FACES OF CROATIAN CINEMA

Fadil Hadžić in the optics of the totalitarian paradigm

In this text the author calls for critical intervention against the totalitarian paradigm as one of the two crucial perspectives from which the history of the socialist cinema in Yugoslavia is written in the post-Yugoslav context (the other perspective is the national one which sees film as a segment of an ethno-national culture). Reducing the history of socialist Yugoslavia to the history of totalitarian terror, the totalitarian paradigm sees Yugoslavian cinema as an instrument of mass manipulation, and as an arena in which the regime demonstrated its absolute power, castrating the unwelcome film authors. The negative effect that the totalitarian paradigm has on writing the history of film is demonstrated on the example of the attempt of critics to present the film The Raid on Drvar (Desant na Drvar, 1963) by Fadil Hadžić as the precursor of the red wave in Yugoslav film, while describing Hadžić as a director with socialist realist qualities. At the end the text calls for discarding the totalitarian paradigm, warning that the ghosts of its totalitarian hell should not be mistaken for Yugo-nostalgic ghosts of socialist Arcadia, since Yugo-nostalgia and the totalitarian paradigm are two complementing depoliticizing strategies which prevent Yugoslav film to be seen in the light of the antagonisms of Yugoslav socialism.

Nebojša Jovanović