Requiem for Yugoslavia

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.