Chronicle's Bibliotheque
THE BREAKUP OF YUGOSLAVIA: CINEMATIC REFLECTIONS
The violent breakup of Yugoslavia into
five nation states (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Macedonia) brought
to an end a complex post war experiment in building and
sustaining a multinational film culture. To a remarkable
degree, the leading members of the Yugoslav film community
were able to hold onto the fragile shared sense of community
and respect for ethnic and national differences long after
those values were systematically subverted by separatist
educational and cultural policies in each of the Republics.
This article traces the evolution of the former Yugoslavia’s
mixed federal and republican system of film production,
distribution and exhibition to one that has now been reorganized
along separate national lines. It considers the ways in
which these new nations are dealing with questions of film
economics, state subsidies and political control of filmmaking
activities. The paper comments on the ways in which critically
important domestic fiction feature films produced from
1991 to 1998 reflect upon the former Yugoslavia’s brutal
internecine warfare and other contemporary social, cultural
and political realities.
The sections of the paper are:
»Virgina — Yugoslavia’s Last Picture Show« (on Srdjan Karanović’s Virgina,
1991), »Belgrade — Making a Way of No Way« (the films considered
in some detail are: Vukovar: A Story, directed by
Boro Drašković; Pretty Village Pretty Flame, by
Srdjan Dragojević; Underground, by Emir Kusturica; The
Powder Keg, by Goran Paskaljević; Premeditated Murder,
by Gorčin Stojanović; Wounds, by Srdjan Dragojević),
»Zagreb — Troubled Passage« (How the War Started on
My Island, by Vinko Brešan), »Ljubljana — New Beginnings«
(Felix, by Božo Šprajc; Outsider, by Andrej
Košak; Express, Express, by Igor Šterk), »Skopje
— Before the Rain« (Before the Rain, by Milcho Manchevski; Across
the Lake, by Antonio Mitrikeski), »Cinema Under Siege
— Sarajevo« (The Perfect Circle, by Ademir Kenović).
The article is a prepublication of a chapter in the book Cinema
in Transition: Post-Communist East Central Europe,
ed. by D. Goulding and C. Portuges (Flick Books, in press,
2000).
Daniel J. Goulding |
