480086 KO Colloquium on Literature (2021S)

The 1960es are the decade when modernist, auteur poetics were strongly developing in Yugoslav cinema. Directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar Petrović, Želimir Žilnik and others were at this period elaborating their individual cinematic stiles which were to be brought under the common denominator “the black wave” in 1969. Notwithstanding major differences in the work of the directors subsumed under the label “black wave”, they have one common trait: their films tend to radically question not only the cinematic, but also the social context within which they appear. The course will therefore revolve around the analysis of particular films from the period, while showing how they enter into an ambivalent relation with Yugoslav Marxist ideological tropes. It will be shown how the auteur cinema of the 1960es offered a new representation of World War II and the Partisan struggle in Yugoslavia, how it questioned the success and the radicality of the socialist revolution, how it gave center-stage to characters appertaining to the Lumpenproletariat, who cannot be integrated into a socialist society, how it boarded the taboo topic of political purges after Yugoslavia’s split with Stalin, how it tried to introduce a sexual revolution in Yugoslavia through film. Starting from two key concepts in Yugoslav film history – what was cinematic modernism and the auteur film – the course will depict how the “black” cinema probed into neuralgic points of the “red” Yugoslav ideology while depicting a complex cultural panorama.

The course will be held in Croatian and English/German. Primary film materials will be provided with English subtitles.