Page 143 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 143
Cinematic Road to a Redefinition
of the Balkans
No matter what one may or may not know about the period of com-
munism in the Balkans, we can say that this period coincided with the pat-
tern of organisation of film production in a framework of national cinemat-
ographies, which were at the time universal. In this period the activity of
filmmaking, especially in countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary
and Yugoslavia, developed in its top products a mode of auter cinema. We
can generally assert that aesthetics, topics, approaches, and so on, of these
cinematographies did not differ much from what we have known as nouvel-
le vague type of cinema in Western Europe. Even after some setbacks fol-
lowing the year 1968, when the political executive and ideological powers of
the time rudely interfered with accusations and exclusions of some authors
or whole cinematic currents,1 this kind of cinema persisted in a somewhat
softened form until the fall of the Berlin wall and Ceauşescu‘s departure. In
the period after these events, cinematographies in the Balkans had to re-in-
vent themselves due to a double (or even triple) impact of political, cultur-
al and technological changes.
1 A very well known case was the so-called black film (crni film) in Yugoslavia, which
actually got its name through the anathema, launched by the Party nomenclatura.
However, in a typical self-mocking denotation this labelling was used by the young-
est representative of the trend Želimir Žilnik as a title of his semi-documentary film
(Crni film – 1971) on homeless people, who theoretically should not exist under the
socialist system.
141
of the Balkans
No matter what one may or may not know about the period of com-
munism in the Balkans, we can say that this period coincided with the pat-
tern of organisation of film production in a framework of national cinemat-
ographies, which were at the time universal. In this period the activity of
filmmaking, especially in countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary
and Yugoslavia, developed in its top products a mode of auter cinema. We
can generally assert that aesthetics, topics, approaches, and so on, of these
cinematographies did not differ much from what we have known as nouvel-
le vague type of cinema in Western Europe. Even after some setbacks fol-
lowing the year 1968, when the political executive and ideological powers of
the time rudely interfered with accusations and exclusions of some authors
or whole cinematic currents,1 this kind of cinema persisted in a somewhat
softened form until the fall of the Berlin wall and Ceauşescu‘s departure. In
the period after these events, cinematographies in the Balkans had to re-in-
vent themselves due to a double (or even triple) impact of political, cultur-
al and technological changes.
1 A very well known case was the so-called black film (crni film) in Yugoslavia, which
actually got its name through the anathema, launched by the Party nomenclatura.
However, in a typical self-mocking denotation this labelling was used by the young-
est representative of the trend Želimir Žilnik as a title of his semi-documentary film
(Crni film – 1971) on homeless people, who theoretically should not exist under the
socialist system.
141
