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by Heinz Klunker
in Catalogue of the 40th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
(Retrospective: the Will Wehling memorial programme)
Belgrade, March 1994. The Serbian metropolis, ex capital of Tito's
Yugoslavian Federation, the capital (together with Montenegro) of what
remains of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, looks dilapidated. Under
the regime of UN sanctions it is a clad in a veil of sadness, the
shimmering atmosphere of former, more normal years has disappeared into
thin air, the faces of the people look as if extinguished. The people
say that Milosevic, the skilled technician of power, has occupied the
city with his mafia. The busses and theatres are crowded, but the shops
and restaurants are empty. Belgrad is an urban patient with no doctor
far and wide.
During this time filmmaker Zelimir Zilnik had an almost perfect
Tito-double appear in the streets of this city so that he could capture
the reaction of a random public on film. A part of the people believed
that Tito had indeed returned in person. Initial irritation was
followed by respect and admiration. It hardly occurred to anyone that
the leader who had emerged from the partisan war in new South Slavia,
the chief of non alignment in the Cold War, was to blame for the
present misery. Tito was gone and so was his failed attempt to reunify
the people between Ljubljana and Skopje, Zagreb and Sarajevo and to
rule from Belgrad.
The masses have begun to seek refuge in nostalgia. While state owned
television celebrates the triumphs of manipulation, opposition stations
reach above all the like-minded and hardly have any effect beyond
Belgrad. Serious documentaries are in need of breathing space. Zilnik,
for example, has made a video on the chauvinist fascist, literary
pretentious intrigues of young women in Belgrad who celebrate a
perverse art nouveau as a cover to the misery of the Bosnian war and
who come from a class which one does not even know still existed. A
fascinated documentation, for which no space has yet been found on
successful German television. Even today there are still documentaries
from the crumbling Yugoslavia with watching, other than - the certainly
important - reports of the may deaths in Sarajevo.
For over two decades Yugoslavian short films - including documentaries,
features and animation films - were of international interest and
focused above all in Oberhausen. Zelimir Zilnik, 1969 winner of the
Golden Bear at the Berlinale for his feature film Early Works (and
where is it still being shown today?), had made a documentary of the
1968 student rebellion, while in Oberhausen audiences admired how
Belgrad students justified their political commitment with Danton's
grand speech by Georg Buchner and how literature was transformed into
dynamite in topical issues. In a mixture of anarchy and analysis,
spontaneity and professionalism a generation of Yugoslavian directors
including e.g. Zilnik, Karpo Acimovic Godina, Krsto Papic, Vuk Babic,
Prvoslav Maric, Lordan Zafranovic, Jovan Jovanovic, Vlatko Gilic,
Zlatko Bourek, Borislav Sajtinac mirrored the political, ideological
and social process of their country where, after the suppression of the
Prague project, a ''Socialism with a human face'' has sustained the
last vague hopes of a social form as an alternative to modern
capitalism.
At the time it was already clear that the self-administered worker
collectives were an illusion. Yugoslavia had been economically
underdeveloped and the necessary practical and theoretical conditions
were missing when it was catapulted from federalism into the modern
world. Here the ''philosophy of practice'' was also of little help.
Filmmakers such as Zilnik also saw through the illusion that effects
could already be achieved if socio critical films reached the
(restricted) public without censorship quarrels. The people in power
had their own problems to contend with. In March 1971, Zelimir Zilnik
said in Belgrad: ''They left us our freedom, we were liberated, but
ineffective''. The ''misery of an abstract humanism'' was attacked and
there was a self critical movement against mythologisation and shame
courage. ''It is a film (The Black Film) about the class structure of
Yugoslavian society, but also the abuse of a socially de-classed people
for the purposes of film. It shows the filmmakers exploitation of
social misery.''
Yugoslavian film convey urgent information about a multi-cultural
society which attempted ethnic consensus without having been allowed a
public discussion about historical and psychological conflicts. They
revealed the weakness of the government-ordered slogan for survival
about ''Brotherhood and Unity'' of Southern Slavonic nationalities -
even though not out of provocative chauvinist interests, but in an
honest attempt at a realistic model for Yugoslavia. However, excluded
had been issues such as latent violence in the suburbs, the misery of
rural life (including the suppression of women), right up to migrant
labour issue which, while having contributed to Yugoslavia's economic
stability, it also did its part towards its political disintegration.
Although it was not always easy to transfer Yugoslavian contributions
to Oberhausen, which lies beyond its borders, the socio critical
radicalism of the films was hardly to be surpassed and their aesthetic
(also poetic) quality truly refreshing when compared to the stark
goodwill of the amateurish and dilletant works often to be seen in the
Federal Republic of Germany, not to mention the dogmatism of DEFA
productions. |
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