480102 KO Colloquium on Literature and Cultural Studies (2023S)

Many of the best and most acclaimed Yugoslav films were following a modernist poetics – Dušan Vukotić’s animated “Ersatz/Surogate” and Dušan Makavejev’s “W. R. Misteries of the Organism” might be the most well-known examples. But how widespread and how important was modernism in Yugoslav cinema? That is something this course will give an answer to. The first traces of modernist cinema can be found much earlier than the 1960s modernist boom, in the era of the Yugoslav kingdom, between the 1st and the 2nd World Wars; the films from this era are relatively few and mostly lost, so the Yugoslav socialist era (1945-1990) is the period when modernist cinema started to flourish. Starting with amateur productions and traces of modernism in the 1950s (Mihovil Pansini and then Tomislav Gotovac), with the Zagreb school of animated film in the late 1950s, the modernist poetics has reached a level widely recognized in Europe and beyond. The Black Wave cinema from the 1960s is the most widely recognized phenomenon in feature films to this day – with masterpieces by Dušan Makavejev, Živojin Pavlović and Aleksandar Petrović most convincingly serving as the tenor of the story of the Black Wave. However, even outside the scope of this movement, starting with films from different parts of Yugoslavia, for instance the films of Serbian director Puriša Đorđević and Slovenian director Boštjan Hladnik (an author strongly influenced by French film), modernist Yugoslav cinema was vibrant, interesting and successful, even beyond the Black Wave. And, although the historical term New Yugoslav Cinema is rarely used today, one of its chief proponents Vatroslav Mimica is still one of the most sophisticated modernist directors from Yugoslavia or the entire region.
The course will give an insight into Yugoslav modernist culture in cinema as well as the films themselves, discussing the alternative as well as the mainstream cinema, taking into consideration the complexity of the process of a medium more complicated in production and more expensive in execution than most of (if not all of) those applied by other arts. The context of socialism and the politics of the era will also be discussed as the context for modernism.

The course is going to be held in English.