Abstract

In postwar Yugoslavia, the Communist-led People’s Liberation Struggle during World War II was constructed as the country’s threefold founding narrative: a resistance to the occupiers, a civil war against the collaborationists, and a revolution. Yugoslavia’s was the second independent socialist revolution and first antifascist revolution in the world. As such, the revolution was integrated, and continuously re-articulated, in various aspects of Yugoslav development; most notably, its Marxist doctrine of workers’ self-management and Cold War non-alignment.
As an assemblage of publications and conference presentations, this dissertation investigates the intertwining of the history of postwar Yugoslavia, cinema as the main medium of its socialist modernization, and Revolution as a complex modality of its politics and aesthetics. From highlighting peasantry as a revolutionary force to critical debates about the supra-, trans-, and extra-national nature of Yugoslav cinema to racialized, gendered, and increasingly neo-liberal hierarchies in Yugoslav society, this project concentrates on the country’s often contradictory entanglement of identity and concrete utopian drive. It simultaneously constitutes material and intellectual resourcefulness as the linchpin of Yugoslav multi-media culture, particularly rich in its non-theatrical and useful incarnations.
I begin with conceptualizing the Yugoslav Revolutionary Cycle as a globally relevant supra-genre encompassing the cinematic representation of and interrelation between revolutionary precursors, war, and work in pre-WWII, wartime, and postwar Yugoslav space and history. In Chapter One, I explore how the 1950s international co-production model and generic hybridization helped Yugoslav filmmakers challenge the legacy of historical imperialisms, incorporate the Young Bosnian rebels and Kosovar Albanian national minority into supra-national socialism, and employ the western partners’ know-how. Chapter Two considers the 1960s Yugoslav auteurs’ departure from the Soviet role models as reflected in their complicated quest for a more egalitarian revolution, economic archive-based practices, and building a long-lasting international film festival community. Chapter Three focuses on the controversial Croatian filmmaker and diplomat Antun Vrdoljak who questioned Yugoslav revolutionary emancipation in his early films and contributed to British national devolution through the 1971 Croatian-British cinematic exchange. Ultimately, this dissertation re-centers Yugoslav cinema as a socialist alternative to better known and seemingly more coherent cultures, such as those in the USA, USSR, and UK.