supporters of a humanist Marxism;⁶ through quoting some of the 1960s auteurs themselves Jovanović showed that political provocation was not their main agenda.

Kirn’s and Jovanović’s critique being well founded, my goal is not, however, to either prove or disprove that the 1960 auteurs were politically radical filmmakers; rather, I wish to show that ‘political provocation’ is indissociable from the workings of the ‘international gaze’. In this regard DeCuir himself enters a little paradox: on the one hand, he claims that in 1969 The Board for Education and Culture of the Association of Communists (Odbor za obrazovanje i kulturu Saveza komunista) came up with new regulations on what the Yugoslav international image and cultural exports should be. In DeCuir’s opinion, the ‘Black Wave’ was definitely not in accordance with the Board’s expectations (2019, 18). On the other hand, DeCuir claims that exactly in 1969 ‘the Black Wave enjoyed an annus mirabilis […], when some of its best films went en masse across national borders and earned a short-lived outpouring of international recognition and celebration’ (DeCuir 2012, 395). DeCuir never explains what allowed for this paradox of ‘unwanted’ cultural goods going across national borders en masse, he simply notes that this was a prelude to the ‘Black Wave’s’ fall.

The paradox is in fact inexplainable within the crude logics of the ‘artist vs. regime’ dichotomy; however, if one focuses on the workings of the ‘international gaze’ itself, it becomes apparent that ‘political provocation’ or ‘subversion’ was deliberately coded into and for this ‘international gaze’, and that this coding had a double purpose. The analysis of this technique should shed a new light on the (ab)use of subversion with regards to the canonization of Yugoslav cinema.

‘Dreary and Sarcastic Images Under the Marshal’s Baton’

As an entry point into the analysis of the aforementioned process can serve the juxtaposition of two phenomena: Vladimir Jovičić’s notorious article ‘Crni talas u našem filmu’ (‘The Black Wave in Our Film’), published in 1969 as an addition to the newspaper Borba, and the so-called ‘Weeks of Yugoslav Film’ taking place the same year.

When publishing his article, Jovičić was the president of the Commission for Ideological Work of the Serbian League of Communists (Komisija za ideološki rad Saveza komunista Srbije), in other words, he was a powerful representative of state ideology and his article is almost without exception regarded as a vehement attack on radical Yugoslav cinema (Radosavljević 2019; Tirnanić 2011), which would in the final analysis lead to the purges of 1972.⁷ In his article, Jovičić had chosen two films as exemplary of the bad, ‘black’ tendencies in Yugoslav cinema: Aleksandar Petrović’s Biće skoro propast sveta/It Rains in My Village (1968) and Jovan Živanović’s Uzrok smrti ne pominjati/Cause of Death Not to Be Mentioned (1968).

Approximately at the same time, in tight cooperation with the Yugoslav state as well as foreign partners, the distribution company ‘Jugoslavija film’⁸ was organizing so-called ‘Weeks of Yugoslav Film’. I could find programs for four such manifestations taking place in 1969, in Berlin, Madrid, New York and London. The quite obvious idea behind these ‘Weeks’ was to advertise Yugoslav film abroad through an organized effort. What is striking in relation to Jovičić’s pamphlet, however, is that Cause of Death Not to Be Mentioned made it into the London selection, whereas some ‘Black Wave’ films, such as Živojin Pavlović’s Kad budem mrtav i beo/When I am Dead and Gone (1968) were part of all four ‘Weeks of Yugoslav Film’. During one year, the same film could thus be both attacked in Yugoslavia as exemplary of ideologically unacceptable film-making and showcased abroad as an exemplary Yugoslav cultural product.

And this is no accident; rather, it is part of a mechanism that was being ridiculed almost at the same time. In 1968, Spiegel’s critic Fritz Rumler thus wrote ironically with regards to Živojin Pavlović’s ‘black film’ Buđenje pacova/The Rats Woke Up (1968):

In marshal Tito’s Peoples’ Republic, prostitutes pose for pornographic photos, homosexuals freely express their desires, partisan veterans scrape a living by sewing ties, while rats and imbecile snitches crawl out of holes. Such dreary and sarcastic images are offered by films shot under the Marshal’s baton and contribute to his glory. (1968, 492, emphasis mine, AP)

This last quote points to why the same film could be vehemently attacked in Yugoslavia and screened at an international Yugoslav cultural manifestation during the same year. Through exporting ‘subversive’ films, Yugoslavia was employing a mechanism of self-fashioning by means of which it was irrefutably proving its liberality. And this mechanism was recognized as such already at the time when the ‘Black Wave’ was flourishing: in allowing for subversive films to be shot and shown—Rumler would claim—the Marshal proves that his country is one where artistic freedoms are respected, and thus adds to his own political prestige.

What needs to be stressed with regards to the ‘international gaze’ is that this process ran in two directions: not only are ‘black’ films proof of a liberal cultural politics on the international stage, but also, through a process of translation, the Yugoslav public is itself being convinced of a certain liberality. Thus in 1969 the daily Borba published an interview with Willard Van Dyke—one of MoMA s curators at that time and a self-proclaimed fan of Yugoslav cinema—in which he stressed the following:

On a seminar of American cineastes we have seen some of your films and many of the participants said that something as open and as critical cannot often be seen on the American screen. Our government would not support such self-critical films as the Yugoslav government does and that is also—brave… (1969, 6)

Thus the international gaze indisputably proves, this time to a Yugoslav audience, that the Yugoslav government is brave, more brave that that of the US for that matter, in supporting radically critical film. What can be seen from the above-listed examples is that a cinematic political critique was programmed, and thus integrated, into a mechanism of cultural self-fashioning that produces its effects both abroad and in Yugoslavia. Slightly ironically paraphrased, if a renowned curator from New York sees Yugoslavia as extremely liberal, who could dare disprove him?

This mechanism points to the fact that one should be quite careful in assessing the subversiveness of the period’s films (and it is to a large extent this subversiveness which grants them their extremely prestigious position within the canon): what might appear as provocation within a single auteur film, can, at least to a certain extent, be regarded as already contained by a wider cultural politics that draws exactly on this provocation in order to state its claim to liberality. It is not my aim, however, to assess whether the Yugoslav 1960s auteur cinema was subversive or not. Rather, my claim is that the insistence on a crude concept of political provocation as means of canonization keeps the critic within the framework of a discourse which was to a large extent programmed by the very cultural politics this critic is discussing: as has been shown, ‘political outspokenness’ and ‘critique’ were solicited by the ‘international gaze’ and were used as markers of liberality by a cultural politics that was in itself not very ‘subversive’. In other words, the contemporary critic who sticks to a crude concept of ‘subversion’ simply retraces Van Dyke’s gesture and thus risks his/her meta-position becoming a rather tautological one.

From a Radical Critique of Everything to Balkan Art

The most striking proof of this reduction is probably the fact that despite an explosion of studies in Balkanism ever since Maria Todorova had published her seminal study Imagining the Balkans in 1997, very few critics have addressed the fact that the ‘international gaze’ does not only deal in programmed political provocation, it also relies on a rather overt, often internalized, balkanizing rhetoric.

To return to Vladimir Jovičić: in proof of his hypotheses that ‘black films’ falsify Yugoslav reality, he quotes the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther who had articulated his impressions on Yugoslavs and their movies in the weekly NIN some weeks before the appearance of Jovičić’s article. This is what—according to Jovičić—Crowther’s impressions are: ‘You Yugoslavs are so … vital … you know how to look at women, how to laugh from the depth of your hearts, you are open, you dispose of an original joy of life. Why, then, are your films so bitter, so dark?’ (Jovičić 1969, 24)

What is celebrated by Crowther via Jovičić or by Jovičić via Crowther is thus a representation of the Yugoslav man who has, while looking at women, laughing and displaying an original vitality, in all probability preserved what Slavoj Žižek has termed a ‘prodigious lust for life’ (2000, 5). What Jovičić offers the Yugoslav audience as a cure for the ‘Black Wave’, and a cure once again supported by foreign authority, is thus a balkanized stereotype.

Ironically enough, in quite a few international reviews of Yugoslav films of the period the auteurs themselves, as well as their films, were regarded through the very same optics of joyful vitality, openheartedness, and ‘primeval’ truth. The French critic Jacques Aumont thus noted that Makavejev’s films have an ‘almost ‘peasant’ ring to them, which allows them to thread resolutely towards primeval truths’ (1968, 413); Marcel Martin noted that the Yugoslav cinema is instinctive, brutal, spontaneous and vitalist and that it exploded like a bomb (1968, 431); Jacques-Pierre Amette wrote that I Even Met Happy Gypsies is a ‘film of enjoyment in the Yugoslav way’ full of ‘a joy of life’ and ‘pagan nobility’ (1968, 387). The directors themselves didn’t get spared of flattering portraits: Makavejev was depicted by Jacques Levy as a ‘benevolent blood-drinker’ with ‘animal-like gestures’ and ‘evidently naïve’ (Levy 1968, 427–428); Aleksandar Petrović was described by Michel Aubriant as ‘a completely happy man, without shame or a bad consciousness’, he is amazed in front of his films ‘like a shoemaker who produced the perfect pair of shoes’ (1968, 378).

In both camps, the one celebrating the auteurs as well as the one attacking them, the debate on political provocation is therefore accompanied by explicit Balkanist stereotypes: a spontaneous vitality, lack of intellectual reflection, brutality (if not primitiveness), a direct contact with the ‘primeval’ etc. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that in the framework of this discourse the Yugoslav (the one looking at women and laughing, as well as the Yugoslav director) is a sauvage noble. And once again, through the workings of the ‘international gaze’, these stereotypes are thoroughly internalized: by means of translating international reviews in the Yugoslav press, the Yugoslav public is being taught that the principal qualities of Yugoslav art are those enumerated above.⁹

It is interesting that this penchant towards Balkanism with regards to the Yugoslav auteur cinema of the 1960s has remained almost fully unreflected to the present day (Jurica Pavičić’s article ‘Lemons in Siberia’ is in this regard a rare exception rather than the rule). It is my claim that this is a direct consequence of the debate’s political coding: since the great auteurs are supposed to be subversives—and this is to a certain extent the case already within the framework established by the 1960s ‘international gaze’—the politics of their films is in most cases regarded solely in light of direct provocations and almost explicit allusions to the then-contemporary Yugoslav (daily) politics. It only rarely gets conceptualized within a broader framework of cultural (self)fashioning that—in imposing its Balkanist ­perspective—is by all means political, but does not fit the neat scheme of auteur vs. regime.

Furthermore, as the above-sketched debate on the nature of the uninhibited Yugoslav and his cinema demonstrates, the Balkanizing perspective has been thoroughly internalized in Yugoslavia; Jovičić, for example, takes the description of the laughing Yugoslav at face value. Nevertheless, since Jovičić had positioned himself on the ‘wrong’ side of the debate anyway, the fact of him exercising Balkanism is not very disturbing for the canonizing master narrative. A somewhat more disturbing proposition would be, however, that the great subversives themselves were—to a certain extent at least—applying strategies of self-exoticization.

There was one area in which this vein of critique was launched already towards the end of 1960s, namely, Yugoslav popular comedy. It is my claim that film criticism has remained almost fully blind to this (re)evaluation due to a final aspect of canonization through political provocation legitimized by the ‘international gaze’.

Poor Mary: Popular Comedy as Means of Re-Evaluation

This leads me to my last two examples: Radina Vučetić’s seminal study on Yugoslav popular culture in the 1960s, entitled Coca-Cola Socialism, and a popular comedy from 1968 entitled Sirota Marija/Poor Mary. In her study, Vučetić regards the ‘Black Wave’ as a radical opposition in two respects: firstly it is an opposition to communist ideology; and secondly, it is an opposition to ‘Americanized’ Yugoslav popular culture: ‘Therefore, the Black Wave was not merely a critique of communist ideology, but it was also, indirectly, by using cinematic language and methods that were diametrically opposed to Hollywood standards, in a position to criticize everything that embellished reality.’ (Vučetić 2018, 82) Not surprisingly, this argument is then paired by Vučetić with the ‘international gaze’: ‘The works of Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar Petrović, Dušan Makavejev, and Želimir Žilnik were crowned with the greatest international laurels, and these directors and their creations came to be of interest to all the leading film critics and theoreticians of the day’ (Vučetić 2018, 83).

The argumentative structure of ideological subversion paired with international success thus once again shapes Vučetić’s argument. But a new element is now introduced into the picture: the subversive, merciless ‘Black Wave’ stands in stark contrast to imported as well as local popular culture, the one whose forms presumably ‘embellish’ reality. Although Vučetić spells this argument out explicitly, it could be regarded as an implicit presupposition of the majority of studies focusing on the Yugoslav cinema of the 1960s. In other words, if there is a relation between the canon of auteur cinema and its popular-cultural surroundings, it is a purely negative one.

Now, Poor Mary is a popular comedy shot in 1968 by Dragoslav Lazić. The film received almost unanimously negative reviews due to its application of a humour verging on the abject¹⁰; however, then contemporary reports claim that it surpassed 100,000 viewers in Yugoslavia (Ranković 1970, 18), a very high number for a domestic production at that time. Poor Mary was thus genuinely popular. Although it remains fully marginal with regards to the auteur canon to the present day, another relevant fact is that it was a project realized by an almost ‘all-stars’ crew of the late 1960s auteur scene. It was the second feature film directed by Dragoslav Lazić, a director whose debut entitled Tople godine/Hot Years had won him the reputation of one of the most promising young authors in 1966; upon its appearance, Tople godine was described as a case of brilliant verism by the prominent critic Bogdan Kalafatović (1967, 6). The script for Poor Mary was written by the tandem Gordan Mihić and Ljubiša Kozomara who, in 1968, authored the script for another film, namely When I am Dead and Gone, which won the main prize at the Pula Film Festival. The leading roles in the film were played by Milena Dravić and Ljubiša Samardžić, both genuine stars of the Yugoslav screen by 1968.

Already this line-up suggests that the 1960s auteurs themselves were far less reluctant to cross the border separating a formally challenging, modernist aesthetics from popular entertainment than those who later canonized their works.¹¹ What is of even higher relevance for the present analysis is that Poor Mary can be regarded as a specific moment of self-­reflexivity, produced by some of those who had taken part in giving the Yugoslav auteur cinema many of its most recognizable traits: the film is an overt critique of Yugoslav auteur cinema, it is a parody of two ‘modernist classics’—Ante Babaja’s Breza/The Birch Tree (1967) and Aleksandar Petrović’s Skupljači perja/I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967). However, this in no way means that Poor Mary supports a ‘communist ideology’ in opposition to the ‘Black Wave’; rather, it mocks the decorum of these films through a full-fledged hypertrophy of Balkanist tropes.

The Birch Tree and I Even Met Happy Gypsies both heavily rely on a ‘merciless’ milieu characterized by thick mud, decaying housing, desolate characters, superstitions and a general backwardness. Although Poor Mary literally paraphrases some scenes from these two films (for example, the one from The Birch Tree in which a village witch performs a ritual), the above-enumerated traits are quite typical of the entire ‘Black Wave’. For example, the characters of quite a few ‘Black Wave’ films—Pavlović’s Neprijatelj/The Enemy (1965), Žilnik’s Early Works or Miroslav Antić’s Doručak s đavolom/Breakfast With the Devil (1971) would be cases in point—cannot help but roll in the thick mud that characterizes these films’ fictional worlds. Furthermore, the typical patterns of behaviour characteristic of the backward, merciless milieu almost without exception rely on a game of ‘raw passions’: excessive drinking and eating, violence, rape, frenetic dancing, the Eros pouring straight into Thanatos, are the main activities of the lustful Yugoslavs defiling through not only The Birch Tree and I Even Met Happy Gypsies, but also through many of the ‘Black Wave’ films in general.

As was mentioned in the previous section, this uninhibited world was then described by non-Yugoslav critics as a case of enjoyment in the Yugoslav way, a show of instinctive, brutal spontaneity, a display of pagan nobility, etc. Poor Mary, in its turn, makes this evidently self-exoticizing code into the main object of its parody. It would take up too much space to enumerate all the parodying mechanisms present in this rather incongruous comedy, I am therefore going to limit the analysis to some remarks on the film’s protagonist Vojo. Vojo is a full-fledged parody of the vital Yugoslav: he is represented as a combustion engine fuelled by meat, liquor, sexuality and violence. These elements are then combined in ways that, due to hypertrophy, verge on absurdity. To take an example: when he gets bored of his girlfriend (the ‘poor’ Mary from the film’s title), Vojo sells her to a local restaurant owner who then brings him a giant plate of roasted meat and a bottle of liquor. Vojo starts eating (naturally, with his hands), but the girlfriend’s old aunt then appears and starts beating him with a roasted turkey leg.

This is only one among many instances within the film where the code of the ‘vital’ Yugoslavs gest overtly ridiculed. The most impressive sequence of this kind is the one closing the film. The backbone of Poor Mary’s plot lies in the heroine’s—Marija’s—attempts to marry Vojo. After the two get engaged, a final ‘accident’ happens: Vojo gets madly attracted to an over-sexualized pub singer.¹² This prompts Marija to escape with a photographer, but Vojo catches up with her and a deal is struck: he is going to say farewell to his bachelorhood by having a last party with the singer, after which he is going to marry Marija.

The film’s last sequence depicts this celebration. As it turns out, in his over-excitement, Vojo had forced the singer and the accompanying band to play for him in the local pub for three days and three nights without a break. As punishment for this, he agrees to be ridden by the singer for five minutes, and the viewer finds him attempting to carry her on all four through the thick mud in front of the pub. At one point, Vojo cannot bear his load anymore and falls face-down into the mud; then two of the band members also fall down and have a sort of ‘snowball’ fight by thrusting handfuls of mud at each other; one then turns straight into the camera, breaks the fourth wall and shows his toothless face fully covered in mud. At that point, Vojo regains his strength and starts dancing frantically to a tune played by the accordion player, the band’s only member left on his feet. It should be noted that the described sequence is rather long and lasts for almost six minutes.

Out of this crude description, it can be seen that Poor Mary pushes the motif of mud to full hypertrophy. And not only does this sequence exploit the imagery of rolling in the mud to its extremes, it also firmly connects it with other elements of the representational system I have been tracing: over-accentuated sexuality, heavy intoxication and a complete frenzy of the senses. However, these motifs, rather typical of a ‘Black Wave’ decorum and, by the same token, of the period’s ‘politically outspoken’ films, get recontextualized through Poor Mary’s hypertrophy: they no longer function as a merciless critique of a socialist society, rather, they are presented as elements of a Balkanist kitsch. Poor Mary thus demonstrates that popular culture is by no means a simple, reality-embellishing object of critique for the radical modernists; to the contrary, it can launch its own critique and re-evaluations of the auteurs’ work: Poor Mary blows up the trope of subversive political cinema by recontextualizing it within a framework of Balkanism. In other words, Poor Mary would claim—already during the 1960s—that what is being successfully exported is not only political provocation, but also, at least to a certain extent, Balkanist clichés.

Finally, Poor Mary encompasses at least one discrete pun on how Yugoslav cinema fashions itself for precisely the ‘international gaze’. Vojo, the protagonist, is a house-painter and one of his gigs includes decorating the front of a restaurant called ‘Krauts and Devils’ (‘Švabe i đavoli’): he is shown painting two murals on the restaurant’s front wall, one depicting a German WWII soldier carrying a red devil on his back and another depicting a red devil carrying a German WWII soldier on his back. Although the name of the restaurant and the two murals might seem to be a random absurdity or provocation, they in fact encompasses a very discreet intertextual reference.

When his film It Rains in My Village was attacked in the Yugoslav press for its abroad marketing strategy in 1969, Aleksandar Petrović replied by furnishing proof that the Partisan epics Kozara (Veljko Bulajić, 1962) was distributed in France under the title Les diables rouges contre les SS (Red Devils Against the SS) by a company named Les Films Jacques Letienne (Petrović 1988, 253). What Petrović wanted to demonstrate is that the Yugoslav critics are selective in their attacks, while they ignore certain phenomena that should be considered scandalous from the perspective of orthodox socialist ideology.

But Petrović’s remark might also explain the name of the restaurant appearing in Poor Mary: although Petrović published his polemics only in 1969 (1 year after Poor Mary had appeared), it is quite likely that already before this time he knew what the French title of Kozara was. And if he disposed of this information, which was not really hidden at the time, one could presuppose that Lazić, Kozomara and Mihić did as well. ‘Krauts and Devils’ is therefore not random nonsense, but a discreet joke on how Yugoslav cinema fashions itself abroad (the title of Kozara was allegedly changed in France to better attract viewers): for the French viewers, the Yugoslav revolutionaries are ‘red devils’, vicious enough to beat the vicious SS.

Poor Mary thus not only mocks a self-exoticization present within quite a few ‘Black Wave’ films, it also discreetly articulates its parody against the complex workings of the ‘international gaze’ that, as has hopefully been shown, not only relied on exoticizations, but also led to these exoticizations being internalized within the Yugoslav cultural context of the 1960s. Although choosing another arena for its critique—not the one of daily politics, but the one of a persistent semi-colonial discourse forcing the Yugoslav into preestablished representational categories—Poor Mary can thus be considered at least as critical as the canonized master-pieces of the 1960s high cinematic modernism. Further still, these very master-pieces become the object of its critique without it ever sliding towards any kind of ‘socialist-realist’, regime-friendly, propagandistic conformism.

Conclusion

The aim of this article was not to ‘dethrone’ the Yugoslav auteur cinema of the 1960s, neither was it to deny this cinema any subversive potential. Rather, what a study of the ‘international gaze’ and the relations it enters with subversion, Balkanism and popular culture points to is that the categories with which the canonization of Yugoslav cinema still largely works should be refined and extended. A first point would be that a simplified concept of heroic dissidence should be abandoned with regards to the Yugoslav auteurs of the 1960s: as has hopefully been shown, political provocation was at least partially contained and (re)coded by the very game of cultural self-fashioning programmed for the ‘international gaze’. This does not mean that one would need to abandon ‘political outspokenness’ as a means of canonization altogether, but it does mean that one would need to work with concepts of subversion and hegemony that exceed in their complexity the simple dichotomy of the dissident auteur against the oppressive regime.

A second, related point is that the auteur-figure would need to lose its innocence: the auteur can at the same time be radical on one front—for example, through attacking the sacrosanct symbols of the Yugoslav political system—and conformist on another front—for example, through exploiting certain clichés that are part of a distinctly Balkanist discursive and representational system.¹³ As has been shown, these two positions slide into one-another without tension within the framework of the ‘international gaze’: Dušan Makavejev can at the same time be the ‘most radical’, ‘politically outspoken’ director of Eastern Europe and the ‘benevolent blood-drinker’.

Finally, one would need to challenge a narrative that regards the canonized, provocative, formally challenging films of the period as strictly separated from (and critical of) their surrounding popular culture. This view relies on a discreet, conservative presupposition that popular culture is inherently conformist, as opposed to ‘high’, modernist art. As has hopefully been shown, the auteurs themselves did not exactly share this opinion and did not resent taking up projects intended to be popular. Furthermore, as Poor Mary demonstrates, popular, non-canonized films of the period were quite capable of turning the tables and launching their own critique. And this critique can exercise an estranging effect on the perspective of the film historian shaping the canon: it might come as a surprise that what is today predominantly being regarded as critical, modernist cinema could at the time of its making be parodied as Balkanist kitsch. Although this parody never attracted the ‘international gaze’, it could discreetly reflect on this gaze’s effects on the one hand, while on the other hand it was capable of attracting large audiences.

Rather than abandoning the ‘golden age’ of Yugoslav cinema, this article thus attempted to show that the 1960s were more complex that the model of their canonization would have it: the blossoming of Yugoslav auteur cinema, as well as its international success, must be assessed within the framework of complex discursive power-relations where subversion and conformism, the elite and the popular, the political and the ‘primitive’ perpetually reevaluate each other.

Filmography

Biće skoro propast sveta/It Rains in My Village (YUG/FR, 1968, D: Aleksandar Petrović)

Breza/The Birch Tree (YUG, 1967, D: Ante Babaja)

Buđenje pacova/The Rats Woke Up (YUG, 1967, D: Živojin Pavlović)

Doručak s đavolom/Breakfast With the Devil (YUG, 1971, D: Miroslav Antić)

Horoskop/Horoscope (YUG, 1969, D: Boro Drašković)

Kad budem mrtav i beo/When I am Dead and Gone (YUG, 1968, D: Živojin Pavlović)

Kad čuješ zvona/When You Hear the Bells (YUG, 1968, D: Antun Vrdoljak)

Kozara (YUG, 1962, D: Veljko Bulajić)

Neprijatelj/The Enemy (YUG, 1965, D: Živojin Pavlović)

Plastični Isus/Plastic Jesus (YUG, 1971, D: Lazar Stojanović)

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

Podne/Noon (YUG, 1968, D: Puriša Đorđević)

Rani radovi/Early Works (YUG, 1969, D: Želimir Žilnik)

Sirota Marija/Poor Mary (YUG, 1968, D: Dragoslav Lazić)

Skupljči perja/I Even Met Happy Gypsies (YUG, 1967, D: Aleksandar Petrović)

Sweet Movie (CA/FR/BRD, 1974, D: Dušan Makavejev)

Tople godine/Hot Years (YUG, 1966, D: Dragoslav Lazić)

Uzrok smrti ne pominjati/Cause of Death Not to Be Mentioned (YUG, 1968, D: Jovan Živanović)

Vrane/Crows (YUG, 1969, D: Gordan Mihić and Ljubiša Kozomara)

Zaseda/The Ambush (YUG, 1969, D: Živojin Pavlović)

Zazidani/Walled-in (YUG, 1969, D: Kokan Rakonjac)

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian Pelc

Adrian Pelc holds a master’s degree in comparative literature (University of Zagreb), and a doctoral degree in Slavic Studies (University of Vienna). From 2020 to 2023, he was employed as an assistant at the University of Vienna’s Department of Slavonic Studies where he holds a postdoc. position since March 2024.

Notes

1 Being not only the country’s president, but also the commander of its army, Josip Broz Tito bore the rank of ‘marshal’; he was therefore often addresses and widely known as maršal Tito/the marshal Tito.

2 To this list could be added the Zagreb-based Gorgona Group, the Genre Experimental Film Festival (GEFF) held in Zagreb biannually since 1963, etc.

3 The term ‘Black Wave’, usually associated with radical, critical Yugoslav films appearing towards the end of the 1960s, is actually largely problematic: it is too broad and too constraining at once. On the one hand, it can encompass all films that ‘deal with neglected social setting, the suburbia and the village’ and depict characters whose lives are dependent on ‘chance, alienating social forces or psychological obsessions’ (Turković 1986, 235); on the other hand, in critical practice, it is often used to designate phenomena connected solely to Serbian ­cinema (Radosavljević 2019). One should also remember that it was in fact introduced as a predominantly pejorative term, and was not univocally accepted by the period’s directors themselves. For all these reasons, when the term is used, it will be kept between quotation marks. For a nuanced debate on the denominators ‘Black Wave’ and ‘New Yugoslav Film’ see DeCuir (2019), Jovanović (2011), Kirn (2012), Levi (2007).

4 To claim that the ‘international gaze’ is a semi-imaginary instance does not mean that the Yugoslav press had invented the quite real success of some of the 1960s films; rather, it means that the possibility of international success (or, in some cases, the lack of such success) was generalized and internalized within then-contemporary debates, which made it into an ­almost abstract authority that can be called-upon at any moment. In quite a few cases, the Yugoslav critic was thus articulating his/her claims against the background of an ‘international gaze’ that was, as has hopefully been shown, constructed through complex processes taking place within the Yugoslav press itself.

5 In his study Disintegration in Frames, Pavle Levi partially goes against this argumentative strain in stressing that ‘the social and political critique of the existing socialist system and its ruling elite, however, did not represent the New Film authors’ sole, or even primary, ­ambition’; in Levi’s view, the auteurs of the 1960s were far more interested in ‘the autonomy of subjective truth’ and in ‘the independent authorial vision’ (2007, 16).

6 A case in point is the renowned director Živojin Pavlović who overtly refuted humanism in claiming that it was fundamentally a ‘sick thing’ (1990, 55).

7 In 1972, the young director Lazar Stojanović was sentenced to prison for having directed the movie Plastični Isus/Plastic Jesus. This was the only such punishment for a director in the entire history of socialist Yugoslavia and it therefore shocked the film industry. Also, Stojanović’s film was a master’s degree project at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. Since Aleksandar Petrović was the project’s supervisor, he lost his professorship, and the attack spread against other directors working at the Academy as well, most notably against Dušan Makavejev and Živojin Pavlović. While Pavlović was able to continue directing in the Federal Republic of Slovenia, Makavejev had to migrate and shot his next project—Sweet Movie (1974)—abroad. 1972 is therefore generally considered to be the year of a great purge led against the ‘Black Wave’ in Yugoslavia.

8 The same company was the publisher of the Festival Pula: Bulletin mentioned in the introduction of this article.

9 All quotes analyzed above appeared in translation in the Yugoslav film journal Filmske sveske.

10 For example, in a sequence towards the end of the film, a celebration of the engagement ­between the protagonists Marija and Vojo is being held in a local bar. During the celebration, one of Vojo’s friends gets into a fight with another and hits him on the back of the head. This results in the beaten man’s eye falling out and landing in a plate full of soup. All guests then search in the soup for the missing eye. The high-point of the scene is reached when Vojo finds an eye in the soup and asks whether it is the one they had been searching for, only to receive the answer: ‘Ne, to je jagnjeće!’ (‘No, that’s a lamb’s eye!’). He then happily eats the lamb’s eye while the others manage to retrieve the human eye and return it to its rightful owner.

11 Another quite striking example of this process is that Miodrag Mića Popović, one of the most extravagant directors of the ‘Black Wave’, was commissioned in 1970 to direct another popular comedy entitled Burduš.

12 The scene depicting Vojo’s growing excitement is once again an overt parody, this time of a very famous sequence from I Even Met Happy Gypsies in which the protagonist Bora – played by Bekim Fehmiu – is so enchanted by the pub singer Lenče that he has to express his feelings by breaking two glasses, cutting his hands and extatically staring at his own flowing blood.

13 A good example of this sort of demystification is the work of Vesi Vuković (2018, 2022), who systematically showed that many of the moments of glorious auteur subversion were supported by explicitly misogynous representations.