I grew up in a culture that was proud of keeping step with the Western world, although—however unlikely it may sound to a Western reader, and to our own countrymen, suffering from collective amnesia—some things at home could be artistically more interesting than what was happening abroad. That is why I listened with the deep understanding of an ‘Easterner’ and the benign skepticism of a ‘Westerner’ to a Russian colleague who told me a few years ago with sincere ‘perestroika’ enthusiasm: ‘Come, you’ll see, we’ve got postmodernism till it’s coming out of our ears! It’s only soap we’re short of!'

Some Western visitors have remarked that Yugoslavia is a 100% Marxist country – 50% Karl and 50% Groucho.

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) can be historicized through a number of valid diagnoses—as a country built on the ruins of war; as a complex “self-governing” economic regime; as a heterogeneous artistic, cultural and intellectual powerhouse—yet it cannot ever be held in isolation, divorced from the international lines of influence that enveloped it and in which it was an active participant. Contrary to the exhaustively debunked (nevertheless still widely present) understanding of formerly communist territories as self-enclosed, detached, hermetic entities secluded behind a wall, the SFRY constituted a veritable hotbed of cross-cultural exchange between East, West and everything in between. In these exciting overlapping networks, cinema played a crucial part. Even more intensely than the other arts, film in the South Slavic land gestured outward—often toward capitalist Europe, North America and the United Kingdom—in pursuit of coproduction or collaborative opportunities, iconographic raw material and circulation infrastructure. The flows of images, ideas and labor were often unpredictable. Rather than in unidirectional center-periphery relations of authority, these intricate cross-pollinations operated in a different, less simplistic manner: filmmakers in Yugoslavia worked on extravagant foreign-financed spectacles, yet they also appropriated, deconstructed and tactically subverted the audiovisual repertoires and grammars of Western mass culture in a plethora of adventurous, experimental ways. Anything but a homogeneous monolith, Yugoslav film encompassed a boundlessly rich (and still dramatically under-researched) spectrum of aesthetico-political approaches. Many of these understood the multinational state as a vector and arena of various competing global forces, as opposed to an autarky under the grip of any fixed stylistic dogma—socialist realism first and foremost.

As such, The Yugoslav Junction interrogates cinema in the SFRY through the analytic prism of internationalism. On view are fifty films (the vast majority of them shorts), divided into nine screenings. The historical frame of the retrospective is significant, ranging from the late 1950s—a decade of fierce expansion, liberalization, professionalization and decentralization in the Yugoslav film industry—all the way to 1988: the onset of Slobodan Milosevic’s “anti-bureaucratic revolution” and a high point of the ethnonationalist, politically fomented hatred that would end up bloodily destroying the country. While over half of the selected titles are products of the famed and mythologized 60s, this series sidesteps usual chronologies that ennoble new film and black wave movements in their singularity, as ecstatic outbursts of invention, opposition, dissidence and critique never to be repeated before or after. Instead, our scope is at the same time broader and more specific. Films and filmmakers from a gamut of historical periods, ideological angles and production contexts (hand-drawn avant-garde animation, mega-budget war drama and homemade 8mm undertakings, to name only a few) are juxtaposed and correlated, always with an eye to the cosmopolitan, worldly connections their images sustain. This is not to diminish, obfuscate or reduce the all-too-real material differences within a conglomeration of artistic practices, but rather to elevate internationalism as a compelling guiding thread, a helpful, productive lens—one among many, no less or more legitimate than a host of others—for making sense of a diverse and relatively uncharted territory of world cinema.

If there was ever such a thing as “national cinema” in the SFRY, it assuredly did not fit a simple mold. To speak of Yugoslav cinematography is necessarily to call up a vast and intricate agglomeration of well-funded government-launched studios (multiple in each republic’s capital and in the two provinces), constant to-and-fro traffic of cast, crew and money within and between the constituent nations, as well as significant openness to overseas sponsors, producers, visitors, guest directors and interested parties of all types. Jetset blockbuster epics such as The Battle of Neretva (Bitka na Neretvi, Veljko Bulajic, 1969)—starring Sergei Bondarchuk, Yul Brynner, Hardy Krüger, Franco Nero and Orson Welles, with a zippy score courtesy of Bernard Herrmann and impeccable poster design by Pablo Picasso—and Battle of Sutjeska (Sutjeska, also known as The Fifth Offensive, Stipe Delic, 1973), in which Richard Burton embodies Marshal Josip Broz Tito, are only the most obvious, glamorized instances of this phenomenon. As a result, film in Yugoslavia was always already a multiethnic and frequently outright transnational venture, with the federation providing something of a limiting case for understandings of “national cinema” in contemporary scholarship and criticism. Against certain nationalist post-independence historiographies, this series discards the ethnic key as a metric through which moving images in the Yugosphere are classified, examined and valued. Instead, the gambit is that incomparably more can be learned by studying the international and multicultural conceptual-material fluxes that tapestried Yugoslavia from within and without.

This shift in emphasis has consequences both for regional film history and for discourses of national cinema more broadly. By casting light on an under-considered dimension of Southeastern European film, The Yugoslav Junction hopes to address area studies’ specialists; by excavating and delineating an array of fascinating (often hybrid) creative models, it attempts to welcome a wider curious public. The Hollywood or pan-European coproduction, the outsourced labor project, the omnibus, the remake, the informal multilingual collaboration: these are all frameworks or schemas through which Yugoslav filmmakers surmounted geographic boundaries. Others include the preponderance of foreign distribution, guest work expeditions, as well as the euphoric, chaotic taking (indeed détourning) of fragments from worldwide televisual channels. Whatever “national cinema” might describe in the Yugoslav space, it surely has nothing to do with ethnic or aesthetic purity, iron-curtain insulation or the sequestering of varied artistic expressions into neat, unchanging nation-state blocks. Amalgamation, not dictatorial confinement, is dominant.

Our programs thus accentuate, link, contrast and probe the assorted modes in which Yugoslavia functioned as a crossroads—or what Mary Louise Pratt would term a “contact zone”—of artistic currents, media representations and the movement of creative labor from Euro-American markets and Non-Aligned terrains alike. Comparable exhibitions of internationalism in the other Yugoslav arts could and have been undertaken with great success; yet it is in the infinitely reproducible, anarchically border-traversing and capital-intensive field of cinema that such webs shine brightest. In its aim to organize an expansive (but not exhaustive) first taxonomy, The Yugoslav Junction brings together: a feature-length WWII tearjerker directed in Serbia by a French-American; a Nikolai Leskov adaptation—itself a take on Shakespeare—made during a heavyweight Polish auteur’s sojourn in the Balkans; a program of found-footage pop appropriations and homages from amateur ciné-clubs and around; two showings of Oscar-winning animation; a deceptively literal remake of Lina Wertmüller’s The Seduction of Mimi set in Vojvodina; seven works by a major cineaste whose documentarism was shown on Norwegian national TV as a tool in a medical fundraising campaign; a pair of analytic, pedagogical 16mm pieces made at this university by Yugoslav expats; a Macedonian anticonformist romance soundtracked by a local Who cover band; and a lineup of films centered on music and the regional incarnations of Anglo-American youth (sub)culture, not least punk and jazz. The films share little in aesthetic orientation, rhetorical position or method of manufacture. Yet they are joined by a common attunement to the outside (non-South-Slavic) world, acting as a site in which transnational identities are collided, thematized, negotiated, contested and taken apart. In the process, notions of a stable national cinema are exploded, debunked.

The Yugoslav Junction navigates a particular region on the edge of Europe; yet it also cannot but emanate from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of the presented titles are on loan from institutional and individual storage vaults, but thirty (almost two thirds) come directly from the in-house collection of the Harvard Film Archive. Exploring and interpreting the Yugoslav and Yugoslav-adjacent holdings of the HFA—itself an establishment with long-existing “ex-Yu” affiliations, namely in the form of founding curator Vlada Petric and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies visiting professor Dusan Makavejev—is a foundational, strategic component of this endeavor. What might Harvard’s eclectic accumulation of film from Yugoslavia be able to teach us? How can an internationalist take inflect or destabilize histories of market socialism and its cinema? What constellations, unforeseen combinations, and thorny blind spots suddenly become visible when one inspects an archive in all its idiosyncrasy? The goal of these screenings is certainly not to offer irrefutable, final answers to such questions. Exhibiting in the realm of cinema what the inimitable Ugresic already illustrated in the realm of writing will suffice: “The Yugoslav cultural space was shared, it was made up of different cultural and linguistic traditions which blended and communicated with one another … It meant freely living different cultures and experiencing them all as one’s own.” With nationalist entrenchment and division all around us, the assignment is anything but easy. – Nace Zavrl