This book investigates the Golden Age of Yugoslav cinema and sheds light on it from a fresh perspective. By examining various tropes and discourses of the archaic that shaped not only the flourishing Yugoslav cinematic modernism of the 1960s but also a broader Yugoslav cultural politics, the book reveals a nuanced panorama of cultural negotiations.
The archaic that which is at odds with modernity is a peculiar crossroads where Marxism intersects with Balkanism, while both are circumscribed by a general distrust towards representation. The analysis thus opens new perspectives on a politics of aesthetics that shaped some of the most successful Yugoslav films of all time. Furthermore, its findings will be relevant to any context in which a political as well as artistic movement seeks to present itself as avant-garde but is confronted with a discourse assigning it time-lag.
Addressing an academic audience of scholars and postgraduate students interested in Balkan and East European area studies, Slavic studies, cultural studies, film, and postcolonial studies, this book is also of interest to those researching the intersections of time, aesthetics, and politics.
Introduction: Entering the Golden Age
1. Coming to Terms: The Archaic
2. The Yugoslav Celluloid Archaic: A Panorama
II. Setting the Figures in Motion: The Game of the Archaic on the Yugoslav
1960s Screen
3. Balkanism: The Time-Lag of Realia
4. In the Future, in the Past, Under the False Appearance of a Present:
Miroslav Krleas Timings of Yugoslav Culture
5. Bloody Weddings and Funeral Bells: Representations of History in Traje
Popovs Macedonian Bloody Wedding and Antun Vrdoljaks When You Hear the
Bells
6. Parody and Naiveté: Ante Babajas The Birch Tree and Dragoslav Lazis
Poor Mary
7. Two or Three Things I Know About Burdu: Mia Popovis Burdu and
Aleksandar Petrovis It Rains in My Village
Closing Remarks on Backwardness and Vitality
III. Revenge on Representation: The Move 3 in the Game of the Archaic on
the Yugoslav 1960s Screen
8. Images, Revolutions (and Their Crusts)
9. Beauty and the Well: Duan Makavejevs Love Affair, or The Case of the
Missing Switchboard Operator
10. Yet Another Effort Yugoslavs, If You Would Become Communists: elimir
ilniks Early Works
Concluding Remarks on the Game of the Archaic
Bibliography
Adrian Pelc is a postdoc assistant in the Department of Slavic Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. His interests include Yugoslav cinema, cultural studies, and critical theory.
