Partisans in Yugoslavia: Literature, Film and Visual Culture [1. Aufl.] 9783839425220

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Miranda Jakiša, Nikica Gilic´ (eds.) Partisans in Yugoslavia

Miranda Jakiša, Nikica Gilic´ (eds.)

Partisans in Yugoslavia Literature, Film and Visual Culture

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2015 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Nastasia Louveau: »rod¯endan partizanke«. 2009. Copyright by courtesy of the artist Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-2522-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-2522-0

Contents

On Partisans and Partisanship in Yugoslavia’s Arts

Miranda Jakiša | 9

P ARTISAN

NARRATIVES , STAGINGS AND TRANSFORMATIONS Contemporary Art. A Meeting of the Current and the Cosmic!

Miklavž Komelj | 31 Yugoslav Partisan Poetry. Songs for the Leader

Tanja Zimmermann | 49 From Memoir to Fiction. Early Yugoslav Partisan Narratives Revisited

Stijn Vervaet | 71 Partisan Star Wars. Aesthetics of Ideology, Ideology of Aesthetics in Croatian Partisan Novels

Maša Kolanović | 91 With or Without Gun. Staging Female Partisans in Socialist Yugoslavia

Natascha Vittorelli | 117 Portraits of Yugoslav Army Soldiers. Between Partisan and Pop-Culture Imagery

Tanja Petrović | 137

P ARTISAN ( FEATURE ) FILM IN YUGOSLAVIA : A ‘ HOUSE ’- GENRE WITH AN AFTERLIFE From Slavko to Slavica. (Soviet) Origins of (Yugoslav) Partisan Film

Barbara Wurm | 159 On the Specific (In)existence of the Partisan Film in Yugoslavia’s People’s Liberation Struggle

Gal Kirn | 197 Narrative and Genre Influences of the International Classical Cinema in the Partisan Films of Živorad-Žika Mitrović

Nikica Gilić | 227 1970s Partisan Epics as Western Films. The Question of Genre and Myth in Yugoslav Partisan Film

Peter Stanković | 245 Bodies That Shudder. Disability and Typhus Sufferers in Partisan Films

Ivan Velisavljević | 265 We Need to Talk about Valter. Partisan Film and the Anti-Leftist Odium

Nebojša Jovanović | 283 T RENUTKI ODLOČITVE . A Slovene Partisan Story from the 50s and 80s

Matteo Colombi | 315

T RST JE N AŠ ! Post-Socialist Slovenian Partisan Cinema

Mirt Komel | 347 The Partisan as an Artist, the Artist as a Partisan? On the Relationship between Artistic Autonomy and Workers’ Self Management

Zoran Terzić | 363 Authors | 379

On Partisans and Partisanship in Yugoslavia’s Arts M IRANDA J AKIŠA

P /P ARTISAN ARTS The term “partisan” raises right from the start a crucial general question when dealing with Yugoslavia’s P/partisan art in literature, film, song and in visual culture: is it partisan in itself or is it first and foremost concerned with the (historic dramatis personae of the) Yugoslav Partisans? Partisan art and partisan art, as we will see in this volume, often tread a common path in the history of the partisan narrative in Yugoslavia. The idea of partisanship as such, the idea of decidedly taking sides, of being part of one group (and not the other), the idea of being a Parteigänger, is relevant for both p/Partisan arts. While depictions of the Partisans in Yugoslavia, that is Partisan art, as well as retrospective attitudes towards these representations always take a stance on the historic partisans in one way or another, partisan art creates the sides to be taken. In bringing a projected and anticipated, and (yes!) revolutionary content into being, partisan art, while creating itself, produces the other.1 In other words, partisan art establishes an us and them in the first place. This not only applies to political and war enemies, but to aesthetic adversaries, too.

1

In the following the terms and notions Partisan and partisan will not be orthographically distinguished any more. For further elaborations on the Partisan/partisan entanglement see Komelj and Terzić in this volume.

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Partisan art wildly and enthusiastically opposes. It opposes something, someone, or both and the dissenting polemics being used in this opposition in Michel Foucault’s words, “recruites partisans” and “establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears”.2 Partisans are in vogue again and they are so appreciated exactly for the unambiguous face-off situation they produce. Acknowledging partisan art, rediscovering its partisan qualities therefore implies willingly embracing the new totality partisan art creates and in doing so unthinking postmodernist notions: dissemination, fragmentation, simulacrum, references without reference. Partisans – that’s the real deal!

E NEMIES

AND FRONTLINES

Let us stay a while with the decidedness of partisan dissent and the production of enemies. If we turn to concrete partisan narratives in Yugoslavia we encounter frontlines on different levels and in different times beginning with the chiastically construed imagery of irregular and individualized partisan fighters from the narod (people) confronted with an amorphous mass of foreign fascist invaders who turn the people – more or less involuntarily – into dauntless defenders: into partizane (partisans)! This narrative, with the fascist invasion in the role of a natural catastrophe within the partisan master plot, has been constantly written and rewritten in Yugoslavia since the 1940s.3 From its first hour, stepping into the path of an enemy defines a partisan story, yet the front lines of the confrontation remain flexible. Partisan combat by nature operates from an ambush, it is irregular in almost all aspects of warfare, be they artistic or not. Nevertheless, the distinction between friend and foe could not be clearer than in partisan combat. Aleksandar 2 3

From Paul Rabinow’s interview “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations” with Michel Foucault in 1984. In Paul Rabinow(ed.): Essential Works of Foucault. Vol.1 “Ethics”, New York: The New Press 1997: 112. See also Jakiša, Miranda: “Der ‘tellurische Charakter’ des Partisanengenres: Jugoslavische Topo-Graphie in Film und Literatur”, in: Esther Kilchmann /Andreas Pflitsch/Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.), Topographien pluraler Kulturen. Europa vom Osten gesehen, Berlin: Kadmos 2011: 207-223.

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Flaker’s distinction between us and them in partisan stories and the permanent option to change or choose between sides, which he considers crucial for the partisan “image of the world”, does not question, but confirms the distinctness of the friend-foe divide.4 The spirit of the partisan fight and the overly powerful enemy that had to “surrender or disappear” (Foucault) animated and energized partisan poetry already in the war years and made it part of the liberation struggle itself (see Komelj in this volume). Partisan encounters with distinct enemies continued to exist and multiply in Yugoslavia’s art even when the historic enemies of World War II started to fade, had to be reshaped and when the partisan fight in general became more figurative. So in Đorđe Balašević’s famous song Računajte na nas (You can count on us, 1978) the young generation in the late 1970s still refers to battles to be fought in the partisan tradition (see Zimmermann in this volume). The success of Balašević’s song is simply a symptom for the generational metalepsis the partisan narrative managed to achieve from the late 1960s on when the partisan generation was superseded by a younger one. This metalepsis, a ‘leap forward’ in Yugoslavia’s partisan (hi)story, bound the Yugoslavs abidingly to the partisan past and transferred the partisan spirit to art production anew. One of this spirit’s liveliest expressions can be found in the alternative partisan film production within the nouvelle vague or novi val (see Jovanović in this volume).5 The renewed frontline in film separated ‘real’ art from the dishonest needs of the “red bourgeoisie” and made the directors partisans of art that fought an all-European artistic war on a Yugoslav frontline. The (artistic) partisan spirit (kept) alive in Yugoslavia for many decades still echoes in today’s dissenting comments on the retrospective reduction of Yugoslavia’s manifold partisan expressions in art to plain state art (often paraphrased as socialist realism). The adversaries of this latest frontline are those (art) historians, literary and film scholars who willingly and often deliberately underestimate and underrate the historic meaning of the liberation struggle depicted in partisan film, literature and song. Even though

4 5

Flaker, Aleksandar: “Partizanska slika svijeta”, in: Forum, 6.20 (1981): 898. See also Jakiša, Miranda: “Großes Kino der Subversion und Affirmation. Vom Schlagabtausch im Film der jugoslawischen 1960er”, in: Hannes Grandits/Holm Sundhaussen (eds.), Jugoslawien in den 1960er Jahren: Auf dem Weg zu einem (a-)normalen Staat?, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2013: 185-213.

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some know better, they choose to interpret Yugoslavia’s artistic production solely along Third Way politics, reducing them to a result of Titoist measures and coercion in art. All too often in order to assert own nationalist demarcations, such interpretations, disapproving of partisan film and literature right from the start, prefer to stress the liberties of the post-Yugoslav societies than to actually take a genuinely interested look at partisan art production itself. The contributions to this volume voice both sides of this late Yugoslav partisan frontline in one way or the other. In the following I will come back to each of these three Yugoslav partisan frontlines, beginning with a more thorough glance at the most recent one.

R EDUCTION

AND FUNCTION / ALIZATION OF PARTISAN ART

There is more to the claim that the reduction of partisan art to state art is highly problematic than differing evaluations of historical events. According to Rastko Močnik, the appeal partisan art still has today has nothing to do with the disappearance of the ideological framework it was bred in.6 To assume this, Močnik claims, would mean to affirm the idea that art and culture are domains to be strictly separated from social and historic contexts. Even more, such a separation means to deprive partisan art of its integral imbeddedness in exactly these contexts without which partisan art cannot exist at all. This crucial notion adds to the entanglement of partisan partisan art and art about the actual Partisans of World War II that was introduced above. Močnik’s analysis once more brings up the circular figure that characterizes partisan art as anticipator of its own circumstances. Partisan art as “kulturno stvaralaštvo” or as “kulturna akcija”7 installs the framework in which itself will become possible. In it, the future is evacuated to the present, or as Miklavž Komelj writes, partisan art is defined by the “presence of the unre-

6 7

Močnik, Rastko. “Partizanska simbolička politika”, in: Zarez 7.161/162 (2005): 12-14. R. Močnik:“Partizanska simbolička politika”, 13.

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alized” it embodies.8 Partisanship therefore not only produces itself and the enemy, it also asserts the will of an avant-garde (future) that at the same time is inaugurated by it (present). In creating the present, Partisan art in Yugoslavia took an active part in the fight itself – not only in the war years but also afterwards. Močnik stresses that there even was such a partisan art in Yugoslavia before there was an actual war, its project being the fight against fascism as the “most developed appearance of capitalist barbarism”.9 Some of the contributions to this volume focus on partisan art in the war itself, most of them on partisan art after the war. In all of them, the historic partisans of the Yugoslav Liberation Struggle, of the NOB,10 have already entered the stage. To write about the partisans in Yugoslavia – as we did – always implies a more or less contoured attitude towards Yugoslavia and its history. The contributors to this volume have all experienced the difficulties of such an endeavour. Whether you want to or not, you find yourself holding a line. One of the challenges of writing on partisan arts was dealing with the often-quoted function of the Yugoslav partisan narrative to provide a founding myth for the new state of postwar Yugoslavia. Seen from this angle, Yugoslavia’s partisan narratives shrink to commissioned work in the service of an ideological re-education program of a primarily selfsustaining, suppressive regime. This way, works of partisan writers like Vladimir Nazor, Oskar Davičo, Branko Ćopić, Miško Kranjec or Mihailo Lalić are retrospectively degraded to ‘state novels’, calling their literary quality into question while the partisan film production in its variety is reduced to a common goal: “propagandizing and legitimizing the newly founded people’s socialist government”.11 The ubiquitous partisan narrative did indeed serve the state of Yugoslavia well in its post World War II nation building and in the re-education of

8

Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, Ljubljana: Založba/*cf. 2009. 9 R. Močnik:“Partizanska simbolička politika”, 13. 10 NOB is Narodnooslobodilačka Borba (People’s Liberation Struggle). In this volume we refer to the Yugoslav Liberation Struggle with the acronym NOB that was in use in Yugoslavia and after. 11 Goulding, Daniel. Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2002, 16.

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its newly united people.12 But while this prominent function as a founding myth, as a uniting narrative (of supranational “Vergemeinschaftung”, to use Max Weber’s term), and the retrospective deconstruction of the partisan ‘myth’ received significant academic attention since the break-up of Yugoslavia, few efforts have been made to explore the actual consistency of the historic partisan narratives, let alone of their – still ongoing – transformations and revivals. The contributions in this volume attempt to fill some of the gaps – some of them combative, some less so – exploring partisan narratives and imagery from different angles and with varying disciplinary approaches, focusing on some of the blind spots, but also adding to existing work, taking into consideration those first postwar partisan articulations (particularly Komelj, Kirn and Wurm in this volume) as well as very recent revisions and reflections of the Yugoslav partisan story (particularly Komel and Colombi in this volume). Yugoslav partisan literature, song and film from 1941 on, that much is clear, tell and retell the story of the Yugoslav partisans in World War II. For Yugoslavia the war started on April 6th, 1941. Yugoslavia’s Royal Army surrendered unconditionally already on April 17th and almost immediately antifascist resistance sprang up throughout the country. The vigor and ubiquitousness of the Yugoslav resistance was not only due to the presence and the actions of the Axis powers in Yugoslavia, but had also to do with the national and ideological differences within the country. The partisans fought the Germans and their allies but also various national collaborator organizations and groups. These combats taking place all over Yugoslavia were the central source of inspiration for partisan narratives in literature and film. Reflecting on the everyday reality of war in Yugoslavia in the 1940s in his study Experiment Yugoslavia, the German historian and expert on the history of South Eastern Europe Holm Sundhaussen writes that, in the light of the events, joining the partisan resistance must have seemed for Yugo12 Snježana Koren writes about the role of the partisan story in schoolbooks that it legitimized Yugoslavia and the socialist revolution and that the sacrifice of the Yugoslav peoples served as foundation of the “brotherhood and unity” idea. In these educative goals, she adds, the partisan fighters and fallen heroes were crucial, Tito taking the most prominent position among them. Koren, Snježana: “̔Heroji̕ i ̔antiheroji̕ u udžbenicima: slike nacionalne povijesti u udžbenicima uoči i nakon 1990. godine”, www.ffzg.unizg.hr/pov/zavod/triplex/historymem oryfulltexts.doc, 2.

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slavs the best chance of survival.13 One of these events that turned people into partisans according to Sundhaussen, was the OKW-order (OKW: Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) of 16th September 1941 to execute 50-100 persons for each German soldier killed by partisans. On the basis of this order ten thousands of civilians were killed by December 1941, thousands alone (including school children) in the massacre of Kragujevac in October 1941. In his study Yugoslavia and its Successor States Sundhaussen stresses some twenty years later, that such events subsequently transformed into narratives and became omnipresent in Yugoslavia’s politics, memorials, holidays, films, songs etc. 14 In short, we can say World War II became omnipresent in Yugoslavia, and this omnipresence was above all realized through the arts. What is interesting is that it was only after the Wars of Yugoslav Succession that the role of the World War II narrative in Yugoslavia was highlighted so clearly by many historians. Before, when the focus was on the relative freedom in Yugoslavia, the partisan heritage and story must have seemed less significant (than non-alignment, Third Way politics and self-management) seen from outside. The image of Miodrag Živković’s monument to the murdered schoolchildren and teachers Prekinut let from 1963, a monument relating to the Kragujevac massacre, indeed was and still is deeply engraved in Yugoslav memories. It affirmed and reminded Yugoslavs throughout all Yugoslav decades that World War II was not only a cherished founding ‘myth’ that brought with it exaggerated figures, pathetic memorial days and ambitious modernist partisan monuments, it also was the crude reality and experience of the people living on Yugoslav territory between 1941 and 1945. Partisan literature, songs, films and other artistic expressions, especially those early ones, are therefore as much efforts of coming to terms with the traumatic experience of war as they were ideologically functionalized in Yugoslavia. The aspect of Vergangenheitsbewältigung as it appears in many partisan novels of the 1940s and 1950s, like those by Oskar Davičo, Milovan Đilas, Branko Ćopić, Dobrica Ćosić, Vladimir Nazor, Mihailo Lalić, Miško Kranjec, Ivan Goran Kovačić and others, has in my view so

13 Sundhaussen, Holm: Experiment Jugoslawien. Von der Staatsgründung bis zum Staatsverfall. Mannheim: B.I.-Taschenbuchverlag 1993, 81. 14 Sundhaussen, Holm: Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943-2011. Eine ungewöhnliche Geschichte des Gewöhnlichen. Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau 2012, 37.

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far not been given appropriate attention. These novels can and should be read as part of the European literature of survival, i.e. of postwar and even Holocaust literature, that has shaped the literary landscape of Europe’s 20th century so incisively with the works of authors like Grossman, Levi, Márai, Kertész, Tišma, Böll or Borchert. In other words: All the important and overdue research that critically turns to the many questions socialist Yugoslavia left unanswered still should not ignore that literature is not written on command and per state order!

Ill. 1: Contemporary illustration of the monument to the victims of mass execution in Niš, Tri pesnice (Three Fists by Ivan Sabolić, 1963) by the artist Nastasia Louveau, acryl/pencil 2011. The early Yugoslav partisan novel, a literature dealing with the experience of World War II, had as much as other European literary works of the time a therapeutic function for its traumatized readers – and writers. Most of the partisan novels of the first two decades, for example Lelejska gora (1957) by Mihailo Lalić, therefore can in a far more convincing manner be contextualized in the field of postwar literature than, for instance, within the ‘method’ of socialist realism. The number of partisan postwar novels in the 1950s is significant for the obvious reason of temporal proximity. These early, and in all cases biographic or biographically inspired partisan novels (see Vervaet in this volume) were exclusively written by war veterans and

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also addressed controversial topics such as Yugoslavia’s internal fascism or partisan war crimes. So besides the therapeutic function we can also assume that the early partisan narratives fulfilled a reflecting and critical function. This secondary function seems even more important in Yugoslavia, yet so far has not been recognized as such, considering the fact that during the entire Tito era there were at best few (or even no) critical approaches to NOB history from historiography.15 Literature’s role in the late 1940s and 50s cannot be overestimated in that respect. Renata Jambrešić-Kirin describes the similar critical function partisan film had later, from the late 1960s on.16 While there definitely was a lack of genuine research on the Yugoslav partisans in Yugoslav times, there still exists an impressive number of publications on the NOB theme from Yugoslavia – editions, conference volumes, illustrated books, historical essays, memoirs, and of course short stories and novels, children’s books, even comic strips as well as a great range of poetry. Some of the latter is evidently poetry for purpose, songs referring to the NOB and glorifying its leader Josip Broz Tito, to be recited on memorial days (see Zimmermann in this volume). Not to speak of the spectacular often-quoted number of more than 200 partisan films the Yugoslav film critic Milutin Čolić presents in his book on Yugoslav film in the 1980s.17 It is also Čolić who informs us that partisan film is a subcategory of war film and who was the first to take a closer look at the question of the partisan film as a genre (see Gilić and Stanković in this volume). In constantly telling and retelling (at least parts of) the partisan story the painful experiences of war could be transformed into an optimistic tale of active victimhood, an attitude that was to dominate the Yugoslav selfperceptions in the years to come. It was not by chance that the overall output of NOB literature and film throughout the Yugoslav decades was so enormous. It served the people, who in the beginning, but as we will see, also later found their present and personal experiences in them, and it served the state. 15 H. Sundhaussen, Holm: Experiment Jugoslawien, 95. 16 Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata: “Politika sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke culture”, in: Lada Čale-Feldman/Ines Prica (eds.), Devijacije i promašaji: etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2006:172. 17 Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984.

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So the exploitation of the partisan story by Yugoslavia’s (cultural) politics was without a doubt useful for the formation of national unity as well as for personal claims of Josip Broz Tito whose partisan leadership achievements ‘predestined’ him for a lifetime presidency. Yet the ‘myth’ of the partisan liberation struggle and the heroic figure of the partisan can by no means easily be reduced to a common denominator or a one-sided function exclusively in state service. On the contrary, the partisan narrative turned out to be flexible and adaptable in more than one respect. But before turning to the narrative’s adaptive qualities, I would like to dwell for a moment on the question of socialist realism in Yugoslavia that is raised whenever Yugoslavia’s partisan art is evaluated in terms of indoctrination.

T HE

GHOST OF SOCIALIST REALISM

Partisan art – at least from today’s perspective – raises very different expectations, occupies different points of view and changes gradually with shifting fields of vision. While Rastko Močnik claims that we deal with artistic works that were created in the midst of a live-or-die war and that it was created by people who considered their partisan art as action in a fight for freedom and emancipation, 18 others consider partisan literature to have been nothing more than state ideology made digestible for the masses. Ideology and masses fuse in the ‘accusation’ of socialist realism, or soc– realism. For many, the supreme way of doing justice to the partisan arts from Yugoslavia is to classify them with the term “socijalni realizam” (social realism) instead of “socialist realism”. Social realism was a (significant!) early Yugoslav modification of socrealism already before World War II in the 1930s. Vojislav Mataga points out that in socialist realism (as well as in Romanticism) the category of “tipičnost” is highly trivialized in the positive hero presented.19 The ideal positive hero in socrealist literature, he adds, is the party secretary, the commissioner, the SKOJ secretary, in short, any distinct member of the communist nomenclature or the hero of work, the

18 R. Močnik:“Partizanska simbolička politika”,12. 19 Mataga, Vojislav: “Socijalistički realizam i kič”, in: Republika 1/2 (1995): 42.

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shock worker. 20 Mataga’s elaborations, even though written from within post-Yugoslavia, give no examples from Yugoslav literature to demonstrate in what way this trivialization actually occurred and which Yugoslav texts actually were socialist realist. Mataga’s more general point about socrealist art is that it is meant for the masses and therefore has to banalize and trivialize artistic production to kitsch to make it digestible for the ‘common people’.21 Putting aside whether this argumentation, not only brought forward by Mataga, is convincing or not, it is remarkable that there is no mention of the partisans even though the partisans outnumbered any other ‘communist’ topic in Yugoslav literature! The literary historian Krešimir Nemec, by contrast, does name actual socrealist novels from Yugoslavia in his literary history – as expected, partisan novels among them! – yet adds that there is not more than “a handful” of them. 22 So where has all the socrealist literature for the masses gone? Maša Kolanović, following Nemec’ list of Yugoslav (Croatian) socrealist literature, analyzes one of these partisan novels, Josip Barković’s Sinovi slobode (Sons of Freedom, 1948), in detail (see Kolanović in this volume). Kolanović stresses, like Mataga, that it is the core pattern of romance that dominates such texts. Partisan novels, at least the allegedly ‘socrealist’ ones, are above all romances according to Maša Kolanović’s convincing study about popular culture and the Croatian novel.23 In them good fights evil and wins in the end. Read from today’s perspective, the black-and-white plot and the description of the sacrificial partisan fight appear in many respects ridiculous. To explain this, Kolanović, attempting also to rid partisan novels of the socialist realist stigma, reads them as projects of populism and of popular culture and refers to Northrop Frye's study on the genre of romance, according to which romance finds ways to lend a face to the dominant ideals of the time, in the binary fight of good and evil. But is it really necessary to find superordinate terms to defend partisan narratives? Dubravka Ugrešić proves to be a reliable ally in taking a second glance at socialist realism in Yugoslavia. Ugrešić in her essay Long Live Socialist

20 21 22 23

V. Mataga: “Socijalistički realizam i kič”, 45. V. Mataga: “Socijalistički realizam i kič”, 44. Nemec, Krešimir: Povijest hrvatskog romana. Zagreb: Školska knjiga 2003, 10. See also Kolanović, Maša: Udarnik! Buntovnik? Potrošač...Popularna kultura i hrvatski roman od socijalizma do tranzicije, Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak 2011.

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Realism! pugnaciously demonstrates the socrealist elements in today’s literature: “Contemporary market literature is realistic, optimistic, joyful, sexy, explicitly or implicitly didactic, and intended for the broad masses. As such, it ideologically remolds and educates the working people in the spirit of personal victory, the victory of some good over some evil. It is socialist realist!”24 Ugrešić in the same essay reminds us that socrealism has been “given such a hammering” and was “killed stone dead” so that “today there is hardly anyone who knows what socialist realism”25 actually was all about. Indeed, the term socialist realism socrealizam has turned into a term of vituperation. It discredits whatever is labeled with it, ‘unmasking’ it as pure ideology and depriving it of any aesthetical significance. Dying partisans with their entrails in one hand still fighting the fascists with the other, love without even the slightest sexual interests, simple-minded glorification of the partisan leader Tito and a general overemphasis of masculinity (comradeship, solidarity, rivalry, competition) as well as outdated gender constellations – all of this can indeed be found in partisan novels! I am afraid, in all these points they do not differ much from other literature from the time not branded socrealist… Even partisan films from the time of the so-called crveni val (Red Wave) in the late 1960s have retrospectively been ‘downgraded’ to socialist realism (see Jovanović’s and Velisavljević’s critique in this volume) – in a time when, by the way, socrealism had faded even in the Soviet Union. Daniel Goulding and Peter Stanković explicitly and historically more convincingly read the early partisan film as socialist realism or more specifically as nationalist realism.26 Yet Tomislav Šakić resolutely opposes even this temporal constriction, stressing that there has n e v e r been a directly propagandistic fiction film with ideological text and socrealist pattern in Yugoslavia.27 As long as there does not exist a single film analysis showing the socrealist pattern of a Yugoslav film, I prefer to stick with Šakić. Accordingly, the art historian Ješa Denegri claims that the whole of Yugoslav art production actually has to be categorized as “socialist 24 Ugresić, Dubravka: “Long live socialist realism!”, in: Dubravka Ugresić, Thank you for not reading. Essays on Literary Trivia. Dalkey Archive 2003: 27. 25 D. Ugresić: “Long live socialist realism!”, 25. 26 D. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 8. 27 Šakić, Tomislav: “Filmski svijet Veljka Bulajića: poprište susreta kolektivnog i privatnog”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009): 19.

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modernism”, since from very early on it had lacked the elements of socialist realism. Denegri claims this even for the time before the often-cited speech Miroslav Krleža gave at the Congress of Writers in Ljubljana in 1952. His speech is usually considered to mark the official rupture with socialist realism in Yugoslavia (see Wurm in this volume on the relation of Soviet and Yugoslav film and the aesthetic paradigm of socrealism). So when was the Yugoslav partisan narrative supposed to have been socrealist at all when we take into account that the first partisan short stories were written in the war years of the 1940s and that the first Yugoslav feature film was produced in 1947? And what light does it shed on the small ‘list’ of Yugoslav socialist realist texts that Katerina Clark, an expert on socialist realism in the Russian novel, notes that even in the Soviet Union writers “dismantle[d] the tradition”28 as soon as Stalin died in 1953? Clark on the other hand mentions in the same breath that a “legacy of socialist realism” can even be found in the early novels of dissident writers like Solzhenitsyn.29 So it might not be necessary to deny socrealist legacies altogether to defend Yugoslavia’s art from being merely in the hands of the bad (not dissident) ideology? Maybe ideology even proves to be good enough in special historical situations like the one postwar-Yugoslavia found itself in, wretched, shattered and wasted? In the end, for Yugoslav artists, directors and writers it might not have been necessary to “batter their child”, the child of socialist realism, as far as there was such a child at all, “to death”?30 Socialist realism in Yugoslavia raises more questions than there are convincing answers: What makes a text socrealist? When was there a socrealist art in Yugoslavia? In the end there is not much more left than Dubravka Ugrešić’s elucidating comment on the Yugoslav cinema program of 1953: “Let’s be honest, there is no essential difference between the aesthetics of Esther Williams films and the aesthetics of the communist spectacles. Except that Esther Williams puts on a better show.”31

28 Clark, Katerina: “Socialist realism in Soviet Literature”, in: The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, London/New York: Routledge 2001: 174. 29 K. Clark: “Socialist realism in Soviet Literature”, 174. 30 D. Ugresić: “Long live socialist realism!”, 27. 31 D. Ugrešić: Thank you for not reading. Essays on Literary Trivia. IL: Dalkey Archive Press 2003, 177.

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P ARTISAN

SPIRIT AND A NARRATIVE THAT ADAPTS

The partisan narrative and the ideology it transported turned out to be flexible and adaptable. The partisan narrative in Yugoslav arts transformed between 1941/42 and 1992 whenever a new Yugoslav reality was to be provided with meaning. An overview of literary and filmic partisan narratives and partisan songs shows at least three intertwined phases of change in the narrative that were interacting with the political and societal present and that simultaneously collided with aesthetic paradigm shifts in European literature and film (postwar literature, nouvelle vague, postmodernism). First, partisan literature mainly consisted of partisan poetry32 and short stories by active partisans already published in the war years (e.g. Vladimir Nazor, Ivan Goran Kovačić and Branko Ćopić). In his 1947 speech at the Croatian Writers Society’s Annual Meeting Vladimir Nazor pointed out that the old notion of the muses silenced by the weapons singing was not true in Yugoslavia. On the contrary, he adds, there was a great demand for poetry and many started writing poems for the first time in their lives.33 In the following two decades, as mentioned above, also explicitly autobiographical works and autobiographically legitimated fiction novels by partisan veterans were printed (see Vervaet in this volume). Like Dobrica Ćosić’s novel Daleko je sunce (1951), which was dedicated “to my comrades”, other partisan novels from the 1950s found ways to authenticate their writers as eyewitnesses even if their texts were not genuine memoirs. The authentic claim “I was there” played a crucial role and marked a position between fact and fiction in which the common distinction of author and narrator in literature was eliminated. This connection of factual participation and literary retelling transformed the person of the author to a representative of the real reader, it served the witnessing of facts and at the same time left enough room for an utopian overcoming of reality in the spirit of partisanship. Photos of Vladimir Nazor with a red star sewn to his hat became iconic of the partisan writer. Nazor was a Dalmatian modernist who, already 63 years old, joined the partisans in 1942 and whose writing and attitudes changed drastically. Veljko Bulajić, in his famous 1969 film BIT-

32 M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? 33 Nazor, Vladimir: Govor počasnog predsjednika, in: Republika. Mjesečnik za književnost, umjetnost i društvo, Zagreb 1947, 145-147.

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NERETVI (THE BATTLE OF NERETVA), one of the figureheads of Red Wave cinema, devoted a whole scene to the icon Nazor, evoking a common Yugoslav literature and people’s enlightenment through books and education correlated with the partisans.

KA NA

Ill. 2: Vladimir Nazor with the partisans: well known photography (fake?) and in the film BITKA NA NERETVI The partisan spirit produced through literature and film empowered the Yugoslav reader/viewer through the partisan narrative, providing her/him with an attitude that was free of the passivity and helplessness of the victim role, without relinquishing the moral innocence and integrity of the assaulted. This position proved to be one that could be developed and made Yugoslavia’s dissident role in between the rivaling systems of East and West its historic legacy. Yugoslavia was to remain an active victim and this notion was reproduced very strongly by the arts, including film. With this attitude, even Yugoslavia’s critical youth could be taken aboard, a youth that, as the line in Balašević’s song goes, was born long after the battles (“bitke daleke”) and could not, unlike the early writers, claim to have been there. Going third ways, taking independent and resistant paths became a generational moral commitment for those on board the ship Yugoslavia. In Živojin Pavlović’s film KAD BUDEM MRTAV I BEO (1967) we find a direct reference to the uncomfortable ‘boat ride’ of Yugoslavia’s youth in this second phase. The main character Džimi Barka (barka – like bark) complains to Bojana aboard a boat, while the Yugoslav flag is waving in the background, that he deserved a better life than his actual (we can add: Yugoslav) one. Pavlović’s film does not imbue its characters with the partisan spirit, but rather its aesthetic devices and historical hints that ambush traditional film making as well as the Yugoslav red bourgeoisie’s inertia. In Pavlović’s film both are being accused of betraying the socialist revolution.

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So up to the 1960s the partisan author thrust the partisan character aside, replacing him. With the change of generations in the 1960s the formerly dominant therapeutic function lost its significance. Yet the partisan spirit of Yugoslavia’s partisan beginnings was transposed to the present and can without much effort be detected in films and literature of the second phase between the early 1960s and late 1970s.34 This transposition established a connection between state and personal responsibility and tied contemporary problems and issues back to the ‘advance services’ the historical partisans had offered. Morals and the ethics of the present needed to match the standards the partisans had set once and for all. In this second phase of metalepsis, also numerous partisan films by ‘state directors’ like Stipe Delić and Veljko Bulajić were released that directly addressed questions of the present and produced their own version of partisan transfer: the role of women in society, linguistic nationalisms, distributional justice between Yugoslav republics, minority politics, selfmanagement, development policy, praxis philosophy and more (see Gilić, Jovanović, Velisavljević in this volume). In them, the metalepsis of transposing contemporary issues into the partisan history of Yugoslavia appears symptomatically in the form of filmic temporal goofs. So for example in Bulajić’s blockbuster KOZARA (1962) the main female character Zlata – evidently construed as a contemporary role model of the working and independent woman – wears 1960s clothes in a 1940s setting (see Vittorelli in this volume on the imagery of the female partisan in Yugoslavia). Next to the Red Wave films in the 1960s and 1970s (see Stanković, Velisavljević and Jovanović in this volume) we also encounter partisan children’s literature and film, mostly about partisans couriers and child partisans, addressing (school-)children and teenagers. In this time also a number of filmic adaptions of partisan novels were produced: some of them are ideologically simplified and lack the critical potential the novels once had, some update the partisan experience in new ways (e.g.: Lalić’s Lelejska gora 1957 adapted in 1968 by Zdravko Velimirović; Davičo’s Pesma 1952 adapted in 1975 by Živojin Pavlović). But as introduced above with Pavlović’s KAD BUDEM MRTAV I BEO, even films thematically not dealing with the partisans engaged the new 34 R. Jambrešić-Kirin: “Politika sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke culture”, 170.

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generation, perpetuated the ideological force of the partisan narrative and paradoxically became a simultaneous means of critique of Yugoslavia. There is a series of critical partisan films from the New Wave that polemically discuss Yugoslavia’s history (see Jovanović in this volume). In them a generation of writers and directors inspired by praxis philosophy usurps the partisan view point and accuses in the same breath the fathers’ and therefore partisans’ generation of having betrayed the spirit of the revolution. In the time after Tito’s death in 1980, the Yugoslav partisan narrative took ironic, postmodern and post-socialist turns (see Komel and Colombi in this volume). In the course of the paradigm shift brought about by the retro avant-garde in Yugoslavia (NSK, Mladen Stilinović), a new idea of political and artistic utopia emerged that took hold of the partisan narrative with deconstructive and media archeological intent.35 Examples like the remake of the partisan film TRENUTKI ODLOČITIVE (1955) by František Čap, remade by Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid in 1985 (see Colombi in this volume), show how formal and ideological borrowings from the partisan film lead to a dissociation of the political present and the narrative. At the same time, immense transformations of partisan motifs took place in literature, while the partisan novel as format disappeared completely for some time. It was only in the last few years that partisan novels sporadically reappeared, like, to take an example from Bulgaria, Alek Popov’s ironic, yet ambivalent novel Sestri Palaveevi v burjata na istorijata (2013) or the first partisan crime fiction novel from Serbia: Vule Žurić’s Nedelja pocova (2010) that reshapes the story about the famous partisan Nikoletina Bursać. The partisan hero Bursać appears as a victim of murder at the beginning of the text! But also genuine partisan novels like Maruša Krese’s Slovenian novel Da me je strah (2012) have reentered the stage of partisan literature. Through all decades the partisan narrative has performed as a space of political and societal negotiations in Yugoslavia (see Petrović on the role of JNA photos in the partisan tradition in this volume). The narrative is still alive, as one can see from the current partisan iconography appearing for example in the context of post-Yugoslav anti-capitalist, anti-global political protest actions and demonstrations as they occurred in Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia in the last few years. It still makes sense – in another way than 35 Arns, Inke: Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu. Ljubljana: Maska 2006 [dissertation published in German 2004].

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before – to turn to the partisan narrative and partisan arts and to trace their beginnings, the fate they encountered on the way right up to the most recent versions and transformations.

T HE

ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS

I would like to thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and Humboldt University for their support of the conference “Partisans. Narrative, Staging and Afterlife” held in Berlin in 2011. There is special compensation for historical sufferings in the fact that the Thyssen Stiftung co-financed this event on the Yugoslav partisans so generously. Thyssen Hütte AG played a crucial role within Germany’s arms industry during World War II and several Thyssen branches abused forced laborers in that time. As 270 000 laborers alone from Yugoslavia were enslaved in Germany, there must without a doubt have been Yugoslavs and also partisans among those forced to work for Thyssen.36 My very special thanks go to my co-editor Nikica Gilić who was the living memory and good spirit of this project. Together we thank everyone who has contributed to this volume. Sincere thanks from us both to our lector Michael Müller and to Lucia Vachek and Mira Soldo for their excellent and sedulous work with the manuscript. The genius and partisan spirit of Nastasia Louveau’s illustrations speak for themselves.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Arns, Inke: Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu. Ljubljana: Maska 2006 [dissertation published in German 2004]. Clark, Katerina: “Socialist realism in Soviet Literature”, in: The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, London/New York: Routledge 2001: 174-183. Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984. 36 Further reading on Thyssen’s slave laborers: Urban, Thomas: Zwangsarbeit bei Thyssen. „Stahlverein“ und „Baron-Konzern“ im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh 2014.

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Denegri, Ješa: “Unutar ili izvan ‘socialističkog modernizma’? Radikalni stavovi na jugoslovenskoj umetničkoj sceni 1950–1970”, in: Irena Lukšić (ed.), Šezdesete, Zagreb 2007: 47–67. Flaker, Aleksandar: “Partizanska slika svijeta”, in: Forum, 6.20 (1981): 897–910. Foucault, Michel: “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations. An Interview with Michel Foucault”, in: Paul Rabinow (ed.): Essential Works of Foucault. Vol.1 “Ethics”, New York: The New Press 1997, 111-119. Frye, Northrop: Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. London: Penguin 1990. Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience, 1945– 2001. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2002. Jakiša, Miranda: “Großes Kino der Subversion und Affirmation. Vom Schlagabtausch im Film der jugoslawischen 1960er”, in: Hannes Grandits/Holm Sundhaussen (eds.), Jugoslawien in den 1960er Jahren: Auf dem Weg zu einem (a-)normalen Staat?, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2013: 185-213. Jakiša, Miranda: “Der ‘tellurische Charakter’ des Partisanengenres: Jugoslavische Topo-Graphie in Film und Literatur”, in: Esther Kilchmann/Andreas Pflitsch/Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.), Topographien pluraler Kulturen. Europa vom Osten gesehen, Berlin: Kadmos 2011: 207-223. Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata: “Politika sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke culture”, in: Lada ČaleFeldman/Ines Prica (eds.), Devijacije i promašaji: etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2006: 149-179. Kolanović, Maša: Udarnik! Buntovnik? Potrošač... Popularna kultura i hrvatski roman od socijalizma do tranzicije, Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak 2011. Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, Ljubljana: Založba/*cf. 2009. Koren, Snježana: “̔Heroji̕ i ̔antiheroji̕ u udžbenicima: slike nacionalne povijesti u udžbenicima uoči i nakon 1990. godine”. www.ffzg.unizg. hr/pov/zavod/triplex/historymemoryfulltexts.doc. Mataga, Vojislav: “Socijalistički realizam i kič”, in: Republika 1/2 (1995): 40–46.

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Močnik, Rastko. “Partizanska simbolička politika”, in: Zarez 7.161/162 (2005): 12-14. Musabegović, Senadin: “Totalitarizam i jugoslavensko socijalističko iskustvo. (primjer Sutjeske Stipe Delića) ”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis, Zagreb 2009: 41–57. Nazor, Vladimir: “Govor počasnog predsjednika društva književnika Hrvatske i počasnog predsjednika saveza književnika Jugoslavije", in: Republika. Mjesečnik za književnost, umjetnost i društvo. Zagreb: Zora 1947, 145-147. Nemec, Krešimir: Povijest hrvatskog romana. Zagreb: Školska knjiga 2003. Šakić, Tomislav: “Filmski svijet Veljka Bulajića: poprište susreta kolektivnog i privatnog”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009): 14-26. Schmitt, Carl: Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkungen zum Begriff des Politischen [1962], Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1992. Šuber, Daniel/Karamanić, Slobodan: “Mapping the Field”, in: Daniel Šuber/Slobodan Karamanić (eds), Retracing Images. Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, Leiden/Boston: Brill 2012: 1–25. Sundhaussen, Holm: Experiment Jugoslawien. Von der Staatsgründung bis zum Staatsverfall. Mannheim: B.I.-Taschenbuchverlag 1993. Sundhaussen, Holm: Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943-2011. Eine ungewöhnliche Geschichte des Gewöhnlichen. Wien/Köln/ Weimar: Böhlau 2012. Ugresić, Dubravka: “Long live socialist realism!”, in: Dubravka Ugresić, Thank you for not reading. Essays on Literary Trivia. Dalkey Archive 2003, 25-27. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan Films & Genre Mimicry: a Historical Survey”, in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 13–21.

P ARTISAN NARRATIVES , STAGINGS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

Contemporary Art. A Meeting of the Current and the Cosmic!1 M IKLAVŽ K OMELJ

Partisan art came into being as an art which represented a break from the past, born in times which themselves marked a break from the past, and as an art which in a most radical way expressed the imperative of the moment (“the first Partisan poem” was made as a response to the call for a “poem for today’s use”). This, however, ushered in a perspective in which there appeared to be extreme tension between the past and the future, which is, in a time of revolution, the only way “the moment” can exist. This is why a poem reduced merely to its momentary usefulness would in that moment actually be useless as a poem; a “poem for today’s use” is a poem which shows the limits of verbal expression, and a genuine response to the appeal of “Follow my song!” is articulated on these limits, for it is not an appeal to make poetry instrumental but rather an appeal to extricate poetry from its impossibility. In December 1941, the Partisan commander Jakhel ecstatically exclaimed to his fighters in a winter forest: “Poetry is eternally alive if it is genuine! Poetry is eternally alive if it is human!” 1

The article is a chapter from the book Kako misliti partizansko umetnost (How to think Partisan art), Ljubljana: Založba /*cf. 2009. The chapter mostly focuses on the role of the Partisan poetry, which needs to be read within the larger argument on the role of Partisan art in WWII Yugoslavia. The translators (Oliver Currie and Gal Kirn) kept to the original and only left out a few footnotes.

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I do not understand this exclamation as a sentimental relic of the old romanticism (although in his talk with Matej Bor, Jakhel also refers to myths of the invulnerable Achilles and Siegfried),2 neither is it an attempt of distancing oneself from the actual situation; it is rather a claim grounded in the individual’s facing that situation. In actual fact, Jakhel’s exclamation derives from historical changes brought about in art by the battle “for freedom and a new society”: the Partisan movement was supposed to channel the art’s transformative potential from its getting lost in the wasteland of individualism into its creation of a new revolutionary subjectivity. In his poetic cycle November Night 1941, Bor takes a farewell in a declarative way from a devouring unrest and abandons his “passport for the empire: the Universe”; he exclaims that the earth is calling, so it is not the time to travel to the clouds, and exhorts the poet to leave as soon as possible the moonlight and move to the barricades. But it is, when he finds himself on the barricades that he truly gets to know cosmic distances. This is an experience shared by other Partisans. Kocbek, member of the General Command and a poet, wrote in his Partisan diary: “Here we are living within cosmic boundaries. It is indeed true that history is poetry.” 3

2 3

Jakhel says that within himself he feels how these myths came into being, for he is convinced that in that battle no harm can come to him – otherwise who would carry out his work? Soon after that, Jakhel is mortally wounded. Kocbek, Edvard: Tovarišija. Dnevniški zapiski od 17. maja 1942 do 1. maja 1943, Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije 1949: 370. When listening to Partisan poetry he has the impression that “we are refounding ourselves in the boundless and unknown” (Ibid. , 75). Later in the poem “Comrades” from the collection Pentagram in memory of fallen comrades he wrote: “Night and day I hear your thunderous voices and see your bright eyes and feel your dying pulses – they are amplified twofold, tenfold and thousandfold in the universe. The dying cry out louder than wailing storms and rumbling oceans, their shadows rise like fire into the vast space, where past and future combine. How I can remember you in peace, comrades, when you have cast yourselves from your bodies into the most violent courage, which neither lovers nor the blessed nor the meteorites beneath the heavens can overcome? […] I can now neither scream nor sing nor whisper nor stutter, I can now only shiver in a silence, which solemnly recoils from eternity and reverberates around our echo chamber.” In: Paternu, Boris/Stanonik, Marija/Novak Popov, Irena (eds.): Slovensko pesništvo upora 1941–1945 II: Partizanske, Novo mesto/Ljubljana: Dolenjska založba/Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete 1995: 620.

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In the forest in winter, Jakhel told Bor how he would define art, which is a form of practical self-criticism that transcends any practicistic and sociologistic reductionism while also opening up cosmic dimensions: “ ‘[…] Man must try everything if he wants to be a man at all. But the first thing is: an eternal self-examination. Precise bookkeeping. Art is nothing else but incessant, utterly sincere examination of one’s own, personal life and of the collective life of the society, world and time. Yes, and of the cosmos as well! Modern art: a blend of the call of the moment and of the cosmic! Have you ever thought of this? This is the very problem. A bit of that is also to be found in your poems. Admittedly, you have surprised me… Can you hear, somewhere a fox is barking?’ From afar in the forest, one could hear, like an echo, a fox barking (who knows where or why) at a moonlit night.”4

Eternity conceived as an eternal self-examination. Modernity is not the same as the present moment: art is modern only if it is not completely reducible to the present moment, but rather comes into being by facing that moment through alienation. It is not by chance that a fox is mentioned; later on in the text, it is a reference of forest animals that leads up to talking about the shaping of new people who “are taking in like hungry wolves”.5 Culture as well as art. A radical confrontation of art with a given time and place also requires a reflection of the greatest distances from the time and place in question which set the coordinates of that confrontation.

4

5

It is interesting that Kocbek also stressed the simultaneity of the current and the cosmic, when he reflected in his diary on 20 November on a sentence from Knittel’s novel Dr Ibrahim, which Josip Vidmar read in a bunker in the Dolomites, as well as on a sentence from his own letter to Ljubljana: “Both sentences have merged into one and I feel a tension in relation to both. One expresses a need for the cosmos, the other for the current. I live from both and can renounce neither. There is something tragic in this totality, but also something magnificent.” (E. Kocbek: Tovarišija, 262) Kocbek is reliably known to have read by then Bor’s broadcast V partizanskem taboru (In the Partisan camp), in which Jakhel’s words are cited. However Kocbek understands this tension in a significantly different frame of reference from Jakhel and Bor: he desires to join the “sacred” and “revolutionary” being, to combine the revolutionary with the mystic. E. Kocbek: Tovarišija, 97.

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In Partisan art, the evocation of cosmic dimensions6 can also have the form of an ecstatic vision of the celestial bodies, partaking in the war fought by the Partisans. Bor writes: “Tomorrow we shall attack. Look, how deep The sky is!”

Then the poet summons the Moon to follow the Partisans faster.7 Some time earlier, the Sun came to help him draw his posters, and now the Moon serves as a spotlight in the Partisan open-air theatre.8 As can be read in a poetic text published in Novi rod, a Partisan newspaper for children, in the war the shaking of the world made stars fall from the sky; some of them fell in forests where they were found by the Partisans who attached them to their caps (called titovke): “The stars illuminate their nights, so they always know their way.”9 At the same time, red stars on Partisan caps make possible a new view of the sky. In the star which is “red like blood” and shines in the sky “as a mark upon these days”, “as if the firmament were afire”, the eyes of an arrested girl and her Partisan boyfriend meet.10 In this way Kajuh develops his conception of love, already articulated before the war, into a wonderful poetic image. His concept of love is not expressed by a gaze into the eyes of one in love, but in the way the gaze of two people in love is directed towards the same object. Amongst Partisans, Kocbek also 6

The “meeting of the current and cosmic”, such as demanded by Jakhel, is totally within the tradition of proletarian poetry of the twenties. Mile Klopčič in his first collection of poems Plamteči okovi (1924), dedicated to the memory of Lenin, tries ceaselessly to realise this union of the current and the cosmic. He speaks about “us, before whom the whole cosmos trembles” (Klopčič, Mile: Plamteči okovi, Ljubljana: Konzorcij “Proletarske knjižice” 1924: 52), and about how “the worker will raise himself up to the universe” (Ibid., 51), “when my faith that we will be the masters of the universe will be vindicated” (Ibid., 14). And also “When the stars blaze in the twilight, we sense our strength and hear our heart singing after the battle” (Ibid., 15). 7 Bor, Matej: Previharimo viharje, Ljubljana (ciklostirana izdaja), 2.62 1942: 33. 8 Himna Agit-teatra, written by Janez Kardelj, in: Paternu, Boris/Stanonik, Marija/Novak Popov, Irena (eds.), Slovensko pesništvo upora I. 1941–1945: Partizanske, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga/Partizanska knjiga 1987: 257. 9 B. Paternu et al.: Slovensko pesništvo upora I, 90. 10 Destovnik-Kajuh, Karel: Zbrano delo, izpopolnjena 3. izdaja, Ljubljana: Založba Borec, 1978: 241.

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stressed this idea, when he cited Saint-Exupery: “Love in two people is not when they look at each other enamoured, but when they both look in the same direction.”11 In his poem Star on the cap, Edvard Kocbek walks amid the stars and starts to carry the heaven.12 The light blue sky becomes one with the cosmic vision of the salvation of the living and the dead in the Primorska Partisan’s poem.13 There are frequently unusual encounters and dialogues between the living and dead in Partisan art. Already in Bor’s book Previharimo viharje, “through the doors of the heart, open ajar, they come all night from all over” to kill those who are cramped amongst the graves and go inside with the Partisans.14 11 12 13 14

J. Kocbek: Tovarišija, 393. B. Paternu et al.:Slovensko pesništvo upora II, 614. B. Paternu et al.: Slovensko pesništvo upora I: 1987, 188–189. M. Bor: Previharimo viharje,: 1942, 28–30. See also Blaž Ostrovrhar’s deeply moving poem Beside fallen fighters, in: B. Paternu et al.: Slovensko pesništvo upora II, 128–120. The words of Ferdo Godina’s static play Mrtvi se oglašajo “The dead are calling”, written and performed after the Italian offensive of 1942, in which characters from the history of the global revolutionary movement and fallen Partisan fighters converse with one another. In: Cesar, Emil: Slovenska kultura v obdobju okupacije in narodnoosvobodilnegaboja, od 8. septembra 1943 do 9. maja 1945, Ljubljana: Svobodna misel 2007: 356. The phantasmagorical blurring of the boundary between the living and dead occurs exceptionally in Partisan literature also as a macabre vision of the return of dead adversaries from the dead; see also the anonymous poem Motif from the revolution, preserved in the archives of Albin Bregar; in it hounds perceive the return of the souls of dead soldiers of the White Guard – they do not even allow the dead to return to the village: they will hurl themselves at the White Guard soldiers and massacre them. The Souls’ corporeality returns to them in this chilling vision. On the last page of the typescript someone (Bregar?) has added the following annotation: “Incredible poem”. The poem runs: “In the village of AJDOVEC the barking of darks/has risen up like dust on the road./ Why did faithful hounds roar?/ Hey! Who is going home so late?/ The hounds hurl themselves like the bora/ at broken windows, so that they can only whine/ outside the houses ‘O GOD HAVE MERCY/ON US, WHO FIND OURSELVES IN THE MIDST OF A STORM!!’// Darkness now creeps ever higher. / I am so scared, I am completely terrified,/for columns of corpses/ come slithering by their hands from the forest/ in silence and ever more silently. – They are heading to the village./ Are they really white-guard soldiers,/ who in the name of Jesus Christ/cried out a song of war??? // In the southerly wind a face is melting away/ nowhere is there sap nor frost…/ This is why their wild column/ imagined that it was already time/ to return to their white village -/ But the hounds hurl themselves at them as in a wave/ none of them will remain/ who will dare steal home. // The hounds will chew their flesh off their bones,/ play

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But at the same time in the revolutionary “assault on the sky” the heavenly bodies can also be attacked – in Javoršek’s poem Partisan Ars Poetica (originally just Ars poetica) the poet as “a venal thief of cosmic things” mischievously mentions to an unnamed friend that they agreed to break up the sky, mine the sun, break off the star’s points, and undress the innocent spring and so on.15 References to cosmic dimensions are in no way confined to a single meaning. The last verse of Skender Kulenović’s poem Stojanka majka Knežopoljka about the earth, which will explode into the sun (“zemlja će nam u sunce prociktati!”16) is associated with an almost paradisiacal vision of the future – an almost identical image on the other hand could characterize the trauma of the present; thus Javoršek in “Still life 1942” addresses the sun, which is “shining day laborer at the summit of the sky”: “More frightening fires were lit in the planet, which knows no peace.”17 In the seventh sketch of Mihelič’s cycle the Apocalypse (1944) a blazing ball of fire descends on the Earth – and the figure of a fleeing woman is reminiscent of the painting motif of the banishment from paradise. The introduction of cosmic dimensions lends an extraordinary intensity to the meaning – but this intensity arises from the dialectic between meaning and meaninglessness. The juxtaposition of “the current” and “the cosmic” also implies that the absolute meaning, which the war of liberation has for the Partisan, must also confront the meaninglessness of the planet moving aimlessly around the cosmos. At the end of the first part of his poem Beyond graves and bayonets, written in a hyperbolic style and dedicated to the workers (the workers of the whole world, emphasizing a global perspective, mentioning Vladivostok, Nanking, Chicago and the Kremlin), Bor fashions a new world, which the workers’ fire will create on the Earth, in opposition to the inertia by which the Earth as a planet is receding into nothingness: with their chin, nose and toes./ SO IT WILL BEFALL EACH OF THEM IN TURN,/ WHO AS MILITIAMEN HAVE FALLEN TO THE GROUND.// I turned away in horror, slung my gun on my shoulder, / the silver moon in the middle of the sky/ skirted behind the clouds which restless hurtled into the endless depths of the heavens. (Slovenski poročevalec, Bregar’s archives, II.) 15 This friend was Vitomil Zupan, Partisan and writer. See: Javoršek, Jože: Usoda poezije 1939–1949, Ljubljana: Partizanska knjiga 1972: 49. 16 Kulenović, Skender: Stojanka majka Knežopoljka i druge poeme, Beograd: Prosveta 1979: 19. 17 J. Javoršek: Usoda poezije, 43.

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“In the fire, which soot Has choked in you for thousands of years, A new world is rising. Your fire irrigates deserts making them groves, And bakes bombs into bread. It radiates through the universe To unfathomable depths and distances. Let passion be the spirit’s nest! In your fire, the earth, unlike a Hottentot drum, like the harp plays the strangest sounds before receding with its weight into distances into distances into the last trap – a place of no return…”18

This poem in which the poet explicitly calls himself “a revolutionary poet”, is also an enraged accusation of the role of culture in a bourgeois society, where “longing abominable individuals” sailed “on romantic journeys” across lakes of workers’ blood, painted their palaces with “bloodstained frescos” and “babbled/about human happiness”. At the same time, the author’s emphasizing that in the fire of the proletarian revolution, the Earth plays like the harp, not like a Hottentot drum, may also feel like an echo of Lenin’s thought that the proletarian revolution must appropriate to itself the cultural treasures of the bourgeoisie, of which it is the only legitimate heir. Only workers of all nations can make the planet play melodies of the harp, whereas the bourgeoisie are considered as “herds of barbarians and nests of jungle snakes”. But what I want to emphasize is the tension between the meaningfulness of the battle and meaninglessness of the planet’s cosmic destiny. This

18 M. Bor: Previharimo viharje: 1942, 69.

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tension is not just a contrast, but also a deep connection. The planetary meaningfulness of the revolution in all its greatness can be presented only by maximally intensifying the inner tensions of a revolutionary situation and putting them in the perspective of enormous temporal and spatial distances, where even the planet’s destiny becomes ephemeral. The same perspective can imply diminishing and magnifying, approaching and retreating.19 And it is this very tension between the new world and the planet which is doomed to death that immensely increases the meaning of the battle, which cannot share the destiny of the planet, but is determined to radiate through the universe.20 (After all, Bor’s lines could also be read from a ‘biocosmist’ perspective.) In this process, the meaning is not given to what is meaningless, but arises from the confrontation with the meaningless. A simultaneous reflection on revolution and cosmic distances was not characteristic only of revolutionary art produced by vanguard movements, but also of the self-reflection of some heroes of revolutionary movements who were protagonists of revolutionary actions, from Auguste Blanqui (cf. 19 Such a change of perspective is particularly evident in Župančič; cf. his Insomnia: “The melancholy whistling/ of midnight trains,/ dull thuds/ of night-time operations,/ bold cries/ of captured fighters,/ blood coursing in their veins/ seething anger:/ everything far, far away/ in the universe cold/ as dusk and wind/ and the moonlight/ and the silent dark -/ and close nearby/ here in the warm heart/ swollen with tears,/ like pleasure and joy/ and pain,/ like our hopes/ and like love/ and withered leaves/ and swift death.” See: Župančič, Oton: Zbrano delo, III. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije 1959: 125. The idea of closeness is expressed here by means of cosmic estrangement. Cf. also Župančič’s poem Whirlwind: “An immense whirlwind lifted me high above this world:/ in terror I saw the planet covered in blood./ The whirlwind gave me the order: ‘Look now/ and say everything without hesitation.’/ ‘Tempest,’ I stuttered, [‘] chase the dense mass of clouds…’/ ‘No!’ replied the tempest. ‘ These are armies in flight which were once mighty./ Don’t you know? I am the dream which never lies to the poet, / without hieroglyphs or secret alphabets / it always shows him the naked truth,/ and you be its witness for the people, even for the price of being splayed wide on the wheel!’”. See: O. Župančič: Zbrano delo, III., 140. In March 1945, Župančič wrote this in his notebook: “There is not enough space/ under the celestial dome/ for all the woes and cries/ of today. Open up, / break through the window into eternity/ otherwise the universe will break asunder,/ like a heart swollen to bursting,/ and will stink like a pestilent boil.” See: Župančič, Oton: Zbrano delo, IV, Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije 1968: 250. 20 Župančič wrote in one of his post-war poems: “We must extend the whole universe.” See: O. Župančič: Zbrano delo, III., 1959: 301.

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his meditations on the universe in the book L’éternité par les astres) to Mao Zedong (who argued – in a somewhat monstrous fashion – that an uncompromising global anti-imperialist struggle is necessary regardless of the consequences, adding that even a possible destruction of the planet would not prove catastrophic for the universe). Among Partisans, such distances were not only part of the awareness of the “court poet of the Revolutionary greatness”; the masses are aware of them too and they also appear in texts written by anonymous fighters. The best example in a wider Yugoslav Partisan context can be found in the poem Vasiona/Universe by an anonymous author, which appeared in the periodic Mladi borac published by the 4th Battallion of IV Sandžak Brigade; the poem which begins with a kiss on the eyes of the universe – “Ja ljubim tvoje oči vasiono” – closes with an appeal to the universe: “Al sto vekova kada za mnom minu ti tada živa jedina od svih negde u visini dovrši moj stih.”21

A real presence of the unrealized in the anonymous fighter’s poem, which makes the poem possible, at the same time articulating it as yet-unrealized, can only find its realization in the vertiginous perspective of the “place of no return”. The perspective, in which life recedes into the place of no return, and only the universe remains alive, does not negate the fighter’s poem, but rather offers a reflection on its completion. It is the only perspective which maintains a sufficiently large spatial and temporal distance to encapsulate its meaning, which finds its completion in the confrontation with time and space, transcending meaning and non-meaning. When Cene Logar issued guidance to artists, he stressed that the new socio-political situation required that artistic production should be for a specific addressee (either a Partisan or Liberation Front activist); here a Partisan addresses his poem to the cosmic void at a time, when there are no longer any more people. Bor hears as an echo to Jahkel’s characterization of contemporary art as a meeting of “the current” and “the cosmic” the 21 “If a hundred eras pass after me,/ then you, the only one alive,/ somewhere in the lofty heights/ finish my poem.” See: Bandić, M.I.: Cvet i steg: književnost narodnooslobodilačke borbe, Beograd: nezavisno izdanje 1975: 87.

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voice of a fox “barking who knows where or why at the moonlight night”. But this means of addressing a work of art to a void transcending the community and individual is not a retreat from the tension of the battle, but the only way to symbolize the distance, which has been opened up in it. This is not a distance from the battle, but the distance which the battle opens up.22 Only in this perspective is it all possible to place art also in relation to those whose lives are most totally connected to battle: those who fell in battle and who – to quote a line from the Partisan poem Mail from the Trnovski gozd by Ivan Minatti – lie “far from the world.”23 This is not mysticism. A radical estrangement is necessary for a confrontation with the present moment.24 22 We can also understand the structure of the Župančič’s book of poems Zimzelen pod snegom, published immediately after liberation in 1945, in a similar way. The book is divided into three parts: Yellowed leaves, From our days and Splinters. In the last part, there are short poetic aphorisms; the critical centre of the work is in the first two parts. The first poem in the first part is Into the silence, the first poem in the second part is Poet, do you know your duty? There is a contrast between the two parts, which is also temporal (the second part contains post-war poems, the first pre-war poems). But the contrasting parts thus juxtaposed also complement one another. We must see the tensions about which the poem Poet, do you know your duty? speaks in relation to the distances evoked in the poem Into the silence (1934), where the poet apostrophises poetry without which there is no life for him: “I am talking to those in the pit,/ I consult those who are not yet in the world:/ our words become softer and softer –/ as in bright sleep – do not wake me on any account now. // I need the great silence, / for so many years I have been surrounded by noise,/ my heart and mind are sick of it,/ and in it my deafened spirit languishes. // I need the great solitude; / I must lean over the last abyss,/ where there are no sounds or images,/ to close my eyes and extend my arms: // I must hold to my ear / the whole shell enclosed by the Milky Way,/ explore the silence with an attuned ear,/ so that I track you, the clear, pure, faithful one. // And if heavenly signs are nets,/ in which the faintest voice is trapped,/ and only beyond them lies the silent world,/ where you dwell, there is nothing on this side to bind me.” See: O. Župančič: Zbrano delo, III., 83–84. Both poems have made possible the two crucial breakthroughs in poetic expression in Župančič’s ‘late’ poetic career and are as such more structurally interconnected than appears at first sight: the fundamental realisation, with which the poem Into the silence concludes and which, in observing the silence, evokes cosmic distances and renounces the logical principle of identity, is the idea that a poem can only breathe in freedom. Given this the poem Into the silence is a precursor to the position he takes in 1941 in the poem Poet, do you know your duty? (or Sing after me!). 23 Minatti, Ivan: Veter poje, Ljubljana: Kajuhova knjižnica I 1963: 30. 24 Jože Javoršek in his memoirs of 1941 paints a self-portrait of a very untypical Liberation Front member, who in occupied Ljubljana, in spite of being an activ-

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However, the distance does not open up only towards the stars: it can be surprising how intensively the Partisan contemplates the smallest details. One of the most unusual Partisan poems is Death in Love25 by Srečko Vatovec (who wrote in Slovene as well as in Croatian). The poem is about the death of a snowflake. The Partisan becomes scared to death, when the snowflake, which he tries “with a child’s devotion” to shelter in the palm of his hand in an evening storm, dies from the heat and the poet is crying and dying with it. Is this a retreat from the intensity of the battle into sentimentality? Or, on the other hand, is it a transposition which alone enabled the expression of the unbearable intensity of battle? Or are the tears at the death of a snowflake not a concentration of all the tears from encounters at the boundary between life and death, which were not able to come to the fore in these encounters? The link between poetry and Partisan struggle in no way meant an a priori reduction of the poetry to its purpose. And I do not only have in mind the poetry of intellectuals who started to have doubts about its purpose. Such are for example the poems of Jože Javoršek, written at a time of serious internal crisis which arose from internal tensions in the liberation movement, especially after the so called ‘Dolomite declaration’, which brought the liberation movement under the leadership of the communists and reduced the autonomy of the Christian Socialist group to which Javoršek belonged. In a Partisan diary on 1 September 1943, as quoted in the book The Fate of Poetry, he reflected on his own poetry as follows: “Art. A poem. How blissful the night is! How senseless and useless I am! Or am I perhaps useful? Who knows? At some point all this energy of beauty about which Saša talks will explode inside me and in the explosion there will certainly be atoms of these days which I am living with such sadness in Rog. With sadness? Yes, because I feel I am senseless and useless, that my work and poetry are in vain”26.

ist busy all day long, continues to write down his dreams in a “surrealist style” and in his free time studies Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Breton. See: Javoršek, Jože: Spomini na Slovence, III. Ljubljana: Adit, 1990: 83. 25 B. Paternu et al.: Slovensko pesništvo upora I, 379. 26 J. Javoršek: Usoda poezije, 82.

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A little notebook, in which a Liberation Front activist in 1944 copied among other poems Igo Gruden’s poem Above the agonies of the world from the volume The Twelfth Hour27, which talks in its entirety of despair and doubt (“My mind has gone mad at the blood of men…”), seems truly emblematic. The poet, who in his mind’s eye contemplates “pyramids of human skulls”, comes to doubt everything which once was a symbolic support in his life, as he looks around in the darkness “without faith, without shelter and without protection”. But already on the following page of the notebook there are specific operational instructions: “Divide the work by sector Jožica is going to the 1st district, Vanda to the Podbrdo district Ivica to the Planota

– '' –”

The coming to terms with senselessness is juxtaposed to specific instructions for the work for liberation. What is more, even in overtly propagandistic texts, the sense emerges from the very suspension of sense, in coming to terms with something which would remain without sense unless we change the world.28 Thus, in Vitomil Zupan’s single act play Aki, the struggle acquires sense in the eyes of those, who are wavering because of something which would be utterly without sense outside the context of the struggle: because of the death of a fifteen year old boy.29 Perhaps, there is something else: the struggle must go on so that the death is not in vain. This is also the message in Bor’s dedication of his 1944 Poems to the readers participating in the liberation movement: whether Nina fell in vain or not depends on our struggle.30 The suspension of sense requires of us that we continue to fight; if “our great endeavor” fails, Nina will suffer yet another – a symbolic – death. Kajuh,

27 Cf. Gruden, Igo: Dvanajsta ura, Ljubljana: Slovenska matica 1939: 92. 28 One of the most moving Partisan poem is the poem To the unborn child by Anica Mežek, who as a Partisan, had an abortion in order not to have her child taken; in the text she addresses the unborn child: “But when dear freedom shines to us / I may quietly fall asleep again, / when mankind stops suffering, / my son, for you had to die for that.” In: B. Paternu: Slovensko pesništvo upora III, 143. 29 Zupan, Vitomil: Aki. Enodejanka, Partizanski 21.795 (5 October 1944). 30 A similar idea about his own death is also expressed in the voice of the fallen fighter Iztok in Vodušek’s Women by the graveside.

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however, in his poem “Mothers, our suffering mothers”31 radically renounces any attempt to give sense to the horrific situation about which he is speaking: when he adds to already poignant lines about pregnant mothers in concentration camps who “bear corpses, corpses in their wombs” the line “the steps of freedom can be heard louder and louder…”, there is no symbolic use of this horror, which the advent of freedom could retrospectively mitigate as something meaningful, but only a complete contrast; as the prospect of freedom nears, the horror becomes all the more absurd. At the same time, in Partisan art the placing of the struggle in a perspective which transcends all concrete conceptualization is linked to the constant questioning of how feeling “the moment” can at all be transposed to the following moment. In the second volume of the collection Poems of our fighters, edited in 1944 by Mile Klopčič, we find a poem written by a fighter with the Partisan name Iztok which refers to the eighth poem from Srečko Kosovel’s32 cycle Tragedy on the Ocean/In twenty thousand years, perhaps. The temporal estrangement of the that moment, which Iztok amplifies by extending Kosovel’s twenty thousand years to several million years, is connected to the anxiety that outside the moment what happens with such an incredible intensity can never be truly understood and recognized outside the moment: “At some point, in several million years time, Perhaps a geologist will write, How people lived today.

His lips will curl in a bitter smile: Yes, yes, then the man was still an animal, So his deeds are not to be judged as a sin.

31 K. Destovnik-Kajuh: Zbrano delo, 246. 32 Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926) was a famous avant-garde, constructivist, and expressionist poet in Slovenia. In this poem Tragedy on the Ocean he criticized the downfall of humankind and reproached it for the absence of struggle. The ocean, Kosovel writes, will simply overgrow the layers, and the geologist will not find any traces of humankind in the future. But even if the struggle takes place, in form of the Partisans, there is no guarantee that the ocean will not simply overgrow it. (Translator’s note).

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But if he could know With what warmth our hearts then beat, That comradeship meant to us more than ourselves, Maybe he would think differently about us And would understand our great sorrows.”33

The internal tensions of the situation are so great that it is possible only to think of them in a future geological time span – for Iztok the crucial question is how it will be possible to understand the struggle in the distant future, which in itself speaks volumes about the importance he attributes to this struggle. At the same time, the question arises whether it will be possible at all to reflect on the struggle in the future, which it needs for its symbolic consistency. The risk that the struggle will not be recognized is the very issue which underpins the outlook of the Dantean “che questo tempo chiameranno antico” as an existential necessity already present in this moment. In Partisan art, the evocation of cosmic and geological distance was not a departure from the contemporary situation; in actual fact, it was the deepest foray into its inner depths – “in these turbulent times, in which an abyss has been dug between yesterday and tomorrow, which can hardly be bridged with one’s memory”.34 The Partisans systematically strived to preserve for the future documents of their symbolic practices, which was sustained institutionally by the Partisan Research Institute collection of all Partisan printed matter. But – is it not in relation to the turbulent revolutionary process and new coordinates of what is possible, which were set by this process, that remembering is already a form of oblivion? Iztok’s anxiety was triggered precisely by the bitter smile of reviving the memory. Not the possibility of the geologist’s finding only parallel strata (as was the case with Kosovel), which would not allow him to suspect the remote existence of the struggle, but quite the contrary: he fears that the geologist may find material remnants of the struggle and on that basis, but without knowing what feelings and what thoughts shaped that struggle, explain “how people lived in those days”. He will not miss the sense not only because of the too great a distance in time,

33 B. Paternu: Slovensko pesništvo upora I, 213. 34 Jarc, Miran/Suhi, Janez: “On partisan poetry”, in: Obzornik. Časopis za ljudstvo prosveto, 6.3 (1951): 141.

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but also because he will try to understand Partisan struggle from the perspective of everyday life. The question whether in another time it is at all possible to recognize the exceptional nature of the historical moment in which the Partisan movement was active and also in which Partisan art came into being troubled Bor as well. It is a question, however, of how Partisans struggle will be understand in millions of years’ time. In the introduction to the reprint of his book Let us overstorm the storm he wrote in 1961: “The time of our liberation struggle was not great only because in it great things were decided, but also because ordinary people were great in the service of the great cause. This extraordinary thing, which happens so rarely in history, happened here during the years of the Second World War. People became greater than they were before, so much greater as to seem quite incredible, especially when described in an everyday account. Their deeds are historically recorded, but the spirit which lived in them and drove them to accomplish those deeds, cannot be captured. Perhaps. Maybe in moments of artistic inspiration, which have the power to penetrate also extraordinary states of human consciousness. We, who took part in the liberation struggle, were also in such an extraordinary state of human consciousness. The struggle itself was such that our consciousness had to change if it was to serve the struggle, in such a way as to leave far behind everyday concerns and desires. Bread became less important than the spirit and daily chores less important than our historical mission. The time of great deeds accomplished by ordinary people is becoming ever more distant from us. Who knows whether its extraordinary character will be lost with it. We are aware of its extraordinariness, but no longer feel it.”35

Here Bor perceives a link between the struggle and art precisely in that which eludes memory: the truth of the struggle is beyond the reach of commemoration, since it cuts across historical time in a way which we can only relate to in terms of the way art in turn cuts across historical time and the trans-historical nature of art is actually a function of its relation to the unique context of its creation. Bor expresses doubt whether his Partisan poetry, owing to its being embedded in a specific situation of struggle, can be understood in another situation, noting at the same time that the trans35 Bor, Matej: Previharimo viharje (nova izdaja), Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba 1961: 5.

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historical existence of art may offer perhaps the only means of understanding the situation itself. Such a point of view has implications for how we conceive Partisan art. What “today” appears as the unfathomability of a past extraordinary time and which is the reason why someone who, from the standpoint of a bourgeois aestheticism appraises the art associated with this extraordinary time, cannot recognize it as art precisely because it came into being in an extraordinary time, can be understood in moments such as those which give rise to art, which provides access to “extraordinary states of human consciousness”. What makes it impossible to accept, from the standpoint of a bourgeois aestheticism, the art of the People’s Liberation Struggle as true art is then – as the state of consciousness of a revolutionary collective – actually the surpassing of art. Nevertheless – is not Bor’s statement with its reference to inspiration and the like an example of romantic intuitionism, which is consistent with the regressive tendencies of his post-war aesthetic ideology? Is not Bor’s talking about bread, which became36 less important than spirit, pure idealism? If we read attentively, we can see that Bor is talking about a change in consciousness brought about by the struggle. The very belief that “the spirit is more important than bread” is a result of the revolutionary struggle. By confronting its own dependence on material circumstances, the consciousness of the masses can itself become a material force in the revolutionary act. Referring to art in such a context does not mean being trapped in a culturalist interpretation of the struggle, but it rather requires that we reflect on art which has become a material force in the revolutionary process.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Bandić, Miloš: Cvet i steg: književnost narodnooslobodilačke borbe, Beograd: nezavisno izdanje 1975. Bor, Matej: Previharimo viharje, Ljubljana (ciklostirana izdaja), 2.62, 1942. Bor, Matej: Previharimo viharje (nova izdaja), Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba 1961. 36 Bor famously refers to the struggle “for freedom, for bread”, see: M. Bor: Previharimo viharje: 1942, 34.

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Cesar, Emil: Slovenska kultura v obdobju okupacije in narodno osvobodilnega boja, od 8. septembra 1943 do 9. maja 1945, Ljubljana: Svobodna misel 2007. Destovnik-Kajuh, Karel: Pesmi [izdala kulturniška skupina XIV. divizije], 6.266 (1943). Destovnik-Kajuh, Karel: Zbrano Delo (izpopolnjena 3. izdaja), Ljubljana: Založba Borec 1978. Gruden, Igo: Dvanajsta ura, Ljubljana: Slovenska matica 1939. Jarc, Miran/Suhi, Janez: “On partisan poetry”, in: Obzornik. Časopis za ljudstvo prosveto 6.3 (1951): 141-148. Javoršek, Jože: Usoda poezije, Ljubljana: Partizanska knjiga: 1972. Javoršek, Jože: Spomini na Slovence, III, Ljubljana: Adit: 1990. Klopčič, Mile: Plamteči okovi, Ljubljana: Konzorcij Proletarske knjižnice 1924. Kocbek, Edvard: Tovarišija. Dnevniški zapiski od 17. maja 1942 do 1. maja 1943, Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije 1949. Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost (How to think Partisan art), Ljubljana: Založba /*cf. 2009. Kulenović, Skender: Stojanka majka Knežopoljka i druge poeme,Beograd: Prosveta 1979. Logar, Cene: “Za graditelje nove slovenske družbe moramo pisati vse, pišemo”, in: Smernice. Organ politkomisarijata Glavnega štaba NOV in POS 2 (1944). Minatti, Ivan: Veter poje, Ljubljana : Kajuhova knjižnica I 1963. Paternu, Boris/Stanonik, Marija/Novak Popov, Irena (eds.): Slovensko pesništvo upora I: Partizanske, Novo mesto/Ljubljana: Tiskarna/ Dolenjska založba/Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete 1987. Paternu, Boris/Stanonik, Marija/Novak Popov, Irena (eds.): Slovensko pesništvo upora 1941–1945 II: Partizanske, Novo mesto/Ljubljana: Tiskarna/Dolenjska založba/Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete 1995. Paternu, Boris/Stanonik, Marija/Novak Popov, Irena (eds.): Slovensko pesništvo upora 1941–1945 III: Zaledne, Novo mesto/Ljubljana: Tiskarna/Dolenjska založba/Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete 1996. Pirjevec, Dušan: “Dnevnik in spominjanja”, in: Nova revija 5.45 (1986): 7–63.

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Slovenski poročevalec. Informacijski vestnik OF (t. e. 69). Zupan, Vitomil: Aki. Enodejanka, Partizanski 21.795 (5 October 1944). Župančič, Oton: Zbrano delo, III, Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije 1959. Župančič, Oton: Zbrano delo, IV, Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije 1968.

Yugoslav Partisan Poetry. Songs for the Leader T ANJA Z IMMERMANN

T HE

EARLY TITO CULT AND VLADIMIR NAZOR ’ S POETICAL ‘ MASTER NARRATIVE ’ IN “ TITO ’ S ‘ ADVANCE !’” (1944) When Tito and his ideologists started to promulgate the Yugoslav cult of the leader after the Second World War, they first followed the Soviet example.1 The official portraits of Stalin, which were mostly painted by his ‘court painter’ Alexander Gerasimov and showed him in a uniform as a marshal of the victorious Red Army, were reminiscent in their festivity, frontality and emphasis on verticals of the traditional portraits of European 1

For the Tito cult see: Kuljić, Todor: Tito – sociološkoistorijska studija, Beograd: Institut za političke studije 1998; Brkljačić, Maja: “Tito’s bodies in Word and Image”, in: Narodna umjetnost 40.1 (2003): 99–128; Sretenović, Stanislav/Puto, Artan: “Leader cults in the Western Balkans (1945-90): Josip Broz Tito und Enver Hoxha”, in: Balázs Apor/Jan C. Behrends/Polly Johnes (eds.), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorship: Stalin and the Eastern Block, ChippenhamEastbourne: Palgrave 2004: 208–223; Petzer, Tatjana: “Tito – Symbol und Kult: Identitätsstiftende Zeichensetzung in Jugoslawien”, in: Angela Richter/Barbara Bayer (eds.), Geschichte (ge-)brauchen: Literatur und Geschichtskultur im Staatssozialismus. Jugoslawien und Bulgarien, Berlin: Frank & Timme 2006: 113–130; Brkljačić, Maja: “Pig’s Head: Stories of Tito’s Childhood“, in: BOI 23. Alltag und Ideologie im Realsozialismus, 2005: 58–69; Zivojinovic, Marc: “Der jugoslawische-Tito Kult – Mythologisierte Motive und ritualisierte Kulthandlungen”, in: Benno Ennker /Heidi Hein-Kircher (eds.), Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut 2010: 181–199.

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monarchs. Photographs were seldom taken and if so they were then retouched to eliminate instantaneousness and immediate presence of the ruler.2 Like painting and sculpture, photographs evoked the spirit of the unattainable and of eternity. In poems and songs dedicated to the leader, the authors used eschatological metaphors of sun and light, flourishing and prosperity, and the Father and Holy Spirit. Such metaphors were commonly used to describe rulers in East and West from pagan antiquity and early Christianity onwards.3 Official proclamations were formulated as Stalin’s personal messages to ‘his’ people, as a one-way dialogue between a speaker and his listeners. Although the entire political life (polis) was constructed as a network of familiar relations (oikos), the political élite – transmitted through the oral media radio – was not depicted as a familiar club, but as a distant, patriarchal one, like that of the orthodox Pantocrator with his believers.4 Stalin presented himself as a severe, inaccessible father with his obedient, timid children.5 Until the early 1950s Tito was also represented in the visual arts and in poems mostly as a distant leader. The earliest traces of the leader go back to the year 1943, when on the 19 th November in Jajce in Bosnia the AntiFascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), a provisional wartime deliberative body, declared Tito the marshal of the Yugo2

3 4

5

Sartorti, Rosalinde: “Großer Führer, Lehrer, Freund und Vater: Stalin in der Fotografie”, in: Martin Loiperdinger/Rudolf Herz/Ulrich Pohlmann (eds.), Führerbilder: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin in Fotografie und Film, MünchenZürich: Piper 1995: 189–209. Garstka, Christoph: Das Herrscherlob in Russland: Katharina II., Lenin und Stalin im russischen Gedicht: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik und Rhetorik politischer Lyrik, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag 2005: 56, 439. Murašov, Jurij: “Sowjetisches Ethos und radiofizierte Schrift: Radio, Literatur und die Entgrenzung des Politischen in den frühen dreißiger Jahren der sowjetischen Kultur”, in: Ute Frevert/Wolfgang Braungart (eds.), Sprachen des Politischen: Medien und Medialität in der Geschichte, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2004: 217–245. An exception to this rule was Stalin’s poster from the series Through India by Viktor Klimashin, which was exhibited at the All-Soviet Art Exhibition in 1952 in Moscow; cf. Sysoev, P.M. (ed.): Vsesojuznaja chudožestvennaja Vystavka 1950 goda, Moskva – Leningrad: Gos. Izd. Iskusstvo 1952: s.p.; Sysoev, P.M. (ed.): Vsesojuznaja chudožestvennaja Vystavka 1952 goda, Moskva: Gos. Izd. Iskusstvo, 1953: 85. Made for the Soviet propaganda in communist India, it shows Stalin gently looking down from a poster (poster in poster), smiling friendly to the poor Indian families. The slogan in English – “We stand for peace and champion the cause of peace. Stalin” – promotes Soviet influence.

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slav Partisans troops, thus conferring on him the highest military rank.6 That was the occasion for the Slovenian painter Božidar Jakac (1899-1989), a deputy at the AVNOJ himself, and the renowned Croatian sculptor Antun Augustinčić (1900-1979), a pupil of Ivan Meštrović, to present portraits of the Partisan leader.

Ill. 1: Božidar Jakac, Portrait of Tito, red chalk, 1943, from: Pajić, Milenko/ Jakac, Božidar: Tito u djelima likovnih umetnika Jugoslavije, Sarajevo: Udruženi izdavači Bosne i Hercegovine, 1979. Ill. 2: Antun Augustinčić, Statue of Tito, bronze, 1948, Kumrovec, from: Duga, 8 May 1980: 34. Augustinčić, who became the leading artist of Socialist Realism in Yugoslavia, later used the bust as a model for a full-length statue of Tito which was raised in 1948 in front of Tito’s house of birth in Kumrovec. The sculpture shows Tito in a uniform as a marshal of Partisan troops, walking forward, his face expressing the determined mood of a ruler used to make decisions. Even photographs of the early period resembled sculptures such as the early works by Vlado Popović, taken already in 1942 in the style of Soviet photographs, especially those Alexander Rodchenko took in the late 1920s.

6

M. Zivojinovic: “Der jugoslawische-Tito Kult”, 183.

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Ill. 3: Vlado Popović, Tito, Photograph of Tito, 1942, from: Duga, 8 May 1980: 3. Ill. 4: Vlado Popović, Tito, Photograph of Tito, 1942, from: Duga, 8 May 1980: 3. In spite of the frozen posture, the photographer claims in an interview that by observing Tito he noticed “characteristic features of strong energy and warmth”.7 His observations transform the cool portrait of Tito into an oxymoronic figure of both coldness and warmth, static and dynamic. Speaking with Freud, the “death drive”, leading into destruction, coincides with the “life drive” of survival and victory over death. Also in early poems and songs from 1941 to 1948, as Vesna Fister claims, Tito appears as a fusion of the hard and cool masculine body with the soft and warm feminine soul.8 The element of warmth associated either with the destructive energy of fire or with the sun providing life, became a dominant feature in metaphors describing the Yugoslav leader. The almost Baroque antithetic composition of coldness and warmth, of sculpture/ice and fire/sun conferred a more dynamic aspect to Tito. A poetical counterpart to Augustinčić’s sculpture of the walking Tito is a Partisan song by the Croatian poet and writer Vladimir Nazor (18767

8

Krivokapić, Boro: “Težko je druže komandante”, in: NIN. Nedeljne informativne novine, 1532, 11 May 1980: 53–55. “Uočavao sam karakteristične crte jake energije […] On je taj lik koji odaje toplinu lica i, istovremeno, neverovatnu energiju, volju, upornost… Tito tu gleda daleko, ne u vas, neko preko vas…” Fister, Vesna: “Ti, naše pesmi začetek! – Kult osebnosti maršala Tita v pesmih od vojne do 1980”, in: Časopis za kritiko znanosti 30 (2002): 217–231.

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1949) who joined the Partisan movement as an old man in January 1943.9 In his diary, written during his sojourn with the Partisans, he presents Tito in panegyric passages as an all-knowing leader in whose leadership he blindly trusts.10 In his most famous poem Tito’s ‘Advance’ (Titov ‘Naprijed!’), which was written at the end of the war in 1944 and influenced by the Russian romantic poetry, especially Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s Caucasian poems as well as by fairy tales and by Albrecht Dürer’s famous etching Knight, Death, and Devil, the leader is described as a horseman, a ‘knight’, riding at the head of a Partisan column, in the midst of icy, foggy mountains. Without hearing or seeing anything that could lead him astray, he rides forward. The poem was soon translated into English and became one of the most influential ‘master narratives’ for the Yugoslav poems and songs for the leader. “Drug Tito jaše na čelu kolone Uz usku stazu planinsku. Visoko, Na vrhu, led. Krš, blato naokolo. […] On jaše; sve to ne vidi, ne čuje. Kamo ga misao prenijela? U kom Svijetu živi? Od čega je bora Na čelu i grč oko tvrdih usta?11 Tito is some way ahead of his column, Riding along the narrow mountain path. Above – ice on the peak: around – just mud and rocks; […] On he rides – hearing and seeing nothing. Where have his thoughts transported him? What world Is his far home? What pain has put the furrows On his forehead and cramped his iron lips?”12

9

Dedijer, Vladimir: Novi prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza Tita 2, Rijeka/Zagreb: Liburnija/Mladost, 1981: 829–835. 10 Nazor, Vladimir: S partizanima, 1943-1944, Zagreb: August Cesarec 1971: 24, 34. 11 Nazor, Vladimir: Legende o Titu, Zagreb: August Cesarec 1972: 17.

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On his straight way Tito is confronted with three creatures – allegories of fear, death and doubt which try to stop him. The first of these creatures, a personification of frost, threatens to transform him and his Partisan force, the poor, ephemeral human flesh, into motionless ice sculptures – a reminder that advises humans not to compete with non-human powers. “Kuda ćeš, drzniče? Ja vladam U toj planini. Okreni se, gledaj Te jadne momke koje ovud vodiš. Goli su, bosi b’jedno ljudsko meso, Nevoljna krv što moj je dah smrzava. Kamo jih vodiš u patnju i smrt? Kipove od leda napravit ću od vas. I stajat ćete, kruti, nepomićni.”13 “Where are you going, presumptuous fool? I am The master of this mountain. Turn round and look! These wretched young men who are following you Are bare-footed and ill-clad; mere travesties Of flesh and blood after the frost-bites of my breath. Why are you leading them to suffering and to death? Now I will turn you into icy statues: And you shall stand, hard, stiff, and motionless.”14

Tito, thus, like an ascetic, fearless knight, does not fight against the fascists, but with himself and with supernatural apparitions. The Partisans accompany him not to fight, but just to follow their great leader, trusting him till death. At the same time, his fight against the apparition has a physical and psychological dimension. Tito’s kathabasis reminds us of Dante’s Divina commedia,15 a descent into the underworld which however is not located deep inside the earth but placed on the top of the mountain. The descent into the underworld is thus replaced by the ascent into a mountain area, the 12 Nazor, Vladimir: “Tito’s ‘Advance’”, in: Yugoslavia: Illustrated Magazine, Belgrade 1949: 17. 13 V. Nazor: Legende o Titu, 17–18. 14 V. Nazor: “Tito’s ‘Advance’”, 18. 15 Platthaus, Isabel: Höllenfahrten. Die epische katábasis und die Unterwelten der Moderne, München: Fink 2004.

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other pole on the vertical axis. According to the Christian axiology of good and evil we would expect him to come closer to heaven, but instead of heaven the hero finds an icy hell. Never turning away or leaving his troops behind, Tito commands them to march ahead on their path. He proves to be an excellent, firm leader, who keeps his spirits up and does not abandon his soldiers when in greatest peril. The element of fire and warmth plays an important part in conquering the phantoms. Tito’s gaze, compared to fire, chases the first monster away: on očima bljesne / I vatru prospe iz plamenih zjenica16; “darts of fire flashed from his blazing eyeballs”.17 Nazor introduces fire as an old symbol of spirit into the iconography of the ruler, used also in poems and songs dedicated to Stalin18 and Mao Zedong.19 In the second apparition of bones and decaying flesh, a personification of hunger wants him to get down from his horse in order to mount it by himself and to lead the Partisans to starvation. Tito, in fact, climbs down, but only to grasp some earth for which he declares to fight. He throws it onto the monster, shouting again: “Advance! Advance!” The stony native soil seems to have a magical power, as it banishes the phantom and makes it disappear. This ‘telluric’ motive coincides with the Partisans’ attachment to the native soil, as Miranda Jakiša pointed out, omnipresent in the Yugoslav Partisan films.20 The third beast, a personification of doubt, suggests to Tito to stop fighting and turn back to his native valley. It is the most dangerous one, because it tries to seduce him by idyllic images. But Tito, accompanied by thunder, wind and eagle’s screeches – attributes of the supreme Greek God Zeus – chases the foggy clouds like the sun and also makes the third

16 17 18 19

V. Nazor: Legende o Titu, 18. V. Nazor: “Tito’s ‘Advance’”, 18. C. Garstka: Das Herrscherlob in Russland, 439. Koenen, Gerd: Die großen Gesänge. Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung. Führerkulte und Heldenmythen des 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag 1991: 373. 20 Jakiša, Miranda: “Down to Earth Partisans”, in: KINO! 10 (2010): 54–61; Jakiša, Miranda: “Der ‘tellurische Charakter’ des Partisanengenres: Jugoslavische Topo-Graphie in Film und Literatur”, in: Esther Kilchmann/Andreas Pflitsch/Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.), Topographie pluraler Kulturen. Europa vom Osten gesehen, Berlin: Kadmos 2011: 209–225; Jakiša, Miranda: “Memory of a Past to come–Yugoslavia’s Partisan Film and Fashioning of Space”, in: Tanja Zimmermann (ed.), Balkan Memories. Media Constructions of National and Transnational History, Bielefeld: Transcript 2012: 113-122.

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phantom disappear. After the disappearance of the monster, the destructiveness of fire and thunder is immediately transformed into the lifespreading power of sun and light. “Al grmnu grom na vrhu planinskome; I vjetar duhnu, i magla se dignu. Zakrješti oro pod oblakom; zasja Sunce što slavno sja i hrani i grije; I Titov glas se prosu kao dažd Na izmučenu čeljad uv’jek žednu Njegovih rječi: “Napr’jed!” ”21 “Suddenly thunder roars upon the mountain top; The mists lift with the blowing wind; and under a cloud An eagle screams; and then the sun shines through, The gorgeous sun that shines and warms and nourishes. And Tito’s voice, like the shedding of gentle rain, Pours on the weary host still thirsting for his words: “Advance!” ”22

The metaphor of sun, having its origin in several antique leader cults from Egyptian pharaohs to the Roman emperors (Augustus as a relative of Apollo),23 became a central attribute of rulers in the time of absolutism, especially in the cult of Louis XIV, who not only appeared as a descendant of Apollo, but as a god himself.24 Already in the Soviet Union and China, this symbol became a central metaphor for the shining future of communism. Nazor’s Partisan poem is thus a panegyric exaltation of the leader, following antique as well as modern communist prototypes. The Partisans who are led by Tito do not appear at all. Instead, they serve as some kind of a silent, voiceless choir, a parergon framing the leader. A great amount of the later songs from the 1960s and 1970s were an answer to this ‘master narrative’ – an oath of the people not to deviate from Tito’s path. 21 V. Nazor: Legende o Titu, 20. 22 V. Nazor: “Tito’s ‘Advance’”, 18. 23 Wlosok, Antonie: “Einführung”, in: Antonie Wlosok (ed.), Römischer Kaiserkult, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978: 36–38. 24 Burke, Peter: Ludwig XIV. Die Inszenierung des Sonnenkönigs, Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach 2009.

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T HE LATER

TITO CULT AND DJORDJE BALAŠEVIĆ ’ POETICAL OATH TO TITO “ YOU CAN COUNT ON US ” After the break with Stalin in 1948, Tito and his followers proclaimed a specifically Yugoslav “third way” in domestic (self-management) and international politics (the non-alignment movement).25 The leading ideologist and minister of foreign affairs Edvard Kardelj formulated it in 1950 as a new way of Yugoslav socialism – some kind of a non-hierarchic and nonetatistic model, which enables workers to participate directly in the governance of their factories. The rhetoric of “self-management decision making” helped to hide the stature of the leader and the state bureaucracy behind the collective body of the Yugoslav people. Tito, son of a peasant and metal worker, tried to merge with the collective forces. Already in the Republika of the 27th May 1947, when Tito and his ideologists started to promote a new Balkan and Danube federation of socialist states never to be realised, the Yugoslav leader is described with theological terms as an “embodiment” (otelotvorenje) of the people’s endeavours and a “symbol of their mental, political and moral unity”, “inseparably bound to the Yugoslav peoples”.26 Also in the international press Tito no longer appeared as a military man, but as a civilian, dressed in a suit and wearing a tie like Western politicians. The photograph on the front page of the American magazine Life from the 21st April 1949, showing him in a close-up manner similar to Hollywood stars, announces in the front line “Tito speaks: The inside, personal story – The men who defied Stalin” to cover up the psychological side of the battle of the Yugoslav ‘David’ against the Soviet ‘Goliath’.27 At the same time, the Yugoslav artists and poets had to create a new artistic language which should differ from the rules of Socialist Realism of 25 Zimmermann, Tanja: “Titoistische Ketzerei. Die Bogomilen als Antizipation des ‘dritten Weges’ Jugoslawiens”, in: Zeitschrift für Slawistik 55.4 (2010): 445– 463; Zimmermann, Tanja: “Novi kontinent – Jugoslavija. Politična geografija tretje poti”, in: Zbornik za umetnostno zgodovino. Archives d’histoire de l’art, n. s. XLVI, Ljubljana 2010: 165–190; Zimmermann, Tanja: “Jugoslawien als neuer Kontinent – politische Geografie des ‘dritten Weges’”, in: Miranda Jakiša/Andreas Pflitsch (eds.), Jugoslawien – Libanon. Verhandlungen von Zugehörigkeit in fragmentierten Gesellschaften, Berlin: Kadmos 2012: 73-100. 26 Republika 82, 27 May 1947: 1. 27 Tito’s photograph on the front page of the Life, 21 April 1949, in: http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/File:Tito_Life_Magazine.jpg>, last access: 8 February 2013.

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Soviet origin. The leading newspaper Republika and even the communist Borba started to use photographs instead of reproductions of the oldfashioned media of painting and sculpture.28 Official portraits, produced by famous Yugoslav painters and sculptors, were no longer used for every day communication. Marshal Tito, although still wearing a military uniform in the Yugoslav press, now was presented in the middle of the masses, visiting factories or welcomed by local politicians, sportsmen or pupils. The hierarchic verticals of Soviet art were transformed into democratic horizontals. By the means of photography, Tito presented himself in less hieratical situations, much closer to everyday life than Stalin. Photographs as indexical signs illustrated and verified his presence and closeness to people. Beside photographs, the Partisan poems and songs were an important means of staging the pseudo-theological merging of Tito with his people. They were published in newspapers as well as in several books, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Tito cult was at its peak.29

28 A systematic overview of photographs, paintings, sculpture and their reproductions has not yet been compiled. The first steps in this direction have been taken by Mojić, Dušan: “Evolucija kulta Josipa Broza Tita. Analiza štampe”, in: Srpska politička misao 2.1 (1995): 133–155; Dimitrijević, Bojan B.: “Armija – oslonac Titovog kulta ličnosti 1945–1954”, in: Istorija 20. veka 2 (2004): 97–122; M. Brkljačić: “Tito’s bodies in Word and Image”; T. Petzer: “Tito – Symbol und Kult”. 29 Mirčić, Spasoje: Tito u narodnoj poeziji, Beograd: Impresum 1962: 1; Mandić, Milorad P.: Pjesme o životnom putu druga Tita. U čast sedamdesetogodišnjice, Bački Petrovac: Novinsko-izdavačko preduzeće 1965; Ivanović, Janko: Tito – večiti genije čovečanstava. Pesme, Bjelovar: Svitanja 1968; Petković, Đorđe: Tito mladost SKJ. Sonetni venac u akrostihu, Paraćin: Biblioteka Dr. Vičentije Rakič 1971; Krklec, Gustav et. al.: Mi smo Titovi, Tito je naš, Zagreb: Spektar 1975; Tahmiščić, Husein (ed.), Tito u poeziji, Sarajevo: Zavod za izdavanje udžbenika 1972; Draganić, Stjepan: Imamo te rado Tito. Kajkavske pjesme đaka osnovne škole ‘Josip Broz Tito’ u Kumrovcu, Zagreb: Spektar 1980; Pavlov, Milutin: Narod se zove Tito. Poema, Kikinda: Nezavisno izdanje 1980; Maričić, Vlada: Tito, slobodo. Poema, Smederovo: Dimitrije Davidović 1981; Manojlov, Pande: Pesni za Tito, Bitola: Razvitok 1981; Janjić, Nadežda/Dabović, Marko M.: Tito i mi. Pesme, Beograd: Savez pisacaa. Jugoslavije 1982; Tahmiščić, Husein (ed.), Pjesme o Titu, Zagreb: Spektar 1983; Kozina, Drago: Pjesme o Titu, Zagreb: “Naša Djeca” OOUR Izdavačka Djelatnost 1987; Rodić, Milivoj: Tito u narodnim pjesmama, Tuzla: Univerzal 1987; Dapčević, Gojko: Ime vječnosti. Poezija o Titu, Nikšić: Univerzitetska riječ 1987. A systematic overview of Tito poems and songs has not yet been compiled.

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Ill. 5: Tito and his wife Jovanka, visiting the ceramic factory “Jugokeramika” in Zaprešić at Zagreb, photograph, 29th May 1962, Photo album of the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Muzej za umjetnost i obrt), Zagreb. Unknown photographer.

Ill. 6: Tito with mineworkers, undated, from: Duga, 8 th May 1980: 57. Unknown photographer. Vesna Fister noticed that in Tito poetry from 1948 to 1980 messianic and eschatological motives (Tito as a light or a star) and rituals glorifying him were increasingly used.30 Now, songs about Tito were collected; they even became an object of ethnological research.31 At the 6th Congress of folklorists held in 1959 in Bled, the ethnographer Dušan Nedeljković read a paper about “Folk creativity in the period before 30 V. Fister,: “Ti, naše pesmi začetek!”. 31 Stanonik, Marija: “Etnološki vidiki raziskovanja NOB 1941-1945”, in: Etnologija in sodobna slovenska družba, Brežice: Slovensko etnološko društvo 1978: 12–18; Vogel, Milan: “Mesto obdobja NOB v slovenski etnologiji”, in: ibid. 19– 24; Krešić, Irena: “Obravnava narodnoosvobodilnega boja v slovenski etnologiji”, in: ibid.: 25–27.

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the revolution, during the liberation war and the construction of socialism in Yugoslavia”.32 He speaks of some 20,000 Partisan and Tito songs, all inspired by the Partisan war, by the revolution and its communist leader. In South Eastern Europe, where oral poetry had played an important role already during the fight against the Ottoman Empire,33 the Partisan song could be seen as a sequel to the Serbian heroic epic.34 As in the Soviet Union, folklore and folk songs became an important element in the building of socialist ideology in Yugoslavia as well, as Maja Brkljačić pointed out.35 Therefore we have to distinguish between genuine Partisan poetry composed as a means of poetical battle against fascism, which is the object of Miklavž Komelj’s book How to think Partisan art?36, and Partisan poetry for communist mass propaganda. Komelj describes Partisan art as a form of creating ‘life art’ – a well-known phenomenon in Russia and the Soviet Union – without quoting these routes. This form of political engagement, as Hans Günther,37 Schamma Schahadat38 and Boris Groys/Michael Hagemeister39 pointed out, wanted to break down the boundaries between life and art in order to create a utopian collective of new heroic men who would change the world like magicians. The totality of life and art, a form of ethical self-sacrifice, soon could be used in a totalitarian system, as in the

32 Nedeljković, Dušan: “Narodno stvaralaštvo u periodu narodne revolucije, oslobodilačkog rata i izgradnje socijalizma Jugoslavije”, in: Rad Kongresa folklorista Jugoslavija VI. – Bled 1959, Bled: Savez udruženja folklorista Jugoslavije 1960: 137–164. 33 Ranke, Leopold: Die serbische Revolution. Aus serbischen Papieren und Mitteilungen, Hamburg: Duncker und Humblot 1929: 35–36. 34 Sertić, Mira: “Pjesme otpora i radnička pjesma”, in: Zmaga Kumer (ed.): Zbornik XII. Kongresa jugoslovanskih folkloristov. Celje 1965, Ljubljana 1968: 83– 90. 35 Brkljačić, Maja: “Popular culture and communist ideology: Folk-epics in Tito’s Yugoslavia”, in: John R. Lampe/Mark Mazower (ed.), Ideologies and National identities: The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe, Budapest/New York: Central European University Press 2006: 180–210. 36 Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? Ljubljana: Založba/*cf, 2009. See also his contribution in this volume. 37 Günther, Hans: “Žiznestroenie”, in: Russian Literature 20 (1986): 41–48. 38 Schahadat, Schamma: Das Leben zur Kunst machen. Lebenskunst in Russland vom 16. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, München: Fink 2004; Schahadat, Schamma: Lebenskunst – Kunstleben, München: Sagner 1998. 39 Groys, Boris/Hagemeister, Michael: Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2005.

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case of the Russian avant-garde.40 For Nedeljković (as well as for Komelj), there is no difference between these two kinds of poetry. In a foreword to the anthology Tito in poetry from 1972, the Bosnian communist writer and Partisan hero Avdo Humo emphasizes that the songs about Tito distinguish themselves fundamentally from songs written by no lesser poets than Pushkin or Shakespeare, because they had been affected by “an immediate experience of historical character, which has made him a legend during his lifetime”.41 Such poems and songs, although not always of the highest poetic quality as Humo admits, are for him much more authentic and genuine than later ones not written in immediate contact with their hero. The authors of such songs, interested in eliminating the distinction between “authentic”, “immediate” poems and songs, which had been produced “during the intimate contact with the personality”, and other hymns, written “from a distance”, avoided telling us the year when they were composed. Many of them are even anonymous, like oral folk poetry. Such ‘folk songs’ (produced in an intimate contact with the leader) would describe Tito as a “bearer of brotherhood and unity”. Humo praised also Partisan songs composed after 1945 because they demonstrated the continuous renewal of the national bond with Tito. “But also in artistic poetry Tito – as people imagine him – is a friend of his people, of children, and pioneers. He believes in the immortality of the people, and the people believe in his immortality. Tito is a mother, a father and a brother. Our rivers, Pliva, Neretva and Sutjeska, talk to him. With him, wishes of children and girls are born in the spring month of May. The sky is blue like Tito’s eyes; he is our awareness, strength, and hunger for love. He is the father of the freedom and the happiness of the people, and his name embodies love, brotherhood, and happiness.”42

40 Groys, Boris: Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin. Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion, München: Hanser 1988. 41 H. Tahmiščić: Tito u poeziji. 42 H. Tahmiščić: Tito u poeziji: “Pa i u umjetničkoj poeziji Tito je onakav kakvog ga je narod zamišljao, prijatelj ljudi, djece i pionira. Vjeruje u besmrtnost naroda, kao što narod vjeruje u njegovu besmrtnost. Tito je majka, otac, brat. S njime razgovaraju naše rijeke: Pliva, Neretva, Sutjeska i rađaju se majske želje djece i djevojaka. Nebo je plavo, kako oči Tita, a on je savjest i jakost i naša glad za ljubavlju. On je otac slobode i sreće za narode, a samo mu ime sadrži ljubav, bratstvo i sreću.”

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Following political and ideological changes, the structure of the new Partisan songs also changed in the 1950s. Tito, the leader, no longer spoke to his troops. The choir of Partisans gradually acquired a voice – however, not so much as to express their own sufferings but to swear not to turn away from Tito’s path: Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo (Comrade Tito, we swear an oath to you), Tito nek vodi nas (Tito shall lead us), Druže Tito, naš maršale (Comrade Tito, our marshal), Put maršala (The path of the marshal), Drug Tito u boj zove (Comrade Tito calls to fight), Poziv u borbu (An appeal to fight), Tito je sa nama (Tito is with us), Pionirski zavet (The oath of the pioneers), Druže Tito, ljubičice bijela, za tobom ide omladina cijela (Comrade Tito, white violet, the entire youth follows you) etc. The oath, a performative speech act, as an interface between law and religion has the function of holding together, of stabilizing and guaranteeing permanence.43 After the exclusion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948, the oath not to deviate from Tito’s way took on a new political meaning – not only to struggle against fascism, but to follow Tito on the “third path” between East and West. The topic of the path and of the oath became a leitmotiv of Partisan and leader songs until the 1980s. In 1978, the famous Yugoslav song-writer and singer Djordje Balašević from Vojvodina, the leader of the group Rani Mraz (Early Frost), composed a song Računajte na nas (You can count on us), which became one of the most popular Yugoslav pop songs. “U ime svih nas iz pedeset i neke za zakletvu Titu ja spev'o sam stih. Ne spominjem prošlost ni bitke daleke, jer rođen sam tek posle njih.44 In the name of all of us from the 1950s I composed a poem to swear an oath to Tito. I don’t remember the past and the distant battles, Because I have been born afterwards.

43 For religious and juridical elements of oath see: Agamben, Giorgio: Das Sakrament der Sprache. Eine Archäologie des Eides (Homo Sacer II.3). Translated by Stefanie Günthner, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008. 44 Ide Tito... 33 najlepše pesme o Titu, CD. Manifactured by DiDisc, 2006.

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Al' život pred nama još bitaka skriva i preti nam, preti, k'o duboki vir. Ja znam da nas čeka još sto ofanziva, jer moramo čuvati mir. But the life before us still conceals battles And threatens us, threaten us as a deep well. I know that hundred attacks are waiting for us, because we have to keep our freedom. Računajte na nas. Count on us. Sumnjaju neki da nosi nas pogrešan tok, jer slušamo ploče i sviramo rok. Al' negde u nama je bitaka plam, i kažem vam, šta dobro znam: računajte na nas. Some people suspect that we are carried by a false stream, because we hear gramophone records and play rock. But somewhere in us there is a flame of fights, and I tell you what I know well: Count on us. U nama je sudbina budućih dana i neki se možda i plaše za nju. Kroz vene nam protiče krv partizana, i mi znamo zašto smo tu. In us there is a destiny of future days And some people happen to fear it. Through our veins flows the blood of Partisans And we know why we are here. Računajte na nas. Count on us.”

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Balašević declares his generation to be an heir of Partisans and a seed of their blood, their sons and daughters. He transforms the battles against the fascists into metaphoric ideological struggles. The hymn-like melody of the 1940s has been exchanged by a popular chanson-like melody. Popular music of the young generation (pop, rock, and chanson) merged with the Partisan song, now transformed into national pop music. As such, in the period of the fall of Yugoslavia and the rise of nationalism in the 1990s, it was again important as a means of national, especially anti-Western propaganda.45 At the same time Tito’s cult of the leader reached the next stage in political theology – marking a kind of apotheosis (consecratio) in his lifetime.46 During the climax of the non-alignment movement, Tito, the messiah, was no longer struggling only for the freedom of the Yugoslav peoples, but of the whole world, which was split into an eastern and western bloc. This was not a Roman form of apotheosis of the emperor after his death, whose soul/genius was to be carried into heaven by eagles or genii of death,47 but a form of socialist mysticism that transformed Tito poetically into an at the same time present and absent body (following Ernst Kantorowiczs’s distinction between natural and political body). The epiphany of the leader as a pagan sun god was replaced by his silent, voiceless body – transformed into a mnemo-technical corpus mysticum for devotion.48 Whereas Tito as a speaking hero vanished from Yugoslav poetry, he was omnipresent in visual media – especially on TV which replaced the leading Soviet medium, the radio. Under the influence of the Hollywood star cult, 45 Žanić, Ivo: Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia, London: Saqi Books 2007: 41–108; Čolović, Ivan: Kulturterror auf dem Balkan: Essays zur Politischen Anthropologie, Osnabrück: Fibre 2011: 41– 65; Zimmermann, Tanja: “The Folk Instrument Gusle and its Resistance to Electrification”, in: Dmitri Zakharine (ed.), Electrified voices: Medial, SocioHistorical, and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer, Göttingen: V&R UniPress 2012: 403-410. 46 For religious motives in the Yugoslav communist ideology see: Flere, Sergej: “The Ateist Civil Religion in Communist Yugoslavia: the Broken Convenat of Tito’s People”, in: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag 2005: 217–232. 47 For the apotheosis of the Roman emperors see: Zanker, Paul: Die Apotheose der römischen Kaiser. Ritual und städtische Bühne, München: (=Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung. Themenband 80) 2000. 48 For the mystical dealing with the body see: Certeau, Michel de: Mystische Fabel. 16. bis 17. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2010: 124–147.

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the Soviet prototype of the leader cult was definitely replaced by the American one.

Ill. 7: Tito and his wife Jovanka in a car, photograph, 29th May 1962, Photo album of the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Muzej za umjetnost i obrt), Zagreb. Unknown photographer. Similar to John F. Kennedy, who during his election campaign visited American cities in a cabriolet with his glamorously dressed and styled first lady Jacqueline,49 Tito and his wife Jovanka now visited Yugoslav cities, presenting themselves as stars, but at the same time still remained close to the people. The ascetic youth and starvation during the war, described as an exemplum of the communist vita in anecdotes and biographies about Tito’s childhood and youth,50 made it possible to present the leader since the late 1950s and early 1960s as a hero of luxury life, as a proof that the communist utopia had already been realized in Yugoslavia hic et nunc. When Tito died on May 4th 1980, the press again emphasized that the people of Yugoslavia should remain faithful to his path. Numerous articles were entitled “On Tito’s way”.51 The Central Committee of the Yugoslav 49 For the Kennedy cult see: Posener, Alan: John F. Kennedy in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek: Rowohlt 1991; Schild, Georg: John F. Kennedy. Mythos und Mensch, Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt 1997. 50 M. Brkljačić: “Pig’s Head”. 51 Bakarić, Vladimir: “Na Titovom putu”, in: Ilustrirovanja politika, br. 1122, 06.05.1980: 12–18; Bofa, Djuzepe, “Titovi putokazi”, in: NIN. Nedeljne

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Communist Party called him “the leader and handler of all battles and victories” (vodja i rukovodilac svih bitaka i pobeda).52 But since the leader was dead, the oath to him became much more an incantation. After the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Tito cult, which was adapted to the modern mass media and to the marketing for young generations, did not vanish. It took a form of a post-socialist nostalgia, attached less to Tito’s political ideals than to symbolical marketing objects, ironical relicts and relics as a pastiche of his period,53 which became a post-modern symbol of the post-communist and post-war Balkan identity. Thus, the Tito cult of the leader in Yugoslavia became an empty pathos, depoliticized and deprived of the ethical aims of the Partisan battle against the fascists.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio: Das Sakrament der Sprache. Eine Archäologie des Eides (Homo Sacer II.3). Translated by Stefanie Günthner, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008. Bakarić, Vladimir: “Na Titovom putu”, in: Ilustrirovanja politika, br. 1122, 06.05.1980: 12–18. Bofa, Djuzepe, “Titovi putokazi”, in: NIN. Nedeljne informativne novine, br. 1532, 11.05.1980: 27–28. Brkljačić, Maja: “Pig’s Head: Stories of Tito’s Childhood“, in: BOI 23. Alltag und Ideologie im Realsozialismus, 2005: 58–69. Brkljačić, Maja: “Popular culture and communist ideology: Folk-epics in Tito’s Yugoslavia”, in: John R. Lampe/Mark Mazower (ed.), Ideologies and National identities: The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe, Budapest/New York: Central European University Press 2006: 180–210. Burke, Peter: Ludwig XIV. Die Inszenierung des Sonnenkönigs, Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach 2009. informativne novine, br. 1532, 11.05.1980: 27–28; Tapar, Romeš: “Pouzdan Vodič”, in: NIN. Nedeljne informativne novine, br. 1532, 11.05.1980: 29. 52 Centralni komitet Saveza komunista Jugoslavije, predsedništvo Socijalističke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije: “Odlučno Titovim putem”, in: Ilustrirovanja politika, br. 1122, 06.05.1980: 2, 3. 53 Velikonja, Mitja: Titostalgija – študija nostalgije po Josipu Brozu, Ljubljana: Mirovni institut 2008.

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Centralni komitet Saveza komunista Jugoslavije, predsedništvo Socijalističke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije: “Odlučno Titovim putem”, in: Ilustrirovanja politika, br. 1122, 06.05.1980: 2, 3. Certeau, Michel de: Mystische Fabel. 16. bis 17. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2010: 124–147. Čolović, Ivan: Kulturterror auf dem Balkan: Essays zur Politischen Anthropologie, Osnabrück: Fibre 2011. Dedijer, Vladimir: Novi prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza Tita 2, Rijeka/Zagreb: Liburnija/Mladost 1981. Dimitrijević, Bojan B.: “Armija – oslonac Titovog kulta ličnosti 1945– 1954”, in: Istorija 20. veka 2 (2004): 97–122. Fister, Vesna: “Ti, naše pesmi začetek! – Kult osebnosti maršala Tita v pesmih od vojne do 1980”, in: Časopis za kritiko znanosti 30 (2002): 217–231. Flere, Sergej: “The Ateist Civil Religion in Communist Yugoslavia: the Broken Convenat of Tito’s People”, in: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag 2005: 217–232. Garstka, Christoph: Das Herrscherlob in Russland: Katharina II., Lenin und Stalin im russischen Gedicht: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik und Rhetorik politischer Lyrik, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag 2005. Groys, Boris: Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin. Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion, München: Hanser 1988. Groys, Boris/Hagemeister, Michael: Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2005. Günther, Hans: “Žiznestroenie”, in: Russian Literature 20 (1986): 41–48. Jakiša, Miranda: “Down to Earth Partisans”, In: KINO! Partizanski film 10: 54–61. Jakiša, Miranda: “Der ‘tellurische Charakter’ des Partisanengenres: Jugoslavische Topo-Graphie in Film und Literatur”, in: Esther Kilchmann/Andreas Pflitsch/Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.), Topographie pluraler Kulturen. Europa vom Osten gesehen, Berlin: Kadmos 2011: 209–225. Jakiša, Miranda: “Memory of a Past to come–Yugoslavia’s Partisan Film and Fashioning of Space”, in: Tanja Zimmermann (ed.), Balkan Memories. Media Constructions of National and Transnational History, Bielefeld: Transcript 2012: 113-122.

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Koenen, Gerd: Die großen Gesänge. Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung. Führerkulte und Heldenmythen des 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag 1991. Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, Ljubljana: Založba/*cf., 2009. Krivokapić, Boro: “Težko je druže komandante”, in: NIN. Nedeljne informativne novine, 1532, 11 May 1980: 53–55. Krklec, Gustav et. al.: Mi smo Titovi, Tito je naš, Zagreb: Spektar 1975. Krešić, Irena: “Obravnava narodnoosvobodilnega boja v slovenski etnologiji”, in: Etnologija in sodobna slovenska družba, Brežice: Slovensko etnološko društvo 1978: 25–27. Life, 21 April 1949, in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tito_Life_Maga zine.jpg, last access: 8 February 2013. Mojić, Dušan: “Evolucija kulta Josipa Broza Tita. Analiza štampe”, in: Srpska politička misao, 2.1 (1995): 133–155. Murašov, Jurij: “Sowjetisches Ethos und radiofizierte Schrift: Radio, Literatur und die Entgrenzung des Politischen in den frühen dreißiger Jahren der sowjetischen Kultur”, in: Ute Frevert/Wolfgang Braungart (eds.), Sprachen des Politischen: Medien und Medialität in der Geschichte, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2004: 217–245. Nazor, Vladimir: “Tito’s ‘Advance’”, in: Yugoslavia: Illustrated Magazine, Belgrade, 1949: 17–19. Nazor, Vladimir: S partizanima, 1943-1944, Zagreb: August Cesarec 1971. Nazor, Vladimir: Legende o Titu, Zagreb: August Cesarec 1972. Nedeljković, Dušan: “Narodno stvaralaštvo u periodu narodne revolucije, oslobodilačkog rata i izgradnje socijalizma Jugoslavije”, in: Rad Kongresa folklorista Jugoslavija VI. – Bled 1959, Bled: Savez udruženja folklorista Jugoslavije 1960: 137–164. Petzer, Tatjana: “Tito – Symbol und Kult: Identitätsstiftende Zeichensetzung in Jugoslawien”, in: Angela Richter/Barbara Bayer (eds.), Geschichte (ge-)brauchen: Literatur und Geschichtskultur im Staatssozialismus. Jugoslawien und Bulgarien, Berlin: Frank & Timme 2006: 113–130. Platthaus, Isabel: Höllenfahrten. Die epische katábasis und die Unterwelten der Moderne, München: Fink 2004. Posener, Alan: John F. Kennedy in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rohwolt 1991.

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Ranke, Leopold: Die serbische Revolution. Aus serbischen Papieren und Mitteilungen, Hamburg: Duncker und Humblot 1929. Republika, Nr. 82, 27th May 1947. Sartorti, Rosalinde: “Großer Führer, Lehrer, Freund und Vater: Stalin in der Fotografie”, in: Martin Loiperdinger/Rudolf Herz/Ulrich Pohlmann (eds.): Führerbilder: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin in Fotografie und Film, München-Zürich: Piper 1995: 189–209. Schild, Georg: John F. Kennedy. Mythos und Mensch, Göttingen: MusterSchmidt 1997. Sertić, Mira: “Pjesme otpora i radnička pjesma”, in: Zbornik XII. Kongresa jugoslovanskih folkloristov. Celje 1965, ed. Zmaga Kumer, Ljubljana 1968: 83–90. Stanonik, Marija: “Etnološki vidiki raziskovanja NOB 1941-1945”, in: Etnologija in sodobna slovenska družba, Brežice: Slovensko etnološko društvo 1978: 12–18. Sysoev, P.M. (ed.), Vsesojuznaja chudožestvennaja Vystavka 1950 goda, Moskva/Leningrad: Gos. Izd. Iskusstvo 1952. Sysoev, P.M. (ed.), Vsesojuznaja chudožestvennaja Vystavka 1952 goda, Moskva: Gos. Izd. Iskusstvo 1953. Sretenović, Stanislav/Puto, Artan: “Leader cults in the Western Balkans (1945-90): Josip Broz Tito und Enver Hoxha”, in: Balázs Apor/Jan C. Behrends, Polly Johnes (eds.): The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorship: Stalin and the Eastern Block, Chippenham-Eastbourne: Palgrave 2004: 208–223. Schahadat, Schamma: Das Leben zur Kunst machen. Lebenskunst in Russland vom 16. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, München: Fink 2004. Schahadat, Schamma: Lebenskunst – Kunstleben, München: Sagner 1998. Tahmiščić, Husein (ed.), Tito u poeziji, Sarajevo: Zavod za izdavanje udžbenika 1972. Tahmiščić, Husein (ed.), Pjesme o Titu, Zagreb: Spektar 1983. Tapar, Romeš: “Pouzdan Vodič”, in: NIN. Nedeljne informativne novine, br. 1532, 11.05.1980: 29. Velikonja, Mitja: Titostalgija – študija nostalgije po Josipu Brozu, Ljubljana: Mirovni institut 2008. Vogel, Milan: “Mesto obdobja NOB v slovenski etnologiji”, in: Etnologija in sodobna slovenska družba, Brežice: Slovensko etnološko društvo 1978: 19–24.

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Wlosok, Antonie: “Einführung”, in: Antonie Wlosok (ed.), Römischer Kaiserkult, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1978: 36–38. Zanker, Paul: Die Apotheose der römischen Kaiser. Ritual und städtische Bühne, München: (=Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung. Themenband 80) 2000. Zimmermann, Tanja: “Titoistische Ketzerei. Die Bogomilen als Antizipation des ‘dritten Weges’ Jugoslawiens”, in: Zeitschrift für Slawistik 55.4 (2010): 445–463. Zimmermann, Tanja: “Novi kontinent – Jugoslavija. Politična geografija tretje poti”, in: Zbornik za umetnostno zgodovino. Archives d’histoire de l’art, n. s. XLVI, Ljubljana 2010: 165–190. Zimmermann, Tanja: “Jugoslawien als neuer Kontinent – politische Geografie des ‘dritten Weges’”, in: Miranda Jakiša/Andreas Pflitsch (eds.): Jugoslawien – Libanon. Verhandlungen von Zugehörigkeit in fragmentierten Gesellschaften, Berlin: Kadmos 2012: 73–100. Zimmermann, Tanja: “The Folk Instrument Gusle and its Resistance to Electrification”, in: Dmitri Zakharine (ed.): Electrified voices: Medial, Socio-Historical, and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer, Göttingen: V&R UniPress 2012: 403-410. Žanić, Ivo: Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia, London: Saqi Books 2007. Zivojinovic, Marc: “Der jugoslawische-Tito Kult – Mythologisierte Motive und ritualisierte Kulthandlungen”, in: Benno Ennker/Heidi HeinKircher (eds.), Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut 2010: 181–199.

CD Ide Tito... 33 najlepše pesme o Titu, CD. Manifactured by DiDisc, 2006.

From Memoir to Fiction. Early Yugoslav Partisan Narratives Revisited1 S TIJN V ERVAET

I NTRODUCTION :

MEMOIRS INTO FICTION , OR HOW TO ESTABLISH A MEMORY CULTURE

The postwar years in socialist Yugoslavia saw the production of an enormous quantity of testimonial literature devoted to the NOB (Narodnooslobodilačka borba, The People’s Liberation Struggle), as the Partisan war against the Nazi occupiers and their auxiliaries was called. Apart from the memoirs of people with a leading function, such as the war diaries of Vladimir Dedijer (Dnevnik, 1945-46) or Rodoljub Čolaković (Zapisi iz oslobodilačkog rata, 1946), less well-known People’s heroes (narodni heroji) and Partisans from all over Yugoslavia were also encouraged to publish their memories of the war2 and thus, we could say, to take part in the writing of the history of the Partisan struggle. 1 2

The author would like to thank Aleksandar Zograf for his kind permission to reproduce illustrations from his comic strip Partizanija. Some of these publications focused on famous battles (Sutjeska, Kozara etc.), others on the history and overall activities of Partisan units operating in a certain area (Slavonia, Dalmatia, Vojvodina, Lika, Kordun), or, even more specifically, in a certain mountain range (Kozara, Ozren, Srem). This is not surprising, given the fact that Partisans, due to the logic of guerilla warfare, to a huge extent depended on the natural shelter provided by forests and mountains. Many Partisan units also carried the name of the region or mountain in which they operated. See, for instance, titles as Popović, Stevo: Majevički partizani, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 1951 (book 1), 1961 (book 2); Bojić, Milosav: Posavski partizani, Be-

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In 1951, a commemorative series was launched by the Belgrade-based publishing house Prosveta under the title Svedočanstva (Testimonies). As the editors stated in the introduction, the series was “dedicated to the People’s Revolution and the libertarian traditions of Serbia”, the goal “to popularize the spirit and tradition of the People’s Revolution”.3 In order to reach as many readers as possible, the series would not provide “historical analysis or judgment”, nor would it “deal with the matter in a historicalchronological way”. Instead, it would look for “engaging writings, in a form interesting and attractive for the reader, yet at the same time respecting historical authenticity”.4 It is interesting that the editors allowed for the possibility of blending ‘historical authenticity’ with ‘attractiveness’ or ‘appeal to the reader’ – a very contemporary and commercial approach which would become paradigmatic for the whole memory culture of WWII in Yugoslavia. Giving the series “the character of a popular literary documentary of the People’s Liberation Struggle”, the editors hoped “to engage a broad circle of contributors: veterans and witnesses, writers and cultural workers, publicists and journalists”.5 As the editors emphasized, “what is at stake is that no single important action, no single exploit, no single heroic personality, no single act of bravery of a certain region, city, village ought to be covered by dust or fade into oblivion as time passes by, leaving memory to dangle on the ever tinier and tinier thread of the memories of a smaller and smaller number of people”.6 Clearly concerned with closing the gap between what Jan Assmann has called “communicative” and “cultural” memory respectively (i.e., between the memory intrinsically linked with the experience of everyday life as remembered by no more than three successive generations, versus the memory stored in archives, institutionalized in rituals, monuments, canonized writings, etc.)7, the editors seemed aware that, if they wanted to establish a

3 4 5 6 7

ograd: Prosveta 1954; Batinica, Dušan: Lički partizani, Zagreb: Problemi 1956; etc. Later on, historical studies on specific Partisan units were also published. Romac, Paško: Bekstvo sa robije, Beograd: Prosveta 1951: 5. P. Romac: Bekstvo sa robije, 5. P. Romac: Bekstvo sa robije, 5. P. Romac: Bekstvo sa robije, 6. See for this Assmann, Jan: “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” Translated by John Czaplicka, in: New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133; Assmann, Jan: “Communicative and Cultural Memory”, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning

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memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) of WWII in which partisan heroism would occupy a central place, they not only had to collect and institutionalize memories of the war, but also to find an appropriate form that would appeal to the masses. One of the genres that seemed to meet the expectations of the engineers of collective memory is war fiction. Presenting itself as based on an ‘eyewitness’ account, war fiction either explicitly or implicitly claims to tell ‘how it really had been’. However, as Astrid Erll reminds us, this claim to authenticity or truthfulness is often used to cater to the public8, and is usually the first concern of the contemporary reception of these works.9 On the other hand, Erll rightly points to the difficulties of providing a clear-cut generic definition of war fiction: “War literature is a hybrid genre, somewhere in-between documentary and fiction, between down-to earth observation and analysis of the situation and clear literary reworking, between a simple report on one’s experiences and (at times crude) ideology. War fiction often adopts elements from the historical novel, adventure novel, travel novel as well as from the Bildungsroman, picaresque novel or tragedy.”10

It is precisely its hybrid nature that makes the ‘genre’ simultaneously appealing to the larger public and suitable for propaganda purposes. However, the ambitious engineers of Partisan memory culture seem to have forgotten that, as Ann Rigney puts it, “the canon of memory sites with which a community identifies is regularly subject to revision by groups who seek to replace, supplement, or revise dominant representations of the past as a way of asserting their own identity”11 and that, secondly, “media (eds.), Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2008: 109–118. 8 Erll, Astrid: “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory”, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin: De Gruyter 2008: 389. 9 Erll, Astrid: “Augenzeugenschaft und kulturelle Paradigmen: Zugänge zur Spanienkriegsliteratur”, in: Bettina Bannasch/Christiane Holm (eds.), Erinnern und Erzählen. Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in der deutschen und spanischen Literatur und in den Bildmedien, Tübingen: Gunter Narr 2005: 60. 10 Erll, Astrid: “Augenzeugenschaft”, 59. 11 Rigney, Ann: “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing”, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning: Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter

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are not passive and transparent conveyors of information […] [but] that they are themselves caught up in a dynamics of their own”.12 With reference to examples from memoirs, fiction, film, and a comic strip, this paper examines the construction and evolution of cultural memory of the Partisan struggle – its narratives, imagery, rhetoric, and ethics – in Yugoslavia. Scrutinizing the ways in which the image of the Partisan hero and notions of heroism are mediated and circulated by different media and in different periods, I will try to demonstrate how the collective imagination about WWII and the role of the Yugoslav Partisans in it has been shaped, transmitted and transformed from the early 1950s to the present day.13 My focus is specifically concentrated on two narratives from Serbia: Paško Romac’s memoir Bekstvo sa robije (Escape from Captivity), and Dobrica Ćosić’s novel Daleko je sunce (Far Away is the Sun), an almost forgotten memoir versus a novel that occupied a central place in the socialist canon. My interest is not only in what Astrid Erll has called the intra-medial rhetoric of collective memory (i.e., how different genres and media represent the past, thus creating different modes of remembering), but also in its intermedial dynamics, that is, the interplay between earlier and later representations and the changing context of their reception.14

2008: 346. (For this point, Rigney refers to Olick, Jeffrey K./Robbins, Joyce: “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices”, in: Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–140.) 12 Erll, Astrid/Ann Rigney: “Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics”, in: Astrid Erll/Ann Rigney (eds.), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Berlin: De Gruyter 2009: 3. 13 This essay thus follows recent developments in memory studies, which have seen a shift in focus from storage (Pierre Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire’) to circulation (see for this the work of Ann Rigney and Astrid Erll) and from high culture to popular culture. In addition, it should be emphasized that memory studies are not as much concerned with the historical accuracy of the narrative presented by novels, films, or comics, as with the collective images of the past that they create and circulate. 14 See for this A. Erll: “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory”.

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P AŠKO

ROMAC ’ S BEKSTVO SA ROBIJE : BETWEEN MEMOIRS ’ CLAIM OF AUTHENTICITY AND AN ATTRACTIVE ADVENTURE STORY The first work published in the aforementioned series Svedočanstva (Testimonies) was Paško Romac’s memoir Bekstvo sa robije (Jailbreak, 1951), which successfully blends ‘authentic’ historical facts, with ‘engaging reading’.15 Romac was one of thirty-two communists arrested and interned as political prisoners in the jail in Sremska Mitrovica during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (at which point the Communist Party had been forbidden since 1921). His memoir relates how, after two failed attempts and with help from people working in the prison as well as from their comrades outside, the communist inmates finally managed to dig a canal under the walls of the prison and, a few days after the Ustasha government had taken over the prison, escaped to the hills of Fruška Gora, where they joined the local Partisan unit and later fled to the region of Mačva in Serbia. Given that this is a suspenseful adventure story (an Alcatraz story avant-la-lettre), it is no surprise that Romac’s memoir was later adapted for the screen,16 both as a feature film STIĆI PRE SVITANJA/ARRIVAL BEFORE DAYBREAK (1978)17, and as a documentary DNEVNIK BEKSTVA SA ROBI18 JE/JAILBREAK DIARY (1979) by the same director, Aleksandar Đorđević. In 2009, the same memoirs inspired the Serbian comic-strip artist Aleksandar Zograf to create a strip about it. In what follows, I will briefly consider the different ways in which the film and the comic strip draw upon the ‘authenticity’ of the memoir and refashion it as a new (fictional) story. I 15 Told by an eyewitness, by ‘someone who was there’, the memoirs clearly lay claim to authenticity. However, also seemingly objective memoirs are written post factum for a readership, and thus composed with a certain intention or even with a pretension to literariness. This does not turn them into fiction, but we should take into account that also memoirs (unavoidably) rely on narrative techniques. 16 Oskar Davičo’s novel Bekstva, which was also adapted for the screen by Radoš Novaković (Avala film 1968, screenplay by Novaković and Muharem Pervić), deals with the same theme and seems to be inspired by the same event, but has an entirely different focus, as it attempts to sketch a psychological portrait of the inmates and their internal conflicts. See for this Kosanović, Dejan: Radoš Novaković, Beograd: Univerzitet umetnosti u Beogradu 1991: 50–53. 17 Đorđević, Aleksandar: Stići pre svitanja. Novi Sad: Neoplanta film 1978. 18 Unfortunately, I have not been able to track down the documentary.

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will also look at the effect of this remediation19 at a later point in time and ask what it tells us about the evolution of the collective imagination about the Partisans. The movie ARRIVAL BEFORE DAYBREAK is directed by Aleksandar Đorđević, who later became famous for his comedies. In 1974, Đorđević directed the very popular television series OTPISANI/THE WRITTEN-OFFS and POVRATAK OTPISANIH/THE WRITTEN OFF RETURN, which was also inspired by historical events and focused on the adventures of a group of ‘illegalci’, an underground communist cell in Belgrade that carried out small terrorist attacks against the German occupier. Đorđević therefore already had some experience with filming the ‘adventurous’ and ‘picaresque’ sides of partisan narratives, which are central to ARRIVAL BEFORE DAYBREAK. The film focuses on the conditions of the jail for political prisoners, the digging of the canal, communication with comrades outside, and the escape itself. Two motives that seem to have become indispensable ingredients of any partisan film at the time are added to the original story: the theme of the traitor within the ranks, and the love story between one of the jailed communists and the Partisan girl that helps organize the escape. Although featuring famous actors such as Bata Živojinović and Ljubiša Samardžić, the acting is for the most part rather unconvincing (over-acted and exaggerated optimism), making the film much less memorable than OTPISANI. Rather unsurprisingly, our sympathy is supposed to be with the imprisoned communists, the rebels who, literally and figuratively, undermine the system by digging a canal. Depicted as ‘good criminals’ against ‘bad policemen/prison guards’, as inventive communists versus stupid but merciless Ustashas, Nazi Germans, and Serbian collaborators, the making of the revolution and the start of the NOB seems to have lost any sense of tragedy and looks almost like a children’s game20 (actually, a boys’ game, all about 19 For a theoretical approach to remediation, see Bolter, Jay David/Grusin, Richard: Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1999; for a theoretical framework connecting memory and remediation, see A. Erll/A. Rigney “Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics”. 20 At a certain moment, the film even invokes the image of schoolboys teasing the teacher: humming the Internationale, the inmates do their best to get on the nerves of the director of the prison, who collaborates with the Nazis. The first time (03:48), they hum the Internationale to welcome new communist inmates who have arrived from the notorious prison of Lepoglava. The second time (34:00), they hum it when, punished by the director of the prison, they have to

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bravery and homosocial bonds, in which women are represented either as couriers or lovers). The film ends (91:38) with a bird’s-eye shot of a column of political prisoners entering the woods of Fruška Gora. The music, which up till then had dramatically underscored the tension and danger of the undertaking, changes into a hopeful melody and the camera shows everything in color and bathed in sunlight (before this point the film consists mainly of dark, at times almost entirely black shots, not only the scenes that show the digging of the canal but all other scenes in the prison, in the local pub, etc.). One of the younger communist escapees leaves the line and runs forward to hug his Partisan girlfriend, who is waiting for him. The overall feeling of euphoria is only partly countered by the words of the older Obren, who, responding to the comment of Velja, “‘Look, Obren: the grass at our feet, the forest before our eyes, this is freedom!”, doubtfully answers: “Ah, my dear Velja. It’s a long way to freedom!” (“‘Pogledaj, Obrene: trava pod nogama, šuma pred očima – sloboda!’ – ‘E moj Veljo… daleko je do slobode!’”). The picture then turns into a freeze frame showing Obren’s face looking doubtfully into the camera, the soundtrack starts playing solemn organ music, and the film ends there. Although Obren’s words and facial expression seem to suggest that the real hard times and struggle against the enemy have yet to come, these hardships are not shown explicitly – as if implying that the viewers are supposed to know what will follow. In Romac’s memoir, however, the times of hardship only start when the communist escapees arrive on the mountain/hills of Fruška Gora, and it is this section that attracted the interest of comic-strip artist Aleksandar Zograf. In 2009 Zograf stumbled upon Romac’s memoir at a flea market in Belgrade, which inspired a short, two-page comic strip entitled Partizanija (Partisanry) that he later included in the album Polovni svet (Second-Hand World).21 In his re-reading (or remake) of the Partisan memoir, Zograf skips the heroic escape story and instead focuses on prosaic details of the grim reality of life under the open sky, details either silenced by the official stay for hours on the courtyard in the soaking rain, showing by their song they have the strength to beard him and underscoring that they find the strength to do so in their communist ideology. 21 Zograf’s fascination with the second-hand world of flea markets obviously points to an alternative concept of historiography that is critical of grand narratives, amongst others of the teleological narrative of the building of socialism and of the heroic image of the Yugoslav Partisan struggle.

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socialist culture of remembrance or presented as ‘heroic’. He chooses to depict scenes showing the fresh Partisans walking around in their white prison garb because they lack adequate clothes, a marked contrast to the brand-new uniforms and weapons in the equivalent scene from Đorđević’s film (76:54). Dependent on hunting and on food supplied by peasants, the Partisans have only a single tent under which they all get soaked when it rains, while the fight against lice is at least as ferocious as the fight against the occupiers.

Ill. 1: ‘The fight against lice lasted as long as the fight against the occupiers.’ From Partizanija by Aleksandar Zograf. Copyright © Aleksandar Zograf, used with permission of the author. The combination of the literal quotations from Romac with Zograf’s antiheroic aesthetics not only underscores the gap between the dominant socialist iconography of partisan heroism and Romac’s original text, but also seems to function as an ironic reflection on the mythifying version of WWII which during the socialist era was regarded as the official historical narrative.

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In other words, repetition does not necessarily mean re-production, but can result in repetition with a difference.22 Zograf’s refashioning of Romac’s text points to the possibility to read the once so heroic Partisan struggle in a new way (which would probably have unpleasantly surprised the editors of the Svedočanstva-series). However, Zograf’s re-reading of the Partisan past also seems to suggest the need for a visual re-imagination of that very past. Ironically debunking the historical stereotypes of Partisan heroism that had been promoted by Yugoslav Partisan memoirs and movies for decades, Zograf shows that rereading the role of the partisans in WWII does not necessarily mean resorting to right-wing revisionism.

Ill. 2: ‘In 1951, Paško Romac published the book Jailbreak.’ From Partizanija by Aleksandar Zograf. Copyright © Aleksandar Zograf, used with permission of the author. While the editors of Romac’s memoir tried to appeal to the reader by presenting the story as an authentic narrative, and Đorđević’s movie by foregrounding the heroic and adventurous aspects of the partisan struggle, Zograf’s comics urge the reader to deconstruct such stereotypical views of the Partisan past. What is more, while the memoir and the movie (at least to

22 This repetition with a difference is, according to Ole Frahm, characteristic of the medium of comics: Frahm, Ole: Die Sprache des Comics, Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts 2010.

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a certain extent) pretended to offer their reader/viewer immediate access to the past ‘as it really had been’, Zograf’s narrator already in the first panel lays bare “the genealogy of its remediation”, to quote Bolter and Grusin.23 Emphasizing the mediated character of the story that follows, and hence reminding the reader that the comic strip, not unlike all other forms of historical representation, depends on (earlier) forms of mediation, Zograf’s work urges us to rethink the possibility of immediate and authentic access to the past.

D OBRICA ĆOSIĆ ’ S DALEKO JE SUNCE ( FAR AWAY IS THE SUN ): THE ‘ TRUE ’ NATURE OF PARTISAN ETHICS AND HEROISM Although Ćosić’s novel Far Away Is the Sun (1951) is a work of fiction, the author’s dedication at the beginning of the novel nevertheless indicates the novel has its roots in the author’s experience.24 It runs as follows: “To my war comrades, the fighters of the Rasina detachment”, and can, hence, be read as the speech act of an eyewitness (‘I was there with you, I know how it was’), as a claim of authority, a claim to truth. Truth and authority, as we will see, are indissolubly connected for Ćosić’s narrator. The novel focuses on the fate of a Partisan unit stuck in the woods of the mountain Jastrebac (next to the town of Kruševac in central-Serbia) in December 1942 and January 1943. The harsh winter and the continuous German attacks have exhausted the Partisans. The commanders of the unit cannot agree on how to resolve this almost hopeless situation, and a conflict soon emerges. Pavle, the Partisan commissar of the unit, proposes to go down the mountain, break through the enemy’s lines and cross the river Morava. Uča, the military commander of the unit, strongly opposes the idea of leaving Jastrebac, and initially enjoys the support of Gvozden, the deputy commander. The Partisans are confused by the disagreement, but

23 See for this J. Bolter/R. Grusin, Remediation. 24 In his afterword to a later edition of the novel, Ćosić informs us in more detail on the genesis of the novel, emphasizing that the book was explicitly meant to counter Stalin, who since 1948 had “belittled Yugoslav Partisan warfare”. Ćosić, Dobrica: “Jedno prisećanje za ‘Daleko je sunce’”, in: Dobrica Ćosić, Daleko je sunce, Beograd: Prosveta 1973: 385–386.

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because all contact with the Party has been lost, the local commanders have to make a decision on their own. The dilemma becomes even bigger when they witness the cruelty of German reprisals against the local peasants. Confronted with the suffering of the people from his region, Gvozden, deputy commander and himself a peasant, proposes to temporarily dissolve the unit. Pavle, the commissar of the unit, declares Gvozden’s idea to be treason and uses his authority of ideologue of the party to form a military court, which subsequently sentences Gvozden to death. (In other words – betrayal of the Partisan unit equals betrayal of the communist revolution.) After Gvozden’s execution, Pavle and Uča decide to split up the unit. Pavle leaves Mount Jastrebac with one part of the detachment and Vuk as its military commander (who is seeking revenge on the Chetniks who have been killing and plundering in his village), crosses the river Morava and, having successfully defeated some Chetnik units and recruited a lot of new Partisans, returns to Jastrebac, where, in the meantime, Uča has been killed and his unit almost completely destroyed. A committee is to be established to discuss ‘the Gvozden case’ – but Pavle does not fear the ordeal, firm in his conviction that he made the right decision. Thus, the novel raises two significant questions: is it worth fighting for freedom/the revolution at any price? And, how to spread the revolution amongst the peasants, who are willing to fight only for their own village or region, but don’t see the point of fighting elsewhere? This second theme could be read allegorically, as a conflict between ‘conservative regionalism’ and the universal, modernizing ideals of the communist revolution, as Andrew Wachtel suggests.25 The story is told by an ‘omniscient’, authorial narrator. The inner world of the protagonists is often presented in the form of quoted monologue, but, as Dorrit Cohn avers, “[a] monologist in a third-person context is not the uniquely dominant voice in the text we read. He is always more or less subordinated to the narrator, and our evaluation of what he says to himself remains tied to the perspective (neutral or opinionated, friendly or hostile, empathic or ironic) into which the narrator places him for us”.26 Ćosić’s narrator is inclined to evaluate, at times in a rather didactic way, the

25 Cf. Wachtel, Andrew Baruch: Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 1998: 153. 26 Cohn, Dorrit: Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978: 66.

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thoughts, feelings, doubts and convictions of the protagonists without even the slightest trace of irony. The characters lack psychological depth and are in many respects shallow and unconvincing.27 Thus, the range of interpretative possibilities is rather restricted and depends on the authority of Ćosić’s narrator, whose sympathy is clearly with Pavle. Dialogues play (structurally as well as thematically) an important role in the novel, and are expressed either in discussions between the protagonists, or in explicitly dialogized interior monologues. However, as Vladislava Ribnikar has convincingly shown, dialogue in Daleko je sunce has “a strictly limited range and operates according to strict guidelines.”28 The fellow partisans never quarrel about the goal of the war or the revolution – the righteousness of which is known – but only about the way to get there. When discussing with the peasants, Pavle eagerly turns to a pedagogical discourse: he has the knowledge, and knows what is best for them. Discussing with ideological opponents is not worth the effort: they are either silenced, or shot. Hence, the novel is a paradigmatic example of a monologically conceived novel, in which “the value of revolutionary action is nowhere brought into question”29. Ćosić’s novel also (re)produces and reinforces many stereotypical images of the Partisan struggle, especially of Partisan heroism, hardship and ‘ethics’. (The enemy is also depicted in a very stereotypical way: the Bulgarians are cowards, the Germans merciless killers and the Chetniks butchers of their own people.) From the perspective of the communist ideology embodied by Pavle and endorsed by the narrator, the death of Gvozden and the suffering of the local peasants are imbued with a higher, sublime meaning – as sacrifices on the altar of revolution. Thus, the Partisans start talking about Gvozden as a hero – this is the only way Uča and the other Partisans can bear his death and the idea that they killed him themselves: by turning him into a sacrifice. The idea that victims have not died in vain, but have fallen for the sake of a higher cause – the revolution – inevitably subsumes their personal suffering into a transcen-

27 Quite often, the narrator’s commentaries “lead away from psychological characterization toward those generalizations about human nature so characteristic of the authorial mode of narration”. D. Cohn: Transparent Minds, 67–8. 28 Ribnikar, Vladislava: “Structure of Dialogue in Socialist Literature”, in: Essays in Poetics: The Journal of the British Neo-Formalist Circle, 19.2 (1994): 9. 29 V. Ribnikar: “Structure of Dialogue in Socialist Literature”, 15.

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dental, allegedly meaning-giving category, preventing the possibility to feel empathy with their suffering and to genuinely mourn their deaths.30 At the time of its publication, the novel was received positively by most critics.31 It was celebrated as the first great novel that dealt with the People’s Liberation Struggle in Serbia – whereas Montenegro had its Mihailo Lalić and Bosnia its Branko Ćopić, Serbia had finally found its own great Partisan writer, as Stevan Majstorović put it.32 The novel soon achieved canonical status and was included in school curricula for “telling the story ‘in the proper way.’”33 What is more, during the 1970s it entered Serbian literary history as the first novel that definitely departed from the paradigm of socialist realism.34 During the 1980s, the novel was praised for having approached the Partisan struggle “in a new, unconventional way,”35 because it had – allegedly for the first time – shown that disagreement amongst Partisans had existed and because it had, according to Miroslav Egerić, raised the moral question whether the revolution should be fought at any price.36 Whether the novel is indeed so ‘unconventional’ or even ‘subversive’ as those critics believed it to be is, as I have tried to show, extremely questionable. Whether or not the novel had really broken with socialist realism, it definitely did not break with the myth of Partisan struggle and accompanying cult of heroism. On the contrary, it seems to have perfectly fit into the borders of the ideologically acceptable and offered – as a fictional narrative 30 Cf. V. Ribnikar: “Structure of Dialogue in Socialist Literature”, 15: “Although the central moral dilemma remains unresolved in the action of the text, the development of the events exposes the ideological and political correctness of the commissar’s viewpoint and affords his voice a privileged position. However tragic it might be, human sacrifices are necessary that the revolution might win. The value of revolutionary action is nowhere brought into question.” 31 Nick Miller even writes that “the book was a preordained success, with praises coming in before it was published.” Miller, Nick: The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle, 1944-1991, Budapest: Central European University Press 2009: 50. 32 Majstorović, Stevan: “Dobrica Ćosić. ‘Daleko je sunce’”, in: NIN 1/27, 8 July 1951: 8. 33 A. B. Wachtel: Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation, 152. 34 See for this Palavestra, Predrag: Posleratna srpska književnost 1945-1970, Beograd: Prosveta 1972: 224-226. 35 Deretić, Jovan: Istorija srpske književnosti, Beograd: Nolit 2002 (1983): 1193. 36 Egerić, Miroslav: “‘Daleko je sunce’ – ili o borbi za slobodu po ceni života” [1982], in: Miroslav Egerić, Vreme i roman: eseji o romanima Dobrice Ćosića, Banja Luka: Zadužbina Petar Kočić 2009 (2001).

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– a ‘softer’, i.e. less obvious way of promoting and circulating the same stereotypical values and images. This becomes also clear from the movie by Radoš Novaković that was based on the novel, finished by November 1953 and released at the beginning of 1954.37 In many ways, the movie is much more convincing than the novel, because it succeeded in foregrounding the tragic side of the story and reducing its explicitly didactic part. This is partly due to the fact that Novaković, as an experienced filmmaker, very skillfully exploited the ‘effet du réel’ of the medium film. In addition, he let the camera take over most tasks of the narrator and thus almost entirely expelled the authorial voice of Ćosić’s narrator. Only in one or two places there is a voice-over that reminds us of the narrator, this voice never ‘instructing’ the viewer on how he or she should interpret the story, but rather resuming and introducing a new episode (e.g.: “‘And so, that evening two units left the mountain Jastrebac, each to their own destiny.’ – ‘I tako su to veče dve čete napustile Jastrebac i pošle svaka za svojom sudbinom.’” [56:00]). In addition, Novaković (or rather, Josip Kulundžić, who wrote the scenario) had to select several kernels from the novel and thus inevitably put other accents. Quite predictably, he gives a central place to Gvozden’s execution, but the suffering of the peasants is also brought to the fore.38 On the other hand, the Chetniks are almost absent from the film, notably the scene of the discussion between Pavle and Chetnik commander Vasić, who had been childhood friends, is omitted. Vasić, who is taken prisoner by the Partisans, tries to give the interrogation a personal tone by referring to their friendship: “[Vasić:] ‘I know that I’m done for. I’m not afraid of death, and I don’t want to postpone it. But I’d like to ask you something…It interests me how much you’ve changed those days. […] Do you find it distasteful and…hard to kill people?’ [Pavle:] ‘Distasteful and horrible! Unless they are traitors to their country…’[…] [Vasić:] ‘First of all, I am not a traitor! I am fighting for my country, but you haven’t got a country. Your country is the Bolshevist USSR. I am a nationalist, I’m fighting

37 D. Kosanović: Radoš Novaković, 32. 38 Interestingly, it is Novaković’s focus on and rendering of this scene that today attracts the attention of critics. Thus, historian Goran Miloradović claims that “in this film, for the first time the thesis was put forward that the peasants as a social layer were the biggest victims of the ideology they served.” See Miloradović, Goran: “Staljinovi pokloni”, in: Istorija 20. veka 1 (2002): 107.

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for Serbia and her king, but you are killing the Serbs for some Tito or other, and for Stalin. It’s you that’s the traitor, not me!’”39

The omission of this scene from the film is worth mentioning, since this is exactly the place in the novel to which Ljubiša Jeremić in 1991 referred, when he claimed that the changed social circumstances had made the time ripe for “a new interpretation” of the novel.40 Briefly, Jeremić’s interpretation of Daleko je sunce seems to be rather simple: ‘what if Ćosić’s Chetnik commander Vasić was right?’ (i.e. that not the communist Partisans, but the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović were the true patriots). To be sure, Jeremić not only does not deconstruct the black-and-white ideology of the novel – he only inverts the positions, favoring the Chetnik commander instead of the Partisan leader as the voice of truth and authority. Apart from the question whether Jeremić would have considered it worth reinterpreting Daleko je sunce, were it not that Ćosić had in the meantime turned into a hardboiled nationalist, and become popular because of his later, nationalistically intoned works, Jeremić seems to have been right about one thing, namely that right-wing revisionist interpretations of WWII have become the dominant culture of remembrance in Serbia over the past few decades. More than half a century since the publication of Ćosić’s novel and twenty years after Jeremić’s ‘reinterpretation’, it seems that, in Serbia, the Partisan myth has indeed been exchanged for an idealized view of the Chetnik movement of Draža Mihailović – a change which since the 2000s, depending on the political coalition in power, has been more or less actively supported by the Serbian government.41 It remains to be seen if, with regard to the changed

39 Ćosić, Dobrica: Far away is the Sun, Engl. transl. by Muriell Heppell/Milica Mihajlović, Beograd: Jugoslavija 1963: 348–349. 40 Jeremić, Ljubiša: “Zapis o narodima sa duplim dnom”, in: Književne novine 827 (1991): 15. Vladislava Ribnikar refers to the same text by Jeremić to make the fine point that even as monological a novel as Daleko je sunce has some traces of dialogicity which enable a reading of the novel contrary to the intentions of the author, once “the dominant ideological discourse, personified by the Partisan commissar, has lost all former authority.” V. Ribnikar: “Structure of Dialogue in Socialist Literature”, 15. 41 For concrete examples of the rehabilitation of the chetnik movement in Serbia, see Vasić, Miloš: “Četnička čitanka za maturante”, in: Vreme, 10 October 2002; http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=323438; and “Četnici-partizani 12:5”, in: Vreme, 23 December 2004, http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=4005 92.

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political context, a novel such as Daleko je sunce will continue to attract the interest of readers. The ideological black and white thinking in patriots and traitors, heroes and victims, the tendency to promote a single historical and political truth on WWII – aspects which are at the heart of Ćosić’s novel – still seem at work in the Serbian public and political arena when WWII is being discussed, suggesting that, although the dominant historical narrative of WWII may have been turned upside down, the logic and discursive mechanisms have to a certain extent remained the same.42

C ONCLUSION Looking back at the efforts of the communist ideologues of the early postwar period in Yugoslavia to establish specific memory culture in which the image of the Partisan hero would occupy a central and stable place, it is rather obvious that, in the long run, the results of their efforts (if these can be ‘measured’ at all) were by far not as predictable and long-lasting as they would have wished or expected them to be. Even a quick glance at the (after)image of the Yugoslav Partisan in fiction, film and popular culture, shows that collective memory is not a fixed given, but always the result of a dynamic process of remembering and forgetting. In addition, the shifting images of the past are unavoidably dependent on the dynamics of mediation and remediation to which all cultural artifacts that shape collective memory are susceptible. As the abovementioned examples show, remediation sometimes results in reinforcing and stabilizing a certain (simplified) image of the past (Đorđević’s Stići pre svitanja), sometimes in a partly new reading of previous narratives (Novaković’s film adaptation of Daleko je sunce), and sometimes in a radical deconstruction (Zograf’s refashioning of Romac’s memoirs). Finally, when examining the afterimage of the Yugoslav Partisan and the changing reception of once canonical films and novels today, we should definitely ask about the effects of remediation of the new public media and the possibilities they offer for circulating, debating, consuming and refashioning previous images, artifacts and narratives of the 42 For a critique of revisionism in recent historical textbooks in Serbia, see Stojanović, Dubravka: Ulje na vodi: ugledi iz sadašnjosti Srbije, Beograd: Peščanik 2010.

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past, from blogosphere and facebook to youtube. Apart from questions of remediation, it would also be relevant to investigate to which extent stereotypical images and narratives of partisan struggle and heroism have premediated mainstream representations and interpretations of the recent Yugoslav wars.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Assmann, Jan: “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” Translated by John Czaplicka, in: New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133. Assmann, Jan: “Communicative and Cultural Memory”, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2008: 109–118. Batinica, Dušan: Lički partizani, Zagreb: Problemi 1956. Bojić, Milosav: Posavski partizani, Beograd: Prosveta 1954. Bolter, Jay David/Grusin, Richard: Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1999. Cohn, Dorrit: Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978. Ćosić, Dobrica: “Jedno prisećanje za ‘Daleko je sunce’”, in: Dobrica Ćosić, Daleko je sunce, Beograd: Prosveta 1973: 377–386. Ćosić, Dobrica: Far away is the Sun, Engl. transl. by Muriell Heppell/Milica Mihajlović, Beograd: Jugoslavija 1963. Deretić, Jovan: Istorija srpske književnosti, Beograd: Nolit 2002 (1983). Đorđević, Aleksandar: Stići pre svitanja, Novi Sad: Neoplanta film 1978. Egerić, Miroslav: “‘Daleko je sunce’ – ili o borbi za slobodu po ceni života” [1982], in: Miroslav Egerić, Vreme i roman: eseji o romanima Dobrice Ćosića, Banja Luka: Zadužbina Petar Kočić 2009 (2001): 1720. Erll, Astrid/Rigney, Ann: “Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics”, in: Astrid Erll/Ann Rigney (eds.), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Berlin: De Gruyter 2009: 1–15. Erll, Astrid: “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory”, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An Inter-

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national and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin: De Gruyter 2008: 389–398. Erll, Astrid: “Augenzeugenschaft und kulturelle Paradigmen: Zugänge zur Spanienkriegsliteratur”, in: Bettina Bannasch/Christiane Holm (eds.), Erinnern und Erzählen. Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in der deutschen und spanischen Literatur und in den Bildmedien, Tübingen: Gunter Narr 2005: 59–75. Frahm, Ole: Die Sprache des Comics, Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts 2010. Jeremić, Ljubiša: “Zapis o narodima sa duplim dnom”, in: Književne novine 827 (1991): 15. Kosanović, Dejan: Radoš Novaković, Beograd: Univerzitet umetnosti u Beogradu 1991. Majstorović, Stevan: “Dobrica Ćosić. ‘Daleko je sunce’”, in: NIN 1/27, 8 July 1951. Miller, Nick: The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle, 1944-1991, Budapest: Central European University Press 2009. Miloradović, Goran: “Staljinovi pokloni”, in: Istorija 20. veka 1 (2002): 97–114. Olick, Jeffrey K./Robbins, Joyce: “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices”, in: Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–140. Palavestra, Predrag: Posleratna srpska književnost 1945-1970, Beograd: Prosveta 1972. Popović, Stevo: Majevički partizani, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 1951 (book 1), 1961 (book 2). Ribnikar, Vladislava: “Structure of Dialogue in Socialist Literature”, in: Essays in Poetics: The Journal of the British Neo-Formalist Circle, 19.2 (1994): 7–24. Rigney, Ann: “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing”, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning: Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2008: 345–353. Romac, Paško: Bekstvo sa robije. Beograd: Prosveta 1951. Stojanović, Dubravka: Ulje na vodi: ugledi iz sadašnjosti Srbije, Beograd: Peščanik 2010.

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Vasić, Miloš: “Četnička čitanka za maturante”, in: Vreme, 10 October 2002, http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=323438. Vasić, Miloš: “Četnici-partizani 12:5”, in: Vreme, 23 December 2004, http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=400592. Wachtel, Andrew Baruch: Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 1998.

F ILMOGRAPHY DNEVNIK BEKSTVA SA ROBIJE/JAILBREAK DIARY (YUG 1979, D: Aleksandar Đorđević) OTPISANI/THE WRITTEN-OFFS (YUG 1974, D: Aleksandar Đorđević) POVRATAK OTPISANIH/THE WRITTEN OFF RETURN (YUG 1976, D: Aleksandar Đorđević) STIĆI PRE SVITANJA/ARRIVAL BEFORE DAYBREAK (YUG 1978, D: Aleksandar Đorđević)

Partisan Star Wars. Aesthetics of Ideology, Ideology of Aesthetics in Croatian Partisan Novels M AŠA K OLANOVIĆ

The years that have passed since the publication of Sinovi slobode, the first Croatian novel with the theme of WWII and a representative work of socialist realist literary practice in Croatian literature written by the novelist Josip Barković1 have been marked by turbulent and dynamic changes within the field of culture and ideology as well within the modes of approaching socialism in the social sciences and humanities. Of course, the first and the most significant change is that the creations of symbolic culture, from which Barković’s novel has emerged, no longer belong to the dominant ideology. The other change is that the legacy of a socialist culture was significantly reevaluated during this period. As theoretician Rastko Močnik claims: “The art of the anti-fascist struggle and its symbolic production become visible or, more watchable, now when it no longer parasitizes as a particular form of social dominance; when it is released from its ideological slavery. Antifascist symbolic production according to this becomes relevant again because it is finally free of the propagandist and agitational slavery of the official and dominant ideology and it is finally coming to where it really belongs – in the field of culture and art.”2 Of course, the new political 1 2

The novel Sinovi slovode was first published in 1948 by the publishing house Novo pokoljenje. Močnik, Rastko. “Partizanska simbolička politika”, in: Zarez 7.161/162 (2005): 12-14.

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context after the collapse of socialism brought new problems related to the specific politics of memory of socialist culture. It happened only recently, after more than two decades of traumatic break up with socialism and its dominant articulation through the metaphors of ‘dark past’. Those metaphors have not yet disappeared from the stage of public discourse of postsocialist countries, but socialism has become the subject of relevant analytical rethinking, where some other issues besides totalitarianism and socalled ‘big history’ emerged. Thus Yugoslav socialism has recently become a subject of much debate both in the international and domestic fields of social sciences, art and humanities as well as within public discourse and everyday life. At first timidly, but recently it became more and more prominent.3 In this initial review of Barković’s novel another recent trend emerging from this shift in the approach to socialism should not be overlooked. One of the consequences of these new processes in the rehabilitation of socialism is that the symbolic creations of socialism not only no longer belong to the dominant ideology or the ‘dark past’, but somewhere along their rethinking a new extreme popped up, where socialism with its ideological sym3

I will mention here the publications on that topic published only in the last decade: Luthar, Breda/Pušnik, Maruša (eds.): Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, Washington DC: New Academia Publishing 2010; Taylor, Karin/Grandits, Hannes (eds.): Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: a History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s), Budapest/New York: Central European University Press 2010; Jakovina, Tvrtko: Socijalizam na američkoj pšenici, Zagreb: Matica hrvatska 2001; Jakovina, Tvrtko: Treća strana Hladnog rata, Zagreb: Fraktura 2011; Dijanić, Dijana et al. (eds.): Ženski biografski leksikon. Sjećanje žena na život u socijalizmu, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije 2004; Duda, Igor: U potrazi za blagostanjem : o povijesti dokolice i potrošačkog društva u Hrvatskoj 1950-ih i 1960-ih, Zagreb: Srednja Europa 2005; Duda, Igor: Pronađeno blagostanje. Svakodnevni život i potrošačka kultura u Hrvatskoj 1970-ih i 1980-ih, Zagreb: Srednja Europa 2011; Čale-Feldman, Lada/Prica, Ines (eds.): Devijacije i promašaji: etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2006; Škrbić Alempijević, Nevena et al. (eds.): O Titu kao mitu. Proslava Dana mladosti u Kumrovcu, Zagreb: Filozofski fakultet/Srednja Europa 2006; Senjković, Reana: Izgubljeno u prijenosu: pop iskustvo soc culture, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2008; Jukić, Tatjana: Revolucija i melankolija: granice pamćenja hrvatske književnosti, Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak 2011; Kolanović, Maša: Udarnik! Buntovnik? Potrošač...Popularna kultura i hrvatski roman od socijalizma do tranzicije, Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak 2011; Janjetović, Zoran: Od “Internacionale” do komercijale: Popularna kultura u Jugoslaviji 1945-1991, Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije 2011; etc.

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bols, partisan culture and paraphernalia of everyday life tends to become reduced to consumerist pop imaginary. For example, Tito’s character has become a brand,4 the hairstyle of his wife Jovanka has become a trend, a leading political weekly magazine in Croatia was filled with pictures of naked pioneer girls,5 not to mention the broader implications of the commercialization of memory on socialism in other former socialist countries. Thus, socialist’s symbols purified’ from their ideology successfully operate in the domestic media landscape of postmodernism fulfilling the cultural logic of late capitalism.6 It seems that one of the strings of this oxymoron which perversely merges the ideologies of the opposite signs lies in the field of popular culture that establishes a broader dialogue between contemporary culture and widespread symbols of socialism. Motivated by such contemporary tendencies in the media and popular culture, in this paper I shall consider the question whether the structural elements of popular culture can, in turn, be recognized in socialist realism and in the discursive strategies of Barković’s novel as its representative example. Or, to formulate this question within the more resonant comparison from popular culture, which I will try to elaborate analytically in the rest of the text, what is the relationship between Star Wars and so-called Partisan Star Wars?

D EATH TO

FASCISM , CULTURE TO THE PEOPLE !

Before I embark on the analysis of Barković’s novel as representative of a partisan image of the world7 performed by the rules of socialist realist poetics, I shall give an overview of the general discursive strategies of socialist realism as an essentially populist project by which the dominant ideology set its symbolic and material power. The ideas of mass culture and the popularization of culture in the period before 1948 had a very specific and unique significance as an important symbolic value of the new socialist 4 5 6 7

Jergović, Miljenko: “'Brand Tito”, in: Globus, 3 June 2005. Jergović, Miljenko: “Lupinove pionirke: Mi nismo anđeli”, in: Globus, 12 August 2005. Jameson, Fredric: “Postmodernizam ili kulturna logika kasnog kapitalizma”, in: Ivan Kuvačić et al. (eds.), Postmoderna: Nova epoha ili zabluda, Zagreb: Naprijed 1988. Flaker, Aleksandar: “Partizanska slika svijeta”, in: Forum 6 (XX) (1981): 897– 910.

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society. Massification of culture was meant as a creation of an authentic socialist culture in its quantitative and widespread dimension. The formation and implementation of such cultural policies was an integral part of the changes that emerged in public life during the socialist transformation of society after 1945. A special body of agitational propaganda – called Agitprop – was formed for these changes, as well. The cultural elevation of the masses represented a key factor in the social transformation based on cultural policy that had the mission to bridge the gap between educated and uneducated.8 The gap was considered as an indication of bourgeois culture. The category of peopleness (‘narodnost’) together with categories of partyness (‘partijnost’), instructiveness (‘idejnost’) and typicality (‘tipičnost’) were the normative meta-aesthetic values of literature and art in socialist realism.9 This very particular category of peopleness thus implies an easy comprehensive form and a quantitative dimension to the wide distribution which are also unavoidable dimensions of popular culture.10 The creation of a new socialist intelligentsia, who would be engaged in the Agitprop apparatus and the cultural and educational committees, cultural centers, schools,

8

In this context it is worth mentioning that the very concept of the people in socialism had a specific political meaning. As the historian Biljana Kašić claims: “[T]he concept of ‘people’ in socialism in contrast to the concept of ‘nation’ had a positive meaning and it was marking both historic entities (‘Yugoslavs’) and the nation in terms of demos, but also the nation as an ideological phrase in the sense of national identity as a supranational entity in the form of class alliance of workers, peasants and so called honest intelligence”. Kašić, Biljana: “Značajke partijske ideologije u Hrvatskoj (1945-1948)”, in: Časopis za suvremenu povijest 1/3 (1991): 243–263. 9 Cf. B. Kašić: “Značajke partijske ideologije u Hrvatskoj”, 259; Mataga, Vojislav: Književna kritika i ideologija, Zagreb: Školske novine 1995: 163. 10 Mataga considers a category of ‘peopleness’ as a key argument in his thesis of socialist realism as kitsch that is considered as central part of the popular taste. As Mataga claims: “Kitsch and socialist realism were actually ‘popular arts’ which led into oblivion by their one-dimensional structure. It is necessary to mention that the category of ‘peopleness’ is also one of the central categories of social realism. Since kitsch and socialist realism are designed mostly for average men or the masses, it is necessary that they trivialize what we call high art so that those products could be consumed by all.” Cf. Mataga, Vojislav: “Socijalistički realizam i kič”, in: Republika 1/2 (1995): 40–46. Art historian Vera Horvat-Pintarić also claims that culture and art of socialist realism can in a theoretical sense be seen as kitsch. Horvat-Pintarić, Vera: Od kiča do vječnosti, Zagreb: Centar društvenih djelatnosti Saveza socijalističke omladine Hrvatske 1979.

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theaters,11 at universities, in academic or cultural institutions, and would be loyal to the Communist Party, was the top priority of the new cultural policy,12 whereby the film industry 13 and literature played a key role in this project of cultural popularization. Thus, in building a new socialist society after WWII, the cultural mobilization unreservedly invited the local intellectuals and artists. Writers had a particularly important, almost mythical role in the political narrative of a time also confirmed during the war, for example Vladimir Nazor, Ivan Goran Kovačić and others. Therefore, the discussions on literature often regularly published in magazines such as Izvor, Republika or Kulturni radnik are extremely valuable documents for the reconstruction of the cultural climate of those times. In those articles all important players in the public life of the time gave their contribution, from Radovan Zogović to Miroslav Krleža. In accordance with the aforementioned central role of peopleness in the implementation of the new cultural policy, it should be mentioned that the term ‘people’, ‘people masses’ or often just ‘masses’ gained fundamental symbolic value in discussions on literature. The connection between people and literature, service of the writers to the masses, seeking literary inspiration in the people and the glorification of the Soviet Union was an inevitable leitmotif of most of the articles published in that period, regardless of the intensity of ideology in their discourse. Thus, for example, Miroslav Krleža in his text Književnost danas, published in the first issue of Republika, emphasizes the power of the masses as a new model for the direction of literature and as important factor in post-war reconstruction and the modernization of the society.14 Also, the Writers’ Union of Yugoslavia emphasizes the values of the masses. Writer and critic Zdenko Štambuk informs his 11 Cf. Batušić, Nikola: “Kazalište pedesetih”, in: Zvonko Maković et al. (eds.), Pedesete godine u hrvatskoj umjetnosti, Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo likovnih umjetnika 2004: 158–177. 12 Cf. Dimić, Ljubomir: Agitprop kultura: agitpropovska faza kulturne politike u Srbiji: 1945.-1952., Beograd: Rad 1988; Knezović, Zlata: “Obilježja boljševizacije hrvatske kulture (1945. - 1947.)”, in: Časopis za suvremenu povijest 24 (1992): 106–108. 13 See also Šakić, Tomislav: “Hrvatski film klasičnog razdoblja: ideologizirani filmski diskurz i modeli otklona”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 38 (2004): 6–33; Gilić, Nikica: Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma, Zagreb: Leykam International 2010; Goulding, Daniel J.: Jugoslavensko filmsko iskustvo 1945.2001.: oslobođeni film, Zagreb: V.B.Z. 2004; etc. 14 Krleža, Miroslav: “Književnost danas”, in: Republika 1 (1945): 158.

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colleagues on such a request at the General Assembly of the Croatian Writers Society in Zagreb on 23 February 1947. Štambuk claims: “[P]eople can and should ask us to fulfill the tasks that the new reality sets specifically for us writers.”15 Writer Vladimir Nazor addressing the same gathering, emphasizes the specific relationship of writer and masses, claiming that “writers must find the means and abilities for short paths not only to the hearts of individuals but also to the masses”.16 Thus the ideal cultural recipient of socialist culture and literature should come from the ranks of the proletariat. The Croatian writer and critic Joža Horvat emphasizes the shock worker (udarnik) as a privileged character for whom the writers should write. As Horvat claims: “[W]hat would we do if one day a miner from Raša comes to our association and says: ‘Comrades, I’m daily exceeding my working norm for so and so much percent. I am a shock worker and I work hard and I faithfully fulfill my obligations. Why do I not deserve that you write about me?’ What would we do if a brigadier from cooperative work and shock workers from youth working actions and innovators of our industry or valued teachers from rural schools were to come to us and ask: We're wondering, when we will become heroes of your dramas, short stories and novels. If that happens, I personally would feel quite embarrassed, and probably all of you would feel the same.”17

One of the particularities of cultural populism in the years after WW II was that the boundary between the so-called high and so-called low culture was equated in a way that the same requirements were set for all the texts and practices. The first post-war comic books, for example, published in the daily and weekly newspapers, are named Sovjetski junaci: Radista komsomolac, Zlatni ključić (based on the novel of Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy), Pionir Čedo or Udarnik Ratko18, while the Croatian Writers’ Society in

15 Štambuk, Zdenko: “O našoj književnosti i književnim prilikama”, in: Republika 3 (1947): 152. 16 Nazor, Vladimir: “Govor počasnog predsjednika Društva književnika Hrvatske i počasnog predsjednika Saveza književnika Jugoslavije”, in: Republika 3 (1947): 146. 17 Horvat, Joža: “Naš rad i naši zadaci. Izvještaj tajnika Glavnoj godišnjoj skupštini Društva književnika Hrvatske u Zagrebu, 1. II. 1948”, in: Republika 3 (1948): 224. 18 Cf. Macan, Darko: Hrvatski strip 1945.-54., Zagreb: Mentor 2007: 15–18.

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1947 published an anthology Na pruzi 19 with texts of a group of writers such as Vjekoslav Kaleb, Jure Kaštelan, Vesna Parun, Gustav Krklec, Josip Barković, Slobodan Novak, Marijan Matković, Grigor Vitez and others on the topic of the voluntary work on the construction of the railway ŠamacSarajevo. All texts praise the cult of the shock worker in the socialist manner of the representation of the body, which is yoked in the process of working for social and common interests. This body does not know about hedonism, individualism and other decadent Western values. In addition to these texts, that deal with themes of WWII and postwar reconstruction as a mythical place of socialist society, and Barković’s novel, which I will examine in detail in this text, I would also like to mention other texts, such as Barković’s Iza prve linije (Behind the First Line, 1945), Na zagrebačkoj fronti (On the frontline of Zagreb,1945) and Iz borbe i izgradnje (From the Struggle and Construction, 1949), Vladimir Nazor’s Pjesme partizanke (Partisan Songs, 1943), S partizanima (With Partisans, 1943-1945), Kurir Loda (Courier Loda, 1946), Partizanka Mara (Partisan Mara, 1946), Legende o drugu Titu (Legends of Comrade Tito, 1946), Pionir Grujo (Pioneer Grujo, 1947), as well as Demonja (Demonja, 1950) by Milan Nožinić, or Kroz borbu do sunca slobode (From Struggle to Sun of Freedom, 1954) by Pero Barić. Some other authors, whose poetics are usually not associated with socialist realism, gave their modest contribution to its poetics as well. For example, Nobel prize winner Ivo Andrić in his early post-war story Elektrobih magnifies the five-year plan of the state enterprise for the electrification of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The narrator of the story uses the name of Elektrobih and the electrification and modernization of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a concrete metaphor for a ‘bright future’, one of the most common metaphorical phrases used in socialist realism.20 Although the dominance of socialist realism in Yugoslav culture was short lived,21 nevertheless during that period a significant number of literary works was produced.

19 Matković, Marijan (ed.): Na pruzi: zbornik radova književnika iz Hrvatske o pruzi Šamac-Sarajevo, Zagreb: Društvo književnik Hrvatske 1947. 20 Andrić, Ivo: Pod grabićem. Pripovetke o životu bosanskog sela, Sarajevo: Seljačka knjiga 1952: 85. 21 Cf. Nemec, Krešimir: “Sozialistischer Realismus und der kroatische Roman”, in: R. Lauer (ed.), Kroatien: Kultur – Sprache – Literatur, Göttingen: V&R 2005: 187–204.

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While considering these populist demands, it should also be mentioned that the public life of literature 22 had a prominent place in this new role of culture. The Croatian Writers’ Union reporting on activities, for example, mentions literary evenings held at the Army building, local cultural centers and other locations in order to inform the masses on literature and to popularize it.23 In these reports various kinds of such events and performances are often mentioned such as readings in Artillery Schools, together with the Army or cooperations with the writers from the proletariat.24 From the courses for “the liquidation of illiteracy”, through the founding of diverse cultural institutions such as ‘nursing culture’, ‘workers’ homes’, so called ‘red corners’, ‘reading rooms’ and organized training courses for librarians and artistic work of the working class through the amateur section, workers’ choirs or music clubs emphasized the fundamental importance of culture and art of the working class in achieving the cultural revolution.25 The frequently used phrase “culture for the masses” in public discourse immediately after 1945 points to a respectable relationship of Croatian/Yugoslav intellectuals and politicians to the mass and popular aspects of culture and literature as an essentially socialist view of culture and nature of the working class.26

D ECADENT

WEST

In the system of binary values rooted immediately after the war, the Soviet Union was generally perceived as a positive social hero, while the capitalist West was ideologically stigmatized through a variety of negative metaphors. In that period, one particularly present ideological metaphor was the phrase of a ‘decadent West’, when it came to issues of the bourgeois culture

22 I use the term “public life of literature” according to Carter, David/Ferres, Kay (eds.): “The public life of literature”, in: Tony Bennett/David Carter (eds.), Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs, Cambridge: University Press 2001: 140–161. 23 Z. Štambuk: “O našoj književnosti i književnim prilikama”, 157–158. 24 Cf. J. Horvat, “Naš rad i naši zadaci”. 25 Cf. L. Dimić: Agitprop kultura, 80–83. 26 See also Hall, Stuart: “Bilješke uz dekonstruiranje popularnog”, in: Dean Duda (ed.), Politika teorije, zbornik rasprava iz kulturalnih studija, Zagreb: Disput 2006: 302.

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which covered currents such as artism, decadence, individualism, existentialism, cubism or surrealism.27 These values were condemned and articulated by a totalitarian discourse of socialist realist critique, often by manners of rigid ideological vocabulary.28 Western values in popular cultural texts and practices have undergone the same ideological conviction, especially, when it comes to comics, literature, music, magazines and Hollywood industry. America has regularly covered the range of these negative semantic meanings included in the phrase ‘decadent West’. As in 1947 the politician Milovan Đilas said in the years before his conflict with Tito, imprisonment and his exile in the United States: “America is our sworn enemy so is jazz, its product.”29 However, although this binary structure was strong only during the early postwar period, 30 I wonder if those opposing ideologies also used different poetics and discursive strategies? The theorist Susan Buck-Morrs in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West argues that the collective dream of mass utopia in 20th century was a driving force in the modernization of industrial capitalism and socialism in which the ideological projects of East and West are only two related modernist projects .31 On that trail, I will try to rethink Barković’s novel in the context of this universal guideline of the discourse of popular culture which is being used (and is still in use) by different ideologies no matter what name they carry.

27 Cf. Kašić, Biljana: “Politika kulture, ideologijsko mapiranje, zasjeci”, in: Nada Kisić-Kolanović et al. (eds.), 1945. - razdjelnica hrvatske povijesti: zbornik radova sa znanstvenog skupa održanog u Hrvatskom institutu za povijest u Zagrebu, 5. i 6. svibnja 2006, Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest 2006: 132– 133. 28 Cf. Šinko, Ervin: “Dvije knjige Petra Šegedina”, in: Republika 6 (III) (1947): 405–408; Gamulin, Grga: “Uz prvi roman Petra Šegedina”, in: Republika 12 (III) (1947): 930–944; Franičević, Marin: “Zimsko ljetovanje Vladana Desnice”, in: Republika 7 (VI) (1950): 456-457; Zogović, Radovan: Na poprištu, Beograd: Kultura 1947; Franičević, Marin: Pisci i problemi, Zagreb: Kultura 1948. 29 Milovan Đilas according to Vuletic, Dean: “European sounds, Yugoslav visions: performing Yugoslavia at the Eurovision song contest”, in: Breda Luthar/ Maruša Pušnik (eds.), Remembering Utopia, 125. 30 Later it will become more relative so as more complex. Cf. M. Kolanović: Udarnik! Buntovnik? Potrošač.... 31 Buck-Morrs, Susan: Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2002: 9.

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P ARTISAN

ROMANCE

The novel Sinovi slobode covers the final years of WWII on the battlefield in the Croatian region Lika. The main protagonists are a group of young partisan fighters. The basic structural and semantic determinants of this novel can be found in the archetypal structure of the romance,32 the dominant genre of popular fiction. It should be noted that Sinovi slobode as a partisan action romance is closest to the definition of gender-coded ‘male’ romance, which is characterized by the establishment of codes of masculinity through the thematic patterns of male solidarity, camaraderie, rivalry, competition, formation of heterosexual identity and male power in the public sphere that can be found, for example, in the classic westerns, war stories, thrillers, spy novels and boyish adventures as well.33 As a gendercoded form of romance, the action plot, of course, has the dominance over the love plot. Sexuality and eroticism were censored in this novel, as they were in partisan war media and folklore communication, as the literary theorist and historian Aleksandar Flaker has shown in his analysis of partisan newspapers from 1943 to 1945.34 Love had to be raised to the level of the ideological struggle and that struggle was the measure of everything. Thus, for example, the melodramatic separation between characters of the partisan girl Bosa and the disabled war veteran Vlado must not cross the border of genre representation of love which is subordinated to the revolutionary activities of the characters:

32 For a broader picture on romance genre see also Frye, Northrop: Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton/New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1957; Frye, Northrop: The Secular Scripture. A Study of the Structure of Romance, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press 1976; Beer, Gillian: The Romance, London: Methuen “The Critical Idiom” 1979; O' Connell, Michael: “Epic and romance”, in: Martin Coyle et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, London: Routledge 1991; Radway, Janice: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill/London: The University of North Carolina Press 1991. 33 Cf. Batsleer, Janet: Rewriting English: cultural politics of gender and class, London: Methuen “New accents” 1985: 75–80. 34 A. Flaker: “Partizanska slika svijeta”, 902. See also Rihtman-Auguštin, Dunja: “Folklor kao komunikacija u NOB-u”, in: Ivan Jelić et al. (eds.), Kultura i umjetnost u NOB-u i socijalističkoj revoluciji u Hrvatskoj, Zagreb: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta 1975: 151–167.

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“Suddenly, they both went silent. The conversation could be interrupted at every moment, and they had so much to say to each other before separation. Very soon he will go to the treatment somewhere unknown and she will continue her duties at the District Board. And now, what is left, what do they know about this love? They had so much to say about these tiny mutual events, as precious and joyful, before they rush to the weight of everyday struggle, which required all power and the last atom of energy? And again, everything is so clear and so harmoniously among them without many words and no explanation. Holding hands like children, they felt that their love does not destroy even a bit of their communist activities, and they were filled with happiness, clear and comprehensive with no shadows and stains.”35

As the war approached its end, it was allowed to think more about love and that part of the plot is then articulated with a “language focused on achieving iconic representation of visual melodrama inherent to popular fiction”.36 Sinovi slobode as a gender-coded ‘male’ partisan romance also assumes the male heterosexual space as a natural space of public action, while the female characters are positioned within a sphere of household and Samaritan activities. Although representation of gender roles in the novel in principle presupposes the equality of all fighters for freedom against fascism, that idea it is often reduced to the patriarchal rural joke. Constant affirmation of masculinity is characteristic for male romance37 and it is established in opposition to the codes of femininity that are articulated in contrast to the harsh world of war. Representative for this are the initial pages of the novel when the village is faced with a dilemma: should the seized enemy weapons be given to young female partisans or boys younger than 16 years? The problem is resolved by referring to the ‘natural’ gender roles, in which the war is men’s work, while the static tasks related to the village are without exception women’s work: “Here, while comrade Vlado is here, we could teach the young boys to fight! And let the women work so far all these tedious jobs. Who is going to plow, who is going to

35 Barković, Josip: Sinovi slobode, Zagreb: Novo pokoljenje 1948: 32. 36 Easthope, Antony: Literary into Cultural Studies, London/New York: Routledge 1991: 92. 37 Cf. J. Batsleer: Rewriting English, 78.

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feed and wash the army? And with these pioneers, these idlers I’ll bust in Gospić...”38

Also, despite the difficult conditions of war, young female partisans never loose on their femininity and they are represented as a role model of constant affirmation of male heterosexual identity.39 Perhaps, this explains why the daughters are lacking in the novel’s title. This gender policy in the novel can be observed at the background of a complex historical context of gender politics during WWII. In her essay about the icon of the female partisan theoretician Svetlana Slapšak claims: “[...] If a female partisan during the war was destined to deal with violence, physical effort, combat readiness and all sorts of parasites as the consequences of poor hygiene, the end of the war and the final victory of the Partisans relegated her to her old gender position, making her more vulnerable. She had again become the ‘normal’ woman, which on the one hand brought her the benefit of hygiene and decoration, but on the other deprived her of weapons and her warrior status.”40

This type of gender roles continued after the war is also reproduced in the novel: “Well – shouted Pećo, so all could hear him better, in war you girls were diligent, because otherwise it could not be done, and now you are diligent so you can show us which one of you will be a good housewife.”41

While female characters in the circumstances of war should not loose their femininity, the male characters are constantly building their manhood. Masculinity is affirmed on almost every page of the novel. Young fighters always seem more mature and masculine than they really are: “They were making a kind of a thick cigarette and smoking like old men, coughing because of spicy tobacco and wet paper.”42 38 J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 16. 39 J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 99–100. 40 Slapšak, Svetlana: Ženske ikone XX veka, Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek 2001: 209. 41 J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 249. 42 J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 53.

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“The boys were very good in these battles and except for a few of their wounds, they had no casualties. Their combat experience has been extensive and nobody in the village has no longer made the distinction between them and the older veterans.”43 “It was still and silent on the Ustasha’s side. They listened helplessly to the partisans' mockery and did not know that in front of them were only boys not older than seventeen.”44 “They walked proudly with the manners and wisdom of the old people.”45

Their physical endurance and composure are confirmed at every opportunity: “The combat unit passed through a baptism of fire, not losing the fighting spirit in difficult situations. Each boy has endured to the end.”46

Especially important are the scenes of mortal wounding in which men are dying, with last words often used in popular jokes about Partisans such as: “It hurts a little bit ... it’s nothing” ... or “Oh, there’s something itchy on my back…”47 Heroic mortal wounds came to life in later partisan anecdotes and jokes as a narrateme 48: “it was just a scratch.” The actions of young partisans in the novel are completely dedicated to the public wellbeing, which is the highest symbolic value within the diegetic universe of the novel. Young fighters do not know about leisure and pleasure and their ideological picture of the world does not tolerate private and particular interests. Those kinds of values were, without exception, condemned and punished by the partisan collective.

P ARTISANS

VS . FASCISTS

Action as a fundamental form of a plot in the partisan gender-coded romance covers battles between the partisans and the occupier (Germans, 43 44 45 46 47 48

J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 120. J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 148. J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 246. J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 91. J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 212. I am using a term narrateme according to A. Easthope: Literary into Cultural Studies.

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Italians, Ustashas), us and them or a dialectical clash of positive heroes and enemies, which is the archetypal conflict between Good and Evil in the genre of romance. As theorist Northrop Frye claims: “The central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader’s values are bound up with the hero. Hence the hero of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world.”49

Such a binary structure, whose axiological model is inherited from the partisan image of the world50, is inscribed in Barković’s novel. The enemy’s name comes from a rich spectrum of negative metaphors and comparisons such as: “gang”, “black enemies”, “black beasts”, “threeheaded monster”, “mad dogs”, “executioners”, “worse than the Devil”, “killers”, “robbers”, “butchers”, “baby killers”, “vultures”, “wolves”, “nonhumans”, “bloodthirsty carcasses” etc. They are opposed to the positive hero as understood by a partisan collective. The conflict, as Frye says, however takes place in, or at any rate primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature: “Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and youth.”51

The hero must pass over the obstacle to reach a happy end, an important outline of romance that is the holder of an utopian perspective. The dialectical polarization, which is clearly indicated between the demonic and regressive world, full of hatred, and the progressive, desirable world, is solved for the benefit of the latter. In this ultimate triumph of the desired

49 N. Frye: Anatomy of Criticism, 187. 50 See also A. Flaker:“Partizanska slika svijeta”, 899; Nemec, Krešimir: Povijest hrvatskog romana, Zagreb: Školska knjiga 2003: 9. 51 N. Frye: The Secular Scripture, 187–188.

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world Frye sees the revolutionary quality of romance.52 This perspective can also be found in Barković’s novel: historical facts about the end of the war on the European battlefield in May 1945, served as the basis for romanticizing partisan victory over the enemy as a victory of good over evil. The snow melted, the enemy is defeated, and the novel ends with an ecstatic display of a gigantic ‘geyser’ of sun, similar to the end of the short novel by Pero Barić, significantly titled Kroz borbu do sunca slobode [Through the Fight to the Sun of Freedom].53 This dialectical conflict between the partisans and the fascists as a fundamental conflict of WWII held its mythical form in former Yugoslavia, as well as in broader world context, and was perpetuated in the socialist’s popular culture and everyday life: from comics to movies and children’s games. Manifold implications of this dialectical conflict that spans Yugoslav daily life and popular culture can also be found in the Leksikon YU mitologije, one of the first articulations of memory of socialism after its collapse from which I extract the entry Partizana i Nemaca:54 “The game that all children, impressed by the local cinema, regularly played on the streets. Since the Germans have always been one of the most hated guys, ‘the Germans’ (players) were often in the minority. Sometimes no one wanted to be German so we all threw stones (bombs) on an imaginary opponent. I always felt pity for people who played roles of Germans in films because it seemed to me like a big shame. I still remember how shocked I was when Ljubiša Samardžić (of course as a Partisan) was killed in one movie. Unfortunately, in these days I hear through the open window that modern children on the street are chasing the Albanians or some other ‘modern’ enemies.”55

52 53 54 55

N. Frye: The Secular Scripture, 139–163. Cf. K. Nemec: Povijest hrvatskog romana, 12. The entry is written by Marko Tasić. Adrić, Iris et al. (eds.): Leksikon YU mitologije, Beograd/Zagreb: Rende/Postscriptum 2004: 296.

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P ARTISAN

FOLKLORE

The plot of Barković’s novel is set in the rural environment which has an important symbolic place in vernacular culture by which this novel is influenced. Thus, the partisan people’s folklore56 in the novel is present in the semantics of partisan folk songs and dances in rounds as a cohesive element of the community as well as the partisan anecdotes from the battlefields57, “written clothing”58 of partisan fashion described in the following quote: “Boys only wore those partisan three-pointed hats. Each boy got this cap, nobody knew how and where. Without the red star on his head – what kind of partisan would he be? The rest of their clothing was in tatters because new clothes could not be obtained. Shoes were especially hard to get. Most of the boys were barefoot. Only a few of them had some old, discarded military shoes which were made out of patches and were tightened with wires.”59

Within these elements of Partisan folklore, the utopian and therapeutic function of storytelling within storytelling plays a very important role. Although the novel has a third person omnipresent narrator, the one that is not taking part in the narrated events, he is, nevertheless, emotionally involved and clearly ideologically committed to the Partisans. But this kind of narrator often leaves his voice to the character narrators in first person, who are retelling to the community stories ‘experienced’ on the battlefield. Those kind of stories hold the utopian perspective of victory and a ‘bright future’. These narrators can fit into the category of storyteller which is, as Walter Benjamin claims, influenced by oral experience, rooted in the people and mainly addressing the community. He is often repeating the same story very much like the narrator of fairy tales who Benjamin considered

56 See also I. Jelić: Kultura i umjetnost u NOB-u. 57 See also Orahovac, Sait (ed.): Partizani u anegdotama, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 1960. 58 I am using the term “written clothing” according to Barthes, Roland: “Pismovni odjevni predmet” in: Mirna Černelić-Cvitan/Bartlett Djurdja /Tonči Vladisalvić (eds.), Moda. Povijest, sociologija i teorija mode, Zagreb: Školska knjiga 2002: 141–165. 59 J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 52.

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the first and genuine narrator.60 Thus characterized storytellers have a high symbolic value in this novel. They are often symbolically positioned in front of a larger group of listeners and their narration takes on a ritual form. Their retelling has a function to give hope to a community, for example: “Such bitter struggle, I say, neither was, nor will be. My battalion had about thirty dead and wounded, but nobody even looked at death or at the wounds. Some man from Dobroselo held his intestines with one hand and with the other he was throwing bombs until he dropped unconscious. We were going forward blindly, we crossed through living and dead, we grabbed one German by his neck and beat him to death. I saw a man from Tolić who was deliriously shaking the German officer, perhaps half an hour, until he was certain that he is dead. Any fighter can tell you more from this particular struggle than from all the other fights in previous wars. They say that nothing more terrible and nothing more beautiful was seen in the war, and could be compared to the scene than when the III. Brigade merged with Pećo’s Brigade and they together drove the Germans back. [...] The boys could not stop listening to what Bude was saying. And Bude’s narration was like a fire, the boys could literally see the sight of the combats and the brigade approaching to Drvar thorough the hills. For several minutes no one broke the silence. ‘What else can we ask?’ If only Bude could continue to retell this story so it could enter our veins for eternity.”61

The great figures of the liberation war, mostly Josip Broz Tito, had a special place in the narration of the events from the battlefield. Tito’s name evoked powerful emotional reactions and gave the narrative a solemn tone: “- And what else did comrade Tito tell you when they reached the Pećo’s brigade? Radan asked, not moving from his place. - What did he say? – repeated Bude, a little surprised. - He was looking how the III. Brigade was slaughtering the Germans. He was looking painstakingly as our soldiers were beating the Germans, so what in the world do we need more than that? - Oh, it’s better that you told us this than if you came to us and told us that war was

60 Cf. Benjamin, Walter: “The storyteller”, in: Bob Asheley (ed.), Reading Popular Narrative. A source book, London/Washington: Leicester University Press 1997: 53–55. 61 J. Barković: Sinovi slobode, 187–188.

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over. And tomorrow you’ll repeat everything in detail from the beginning, wont you?, asked Pećo. - You’ll take a break so you don’t retell everything so quickly like today. [...] Without any more words that would express his happiness, Dragaš took off his Tito’s hat and said with a trembling voice: - Oh, comrade,

Tito, born within us, everything happened exactly as you said on

the very first day!”62

As can be seen from this representative pattern, Josip Broz Tito was presented as a kind of earthly divinity, an idol of Partisan fighters fully dedicated to the public good and symbolic values of the socialist society.

I DEOLOGICAL

PICTURE OF THE WORLD

In this analysis I have tried to show how the Partisan novel Sinovi slobode follows the archetypal pattern of the genre of romance in its structural and semantic elements such as polarization of Good and Evil, tense action mixed with the love topic ultimately resolved in a happy end. Such patterns fit into the context of romance that is often used by the discourse of dominant ideology, which can be evidenced by numerous examples from the cultural memory of the genre. As Frye emphasizes: “The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy. This is the general character of chivalric romance in the Middle Ages, aristocratic romance in the Renaissance, bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, and revolutionary romance in contemporary Russia. Yet there is a genuinely ‘proleterian’ element in romance too which is never satisfied with its various incarnations, and in fact the incarnations themselves indicate that no matter how great a change may take place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking for new hopes and desires to feed on. The perennially childlike quality of romance is marked by its extraordinary persistent nostalgia, its search for 62 Cf. A. Flaker: “Partizanska slika svijeta”, 907–910; Rihtman-Auguštin: “Folklor kao komunikacija u NOB-u”, 157–158.

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some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space. There has never to my knowledge been any period of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic revivalists stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf poet to writers of our own day.”63

On this occasion, therefore, I would like to point out reflections the writer Dubravka Ugrešić made in her essay Živio socrealizam!, in which she discusses the structural links between the poetics of socialist realism and contemporary, market-oriented literature, film and television culture in capitalism.64 In the core of both, as Ugrešić claims, are the same structural settings: the struggle between positive and negative heroes, bold optimism, emphasizing of the powerful, muscular, strong and healthy body and the idea of progress. As it was said in the previous analysis in this paper, those are the qualities of the Partisan romance Sinovi slobode as well. After a series of lucid comparisons, Ugrešić concludes: “Today's market of literature is realistic, optimistic, cheerful, sexy, explicitly or implicitly didactic and intended to amuse the masses. As such, it is ideologically transformed to educate working people in the spirit of a personal victory of good over evil. As such it is indeed a socialist realist.”65

However, in the past fifty years or more, says Ugrešić, Eastern European artists have run away from socialist realism and protested when it was only mentioned66, developing rich strategies of resistance: “[T]hey beat the devil in this social realism, they killed it and hid every trace. Today no one can explain what is actually comprised in this socialist realist evil. [...] They

63 N. Frye: The Secular Scripture, 186. 64 Today it is almost difficult to find an area of literature, film and television culture that is not market-oriented so it should be noted here that Ugrešić primarily refers to the mainstream American film and television productions such as films with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone or television shows such as Oprah Winfrey's talk show, while in the literary production the examples are self-help manuals or mainstream bestsellers. Cf. Ugrešić, Dubravka: Zabranjeno čitanje, Zagreb/Beograd: Konzor/Samizdat, B92 2002: 43. 65 D. Ugrešić: Zabranjeno čitanje, 63. 66 D. Ugrešić: Zabranjeno čitanje, 41.

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killed their own child, they threw old hard-working socialist realist writers into the trash and they didn’t actually learn the craft of the market. ”67

The Partisan novel Sinovi slobode experienced the same fate. Therefore, I took it from the recycling bin of Croatian literature, objecting to the idea that the equation of this work with ideology is also the end of every analysis. The structure and semantics characteristic of this novel were observed in its ideological context of cultural politics and poetics of socialist realism, therefore, suggesting that mobilization movements are using populism as their fundamental discursive form. So why should we analytically prefer works of one ideology more than other? It seems finally that Star Wars as a worldwide pop culture American epic space opera by 20th Century Fox and so called Partisan Star Wars as a socialist realist epic war of NOB essentially have a lot in common.

T HEY LIVED ( UN ) HAPPILY

EVER AFTER

…

The specific articulation of the Partisan struggle in WWII as the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia in this novel thus participates in the shaping of the politics of memory of this historical event. It furthermore largely corresponds with Partisan films and comic books that made up a register of popular culture which played a central role in the perpetuation of ideological forms of historical memory. Such a representation is known in Yugoslav popular culture from comics such as Mirko i Slavko over movie spectacles such as KOZARA (1962, D: Veljko Bulajić), BITKA NA NERETVI (YUG/ITA/West Germany 1969, D: Veljko Bulajić), SUTJESKA (YUG 1973, D: Stipe Delić) up to the TV-shows such as KAPELSKI KRESOVI, SALAŠ U MALOM RITU and others.68 The novel Sinovi slobode can be seen as a repository of ideological, cultural and literary codes that participate in the creation of an ideological image of the world made by socialist realism’s recipe that will also become a target of criticism and parody of another 67 D. Ugrešić: Zabranjeno čitanje, 42–44. 68 Cf. Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata: “Politika sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke culture”, in: Lada Čale-Feldman/Ines Prica (eds.), Devijacije i promašaj : etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2006: 164.

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popular culture discourse. The specific phenomenon of “jeans prose”69 that occurs in the sixties will have a major role in this reevaluation of Partisan culture. The “jeans prose” can be seen as a place of the new emerging “structure of feeling”70 that leads to the dismissal of the war and postwar generations. Rebels, with or without reason, in jeans will oust the symbolic ideal of Partisans and shock workers. Characters entirely dedicated to the public good and sacrificing themselves for the community will be replaced by characters whose underlying symbolic value is that of individualism and hedonism and whose desires are openly influenced by Western popular and consumerist culture.71 Likewise, the concepts of ‘massification’ and ‘popularization’ of culture, as compelling values and positive aspects of the culture in the early postwar years, will get their meaningful competitor in the notion of ‘mass culture’ which has from the 1950s on primarily been related to the popular culture of Western origin. Of course, socialist realism did not completely disappear from the public scene. It still circulated even in public arts during the later years of Yugoslav bastardity as a country between East and West. Also, the Partisan image of the world remained the subtext, to which even contemporary artistic practices and texts directly or indirectly refer. An example of such a contemporary afterlife of Partisan culture I will mention here is the work Neo NOB by sculptor Ivan Fijolić, member of the youngest generation of contemporary Croatian artists. In his work, the author uses allusions to Partisan mythology. One of his sculptures is particularly focused on the reinterpretation of the famous monument of Marshal Tito made by the well known social realist sculptor Antun Augustintičić between 1943 and 1947. In Fijolić’s lucid reinterpretation, the body of Tito’s figure is made after Augustinčić’s monument, but his head is replaced by the head of his wife Jovanka Broz. The most famous political pair of public life in socialism is thus interpreted as a mythical monster, ambiguously opened to different kinds of interpretations: on the one hand, it can be seen as a grotesque apostrophe of a neglected and ruined heritage

69 Flaker, Aleksandar: Proza u trapericama, Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber 1983. 70 I am using the term “structure of feeling” according to Williams, Raymond: “Analiza kulture”, in: Dean Duda (ed.), Politika teorije, zbornik rasprava iz kulturalnih studija, Zagreb: Disput 2006: 35–63. 71 Cf. M. Kolanović: Udarnik! Buntovnik? Potrošač…

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of social realism in the 1990s thrown overboard,72 but on the other hand, the headless leader with his feminine head can be seen as a criticism of an imposed heroic culture in socialism with its macho positions, where women were just the decor of public life. Other works in this author’s project include the sculptures of women who are sunbathing near war trenches and sculptures of Partisan fighters as Western super heroes. The Neo NOB project is thus a welcome comment on partisan culture in our contemporary perspective, especially coming after the period that followed Yugoslavia’s traumatic collapse during which the monumental traces of Yugoslav socialism have been a subject of the un-culture of devastation.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Adrić, Iris et al. (eds.): Leksikon YU mitologije, Beograd/Zagreb: Rende/Postscriptum 2004. Andrić, Ivo: Pod grabićem. Pripovetke o životu bosanskog sela, Sarajevo: Seljačka knjiga 1952. Barković, Josip: Sinovi slobode, Zagreb: Novo pokoljenje 1948. Barthes, Roland: “Pismovni odjevni predmet” in: Mirna ČernelićCvitan/Bartlett Djurdja/Tonči Vladisalvić (eds.), Moda. Povijest, sociologija i teorija mode, Zagreb: Školska knjiga 2002: 141–165. Batsleer, Janet: Rewriting English: cultural politics of gender and class, London: Methuen “New accents” 1985. Batušić, Nikola: “Kazalište pedesetih”, in: Zvonko Maković et al. (eds.), Pedesete godine u hrvatskoj umjetnosti, Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo likovnih umjetnika 2004: 158–177. Benjamin, Walter: “The storyteller”, in: Bob Asheley (ed.), Reading Popular Narrative. A source book, London/Washington: Leicester University Press 1997: 53–55. Buck-Morrs, Susan: Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2002.

72 See also Profaca, Ivica: “Mladi Nijemci istražuju: zašto Hrvati ruše partizanske spomenike?” 2009, in: http://www.slobodnadalmacija.hr/Hrvatska/tabid/66/artic leType/ArticleView/articleId/69416/Default.aspx, last access: 23 April 2011.

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Carter, David/Ferres, Kay (eds.): “The public life of literature” in: Tony Bennett/Carter, David (eds.), Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs, Cambridge: University Press 2001: 140–161. Čale Feldman, Lada/Prica, Ines (eds.): Devijacije i promašaji: etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2006. Dimić, Ljubomir: Agitprop kultura: agitpropovska faza kulturne politike u Srbiji: 1945.-1952., Beograd: Rad 1988. Easthope, Antony: Literary into Cultural Studies, London/New York: Routledge 1991. Flaker, Aleksandar: “Partizanska slika svijeta”, in: Forum, 6.20 (1981): 897–910. Flaker, Aleksandar: Proza u trapericama, Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber 1983. Franičević, Marin: Pisci i problemi, Zagreb: Kultura 1948. Franičević, Marin: “Zimsko ljetovanje Vladana Desnice”, in Republika 7 (1950): 456-457. Frye, Northrop: Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957. Frye, Northrop: The Secular Scripture. A Study of the Structure of Romance, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press 1976. Gamulin, Grga: “Uz prvi roman Petra Šegedina”, in: Republika 12 (1947): 930–944. Gilić, Nikica: Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma, Zagreb: Leykam International 2010. Goulding, Daniel J.: Jugoslavensko filmsko iskustvo 1945.-2001.: oslobođeni film, Zagreb: V.B.Z. 2004. Hall, Stuart: “Bilješke uz dekonstruiranje popularnog”, in: Dean Duda (ed.), Politika teorije, zbornik rasprava iz kulturalnih studija, Zagreb: Disput 2006: 279-311. Horvat, Joža: “Naš rad i naši zadaci. Izvještaj tajnika Glavnoj godišnjoj skupštini Društva književnika Hrvatske u Zagrebu, 1. II. 1948”, in: Republika 3 (1948): 220-234. Horvat-Pintarić, Vera: Od kiča do vječnosti, Zagreb: Centar društvenih djelatnosti Saveza socijalističke omladine Hrvatske 1979. Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata: “Politika sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke culture”, in: Lada Čale-

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Feldman/Ines Prica (eds.), Devijacije i promašaji: etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2006: 149-179. Jameson, Fredric: “Postmodernizam ili kulturna logika kasnog kapitalizma”, in: Ivan Kuvačić et al. (eds.), Postmoderna: Nova epoha ili zabluda, Zagreb: Naprijed 1988. Jergović, Miljenko: “Brand Tito”, in: Globus, 3 June 2005. Jergović, Miljenko: “Lupinove pionirke: Mi nismo anđeli”, in: Globus, 12 August 2005. Kašić, Biljana: “Značajke partijske ideologije u Hrvatskoj (1945-1948)”, in: Časopis za suvremenu povijest 1/3 (1991): 243–263. Kašić, Biljana: “Politika kulture, ideologijsko mapiranje, zasjeci”, in: Nada Kisić-Kolanović et al. (eds.), 1945. - razdjelnica hrvatske povijesti: zbornik radova sa znanstvenog skupa održanog u Hrvatskom institutu za povijest u Zagrebu, 5. i 6. svibnja 2006, Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest 2006: 123-137. Knezović, Zlata: “Obilježja boljševizacije hrvatske kulture (1945. - 1947.)”, in: Časopis za suvremenu povijest 24 (1992): 101-133. Kolanović, Maša: Udarnik! Buntovnik? Potrošač...Popularna kultura i hrvatski roman od socijalizma do tranzicije, Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak 2011. Krleža, Miroslav: “Književnost danas”, in: Republika 1 (1945): 139-160. Luthar, Breda; Pušnik, Maruša (eds.): Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing 2010. Macan, Darko: Hrvatski strip 1945.-54, Zagreb: Mentor 2007. Matković, Marijan (ed.): Na pruzi: zbornik radova književnika iz Hrvatske o pruzi Šamac-Sarajevo, Zagreb: Društvo književnika Hrvatske 1947. Mataga, Vojislav: “Socijalistički realizam i kič”, in: Republika 1/2 (1995): 40–46. Mataga, Vojislav: Književna kritika i ideologija, Zagreb: Školske novine 1995. Močnik, Rastko. “Partizanska simbolička politika”, in: Zarez 7.161/162 (2005): 12-14. Nazor, Vladimir: “Govor počasnog predsjednika Društva književnika Hrvatske i počasnog predsjednika Saveza književnika Jugoslavije”, in: Republika 3 (1947): 10-147.

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Nemec, Krešimir: “Sozialistischer Realismus und der kroatische Roman”, in: R. Laure (ed.), Kroatien: Kultur – Sprache – Literatur, Göttingen: V&R 2005: 187–204. Nemec, Krešimir: Povijest hrvatskog romana, Zagreb: Školska knjiga 2003. Orahovac, Sait (ed.): Partizani u anegdotama, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 1960. Rihtman-Auguštin, Dunja: “Folklor kao komunikacija u NOB-u”, in: Ivan Jelić et al. (eds.), Kultura i umjetnost u NOB-u i socijalističkoj revoluciji u Hrvatskoj, Zagreb: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta 1975: 151–167. Slapšak, Svetlana: Ženske ikone XX veka, Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek 2001. Šakić, Tomislav: “Hrvatski film klasičnog razdoblja: ideologizirani filmski diskurz i modeli otklona”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 38 (2004): 6–33. Šinko, Ervin: “Dvije knjige Petra Šegedina”, in: Republika 6 (1947): 405– 408. Štambuk, Zdenko: “O našoj književnosti i književnim prilikama”, in: Republika 3 (1947): 147-162. Taylor, Karin/Grandits, Hannes (eds.): Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: a History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s), Budapest/New York: Central European University Press 2010. Ugrešić, Dubravka: Zabranjeno čitanje, Zagreb/Beograd: Konzor/Samizdat, B92 2002. Vuletic, Dean: “European sounds, Yugoslav visions: performing Yugoslavia at the Eurovision song contest”, in: Breda Luthar/Maruša Pušnik (eds.), Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing 2010: 121144. Williams, Raymond: “Analiza kulture”, in: Dean Duda (ed.), Politika teorije, zbornik rasprava iz kulturalnih studija, Zagreb: Disput 2006: 35– 63. Zogović, Radovan: Na poprištu, Beograd: Kultura 1947.

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F ILMOGRAPHY BITKA NA NERETVI/THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (YUG/ITA/West Germany 1969, D: Veljko Bulajić) KOZARA (YUG 1962, D: Veljko Bulajić) SUTJESKA/THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA (YUG 1973, D: Stipe Delić)

With or Without Gun. Staging Female Partisans in Socialist Yugoslavia1 N ATASCHA V ITTORELLI

The Partisan moves on masculinely coded terrain. A terrain shaped by fighting, killing and falling. The woman going to war, wearing uniform and carrying guns, willing to kill and to die for her convictions embodies an exception. She contradicts conventional images of femininity. Nevertheless – or perhaps for exactly that reason – the female Partisan represents a legendary type of woman.2 Depending on political alignment she appears either appealing or repulsive. This – as well – differentiates her from the male Partisan, who seems either a fascinating figure or of dubious character.3 1

2 3

The APART grant by the Austrian Academy of Sciences permits me to write on and research the topic of female Partisans in Socialist Yugoslavia in a financially secure manner. My thanks for help and insights go to Georg and Matthias Beckmann, Dejan Kosanović, Julia B. Köhne and Milojka Magajne as well as the participants of the workshop “Partisans. Narrative, Staging and Afterlife” held in July 2011 in Berlin. Cf. a German version of this text focusing on spectacularities of staging female Partisans in Socialist Yugoslavia. Vittorelli, Natascha: “Kriegerin und Krankenschwester. Mehr oder weniger spektakuläre Inszenierungen der Partisanin im sozialistischen Jugoslawien”, in: L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 23.1 (2012): 73– 90. Cf. Slapšak, Svetlana: “Partizanka”, in: Svetlana Slapšak: Ženske ikone XX veka, Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek 2001: 206–210. Interestingly enough the figure of the Partisan was no subject of theoretical discussion in Socialist Yugoslavia. Probably the most important theoretician of the Partisan is Carl Schmitt. Cf. Schmitt, Carl: Theorie des Partisanen. Zwi-

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Socialist Yugoslavia based its historic state formation as well as its symbolic existence on the successful resistance against Fascism and National Socialism. Women were ascribed a decisive involvement4 in the victory against foreign occupants and domestic combatants. The image of the female Partisan was therefore widely employed a “symbol of Socialist Yugoslavia”5. But while war still acted as “a great leveller”6, by the end of WWII the limits of officially proclaimed gender equality became obvious. The ruling – and be it a socialist – gender order seemed threatened by images of armed, fighting, firing and (potentially) killing women. Two telling statements Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) made – the first during wartime, the second one in the late 1950s – clearly illustrate this change of attitude. At the first conference of the Antifascist Front of Women (“Antifašistički front žena” – AFŽ)7 on December 5th 1942 Josip Broz Tito spoke to the delegates of “our heroic women of Yugoslavia”:

4

5 6 7

schenbemerkungen zum Begriff des Politischen, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 20025 (1963). Among the most significant theoreticians of Partisan warfare rate Vladimir Il’ič Ul’janov – Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ernesto Che Guevara. “In no other country in the world have women played such a decisive part in the achievement of victory over an occupying enemy and the realization of a Communist state.” Jancar-Webster, Barbara: Women and Revolution. Yugoslavia 1941–1945, Denver: Arden Press 1991: 1. Jancar, Barbara: “Yugoslavia. War of Resistance”, in: Nancy Goldman Loring (ed.), Female Soldiers. Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Westport, London: Greenwood Press 1982: 92. B. Jancar: “Yugoslavia. War of Resistance”, 95. On the history of the “Antifascist Front of Women” cf. Popov, Čedomir: “Formiranje AFŽ-a 1942. Rezultat stava KPJ prema ženskom pitanju i posledice politike stvaranja narodnog fronta”, in: Godišnjak filozofskog fakulteta u Novom Sadu 6 (1961): 9–55; Reed, Mary E.: “The ‘Anti-fascist Front of Women’ and the Communist Party in Croatia. Conflicts within the Resistance”, in: Tova Yedlin (ed.), Women in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, New York: Praeger 1980: 128–139; Sklevicky, Lydia: “Organizirana djelatnost žena Hrvatske za vrijeme narodnooslobodilačke borbe 1941–1945”, in: Povijesni prilozi 3 (1984): 85–127; Sklevicky, Lydia: “‘Antifašistička fronta žena’. Kulturnom mijenom do žene ‘Novog tipa’”, in: Lydia Sklevicky: Konji, žene, ratovi, Odabrala i priredila Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka 1996: 25–62; Sklevicky, Lydia: “Emancipacija i organizacija. Uloga ‘Antifašističke fronte žena’ u postrevolucionarnim mijenama društva”, in: Lydia Sklevicky: Konji, žene, ratovi, Odabrala i priredila Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka 1996: 63–152.

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“Women today are fighting shoulder to shoulder with men for the liberation of the peoples of Yugoslavia […]. The daughters of our peoples stand in the first rows of the People’s Liberation Army and the Partisan forces of Yugoslavia. […] Our women, our daughters, mothers, participate with guns [sic!] in their hands in the People’s Liberation Fight. I am proud to head an army, which possesses an enormous number of women.”8

While already this speech repeatedly stressed the importance of women’s tasks in the hinterland, an interview Josip Broz gave 1959 marking the 40th anniversary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, fulfilled a remarkable shift replacing guns by humanity and the female fighter by the female medic: “During war women in the hinterland as well as at the front wrote the most glorious pages in the history of our revolutionary fight […]. Women brought humanity [sic!] into our fight and passed it on to our fighters. The protection and rescue of injured was a moral obligation for each fighter. It was precisely women, who discharged this obligation. The human element played a crucial role in the strengthening of morale, as our people could be confident, that in case of injury everything would be done for their rescue.”9

These ambivalences concerning the “partisan myth of equality”10 were reflected by historiography as well: The existence of female combatants was either emphasized or – pointing out the importance of female civic resistance and infrastructural activity like medical, care or courier services, educational activities and political propaganda – marginalized. Both narratives accounted for the heroisation of women’s participation in the NOB, the “People’s Liberation Struggle”. The female Partisan I want to capture could be called a socialist icon of femininity. As such, she oscillates between fighter and medic. She adopts masculine attributes, but is thrown back on her femininity. A revolutionary gender order is insinuated but not established. I believe that in this process 8

Broz, Josip Tito: “Govor na prvoj zemaljskoj konferenciji Antifašističkog fronta žena”, in: Josip Tito Broz: Žene u revoluciji, Sarajevo: Svjetlost et. al. 1978: 80f. All translations from Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and German are mine, NV. 9 Broz, Josip Tito: “Odgovor na pitanja glavnog urednika časopisa Žena danas”, in: Josip Tito Broz: Žene u revoluciji, Sarajevo: Svjetlost et. al. 1978: 199f. 10 B. Jancar-Webster: Women and Revolution, 96.

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the gun plays a crucial role in gender related distinction. With the help of three case studies I want to introduce three modes of un/armed representation of female Partisans, which deeply influenced the symbolic landscape of Socialist Yugoslavia. The choice of audio-visual set pieces is representative and arbitrary at the same time. The female Partisan thereby becomes visible as a figure whose historic existence made changes in post-war Yugoslav gender order possible and at once impressively represents the limits of these changes.

F RANJA ,

THE FEMALE PARTISAN WITHOUT GUN

In her most legitimated version the female Partisan enters the theatre of war as a medic, possibly as a doctor.11 Personating the unarmed resistance fighter she puts gender disorder due to war back into order. Fulfilling traditionally female duties as caring and nursing she nevertheless promises a revolutionalisation of gender relations. She stands for humanity and solidarity, altruism and idealism in times of war. When Yugoslav historiography and visual culture refer to the female Partisan at all, the representation of the medic dominates. The former “Partisan hospital Franja”12 in Dolenji Novaki near Cerkno, in today’s Slovenia, was made accessible to public in 1946. The name “Franja” referred to the doctor Franja Bojc Bidovec (1913–1985), who headed the hospital from January 1944 to May 1945.13 At the time of its construction in December 1943 the “Partisan hospital Franja” consisted of a 11 On female doctors in the People’s Liberation Struggle cf.: Gavrilović, Vera S.: Žene lekarke u ratovima 1876–1945. Na tlu Jugoslavije, Beograd: Naučno društvo za istoriju zdravstvene kulture Jugoslavije 1976: 53–106. 12 Only an insignificant amount of the about 120 conspirative Partisan hospitals on Slovenian ground were preserved and only an insignificant amount of them were named after individuals. 13 With the exception of an intermission in the summer of 1944: Franja Bojc was removed as head of the Partisan hospital as she was subjected to a penal procedure. Among others she was charged with “rough negligence of professional duties, disintegration of the internal cohesion among Partisans, damaging influence on medic bases of the People’s Liberation Army.” Franja Bojc was acquitted of all charges and returned as head of the Partisan hospital “Franja” at the beginning of October 1944. On the trial against Franja Bojc and her superior Viktor Volčjak (1913–1987) cf.: Jeraj, Mateja/Melik, Jelka: Partizanski zdravniki in pravniki med stroko in politico, Ljubljana: Arhivsko društvo Slovenije 1996.

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single wooden shack. Until the end of war a range of other facilities were added: sick, operation, treatment and washing rooms, kitchen, storage, bunkers, an asylum for invalids; even an X-ray chamber, a disinfection tank, and a small power station were supplied. The later cultural monument “Franja” was designed a spectacular image of these historic conditions. Visitors had to cross a narrow gorge, passing torrent and waterfall to finally reach a ravine. The museum complex was equipped with furnishings, facilities and medical instruments. Nevertheless, something seemed to be missing within the scope of the museum’s presentation: While the former Partisan doctor and head of the hospital was present as name-giver, no visual image of Franja Bojc Bidovec was provided. In the 1950s the museum’s janitor wrote a series of monthly reports to Ljubljana repeatedly indicating the public’s wish for at least a portrayal of the former Partisan hospital’s head and museum’s name-giver.14 Probably at the beginning of the 1960s, this wish was finally granted and a typical portrait installed.

Ill. 1: Portrait of Franja Bojc Bidovec (1913–1985), from: V. Gavrilović: Vera S.: Žene lekarke, s.p. 14 France Bevk sent his hand-written reports to the “Zavod za varstvo in znanstveno proučavanje kulturnih spomenkov in prirodnih znamenitosti Slovenijie“. See his letters dated September 1, 1953 (document 18–53); September 2, 1956 (document 11–56); 2.11.1956 (document 17–56) as well as January 1, 1957 (document 1–57). Ministarstvo za kulturo republike Slovenije. Indok center pri direktoratu za kulturno dediščino. Arhiv spisov Bolnišnica “Franja“.

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This addition to the existing composition shows a young, neat woman with dark hair wearing a coatee and a side cap. She is indicating a smile while her gaze seems to wander wide and look past the viewer. This picture fits into a general pattern with which female Partisans were preferably staged: a woman wearing the features of uniform and side cap, but without any gun. As a doctor Franja Bojc Bidovec did not extinguish life, but saved it. The former invisibility of the female Partisan was thereby replaced by a legitimate kind of visibility.

S LAVICA ,

THE FEMALE PARTISAN WITH GUN

Previous to its first showing on 13 May 1947 several dailies had been announcing the media event;15 Belgrade’s trolley cars, showcases, billboards and advertising pillars were lettered with the name of the film-title SLAVICA (1947, D: Vjekoslav Afrić). In the days after the premiere hundreds of men, women and adolescents were patiently queuing for tickets for one of the several daily screenings.16 The realization of the first Yugoslav feature film only two years after the end of WWII constituted a sheer sensation: Communication and transport infrastructure as well as Yugoslavia’s industry were almost completely destroyed. One million out of the 16 million inhabitants at the start of war had lost their lives; millions were forced to flee or had suffered the

15 Cf. Borba, 4 May 1947: 6; Glas, 4 May 1947: 7; Politika, 4. May 1947: 8;“‘Slavica’ – Prvi domaći umetnički film završen je pre kratkog vremena“, in: Politika, 7. May 1947: 5; “Pred premijeru prvog domaćeg umetničkog filma“, in: Glas, 8. May 1947: 4; “Naš prvi domaći umetnički film“, in: 20. Oktobar, 9 May 1947: 9; 20. Oktobar, 9 May 1947: 10; Borba, 11 May 1947: 5; Politika, 11 May 1947: 8;“Pisac scenarija i reditelj “Slavice” Vjeko Afrić govori nam o radu na ovom filmu“, in: Politika, 12 May 1947: 5; Borba, 13 May 1947: 6; Radosavljević, Marija: “Stvaraoci filma “Slavica” o svom zajedničkom delu“, in: Glas, 13 May 1947: 5; Glas, 13 May 1947: 7. 16 Cf. Bunuševac, Radmila: “Prvi umetnički film domaće proizvodnje”, in: Politika, 18 May 1947: 7.

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loss of their homes or holdings.17 Before WWII a Yugoslav film industry was virtually absent.18 Considering these circumstances the conditions under which the first Yugoslav feature film was produced were challenging: a scriptwriter and director – Vjekoslav Afrić (1906–1980) –, who never before had written a script and only once had worked as an assistant director; a director of photography, who had assisted in two documentaries; stage actors who possessed no experience in shooting; scarce technical equipment, which was insufficient or out of date; no film sets; no lightning. No wonder, that experts did not await the first Yugoslav full-length movie before the beginning of the 1950s.19 No wonder either, that the first showing was staged as a spectacle and Yugoslav audience received SLAVICA with love, pride and tenderness.20 The film became a remarkable success and was to gain the status of a cult movie. Besides the fact that it simply marked “our” first feature film, the plot – entangling recent war history with questions of class and gender – contributed to its significance. The owners of the local fish cannery exploit the inhabitants of a Dalmatian village. A group of factory workers decides to fix their own fishing boat. In the course of preparations Slavica and Marin get to know and love each other. The day of their marriage Slavica launches the boat, which is named after her. It is the same day the Axis powers start the Balkan campaign. Italian troops occupy Dalmatia. Their local henchmen want to confiscate the “Slavica”, but the fishing cooperative refuses delivery and hides the boat. As a result village folk is captured and liberated by the Partisans in the nick of time. They flee to the mountainous hinterland, where progressive factory workers join the Partisans. Ivo Marušić, the commander, gives out the few weapons in their possession – three rifles and one gun. While the rifles are handed out to men, Slavica claims the only gun for herself. 17 Cf. Pavković, Aleksandar: The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Nationalism and War in the Balkans, Basingstoke: Macmillan 20002 (1997): 42. 18 Cf. Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience, 1945– 2001, Bloomington/Indianapolis (Revised and Expanded Edition): Indiana University Press 2002: 1–4. 19 Cf. “Pisac scenarija i reditelj ‘Slavice’ Vjeko Afrić govori nam o radu na ovom filmu“, in: Politika, 12 May 1947: 5; Radosavljević, Marija: “Stvaraoci filma ‘Slavica’ o svom zajedničkom delu“, in: Glas, 13 May 1947: 5. 20 Cf. Filipović, Frida: “Slavica”, in: Glas, 14 May 1947: 4; Drašković, Branko: “Još jednom o ‘Slavici’”, in: Borba, 8 July 1947: 2; Soldić, Luka: “Naš prvi film ‘Slavica’”, in: Mladost 3.6 (1947): 91.

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When Slavica’s mother tries to prevent Ivo Marušić from doing so, he counters: “No, mother, she too has hands and head. She too possesses the right to fight.” Slavica takes the gun and becomes the “first female Partisan”.21 War takes her to Bosnia. Marin is appointed commander of the boat “Slavica”, which is incorporated into the Partisan navy. The couple meets again in 1944 in Split, where Marin is recovering from a war injury. Slavica is detached to the crew of the “Slavica”. In the following naval action male crewmembers are firing at the enemy from the deck, while Slavica plugs the bullet holes bellow trying to prevent the ship from sinking. In this scene Slavica “sacrifices her young body”.22 She dies fighting against Fascism and National Socialism and for the liberation of her country.

Ill. 2: Slavica (performed by Irena Kolesar) – still wearing everyday clothes – receives the gun including a gunbelt thus becoming ‘the first female Partisan’. Still from SLAVICA. The ‘revolutionary’ gender order established by the film appears rather ambivalent: Slavica goes to war, is carrying gun and rifle, during a deployment she even holds the ammunition belt, while Marin is operating the machine gun. But in no scene is Slavica seen firing a shot. On the contrary: She is shown bandaging a wounded combatant and nursing Marin during his recovery. Despite this – or precisely because of it – it is Slavica who is dying, not Ivo Marušić, not Marin, not Stipe, not Barba Tone and none of 21 “Slavica”, in: Žena danas 49 (1947): 51. 22 “Slavica”, in: Žena danas 49 (1947): 51.

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her other brothers-in-arms. While Slavica becomes a heroine by dying, her comrades survive as heroes.23

Ill. 3: The couple’s reencounter on the deck of the “Slavica”: Slavica is kneeling in the pose of the medic besides the wounded Marin (played by Marijan Lovrić), while still wearing the uniform, the side cap and the shouldered rifle of the fighter. Still from SLAVICA.

Ill. 4: In the following scene the fighter is disarmed, has taken off her side cap and unbuttoned her uniform jacket. The medic puts a bandage on the wounded who is suffering from pain. Still from SLAVICA.

23 “Not even in death were women and men ‘equal’, for they gave up their lives in proportionally greater numbers than men.” B. Jancar: “Yugoslavia. War of Resistance”, 85.

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However: Slavica makes her choices consciously and independently. She clearly expresses her – sincere and honest – desire. She is the one kissing Marin and suggesting marriage, which is legitimizing their bond shortly before the outbreak of war. Despite the lawfulness of their union spatial separation ensures sexual abstinence. Heterosexuality as well as chastity is affirmed. For her enemies as well as her brothers-in-arms the armed woman embodies self-determined and offensive female sexuality: “The woman with gun is choosing herself.”24 Which is exactly what Slavica does: She is choosing husband as well as arms herself. Whether it be the class enemy or the war enemy, there is no doubt in her mind that her fight is just and necessary. In favor of a new social order Slavica swaps everyday clothes for uniform and weapon. She takes the risk of losing her job and being injured, captured, tortured and even killed. “Was her death really necessary?” Svetlana Slapšak asked in this context.25 Even more than by the question of its necessity I am intrigued by the consequences of Slavica’s death. The spectacularity of her death’s staging shows the degree of the character’s willingness to make sacrifices. Slavica carries it to extremes and gives her life in a vain and hopeless fight against the sea. But even then the film title remains vague: Does “SLAVICA” mean the Partisan or the ship? And is Slavica the protagonist of the film at all?

K OZARČANKA , THE FEMALE PARTISAN WITH AND WITHOUT GUN In 1943 Georgije (Žorž) Skrigin (1910–1997) – the later director of photography of SLAVICA and later on a film director himself – shot the photograph of an armed Partisan. The young woman wears her shoulder-length hair loose, a thick cardigan, a five-pointed side cap – and a rifle. She appears healthy, reposed, and good-humored, her clothes are neat and tidy. The glance over her shoulder reinforces the dynamics of her gesture, the bright smile communicates confidence and optimism, even joy and enthusiasm; the dangers and exertions of war seem remote, the victory near. Quite relaxed she seems to go to a war, which promises adventure and gender equality. Her belief and voluntariness – at no time women were drafted – 24 S. Slapšak: “Partizanka”, 209. 25 S. Slapšak: “Partizanka”, 209.

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make the People’s Liberation Struggle a cause of the ‘whole nation’ and lend the legitimacy of this nation’s cause a womanly face.26

Ill. 5: Kozarčanka (Woman from Kozara), in: Skrigin, Žorž: Rat i pozornica. Beograd: Turistička štampa 1968: 248. The tension between woman and weapon emphasizes the femininity of the young Partisan, but despite the rifle she rather radiates harmlessness than harassment; her girlishness undermines the provocation the female Partisan implies. In his publication “War and Stage” Žorž Skrigin supplied the picture with a legend, that testifies to the bravery, patriotism and grits of a young woman who already looked back at a colorful past: “As a young woman she was captured during the First Enemy Offensive.27 She succeeded in escaping – even from Germany – and reached Kozara,28 where she became a fighter of the Kozara forces.”29 The picture above gives the young smiling woman a heroic aura. And “Kozarčanka” (“Woman from Kozara”) actually gained iconic status within 26 Cf. Gerhard Paul’s observations on the Spanish Civil War. Paul, Gerhard: Bilder des Krieges. Krieg der Bilder. Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges, München: Wilhelm Fink 2004: 173–205. 27 Yugoslav historiography divided the course of WWII on Yugoslav territory into altogether Seven Enemy Offensives of the Axis powers. 28 Kozara is a mountain in Nord-western Bosnia and Herzegovina, where in June and July 1942 the battle of Kozara as part of the German operation “West Bosnia” took place. 29 Skrigin, Žorž: Rat i pozornica, Beograd: Turistička štampa 1968: 248.

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Socialist Yugoslavia. Out of the rich afterlife of the picture I will single out one moment from the late years of Socialist Yugoslavia.30 In 1986 the band Merlin released their album “I can hardly bear being with you, but even less without you” (“Teško meni sa tobom a još teže bez tebe”). The front side of the album-cover was inspired by Skrigin’s “Kozarčanka”. The beaming face of the young Partisan is shown in black color on blood-red ground. Contrast enhancement and simplification of shadow zones reduce the plasticity of the portrayal and at the same time increase its suggestivity. Nuances are achieved by horizontal stripes, which vary according to the degree of darkness. While the side cap remains clearly recognizable, the picture no longer shows either cardigan or rifle anymore. The unmistakable reference to the composition of the poster “Hasta la victoria siempre”, a graphic redrawing of Ernesto Che Guevara’s famous photograph, provides the picture with revolutionary appeal.

Ill. 6: The front of the album cover “Teško meni sa tobom a još teže bez tebe” (“I can hardly bear being with you, but even less without you”) from the band Merlin, YU 1986.

30 So far I have not been able to discover if (a Yugoslav) public already before Žorž Skrigin’s publication in 1968 knew and was familiar with the image of “Kozarčanka”.

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The caption with the second half of the album’s title “but even less without you” partially overlaps the face of the Partisan. The band’s name Merlin is displayed in white capital letters above the head of the young woman. The back of the album-cover unambiguously contrasts the female Partisan with one of Hollywood’s most famous divas: stylized by airbrush technique Marilyn Monroe is shown smiling exuberantly; the blood-red painted lips offset her pearly-white teeth; the mandatory birth mark above the top lip is plainly visible, the eyebrows clearly accentuated, the head thrown back, the platinum blond hair carefully draped. While skin, hair and background are kept in a similar shade of colour and softened by the use of airbrush, lips, eyes and beauty spot are shown clearly defined. With her eyes half-open Marilyn Monroe appears to look directly at the viewer. Given the album-title it seems beyond question that this viewer is male. In the lower right corner the first half of the album title “I can hardly bear being with you” is written over her hair. This time the band’s name Merlin is displayed in black capital letters above the head of the actress – and singer.

Ill. 7: The back of the album cover “Teško meni sa tobom a još teže bez tebe” (“I can hardly bear being with you, but even less without you”) from the band Merlin, YU 1986.

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As the songs and their texts show no direct link to the subject of the albumcover, the confrontation of both types of women seems to suggest fun, but principally arbitrariness. At a time when the Partisan myth had already lost its sanctity, socialist as well as capitalist icons of femininity could enter the repertoire of Yugoslav popular culture and reveal dissimilarity as well as similarities at the same time. In reversing the two halves of the album title, front and back covers strongly correlate with each other: While Kozarčanka has been disarmed and deprived of any threat, Marilyn Monroe is fighting with the kind of dangerous weapons women are said to have at their disposal. The bright and shining picture makes Marilyn Monroe appear as in an enraptured limbo; and only retrospectively is it possible to read into the female Partisan against the blood-red background, who being without is even less bearable, an announcement of Socialist Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Long after the end of WWII, Socialist Yugoslavia and the wars of the 1990s, the identity of Kozarčanka was established. In 2007 Milja Marin (1926–2007), née Toroman, revealed herself as being the famous female Partisan. It turned out, that during WWII she had been a medic. Among five other medics Žorž Skrigin had chosen Milja Toroman for his shot. He put the jumper on her, combed her hair, put the side cap with the five-pointed star on her forehead and slung the rifle over her shoulder. He asked her to smile and shot the legendary photo. Never before or after had Milja Toroman carried a gun.31

31 Milja Marin shortly before her death. Thanks to Barbara N. Wiesinger for sharing this information with me. Cf. Kovačević, Dinka: “Mlada partizanka iz čitanke”, in: Nezavisne novine 3172, 9 June 2007: 7, http://www.nezavisne.com/novo sti/bih/Mlada-partizanka-iz-citanke-10554.html, last access: 1 December 2011; “Milja Marin iz Prijedora je čuvana partizanka sa slike”, 23 June 2007, http://pri jedorcity.com/component/content/article/13-prijedor/1731, last access: 11 August 2011; R.R.: “Preminula partizanka sa znamenite slike”, 16 November 2007, http://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/preminula-partizanka-sa-znamenite-fotografi je/365130.aspx, last access: 1 December 2011; “Umrla partizanska Merlin Monro”, http://www.srpskadijaspora.info/vest.asp?id=9336, last access: 1 December 2011.

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As a central founding myth of Socialist Yugoslavia the fight and victory of the Partisans remained – even if increasingly contested – ever-present. The chosen case studies show how historical substance originating from WWII served and was readily used as a basis for postwar staging – for instance by transforming a Partisan hospital into a cultural monument. Or – as in the case of Kozarčanka – by deploying Partisan staging, dating from WWII, for staging of Partisans after the war. Using original material reinforced the authenticity and credibility32 of staging and at the same time blurred the distinction between wartime and postwar period.33 The female Partisan could be a medic or a fighter or both. By uniting medic and fighter, the figure of the female Partisan seems to erase the difference between the woman going to war, wearing uniform and carrying guns, willing to kill and to die for her convictions, and the woman nursing and caring for her injured and wounded brothers-in-arms, saving or at least prolonging their lives through her devotion and dedication. Oscillating between invisibility and visibility, legitimacy and illegitimacy, marginalisation and spectacularisation, intimisation, erotisation and sexualisation she experiences conflation and multiplication at the same time: “Franja” was the name of the Partisan doctor Franja Bojc Bidovec, head of a conspirative Partisan hospital named after her, which was turned into a cultural monument of the same name after WWII; SLAVICA is the title of a film about a female Partisan named Slavica, after whom a boat was named; behind the fighter “Kozarčanka” the medic Milja Toroman was hiding. The female Partisan has no name at all or is known only under her first name. In the process of staging the female Partisan a crucial role was assigned to weapons. Carrying and using weapons stand for power, violence, threat, danger, protection, injury, killing, and death. All these terms conventionally are associated with men, not women. But war times mark exceptional con32 Vjekoslav Afrić, Žorž Skrigin, Irena Kolesar (1925–2002) as well as many others of the actors of SLAVICA were members of the “People’s Liberation Theater”. Their involvement in the Partisan movement strengthened the authenticity of the film’s plot. On “strategies of authentication” in films on Partisans including the death of protagonists, cf. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan Film & Genre Mimicry. A Historical Survey”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 18. 33 The rhetoric of ‘cold war’ reflects this perceived need of blurring the differences between war and peace clearly.

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ditions: Not only is violence and killing legitimatised; even the female warrior – under normal circumstances representing an oxymoron – becomes possible while still staying exceptional. This exceptional status becomes even more evident in the staging of the female Partisan after WWII. Only then the ambivalences concerning armed women were revealed. Even in the socialist gender order, which had continuously to be established, the female Partisan was not to equal her brother-in-arms and therefore was either disarmed or replaced by the unarmed resistance fighter. The former invisibility of the female Partisan herself was replaced by the invisibility of the weapons she was occasionally carrying. In cases when the female Partisan was shown wearing weapons, she was not making any use of them. The ambivalences concerning the staging of female Partisans not only reflect ambivalences concerning the armed participation of women in the fighting of WWII, but also ambivalences of what was to be a post-war socialist gender order. Gender inequality during WWII continued after the end of the war. In the course of WWII and immediately after the end of the war the active involvement of women in the National Liberation Struggle as well as in the realization of a ‘Socialist Revolution’ served as a central argument for granting women’s suffrage, women’s right for education and the opening of the labour market for women.34 The historic existence of female Partisans may have contributed to changes in Yugoslav gender order, but her armed or mainly unarmed staging refers to the ambivalences of the officially proclaimed gender equality in Socialist Yugoslavia.

B IBLIOGRAPHY 20. Oktobar, 9 May 1947: 10. “Milja Marin iz Prijedora je čuvana partizanka sa slike”, 23 June 2007, http://prijedorcity.com/component/content/article/13-prijedor/1731, last access: 11 August 2011. Bevk, France: Document 18–53 (1 September 1953); Document 11–56 (2 September 1956); Document 17–56 (2. November 1956); Document 1– 34 Whereby decades of feminist struggle by women and the women’s movement in the Yugoslav region were denied. Cf. for example Vittorelli, Natascha: Frauenbewegung um 1900. Über Triest nach Zagreb, Vienna: Löcker 2007.

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57 (1 January 1957). Ministarstvo za kulturo republike Slovenije. Indok center pri direktoratu za kulturno dediščino. Arhiv spisov Bolnišnica “Franja“. Borba, 13 May 1947: 6. Borba, 11 May 1947: 5. Borba, 4 May 1947: 6. Broz, Josip Tito: “Odgovor na pitanja glavnog urednika časopisa Žena danas”, in: Josip Tito Broz: Žene u revoluciji, Sarajevo: Svjetlost et. al. 1978: 195–205. Broz, Josip Tito: “Govor na prvoj zemaljskoj konferenciji Antifašističkog fronta žena”, in: Josip Tito Broz: Žene u revoluciji, Sarajevo: Svjetlost et. al. 1978: 80–85. Bunuševac, Radmila: “Prvi umetnički film domaće proizvodnje”, in: Politika, 18 May 1947: 7. Drašković, Branko: “Još jednom o ‘Slavici’”, in: Borba, 8 July 1947: 2. Filipović, Frida: “Slavica”, in: Glas, 14 May 1947: 4. Gavrilović, Vera S.: Žene lekarke u ratovima 1876–1945. Na tlu Jugoslavije, Beograd: Naučno društvo za istoriju zdravstvene kulture Jugoslavije 1976. Glas, 13 May 1947: 7. Glas, 4 May 1947: 7. Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience, 1945– 2001, Bloomington/Indianapolis (Revised and Expanded Edition): Indiana University Press 2002. Jancar-Webster, Barbara: Women and Revolution. Yugoslavia 1941–1945, Denver: Arden Press 1991. Jancar, Barbara: “Yugoslavia. War of Resistance”, in: Nancy Goldman Loring (ed.), Female Soldiers. Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Westport, London: Greenwood Press 1982: 85–105. Jeraj, Mateja/Melik, Jelka: Partizanski zdravniki in pravniki med stroko in politico, Ljubljana: Arhivsko društvo Slovenije 1996. Kovačević, Dinka: “Mlada partizanka iz čitanke”, in: Nezavisne novine 3172, 9 June 2007: 7, http://www.nezavisne.com/novosti/bih/Mladapartizanka-iz-citanke-10554.html, last access: 1 December 2011. “Naš prvi domaći umetnički film”, in: 20. Oktobar, 9 May 1947: 9.

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Paul, Gerhard: Bilder des Krieges. Krieg der Bilder. Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges, München: Wilhelm Fink 2004. Pavković, Aleksandar: The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Nationalism and War in the Balkans, Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000 2 (1997). “Pisac scenarija i reditelj ‘Slavice’ Vjeko Afrić govori nam o radu na ovom filmu“, in: Politika, 12 May 1947: 5. Politika, 11 May 1947: 8. Politika, 4 May 1947: 8. Popov, Čedomir: “Formiranje AFŽ-a 1942. Rezultat stava KPJ prema ženskom pitanju i posledice politike stvaranja narodnog fronta”, in: Godišnjak filozofskog fakulteta u Novom Sadu 6 (1961): 9–55. “Pred premijeru prvog domaćeg umetničkog filma”, in: Glas, 8 May 1947: 4. R. R.: “Preminula partizanka sa znamenite slike”, 16 November 2007, http: //www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/preminula-partizanka-sa-znamenitefotografije/365130.aspx, last access: 1 December 2011. Radosavljević, Marija: “Stvaraoci filma ‘Slavica’ o svom zajedničkom delu“, in: Glas, 13 May 1947: 5. Reed, Mary E.: “The ‘Anti-fascist Front of Women’ and the Communist Party in Croatia. Conflicts within the Resistance”, in: Tova Yedlin (ed.), Women in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, New York: Praeger 1980: 128–139. Schmitt, Carl: Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkungen zum Begriff des Politischen, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 2002 (1963). Sklevicky, Lydia: “‘Antifašistička fronta žena’. Kulturnom mijenom do žene ‘Novog tipa’”, in: Lydia Sklevicky: Konji, žene, ratovi, Odabrala i priredila Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka 1996: 25–62. Sklevicky, Lydia: “Emancipacija i organizacija. Uloga ‘Antifašističke fronte žena’ u postrevolucionarnim mijenama društva”, in: Lydia Sklevicky: Konji, žene, ratovi, Odabrala i priredila Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka 1996: 63–152. Sklevicky, Lydia: “Organizirana djelatnost žena Hrvatske za vrijeme narodnooslobodilačke borbe 1941–1945”, in: Povijesni prilozi 3 (1984): 85–127. Skrigin, Žorž: Rat i pozornica, Beograd: Turistička štampa 1968.

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Slapšak, Svetlana: “Partizanka”, in: Svetlana Slapšak: Ženske ikone XX veka, Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek 2001: 206–210. “Slavica”, in: Žena danas 49 (1947): 51. “‘Slavica’ – Prvi domaći umetnički film završen je pre kratkog vremena”, in: Politika, 7 May 1947: 5. Soldić, Luka: “Naš prvi film ‘Slavica’”, in: Mladost 3.6 (1947): 91–93. “Umrla partizanska Merlin Monro”, http://www.srpskadijaspora.info/ vest.asp?id=9336, last access: 1 December 2011. Vittorelli, Natascha: “Kriegerin und Krankenschwester. Mehr oder weniger spektakuläre Inszenierungen der Partisanin im sozialistischen Jugoslawien”, in: L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 23.1 (2012): 73-90. Vittorelli, Natascha: Frauenbewegung um 1900. Über Triest nach Zagreb, Wien: Löcker 2007. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan Film & Genre Mimicry. A Historical Survey”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 13–21.

F ILMOGRAPHY SLAVICA (YUG 1947, D: Vjekoslav Afrić)

Portraits of Yugoslav Army Soldiers. Between Partisan and Pop-Culture Imagery T ANJA P ETROVIĆ

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AND INTERPRETATIONAL UNCERTAINTY

There is probably not a single photo album1 in the former Yugoslavia that does not contain a portrait of a young man in the uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija, henceforth JNA)2 taken in a 1

2

As stressed by Frizot, “das Fotoalbum wird vor allem als Familienalbum, als ein privates Gedächtnis der Amateurfotografen thematisiert”, in: Frizot, Michel: “Familienalbum”, in: Michel Frizot (ed.), Neue Geschichte der Fotografie, Köln: Könemann 1998: 679. It is simultaneously a repository of memory and an instrument of social performance, see: Langford, Martha: “Speaking the Album: An Application of the Oral-Photographic Framework”, in: Annette Kuhn/Kirsten Emiko McAllister (eds.), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books 2006: 223. The narration provided by a photo album is usually organized chronologically around the most important individual and family rituals (education, wedding, travels etc.), see: Bickenbach, Matthias: “Fotoalbum”, in: Nicolas Pethes/Jens Ruchatz (eds.), Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon, Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag 2001: 178. The Yugoslav People’s Army was a military force of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Military service, which lasted between one and three years in different periods, was mandatory for all men after they turned eighteen and/or graduated from high school. Milićević, Aleksandra Sasha: “Joining the War: Masculinity, Nationalism and War Participation in the Balkans War of Secession, 1991–1995”, in: Nationalities Papers 34.3 (2006): 266. The JNA was an institution organized and ideologically shaped both as a central embodiment and main agent of the unity of all people living in socialist Yugoslavia. It was

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local studio in a town where the person in the photograph performed military service. The photographs in family albums depict male family members, but also relatives and friends, since JNA soldiers used to mail them home, as well as to their relatives and family friends. These photographs were often stylized as postcards, with the inscription “A souvenir from JNA” or “A memory from JNA”. Studio portraits of men in uniform are neither unique to Yugoslav soldiers nor are they a ‘socialist invention’.3 However, while portraits of this kind were usually taken during periods of war and were sent by soldiers to their family members with the main message that they were alive and well,4 in socialist Yugoslavia such studio portraits were products of a cultural practice that was characteristic of peaceful times. The portraits were embedded in family frames and ideology of patriarchal masculinity, but they also related to the state ideology, of which the JNA was an important part. Sending their photographs taken in local studios far away from their homes, young men were also sending a message to their families and friends that they were successfully completing the initiation to adulthood through fulfilling themselves in the role of Yugoslav army soldiers. Within the framework of the patriarchal tradition of the former Yugoslav societies, military service was perceived as a necessary step towards becoming a mature man who would be able to assume the responsibilities of the head of the family and a member of society.

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considered as one of the most important pillars of Yugoslav unity, and often referred to as “the forge of Yugoslavism” (kovačnica jugoslovenstva) and “school of brotherhood and unity”: Bjelajac, Mile: Jugoslovensko iskustvo sa multietničkom armijom 1918–1991 (Yugoslav experience with multiethnic army 1918– 1991), Belgrade: Udruženje za društvenu istoriju 1999: 13. To strengthen the idea of unity among all Yugoslav peoples, the JNA had a policy of sending recruits as far from their homes as possible, always to another socialist republic. On the website Skarabej – Online museum of old family photographs (www. skarabej.com), there are among numerous photographs of JNA soldiers also portraits of soldiers from all around the world (the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, etc.), as well as portraits taken in the former Yugoslav lands, but in earlier periods. Cf: Willis, Deborah: “A Search for Self: The Photograph and Black Family Life”, in: Marianne Hirsch (ed.), The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1999: 118–119. In her study of the WW1 postcards, Christine Brocks (2008) also discusses those in the form of soldiers’ portraits.

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The subjects of these portraits do not have much choice about how and where their photograph is taken, but are placed in a staged setting. The stage is neutral and does not provide any particular background. The only distinct and recognizable element of the photograph is the JNA uniform, which serves as a backdrop.

Ill. 1–2: Studio portraits of JNA soldiers Men photographed in dress uniform perform/stage the identity of the socialist Yugoslav soldier, just as Auschwitz inmates could have their portraits taken at a photo place that had a camp uniform – “a new and clean one – to make souvenir photos”5 perform, or stage the identity of the camp inmate.6 While in the latter case, the mere performance of the identity of a concentration camp inmate makes the photographs particularly disturbing,7 the identity performance of JNA soldiers is distinctly different in character. The JNA uniform as a backdrop, neutral background and fixed posture and photographic conventions and protocols make the practice of taking studio portraits of JNA soldiers highly ritualized. Understood as an initiation that enables young boys to enter the world of adults and become family men, the JNA service as a whole was ‘surrounded’ by a number of practices that were ritual in character. Army send-offs, paid songs played on local radio 5 6 7

Spiegelman, Art: Maus, zgodba o preživetju, II: In tu so se začele moje težave, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003: 134. Hirsch, Marianne: Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Post–memory, Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press 20022: 38. M. Hirsch: Family Frames: 38.

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stations at the request of parents, grandparents and relatives, being photographed in a local studio once they became JNA soldiers and sending photos to their family members, friends and relatives were all practices young men entering the JNA service were participating without necessarily being fully aware of their meaning and even without completely internalizing these practices and messages they could convey. The JNA service as an experience also possesses numerous features with which Stephan Feuchtwang8 defines ritual: it is characterized by repetition, standardization and ‘orthopraxy’ – it is a prescribed and thus deliberately learned discipline separated from the everyday; it is also essentially an expression of power that always involves negotiation of authority. The everyday reality of men serving in the JNA was composed of highly organized and structured practices that, once learned, became predictable. The hierarchy among the men involved was strictly defined. The language used in the Yugoslav army was highly structured and predictable as well. In (late) socialism it was characterized by standardization of discourse forms just as public language in general,9 but in the context of the military, where official communication was largely based on performatives (giving orders, asking for permissions...), the standardization of discourse forms and the consequent ritualization of language use were even more radical. This resulted in a situation where, as in ritualized practices that emphasized the traditional/patriarchal aspect of their military service, young men “regularly paid little attention to the literal meanings of the ritualized acts and pronouncements in which they participated”.10 The ritual nature of the JNA experience offers itself as a self-evident answer to the question why army stories are still so persistent and ubiquitous in the post-Yugoslav space and why they are ‘insensitive’ to currently dominant (national) discourses and ideologies as well as significantly changed values and generational differences. The fact that most former Yugoslav men who served in the JNA regard it as a worthwhile experience and still find it important to share their army stories and memories can be interpreted as a way for them to preserve and maintain the memories of that 8

Feuchtwang, Stephan: “Ritual and Memory”, in: Susannah Radstone/Bill Schwartz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press 2010: 281–298. 9 Yurchak, Alexei: Everything was Forever until it was no More: the Last Soviet Generation, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press 2006: 14. 10 A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever until it was no More: 16.

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peaceful, structured and ritualized period in which they were protected and others took care of their existence. Understood this way, these memories should provide a ‘shelter’ from the present as well as more recent past, both characterized by rupture, shaken structures, trauma and insecurity. While the ritual nature of the JNA certainly has to do with remembering military service as a way to forget some other experiences, the explanation that people remember their military service in order to overcome trauma proves unsatisfactory, considering that the need to remember their JNA service and to stress its positive aspects is expressed by a wide range of people who dramatically differ according to their social, educational and ethnic background, but also in the way how they acted in the 1990s as well as in self-perception and the degree of their success and security achieved in the post-Yugoslav period. Limited to this explanation, the understanding of JNA memories cannot avoid the traps of interpreting socialist experience in general – where subjects are perceived as passive and without tools to reflect upon their own experience and where the meaning of social structures is strongly emphasized, while subjectivities inscribed into these structures are largely ignored.11 To put it differently, in such interpretations, the former Yugoslav men subjected to the JNA institution are regarded as people who had no agency and who completely and passively gave themselves up to the JNA and its mechanisms of disciplining, controlling and managing. The aspect of personal engagement and investment stressed by so many former JNA soldiers while reflecting upon their army experience is neglected in such interpretations. As an alternative, I suggest not to look solely at the ways in which the institution of the JNA shaped the experience of the former Yugoslav men, but also at possibilities for their engagement and negotiations that emerged from the ritualized reality of the JNA service. The ritualization is always followed by detachment of the act from its literal meaning. This detachment has important consequences on the ways how the JNA service is remembered and how these memories are interpreted. At the time the service was performed, its ritualized nature provided the possibility for play and subversion without total exclusion of support. At the bottom line, identification was a precondition for any distance and subversion: soldiers had to acquire all the rules and conventions of these ritualized practices in order to be able

11 For more on this see A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever.

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both to subvert them and to ‘survive’ in the army. Detachment of the act from its literal meaning has also significant epistemological consequences on the ways how both the JNA experience and memories of it are interpreted. It makes practices constituting the JNA service and memories of the JNA “sites of epistemological uncertainty”12 about how to understand/interpret them and their actors. In this text I aim to explore the consequences that the ritualization of the practice of taking JNA studio photographs has had on the ways in which we ‘read’ these photographs today. Photographs that schematically depict young men in the JNA uniform put a strong emphasis on the form, which then prevents individuality from coming to the fore and ‘speaking’. What I want to argue here, however, is that this silenced individuality by no means makes all JNA soldiers ‘the same’ – on the contrary, this silence warns us that their sameness is only a frame for very different, often contradictory negotiations, and that the messages of the utterances they produce do not necessarily stick to the form. What is even more important, this “hegemony of form”13 grants JNA soldiers what I call representational autonomy, referring to representation mainly through the question who represents whom i.e. who speaks on behalf of whom.

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Despite the high uniformity of portraits, it is nevertheless possible to outline the development of JNA portraits with regard to their formality/degree of ritualization. Early JNA studio portraits draw heavily on the Partisan imagery from the war that had just ended. The soldiers depicted can be most easily placed in time by still not standardized uniforms, and the dividing line between Partisan fighters and early JNA soldiers is often blurred. On the website www.kolekcionari.com, which gathers collectors of varia from the past, one can follow several discussions as to whether some photographs depict Yugoslav Partisans or JNA soldiers from the early period. For collectors, the most reliable way to distinguish Partisans from early JNA soldiers is by the look of their uniforms. “In the early Yugoslav army soldiers would wear parts of German uniforms, but they were ‘de-nazified.’ 12 Appadurai, Arjun: “The Colonial Backdrop”, in: Afterimage 24 (1997): 4. 13 A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever, chapter 2.

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I have some photographs where this is visible... But in this (particular) photo they are Partisans for sure, because they wear uniforms of the Allies and some still have stars sewn on their caps – that was quite rare after 1946,” writes one of the discussants in reference to a photo depicting a group of six men in uniform.14 The same dilemma was also solved by a closer look at the uniform in the photo below, so that it was defined as a photo of a Partisan.

Ill. 3: A portrait of a Yugoslav Partisan The early period of JNA soldiers’ studio portraits is also recognizable by posture and decoration that were common for all studio portraits of the time: common elements of studio decoration, such as artificial flowers, curtains or armchairs, provided a scene for all kinds of portraits – of individuals, families, wedding couples, and soldiers alike. Although the reasons for using these elements were often technical, they nevertheless (albeit inadvertently) further contributed to securing the early JNA portraits a firm place among other family photos. Full figure portrait and a posture of the photographed soldier that enables eye contact are important characteristics of these early photos.

14 http://www.kolekcionari.com/showthread.php?t=10564, posted 15 April 2011, last access: 24 April 2011.

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Ill. 4–6: Early studio portraits of JNA soldiers While ideologically, the Partisan imagery was a fundamental element of the JNA throughout its existence, in the case of studio photography it is nevertheless possible to claim that the image of a JNA soldier gradually gained certain autonomy from the Partisan imagery – not by a radical break from the Partisan tradition, but with the formalization and increased fixity of the portraits and the ritualization of photographic practice. The posture, expression and design of the portrait as a whole were strongly fixed in the period roughly between the early 1960s and early 1980s.

Ill. 7–8: ‘Typical’ studio portraits of JNA soldiers Such portraits became romanticized, most saliently by the absence of eye contact, and got a tinge of the past the very moment they were created (the practice of making material memories/souvenirs from the JNA service).

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Apart from the absence of direct eye contact, the most salient visual characteristic of these portraits is the standardized and well-kept uniform. Also, in addition to belonging to the domains of the state ideological and the familial, the practice of studio photography became a site of negotiation of cultural identities for JNA soldiers. Portrayed subjects in the JNA uniform referred not only to the Partisan imagery, but also to various aspects of popular culture, such as the Hollywood world of celebrities. In SVEČANA OBAVEZA (1986), a TV movie directed by Božidar Nikolić and written by Siniša Kovačević, there is a scene in which after the military oath ceremony a soldier goes to a local photo studio called “Hollywood”. There he is asked by the photographer whether he wants to pose as Marlon Brando or have a “Greetings from JNA” inscription. He chooses the former, for which he has to pay more. Even these highly standardized portraits, strictly defined by the JNA uniform, show what Samuel draws attention to: “people [...] draw models for personal portraits from other media, including cinema.”15 This photographic practice provided a basis for cultural differentiation among soldiers: not all of them would make this kind of souvenirs – urban young men often considered it kitschy and a sign of backwardness. Although they would not make these portraits themselves, these same men nevertheless kept portraits of their army mates which they received from them as a souvenir. Placed in personal photo archives, portraits of army buddies – although a sign of cultural difference between the person photographed and the current possessor of the photograph accentuate the ties of friendship and emotional attachment between them. As in the case of other JNA-related practices, difference is simultaneously a basis for connection, solidarity and friendship (maintained or only remembered).

15 Samuel, Raphael: Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London: Verso 1994: 369.

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R EPRESENTATIONAL

AUTONOMY

As objects of interpretation, the portraits of JNA soldiers, defined by the JNA uniform and fixed posture, with individual characteristics pushed to the background, create an empty space which underlines the inherent ambiguity of the word ‘pose’ “with its double implications of posture as deception and posture as stance”.16 The empty space may be filled with different meanings. This emptiness does not leave ‘readers’ of the photographs much relaxing self-confidence: whatever way we read them, there is always an awareness that other readings are possible or, at least, cannot be absolutely excluded. This uncertainty related to ritualized objects and acts protects involved individuals and groups from exposure to interpretations with which they would not identify and assures them a certain amount of representational autonomy. At the time of serving in the army, JNA soldiers could make use of similar autonomy due to the ritualized nature of the JNA service. Let me illustrate this with an example of language use. Performing the JNA service, soldiers also acquired the language of the military. Conducted exclusively in Serbo-Croatian, communication within the JNA was highly ritualized and performative, abundant with technical terms, abbreviations for all possible procedures and objects (and long bureaucratic names for which these abbreviations stood), and commands that were used according to a precise protocol. In his study on late socialism in the Soviet Union, Aleksei Yurchak uses the Russian slang expression ‘stiob’ referring to “particular form of irony that differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision, or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humor. It required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which this ‘stiob’ was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two”.17 In the context of the Yugoslav army, where the official language use was strictly defined, strongly performative and ritualized, it is the combination of subjecting to the rules of official communication and overidentifying with the socialist ideology by an exaggerated use of its language that created a site for irony and potential subversion, simultaneously making it impossible to judge with certainty the 16 A. Appadurai: “The Colonial Backdrop”, 5 17 A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever, 250, emphasis in original.

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seriousness/sincerity of one’s statements and intentions. This capacity of language use within the army is nicely illustrated in the movie KARAULA (2006) in which a soldier, well-known for his problematic behavior, approaches his superior with an unusual request to go to Belgrade on foot to visit Tito’s grave. Expressing his request, the soldier, otherwise known as someone who breaks the rules and shows disobedience to authorities, strictly sticks to formal expressions and the prescribed use of language when addressing a superior officer. The officer, on the other hand, constantly tries to break the set rules – by informal responses to very formal addresses, by ironic comments, and by insulting qualifications. Deviating from clearly defined communicational rules is a privilege of a collocutor who is superior in rank, but this practice can be fully understood only if related to the concepts of interpretational uncertainty and representational autonomy: by breaking the fixity and ritualized character of formal communication, the lieutenant hopes that his collocutor will do the same, step out from the shelter provided by the fixed forms and make it possible for him to decide about the sincerity and seriousness of the soldier’s words. As long as the soldier remains in the framework of the fixed, ritualized forms and canons, the lieutenant cannot know whether the soldier really thinks what he says. Ritualized language and highly defined procedures of official communication within the JNA, which by its nature contributed to the strengthening of hierarchy and keeping soldiers subordinate to officers, simultaneously kept soldiers ‘safe’ by providing them with the possibility to express irony and detachment, in circumstances that made it impossible to form any reliable judgment about their sincerity. This impossibility paradoxically transforms the use of ritualized language into a tool for relativization – and even inversion – of positions defined in terms of authority and subordination. Let us now return to JNA studio portraits. The most radical realization of detachment of meaning from the form is observable in what the JNA jargon called ‘photos with memory’. Here the person photographed with his individual characteristics, attitudes and beliefs is pushed even more to the background: in these portraits the backdrop, already defined by the JNA uniform, comes to the foreground and becomes materialized as a frame in which individuals with their particularities are exchangeable. The frame is real – made of cardboard or wood, with inscription “Uspomena iz JNA” (Memory from the JNA – hence the name) and drawings of the Yugoslav

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flag, red star, tanks and other weapons, portrait of Tito and other images with which young men in uniform were expected to identify. Photographing in this kind of frames (typically available at sites such as amusement parks, tourist sites, fairs and festivals) usually suggests ludic atmosphere and implies “ideas of humor, irony or play”.18 It serves as a tool for “resistance to the realist pretensions of photography, by distorting or escaping quotidian contexts and predicaments”.19 The frames in which JNA soldiers were portrayed, however, are void of any ironic, humorous and ludic pretext (which does not necessarily imply that these meanings could not be attached to them). They did not signal deception, but the opposite, they stressed and brought to the fore the backdrop already defined by the JNA uniform.

Ill. 9–10: Portraits “with memory” Veselin Gatalo, a writer from Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, described his JNA service in Sarajevo in an autobiographic novel titled A Photo with Memory (Slika sa uspomenom, Gatalo 2009). The meaning of the title is revealed in one of the chapters: one day, his army buddy Nazif from Sandžak (a Muslim-populated border region between Serbia and Montenegro) left the barracks and went to town. The next day, he showed the author/narrator, with pride and delight, a photograph taken in a local studio.

18 A. Appadurai: “The Colonial Backdrop”, 5. 19 A. Appadurai: “The Colonial Backdrop”, 5.

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The narrator ironically describes what he saw: “It was him, Nazif, on the photo. Around him, Nazif, was some green heart-like wreath, with a red star on the top of it. Under the wreath were the letters JNA.”20 Nazif enthusiastically explained how to get this photo: “See, this is painted, and you need to stand here. The photographer takes a photo and after one week you can pick them up. [...] [The price] is nothing. I made three photos – one for my parents, one for my sister, and one for me [...]. It’s called a photo with memory. When you go to the photo studio that is what you need to ask for.”21 For the narrator, an urban guy from Mostar, ironic and reluctant about most aspects of the JNA experience, these photos were ridiculous, while for Nazif they were important and a source of pride, just as the fact that he was a JNA soldier. For the young man from an under-developed region of Sandžak, these were also rare photographs of himself. The movie SVEČANA OBAVEZA, too, features a humorous and ironic scene of ‘taking a photo with memory’: Zoran, a geography teacher from Belgrade impersonates his army buddy Ranko, a farmer from Vojvodina, and meets Ranko’s father, who abandoned and rejected his son many years ago, so that now he cannot recognize the deception. Having been drinking a lot already, they go to a local studio to take a photo. The photographer instructs Zoran how to hold ‘the memory’, a cardboard frame with the inscription “Memory from the JNA”, uttering sentences such as “Lift the memory! Put it down a little... Even the memory!”, which are logically absurd, but necessary to produce the desired result – the photo of the ‘son’, JNA soldier, with which the ‘father’ proudly leaves. During the photo session Zoran is visibly confused as a result of the combination of his fake identity and strange relationship with a man who believes to be his father, as well as of being drunk and involved in a photographic practice he would probably avoid if it were himself. However, the very outcome of ‘photographing with memory’ is by no means affected by the confusion and estrangement of its protagonist – it is a romanticized photo of a forwardlooking young man in uniform, framed with improvised decoration that is meant to transform the photo into an object of memory/souvenir the very instant it is created and to add a tinge of the pastness to it much earlier than

20 All translations into English from Gatalo (2009) are mine. 21 Gatalo, Veselin: Slika sa uspomenom, Sarajevo: Mauna-Fe 2009: 72.

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it actually becomes the past.22 It is very much like countless images of the same kind that can be found in family albums across the former Yugoslavia, internet collections of ‘old photographs’ and at auction sites where they are offered for a low price as ‘antiquities’. Or to put it differently: it is precisely the highly ritualized nature of studio photography practices, due to which the meaning of the practice/ritual was not necessarily important/available for those who practiced it (detachment of the meaning from the practice is further strengthened by the detachment of ‘memory’ from ‘the photo’ in this photographic practice), that enabled persons with so different backgrounds, personal stories and worldviews such as Zoran and Nazif to unproblematicaly ‘fit’ the improvised cardboard frames. Consequently, these uniform, standardized images allow for reading very different meanings into them. It is their explicit staginess that warns us that plain, one-layered interpretations cannot prove satisfactory for these images – and the same is also true for the army experience as a whole. The context in which studio portraits of JNA soldiers were produced assured portrayed persons a ‘protected’ and ‘autonomous’ position. Portrayed on their own initiative, but within a ritualized (familial and broadly social) framework in which this initiative could, to a large extent, be the fulfillment of set expectations, soldiers did not necessarily reflect upon the performed act. Furthermore, the very act of photographing was highly predefined by conventions and fixed protocols of the time, which minimized the role of the photographer in making decisions about the result of photographing. The minimized role of the photographer is nicely illustrated by the photographic scene in SVEČANA OBAVEZA: there is a large cross (X) drawn on the studio wall and the photographer does nothing but instruct the soldier to look at this sign. Uniformity of photos makes solders as individuals silenced, but not muted: it is precisely the ritualization and uniformity that 22 As Corinne Kratz points out, realism is not necessarily an inherent feature of portrait photography – on the contrary, “as photographic practice developed in the United States in the late 1830s, the extreme lifelike quality of daguerreotypes was seen as a hindrance to portraiture. Photographic conventions that distinguished between portrait and mere likeness developed in the 1840s, drawing on portrait conventions in other media”. Kratz, Corinne: The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press 2002: 118; cf. also Trachtenberg, Alan: Reading American Photographs, New York: Hill and Wang 1989: 24–26.

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makes us as ‘readers’ of these photographs uncertain about how to interpret them. The ‘voice’ of photographed soldiers is thus silenced, but not taken away from them – the fact that we do not hear it makes us aware that these voices may be very diverse. The photograph below may be taken as a metaphor of the time when both the fixed and ritualized nature of the studio photography practice and solidity of the Yugoslav army institution were already disintegrating; it seems to be a product of inertia and still present wider social expectations that could not be fulfilled any more.

Ill. 11: A photo of a JNA soldier on the eve of the dissolution of Yugoslavia The photo above was most probably taken in the 1980s, when the Yugoslav army lost much of its reputation as the “forge of Yugoslavism” and its firm structure already began to shake. At the same time, more precisely in 1986, Slovenian art photographer Jane Štravs took a number of portraits of JNA soldiers while performing his own military service in Belgrade. Three of them were later chosen to appear in his book of photographs in a series titled “JNA soldiers” and in the gallery on his website.23

23 Štravs, Jane: Photographic Incarnations, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003. And: www.stravs.net.

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Ill. 12-14: Yugoslav People’s Army soldier I-III (Jane Štravs: Photographic Incarnations.) The personalized black-and-white portraits were taken in an apparently non-official situation, which is most strongly suggested by the way soldiers wear the uniform. Featuring soldiers in front of a tarpaulin dressed in shabby gray uniforms, the photographs are reminiscent of the military photography genre – so much so that they unexpectedly, even absurdly, begin to remind us of Partisan photographs. The production of JNA photos of this genre, quite different from what JNA photos were several decades before, was only made possible after significant changes took place in the social and political economies in the former Yugoslavia. In this particular case, artistic production should also be placed in the specific Slovenian context of the 1980s. Štravs’ photographs, together with others taken in the 1980s, embody the artist’s critical stance towards social reality: in the words of Marina Gržinić, “Štravs’ work in the eighties is the re-articulation of life on

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the margins of a totalitarian structure”.24 The artist is similarly critical of post-socialist reality in the independent Slovenia in photographs taken in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.

P HOTOGRAPHY

AND POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

The above mentioned three portraits of JNA soldiers open a plethora of questions that concern politics of representation, mediation and interpretation. They emphasize the need to address the issues of the politics of representation which always involves power, knowledge and engagement25 and of representational control, which essentially concerns questions of authorship and audience26 as well as “questions about rights, authority, and the power to control which voices talk when, how much, in what order, in what language”.27 Practices of selecting and labeling, inherent to exhibitions and collection making, are also integral part of the politics of representation.28 In opposition to ritualized studio portraits discussed above, the three portraits of JNA soldiers taken by Jane Štravs are highly individualized, with a strong emphasis on the facial expression of the portrayed soldiers. At the first glance, they are also highly realistic, taken in a ‘natural’ setting of the JNA service and in a spontaneous, everyday situation. However, Štravs’s realism is misleading, which is also stressed by Gržinić, who writes that his photographs make us “refuse the early and ‘innocent’ belief that the camera merely presents us with visual facts that were simply ‘out there’ and which are now objectively observed and recorded”.29 Štravs took the three portraits using a wide-angle lens that slightly deformed the photographed object.30 But in opposition to the studio photographs discussed above, where the difference between reality and portrayal was made explicit by the 24 Gržinić, Marina: “Štravs’ photographic incarnations”, in: Jane Štravs, Photographic Incarnations. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003:7. 25 C. Kratz: The Ones That Are Wanted, 222. 26 Jaffe, Alexandra: “Introduction: Non-Standard Orthography and Non-Standard Speech”, in: Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000): 507. 27 Feld, Steven: “Postscript, 1989”, in: Steven Feld: Sound and Sentiment, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 19902: 241. 28 The consequences of these processes and dilemmas they cause are beautifully described by C. Kratz: The Ones That Are Wanted. 29 M. Gržinić: “Štravs’ photographic incarnations”, 8. 30 Interview with Jane Štravs, Ljubljana, May 2011.

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absence of eye contact, Štravs’ portraits suggest that they are realistic, which is also due to the fact that the subjects look directly into camera. Frontal portraits, as Tagg suggested, have often been associated with a “code of social inferiority” and documentation of human beings for diverse scientific, legal and medical purposes.31 Both social hierarchization and ‘othering’ may be read from the three portraits of JNA soldiers. According to Štravs, they can stand for three ‘typical’ former Yugoslav nations and (supposedly) represent a Serb, a Gypsy, and an Albanian (although persons in the photographs were not necessarily members of the stated ethnic groups). The processes of selection and classification (type making) are then followed by the process of generalization through labeling: each in the series of the three portraits was labeled “a JNA soldier”. This way, the selected, distorted and (nationally/ethnically) typified portraits become a representation of the JNA as a whole. Although the photographs suggest the opposite, the representation of ethnic types and the use of generalized labels actually erase individuality from the portraits. Štravs’ portraits suggest realism, even though they are not realistic; likewise, they suggest individuality rather than being individualized. Štravs’ images of JNA soldiers possess a distinct voice – but the question remains whose voice it is. In the way these portraits were made, it becomes irrelevant who the people in the photos really are; the photos were not made for them and they most probably would not see in them images they wanted. What is more, the featured soldiers have also never seen or received the photographs.32 Štravs’ series of photos aimed to provide an artistic critique of Yugoslav socialism in the 1980s, and alert to the hegemonic discourses and practices of the JNA. These individualized and strongly expressive photographs did so effectively, but at the cost of the persons portrayed: to enable the artist to voice a social critique, they first had to be deprived of their own voice and, more importantly, of the very possibility to articulate any voice, which made them essentially muted.

31 Tagg, John: The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1988: 36-37, 76, 80, quoted after C. Kratz: The Ones That Are Wanted, 122. 32 Interview with Jane Štravs, Ljubljana, May 2011.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Appadurai, Arjun: “The Colonial Backdrop”, in: Afterimage 24 (1997): 4– 7. Bickenbach, Matthias: “Fotoalbum”, in: Nicolas Pethes/Jens Ruchatz (eds.), Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon, Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag 2001: 177–178. Bjelajac, Mile: Jugoslovensko iskustvo sa multietničkom armijom 1918– 1991 (Yugoslav experience with multiethnic army 1918–1991), Belgrade: Udruženje za društvenu istoriju 1999. Brocks, Christine: Die bunte Welt des Krieges: Bildpostkarten aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1918, Essen: Klartext 2008. Feld, Steven: “Postscript, 1989”, in: Steven Feld: Sound and Sentiment, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 19902. Feuchtwang, Stephan: “Ritual and Memory”, in: Susannah Radstone/Bill Schwartz (eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press 2010: 281–298. Frizot, Michel: “Familienalbum”, in: Michel Frizot (ed.), Neue Geschichte der Fotografie, Köln: Könemann 1998: 679. Gatalo, Veselin: Slika sa uspomenom, Sarajevo: Mauna-Fe 2009. Gržinić, Marina: “Štravs’ photographic incarnations”, in: Jane Štravs, Photographic Incarnations. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003. Hirsch, Marianne: Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press 20022. Jaffe, Alexandra: “Introduction: Non-Standard Orthography and NonStandard Speech”, in: Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000): 497-513. Kratz, Corinne: The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press 2002. Langford, Martha: “Speaking the Album: An Application of the OralPhotographic Framework”, in: Annette Kuhn/Kirsten Emiko McAllister (eds.), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books 2006: 223–245. Milićević, Aleksandra Sasha: “Joining the War: Masculinity, Nationalism and War Participation in the Balkans War of Secession, 1991–1995”, in: Nationalities Papers 34.3 (2006): 267–287.

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Samuel, Raphael: Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London: Verso 1994. Spiegelman, Art: Maus, zgodba o preživetju, II: In tu so se začele moje težave, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003. Štravs, Jane: Photographic Incarnations, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003. Tagg, John: The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1988. Trachtenberg, Alan: Reading American Photographs, New York: Hill and Wang 1989. Willis, Deborah: “A Search for Self: The Photograph and Black Family Life”, in: Marianne Hirsch (ed.), The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1999: 107–123. Yurchak, Alexei: Everything was Forever until it was no More: the Last Soviet Generation, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press 2006.

F ILMOGRAPHY KARAULA (UK/SER/ME/CRO/SI/MAK/BA/HUN/AUT 2006, D: Rajko Grlić) SVEČANA OBAVEZA (YUG 1986, D: Božidar Nikolić)

P ARTISAN ( FEATURE ) FILM IN YUGOSLAVIA : A ‘ HOUSE ’- GENRE WITH AN AFTERLIFE

From Slavko to Slavica. (Soviet) Origins of (Yugoslav) Partisan Film B ARBARA W URM ( IN COLLABORATION WITH T ATJANA S IMEUNOVIĆ )

G ENEALOGIES – LIBERATION ,

APPROPRIATION ,

INFILTRATION Dealing with history – political history as well as cultural and film history – means dealing with genealogy; dealing with genealogy means dealing with strategies of appropriation. Victory is one thing – claiming victory another. Liberation is one thing – self-liberation another. In this sense, Yugoslavia’s most prominent master-narrative,1 the story of self-liberation by its people, above all, by its Partisan movement/s during WWII, has always been a big challenge for the Soviet Union, an empire that never really undertook the attempt to re-evaluate the hegemonic term used for the expansion of its ideological influence in (post-)war Europe – “liberation” (“osvoboždenie”). Among other issues, the Tito-Stalin-split (occurring less than four years after the big brothers’ common victory over fascism) had unveiled the diplomatic failure between the FNRJ (Federal People’s Republic of Yugo1

Or, as Goulding put it, linking political history directly to film history: “The National War of Liberation waged by the Communist-commanded Partisans in Yugoslavia was the central founding myth upon which the new Tito-led postwar government was built. In order to understand the filmic transformations of its primary legitimizing symbols and motifs, it is necessary first to trace out the broad historical schematics of this dramatic and complex event.“ Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2002: 7.

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slavia) and the USSR in coming to terms about who had more influence on liberating Belgrade and winning the war – the NOV i POJ2 (National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, in short: the Partisans) or the Red Army.3 The Yugoslav case – the “first schism within the Communist bloc,”4 “the exception that defied the clear-cut geopolitical and ideological constellation of the Cold War [demonstrating] that a regime could endorse socialist ideology and yet not function as a mere satellite of Moscow”5 – becomes thus an eminent playground for negotiating (communist) political hegemony and supervision on the one hand and strategies of (communist) self-empowerment and autonomy efforts on the other. As Tito once put it, dating the beginning of the crisis to a much earlier point: “As early as that [1941] the Soviet leaders revealed a tendency to direct our whole uprising in the interest neither of the Yugoslav peoples nor of the struggle against Hitlerism in general, but mainly in the way which best suited the interests of the Soviet Union as a State and its Greater-Russia policy.”6 According to Tito, in 1944, on another occasion, Stalin even questioned “our army, […] [and] our contribution in the war. He spoke disparagingly about the Partisans, their fighting spirit, even their numerical strength. ‘I know those Partisan figures. They are all exaggerated.’”7 One lesser known, yet intriguing argument referred to in the prominent correspondence between the two Central Committees of the KPJ and the 2 3

4 5

6 7

Abbr.: Narodnooslobodilačka vojska i partizanski odredi Jugoslavije In the letter of May 4th 1948, the Central Committee of the CPSU denied the KPJ’s special status among other European communist parties by ‘reminding’ Tito and Kardelj, that “after the destruction of the Yugoslav Partisans’ General Staff by German paratroopers, at a time when the Yugoslav people’s liberation movement went through a severe crises, the Soviet Army came to the Yugoslav peoples’ aid, broke the German occupation force’s resistance and liberated Belgrade and hereby laid the foundations for the KPJ’s coming into power”. Tito contra Stalin. Der Streit der Diktatoren in ihrem Briefwechsel, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1949: 62. (Translation BW) Perović, Jeronim: “The Tito-Stalin Split. A Reassessment in Light of New Evidence”, in: Journal of Cold War Studies 9.2 (2007): 32–63, http://www.zora. uzh.ch/62735/1/Perovic_Tito.pdf, last access: 29 August 2013. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Futur Antérieur of Yugoslav Cinema, or, Why Emir Kusturica’s Legacy is Worth Fighting For”, in: Daniel Šuber/ Slobodan Karamanić (eds.), Retracing Images. Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, Leiden/Boston: Brill 2012: 153–154. Dedijer, Vladimir: Tito speaks. His self-portrait and struggle with Stalin, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1953: 264. V. Dedijer: Tito, 267.

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KPSS in the spring of 1948 concerned the question of the origins of partisan combat. The Soviets accused Tito of claiming to have invented partisan strategies, whereas they themselves – despite the Red Army’s partisan experience against the Whites during the Civil War or already General Kutuzov’s “small war” tactics in early 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars – had never thought it necessary to claim any kind of primacy, since it was common ground in “Marxist military studies” that partisan strategies were invented by the Spanish in their fight against Napoleon as early as 1808.8 What could be read between the lines was this: claiming originality meant deviation from the party doctrine by emphasizing the – following Carl Schmitt – probably most important aspect of partisan combat which in the Soviet case, due to the given hegemonic status as the leaders of international communist world-revolution, had been superimposed by governmental issues: the aspect of irregularity.9 As a matter of fact, Stalin’s questioning of the Yugoslav Partisans’ practice and share in victory is a crucial facet when we try to re-evaluate the figure of the partisan in cultural history. Schmitt’s idea that the power and significance of irregularity stems from the power and significance of regularity challenged by this very irregularity, works very well as meta description of the relation between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The regularity imposed by the super power is challenged, so to speak, by the insistence on irregularity by the little brother. The (verbal and ideological) battle between the former brothers in arms becomes the heart of examining the status of the partisan in redefining state, party, class, and revolution. More than that, it becomes the demarcation line of the very core of “the political” as understood by Carl Schmitt – the distinguishability between friend and enemy.10 In the Soviet-Yugoslav 8

V. Dedijer: Tito, 267. See also: Zimmermann, Tanja: “From the Haiduks to the Bogomils: Transformation of the Partisan Myth after World War II”, in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 63. 9 Cf.: Schmitt, Carl: Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkungen zum Begriff des Politischen [1962], Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1992: 11, 12, 21, 28. – See also Jakiša, Miranda: “Memory of a Past to come–Yugoslavia’s Partisan Film and Fashioning of Space”, in: Tanja Zimmermann (ed.), Balkan Memories. Media Constructions of National and Transnational History, Bielefeld: Transcript 2012: 117–119. Jakiša analyzes the maintenance of Schmitt’s irregularity criterion in regard to Yugoslav Partisan Film, emphasizing the conservation of the “partisans’ perpetual transitory state” (118). 10 Cf. Schmitt, Carl: Der Begriff des Politischen [1932], Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1996.

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conflict faces became versatile. Schmitt, transferring his ontological figure of the partisan into the actual political context of (post-)war Europe, writes: “As an irregular fighter, the partisan somehow always relies on the support of a regular power. […] [But] if more interested third parties are competing with each other, the partisan is in possession of a maneuvering room for his own politics. This was Tito’s situation during the last years of the world war.”11 We needed to recapitulate this brief but important chapter in the history and theory of politics in order to set the ground for another (but parallel) history of genealogy, namely film history. As one story goes, “the first feature film in postwar Yugoslavia was SLAVICA, produced by Avala film of Belgrade in 1947 and directed by Vjekoslav Afrić [who] had picked up what skills in film direction he could as an assistant director to the wellknown Soviet director Abram Room, in shooting the film V GORACH JUGOSLAVII/U PLANINAMA JUGOSLAVIJE/IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA in 1946.”12 Since both films, the Soviet-Yugoslav-coproduction IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, shot in 1945 and released in 1946, as well as SLAVICA, shot in 1946 and released in 1947, focus on the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB), Afrić, who had fought as a partisan himself, might well be regarded a ‘natural’ key figure in the conglomerate of founding myths surrounding the origins of Yugoslav cinema in general and the partisan genre within it in particular. To a certain extent he might even be seen as the (hidden and torn) face of the first upswell of this significant and (thematically) generic cinema: For IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA he worked also as an actor – playing two roles (sic!) with completely different ideological ‘value’, Ivo, the political commissar guiding the Partisans on the one hand, and Draža Mihajlović, the leader of the Chetniks (thus: the inner enemy), on the other.13 And in ŽIVJEĆE OVAJ NAROD/THIS PEOPLE WILL LIVE (1947, D.: Nikola Popović), after SLAVICA the official number

11 C. Schmitt: Theorie des Partisanen, 77–78. 12 D.J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 16. 13 Kosanović/Tucaković call this “[…] dovoljno shizofreno” (quite schizophrenic) – cf. Kosanović, Dejan/Tucaković, Dinko: Stranci u raju, Beograd: Stubovi kulture 1998: 109. For Volk this is a result of the general “flippancy” (površnost) of Room’s film – cf. Volk, Petar: Svedočenje: Hronika Jugoslovenskog Filma 1945-1970, part 2, Beograd: S. Mašić, P. Volk 1975: 11.

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two in Socialist Yugoslavia's filmography, Afrić was the first native actor to impersonate Marshall Tito.14 Even if it holds true that on an infrastructural and technical level as well as in terms of experience, the Soviet Union stood ‘for all’ and the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia ‘for nothing’, and even if there is plenty of evidence, that the prominent film crew from Russia (including cameraman Ėduard Tissė, composer Jurij Birjukov, and actors like Nikolaj Mordvinov, Ol’ga Žizneva or Aleksej Utkin) had influence on the former stage actor Afrić, and that the production process of the Soviet film served at the same time as a training camp for many young on-going Yugoslav filmmakers organized by Mosfil’m,15 we cannot speak of a smooth line of heritage or Big-Brother-model. There is more to the mystical origin of Yugoslav partisan film, if one takes a closer look, because not only SLAVICA (on an ideological level set, so to speak, precisely on the borderline between the nation’s status before and after the break with the Soviet Union) turns out to be a more complex partisan-film-case than expected, but also its ‘ancestor’, Abram Room’s IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, is more than just a perfectly working role model in Socialist Realist aesthetics, from which Afrić could ‘depart’ – in one way or another, thus, either prolonging Socialist Realist aesthetics or trying to avoid it and polemically act against it. Moreover, as we will see, both films not only reflect the genealogy of liberation and (its) appropriation, but they contribute to it.

14 Like SLAVICA, which in 1948 members of the Information Bureau tried to prevent from being screened in North America, using it in their campaign against Tito’s Yugoslavia (see: Mikata, Aleksandra: “Sto srpskih fotografija koje su obeležile ovaj vek“, in: Borba 28–29 August 1999: 12), also THIS PEOPLE WILL LIVE – due to the short scene in which Afrić appeared as Tito – was banned, being officially excluded from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. 15 See for instance Rajgorodskaja, Irina: “Jugoslavskoe kino: temy i problematika”, in: Irina Rajgorodskaja (ed.), Kino Jugoslavii, Moscow: Iskusstvo 1978: 16: “Despite the fact that the authors of this film [IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA] did not always succeed to personify the dramatic war time collisions on screen convincingly, the production of this film was of big significance for the history of Yugoslav cinema. On the set and during the shooting Vjekoslav Afrić, Miomir Denić, Radoš Novaković, Nikola Popović, Aleksandar Sekulović, Žorž Skrigin [cameraman of SLAVICA], France Štiglic and other directors, cameramen, actors and set designers of future Yugoslav cinema went through their personal ‘film academy’.” (Translation BW)

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Therefore we consider them an exceptional site for negotiating and filling the gap between cultural and media studies (on Yugoslav grounds).16 It is of a higher significance in terms of the new nation’s integrity that with the above mentioned (threefold) versatility of dissimilation – (Moscow supervised?) political commissar as well as Chetnik leader and Partisan leader Tito – Afrić and his film, seen from the then contemporary, national perspective, became the token of the origins of Yugoslav cinema. In a newspaper article of May 9th 1947, just after the film’s preview, SLAVICA is praised as “our first native artistic film, shot in our country, about our lives, in our language, imagined and made thanks to the work of native artists, technicians and labourers.”17 The possessive “our” (naš) quite evidently stands for “Yugoslav” (jugoslavenski). What is emphasized is that SLAVICA, the first feature film made in socialist Yugoslavia (produced by the Belgrade based “Avala Film”), together with THIS PEOPLE WILL LIVE (produced by the Zagreb based “Jadran Film”), marks the beginning of an autonomous film production in the new republic – with the potential, as Miranda Jakiša points out, to create “a first all-Yugoslav audience” through “the down-to-earth Partisan genre […], a central space of generating a belonging to the newly founded Titoist state”.18 SLAVICA thus stands for a non-Russian and tentatively non-Soviet film (even if the Soviet experience in producing a multi-ethnic ‘nationality’ could have been regarded as an evident historical and political parallel). In the article, Afrić is referred to as “director of the Film School for acting and directing” (direktor Škole za filmsku glumu i režiju), the Soviet training camp of IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA he and his staff went through is worth no more mentioning.

16 In regard to Yugoslav visual politics this gap between cultural theory disregarding the intrinsic power of visual images on the one hand and media theory focusing on ‘the material’ only and neglecting social data, is discussed in length by Šuber, Daniel/Karamanić, Slobodan: “Mapping the Field”, in: D. Šuber/S. Karamanić (eds.), Retracing Images,1–25, here: 2. 17 “[P]rvi naš domaći umetnički film, izrađen u našoj zemlji, sa temom iz naših života, na našem jeziku, zamišljen i ostvaren radom domaćih umetnika, tehničara i radnika.” “Naš prvi domaći umetnički film ‘Slavica’”, in: 20. Oktobar, 9 May 1947 (see the dossier on SLAVICA in the Jugoslavenska Kinoteka, Belgrade) (Translation TS). 18 Cf. Jakiša, Miranda: “Der ‘tellurische Charakter’ des Partisanengenres: Jugoslavische Topo-Graphie in Film und Literatur”, in: Esther Kilchmann/Andreas Pflitsch/Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.), Topographie pluraler Kulturen. Europa vom Osten gesehen, Berlin: Kadmos 2011: 209. (Translation BW)

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By this time, obviously, a second process of liberation has already taken place, a second beginning, the ‘real’ one, the shooting of a ‘film of one’s own’.19 Contesting the rhetoric of origins, any kind of transcendental signified in this story of founding figures should, however, be avoided. On the contrary, origins ought to be considered as either constantly delayed or already structured. In this sense, both, Afrić – as the son of Socialist Yugoslav cinema – but also his immediate predecessor Room – the (unloved) fatherfigure, so to speak, of Socialist Yugoslav cinema – are part of a prestructured and often more contradictory than homogenous set of signs. This is the reason why in our discussion of the two mentioned films we will try to search for signifiers more than for the signified (like, for example, ‘brotherhood and unity’). What needs to be deconstructed is the direct link between Soviet (Partisan) cinema and Yugoslav National Cinema, two quite distinct spheres of ‘revolutionary art’ – on the one hand the ‘great nation’, in which film for nearly half a decade had been established as (according to Lenin) the “most important of all arts”, and on the other the ‘new nation’ with little to no filmic tradition of its own. We suggest that the juxtaposition of IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA and SLAVICA, two early post-war visual and narrative efforts in putting the Yugoslav Partisans’ combat on screen, brings forward some ambivalence in the general aesthetic paradigm they both were ascribed to, namely Socialist Realism, as well as in the description of the genre they both refer to – Partisan film.20 Our analysis, thus, tries to challenge Daniel Goulding’s assertion that although “Yugoslavia escaped the worst consequences of Zhdanovism through the development of its own more moderate variant of socialist realism, there is little to distinguish the two variants in the area of film expression except […] in the area of nationalist-inspired thematic orientation.”21 19 In her article on Yugoslavia’s self-fashioning, Miranda Jakiša claims that SLAVICA “initiated the decade-long liaison between the state and the partisan genre, helping the Yugoslav partisan myth to erect its own monument in cinema”. M. Jakiša: “Memory of a Past to Come”, 111. 20 Stanković calls IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA a “downright catastrophe” and SLAVICA “slightly better”, classifying it – as most other film historians – as “socialist realist Partisan film” or – in accordance with Goulding – as “nationalist realist” Partisan film. – Cf.: Stanković, Peter: “Je li mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?” in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 23–24. 21 D.J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 8.

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It should have become evident by now that to tackle the question whether Yugoslav Partisan film can be analysed in terms of its Soviet origins, is not only a matter of film history and aesthetics, but a political one – for at least three reasons. Firstly, the depiction of the Yugoslav Partisan movement goes hand in hand with the liberation of the Yugoslav people/s, the building of a nation, and the foundation of the only post-war communist state which to a certain degree had been demanding integrity and autonomy successfully – Partisan film, thus, is far more (and at the same time less) than a “tool of manipulation for the sake of substituting with fiction what had not existed for real”;22 secondly, the interpretation of the Partisans’ role in the war was a major undercurrent in the 1948 correspondence between Central Committees of the Yugoslav and the Soviet Communist Parties and it dates back to the early years of WW II; the third reason is rather unknown and so surprising as well as intriguing that it needs further elaboration. We enter the field of political infiltration tactics on the production site of a film. When Milovan Djilas, Tito’s revolutionary combatant and a Politburo member with close relations to the Soviet Communist Party,23 wrote his memoirs about the immediate post-war years from a forty-year distance, his chapter about the conflict with the USSR was opened by an extensive reference to the shooting of IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA: “Early 1945 the Soviets decided that a film should be shot about the ‘battle of the Yugoslavia’s patriots’ and therefore they sent a Russian film team to Belgrade. The Soviets’ behaviour had something of the untamed energy of Mongolian invaders.”24 – Djilas’ political memoirs give a quite disgusted account not

22 Cf. the critical comment on Mila Turajlić’s populist documentary CINEMA KOMUNISTO (2010) in: D. Šuber/S. Karamanić: “Mapping the Field”, 8; a film which unfolds around the topos of manipulation. 23 Djilas was elected to the Central Committee in 1938. Together with Tito he is regarded as the founder of the Partisan movement and was a guerrilla commander in Montenegro during the war and afterwards responsible for propaganda issues. Because of his close contact to the Soviet Union, he played a key role in the Comintern crises, and after the break became a leading critic of Stalin’s decision to exclude Yugoslavia. In 1954, however, Tito broke with Djilas, expelling him from the party – with his criticism, by then directed against Tito’s own “totalitarian” and “anti-democratic” leadership, Djilas had gone too far: he was imprisoned. His memoires were written later and in exile. 24 Djilas, Milovan: Jahre der Macht. Kräftespiel hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang. Memoiren 1945-1966, München: Molden-Seewald 1983: 87.

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only of the film itself but especially of the making of it. As a leading figure in propaganda and agitation, he was directly confronted with the question of how to react to the Soviets’ constantly unsatisfied, renewed and broadened demands in this co-operation, from script assistance to logistics, from accommodation to alcoholic beverages. According to Djilas, no matter how hard they tried, the Yugoslav part had no influence whatsoever on the political or artistic impact of the film, “despite ideological identity and fraternity; a fraternity manifesting itself especially warm-heartedly on the occasion of feasts, in which the Soviet representatives eagerly participated”.25 Whereas the director, Abram Room, is described as sad, shy and somewhat exhausted,26 the scriptwriter, Georgij Mdivani, according to Djilas, was responsible for the “banal, phrase-mongering peasant theatre, garnished with fireworks” in the film as well as for several drinking orgies and unpleasant experiences on the set.27 The Yugoslav inner communist circle including Tito – that’s the general picture one gets reading these memoires –, and most of the film critics were disappointed about the film on an aesthetical and political level, especially because of the degrading and subordinate depiction of Tito’s historical role in the revolution. But on top of that, the Soviets, as Djilas and the Secret Police found out only after Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union, used the feasts, the 25 M. Djilas: Jahre der Macht, 87. 26 Not only as a filmmaker (his 1936 Oleša-adaptation STROGIJ JUNOŠA/STRICT YOUTH was forbidden for “major deviation of the Socialist Realist doctrine”), but also as a “key pedagogue” Abram Room had “fallen out of favour with the cinema administration” of the USSR already in the 1930s (Cf. Miller, Jamie: Soviet Cinema. Politics and Persuasion under Stalin, London: Tauris 2010: 59, 149). As the ‘key pedagogue’ in the Yugoslav case, that obviously makes him a rather ‘non-identifiable’ father-figure. By the mid 40’s, however, Room had again already gained a reputation as an experienced ‘Partisan’ and warfilmmaker (BUCHTA SMERTI/THE BAY OF DEATH, 1926; ĖSKRADIL’JA NO. 5/ SQUADRON NO. 5, 1939; NAŠI DEVUŠKI/OUR GIRLS, 1942; NAŠESTVIE/INVA– SION, 1944 – receiving the Stalin Prize Second Class), which might be the reason for having been entrusted to put IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA on screen, a film-script originally assigned to the famous ‘founding figures’ of Soviet Socialist Realism in film, the Vasil’ev-‘brothers’ Georgij and Sergej (ČAPAEV, 1934). 27 In a recent discussion about Eastern European Cinema and the USSR, Michail Kozakov described Mdivani as an “absolutely prosoviet, prostalinist Georgian in Moscow bottling […] a significant figure from the nomenclatura”. – Cf. “Kinematograf Vostočnoj Evropy – proščanie s prošlym, in: Kinovedčeskie zapiski 71 (2005): 12.

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[costly] “travelling around the country and the whole spectacle as such to infiltrate artistic circles and recruit Yugoslavs for the Soviet intelligence service”; the fuss about the drinking orgies’ immoral and lavish aspects and the confidence created by celebrating “ideological and Slavic brotherhood” had distracted even the highest communist leaders from the real goal of this insidious film production and the bacchanals surrounding it – to install disguised control over the country.28 An ‘expert’ the Soviets had sent to establish Yugoslav film industry was unmasked as an agent, and the first draft of the contract between the two states about collaboration in the film industry was rejected as early as 1946, because it provided for a Soviet monopoly in distribution and would have actually prevented, not encouraged, a national Yugoslav film production.29 From a political and historical perspective, the post-war cinematographic Soviet-Yugoslav-cooperation (including the co-production IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA) was a mere nightmare, even for an expatriate like Djilas, whose eminently important memoires – we need to emphasize this – start with the description of a forgotten fiction film.

28 Cf.: M. Djilas: Jahre der Macht, 88-90. Apparently Tito’s bodyguard was part of these infiltrating actions, too. 29 Cf.: M. Djilas: Jahre der Macht, 92. Tito’s and Kardelj’s signing the second draft as described by Djilas was a mere gesture of subordination, which only after the final break in 1948 turned into open conflict and opposition. – See also V. Dedijer: Tito, 275: “As for films, in 1946 they imposed on us a block booking contract, so that we had no choice of the films they sent; and we had to pay the rental in dollars, at three, four, or five times the prices we paid for films from the West.” – The Soviet perspective on the “sovietization” of film distribution and production in Central and Eastern Europe can be traced in some documents published in 2005 – among them two secret notes to high party members on the distribution of Soviet films in Yugoslavia, one from Oct. 5th, 1945, the second from Dec. 28th, 1948 – cf. Fomin, Valerij (ed.): “Političeskij ėffekt fil’ma >Russkij vopros< propadaet …’ Iz opyta sovetizacii poslevoennogo kinoprokata i kinoproizvodstva v Central’noj i Vostočnoj Evrope”, in: Kinovedčeskie zapiski 71 (2005): 202–203, 237–238. Tito’s contacts with the US film export association and his ignorance towards the “Sovexportfilm” representative in Yugoslavia, Solovcov, is severely criticized.

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Y UGOSLAVIA (SU 1946, D.:

IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA (which had many titles in Yugoslavia: URAGAN NA BALKANAH, BURA NA BALKANU; OLUJA NA BALKANU; VIHAR 30 V JUGOSLAVIJI; NOVA JUGOSLAVIJA) is the story of Slavko Babić, whose development from a brave, masculine peasant into a Partisan leader with a gradually gained political consciousness is shown as an essential contribution to ‘big’ history, a (Soviet-Yugoslav) history marked by the beginning of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, being announced by Nazi accents via Belgrade’s loudspeakers, and commander Tito’s decision to found the “Vrhovni štab NOVJ”. The film ends with the liberation of Belgrade by the “heroic Red Army […] united with the Yugoslav people's liberation army […] on October 19, 1944”, as we learn from one of the few (and therefore ear-catching) off-screen comments. Whether or not, in the end, Slavko dies, remains undecided, since obviously there exists more than one final version of the film. In the DVD-release of the Ėnciklopedija Mastera Kino series, there is no evidence that, as Abram-Room-scholar Irina Graščenkova asserts, “in the end of the film on the triumphant streets of victory-celebrating Belgrade, Slavko died, struck by a bullet from the nationalist ustaša”, or as Zimmermann writes, “in the end he has to die in order to render his place to Tito who has been following the Soviet model from the very beginning and therefore does not have to undergo transformation”.31 In his diary, Nikolaj Mordvinov, at the time a prominent Soviet stage and film actor, also mentions his character’s (i.e. Slavko’s) death, the mis-en-scene of what he himself claims to have suggested to the director of the film (“Room was delighted about my idea – to shoot Slavko’s death butt-jointed with victory in Belgrade.”)32 And from Mordvinov’s biography we learn that the actor was extremely enthusiastic about being able to go to Yugoslavia – after all, a trip abroad was something special – (“meeting the people of this country had an indelible impact on him”, “he dreamt of the

30 Cf. Brenk, Francè: Slovenski film. Dokumenti in razmišljanja, Ljubljana: Partizanska knjiga 1980: 80. 31 Graščenkova, Irina: Abram Room. Moskva: Iskusstvo 1977: 45; T. Zimmermann: “From the Haiduks to the Bogomils”, 64. 32 Cf. Mordvinov, Nikolaj: Dnevniki 1938–1966, Moskva: Vserossijskoe Teatral'noe Obščestvo 1976: 238.

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film as of something extraordinary, original and excitable”), but his hopes were darkened by the fact that “in the process of the multiple revision and completion of the film many episodes were cut out, causing ‘damage’ above all to the main protagonist. His features were reduced to the most general national characteristics, which is why nothing individual or personal remained.”33 Several interest groups had an influence not only on the question of how exactly the first Yugoslav fiction Partisans should be depicted, but also on another one, namely whether the main hero was to sacrifice his life for his people, or not. According to Mordvinov’s diary entry of June 19, 1946, by that time, Room had gone through the material shot and was full of doubts – especially about the ending, the synchronization and the terrible quality of the sound recording in general; a lot of additional work needed to be done – and the director seemed to lose control over the project. Once again, the leading actor made some suggestions, which, once again, were accepted: “Luckily, Room was happy with everything [I suggested]. But I just don’t know who is going to consult him now and will convince him of the opposite.”34 The revision of IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA went on for some months. Only in October 1946 was the ‘final cut’ shown to the advisory board of the ministry – “reproaches hailed down” (kartinu opjat’ bombardirovali), Oct.10th; the next day the film was screened in the Yugoslav embassy – “As Tissė reported: a sensation” (Kak peredal Tissė – “furor”); apparently the film was well received; again Mordvinov quotes Tissė’s report: “Historically correct. At first little faith in the film, now pleasantly surprised. Astonished. The Yugoslav temperament. In outward appearance – real Yugoslavs. […] When they discussed you [your character, i.e. Slavko, B.W.], they didn’t hide their delight, obviously they really liked you, a triumph: ‘Such wild mountain people really do exist.’ (U nas est’ takie dikie gornye ljudi.)”; on premiere day, Oct. 31st, 33 Cf. Parfenov, Lev: Nikolaj Mordvinov, Moskva: Iskusstvo 1981: 78. – Mordvinov’s diary entries of January, February and March 1946, the time of the actual shooting, indeed reflect this enthusiasm (he writes about this “utterly interesting country and its people, so different from our people […], their grace [gracija], their sense of rhythm [plastika], their catlike softness [košač’ja mjagkost’]) – but also his disappointment, complaining about the “deliberate solemnity and sleekness” of the film-script (naročitaja toržestvennost’ i gladkost’). Most interesting seems his commentary about the numerous changes: “Abram accepts them all, unconditionally” (Abram vse [noyve rešenija] prinimaet bezogovoročno). – Cf. N. Mordvinov: Dnevniki, 237, 238. 34 Cf. N. Mordvinov: Dnevniki, 243.

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Mordinov finally saw the result himself, being utterly disappointed, especially about the “merciless, thoughtless reediting”, causing a total “lack of nuances” as well as the disappearance of most “lyrical parts” and “humor”.35 Obviously, IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA was a very special transnational project, fulfilling several missions at the same time and therefore undergoing numerous and permanent ‘corrections’. What can be seen on the distributed DVD version of the film goes like this: Slavko Babić defends the village against the Italian occupants; he is ‘obliged’ to shoot his fellowman Janko who refuses to follow orders of the “Vrhovni štab”, showing the white feathers instead of becoming a Partisan fighter (thus ‘betraying’ his comrades); he adopts Janko’s son who is handed over to him (his father’s assassin) as an ammo carrier by Janko’s wife (now widow) Anđa (Žizneva, Room’s wife, by the way) to prove that “in our family there are no cowards”36; he unites different ethnical and religious groups into one Partisan unit, wrongly relying also on the Chetnik Blažo (who, in the moment of decision, rejects Slavko Babić and opts for Draža Mihajlović, the Nazi collaborator); Slavko becomes friends with Dušan from the “Vrhovni štab” and therefore unresistingly accepts Ivo, the political commissar, as combatant and ‘right hand’; he keeps fighting heroically (his fame, naturally, soon reaching Tito), and when the Chetniks kidnap his wife Milica, blackmailing him, he sacrifices her and his love, being truthful to his Partisan mission only (“He has learnt to understand that personal interests should be subordinated to social ones”, Pravda comments)37; he becomes colonel of a “unit which has grown into a formidable force”38 and finally meets Tito (Ivan Berzenev) in person, reassuring the hidden master-mind of combat that “the people will endure” (narod vyderžit); side by side and for a couple of years they walk “through the snows and winds” and fight for “Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu!” (Death to fascism, freedom to the people!). By the end – citing the director’s official Sovspeak of the time again –, Slavko Babić has “passed the glorious path from a simple peasant to a colonel. […] His glory resounded not only in 35 Cf. N. Mordvinov: Dnevniki, 245, 246. 36 Unless stated otherwise, all quotes refer to the DVD version of the film published some years ago in the Russian series Ėnciklopedija Mastera Kino (Translation BW). 37 Borodin, Sergej: “V gorach Jugoslavii”, in: Pravda, 3 November 1946: 3. 38 Cf. Abram Room in an interview: “Kak sozdavalsja fil’m ‘V gorach Jugoslavii’”, in: Večernjaja Moskva, 31. October 1946: n/a.

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Bosnia, but all over Yugoslavia”.39 Under the guidance of comrade Tito, together with his (Partisan) fellow men and with the support of the “heroic Red Army” he liberates Belgrade. The hero’s transformation – according to Tanja Zimmermann “from homo balkanicus to homo sovieticus”, representing the transformation of “Yugoslavs […] into new socialist men in accordance with the Soviet prototype” –40 is indeed the crucial point of this film, not only in regard to Socialist Realism (where it ostensibly matches Vasilij Čapaev’s ‘glorious path from a simple peasant to a politically conscious commander’ in the 1934 role model film by ‘brothers’ Vasil’ev, ČAPAEV),41 but especially, when judging its potential as a paratext on the relationship between the two nations. Browsing through the few available comments on IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, it becomes evident that it is exactly the fashioning of the main protagonist’s transformation which provokes some kind of unease, to say the least, among non-Soviet (re-)viewers. Even Francè Brenk, a contemporary film activist and historian, who took part in organizing the shooting parts in Slovenia, and who dedicated a whole chapter of his book on Slovenian cinema to the context of Room’s film (Uragan na Balkanah),42 considered the film as “weak” for “interpreting our fight ‘à la russe’: according to the ‘general dramaturgic laws of Socialist Realism’, and at the same time in a Russian acting, dialect and scenographic style”.43 39 “Kak sozdavalsja fil’m”. 40 T. Zimmermann: “From the Haiduks to the Bogomils”, 64, 63. 41 See Kenez, Peter: Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin, London/New York: Tauris 2001: 143–164 on the “prototype” ČAPAEV and the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism in film in general. Among its obligatory features Kenez mentions the “acquisition of consciousness” (152) of an “individual” (positive) hero (152), a “Iago-like” negative hero (p. 154), and an “optimistic” outline (158); besides (and fitting our case precisely), “the foreign locales clearly reflected the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy” (150). 42 As head of the “Photo- and Film Department of the Executive Committee of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People” (oddelka za fotografijo in kinematografijo IOOF) Cf. Golubovič, Nataša: Nastanek Slovenske nacionalne kinematografije v 50-tih, [Diploma] Koper 2009: 33 (https://share.upr.si/fhs/PUBLIC/ diplomske/Golubovic-Natasa.pdf, last access: 29 August 2013); Francè Brenk (1912–1990) was a key figure in post-war Slovenian cinema and most likely one of the most important ‘mediators’ of this Soviet-Yugoslav Partisan film. 43 “Toda V GORAH JUGOSLAVIJE je slab film. Vse bi rad pokazal v poldrugi uri […]. […] interpretirajo naš boj ‘po rusko’: po ‘obče veljavnih dramaturških zakonitostih socialističnega realizma’, in hkrati v ruskem igralskem, dialoškem in scenografskem stilu.” F. Brenk: Slovenski film, 110 (Translation BW).

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Brenk knew how fastidiously Room had studied the local atmosphere, how composer Birjukov tried to include as much original Bosnian and Montenegrinian folklore and authentic Partisan songs as possible, how Berzenev was proud of his repeated meetings with Tito in order to study his features and characteristics, and how Mordvinov was eagerly trying to learn “how to walk à la Bosnian”; but regardless of all efforts “the Russians in IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA didn’t know how to walk in Bosnian. Just like they didn’t make it the ‘Czech way’ in NEULOVIMYJ JAN, the ‘Latvian way’ in SINOV’JA, and the ‘Polish way’ in ZIGMUND KOSOLOVSKIJ.”44 Brenk’s account of the Soviet-Yugoslav coproduction’s inappropriate effort to establish a national film production ‘from without’ is indeed a striking judgement. He believed in this enterprise, he describes how most of the people involved believed in it, too, and were eager to get acquainted as much as possible with ‘real Yugoslav Partisan’ experience, but in the end, also from his point of view, ‘Russianness’ prevailed. It was in December 1946, when Aleksandar Vučo, director of the Yugoslav federal committee for cinematography, in the editorial for the first issue of Film, hoped for Yugoslav cinema to turn to “those clear and welllit paths which the Soviets are following, orienting itself to the millions of working people actively sharing with them and strengthening them in the knowledge of our national consciousness, and of its power and its great tasks”, whereas after Tito’s break with Stalin the same person, Vučo, criticized the Soviets for their assumed superiority and their habit of “falsifying history whenever it touched on the role of other socialist states”; in Soviet post-war cinema he now saw mainly “great Russian hegemonic and nationalistic chauvinism”.45 From this perspective, with its attempt to directly depict Tito and the NOB, IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, a film which over the years hardly received any attention, not even in Soviet film history,46 for the ones who actually did react, turned into a projection surface of 44 F. Brenk: Slovenski film, 110. The Soviet war films on different foreign nations he mentions are: THE ELUSIVE JAN (1942, D: Isidor Annenskij/Vladimir Petrov, 1943); SONS (1946, D: Aleksandr Ivanov); ZIGMUNT KOLOSOWSKI (1945, D: Boris Dmochovskij/Sigizmund Navrockij). 45 Cf.: Vučo, Aleksandar: “Naša mlada filmska proizvodnja”, in: Film 1 (1946): 1– 4 and Vučo, Aleksandar: “Velikoruski šovinizam u sovjetskom filmu”, in: Filmska kultura 1 (1950): 15–20. Quoted from: D.J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 9–10. 46 The film finds no mentioning in important publications on Soviet films on the war, such as Zak, Mark/Mucheeva, Ju. (eds.): Vojna na ėkrane. Moskva: Mate-

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hopes, expectations and disappointments. On the one hand, as Djilas confirmed, the influence of the Yugoslav co-production side was restricted to questions of folklore only (not even the title, which should be much more meaningful in historic terms, would be changed) and yet “most of the leading comrades saw things in a pragmatic way: to get to see our battle on screen was better than not to get to see it”;47 on the other hand, for most Yugoslav viewers – and according to Petar Volk already within the first three weeks after the Belgrade premiere in early 1947 there were more than 47.000 spectators 48 – the film was a perfect incarnation of what was later overtly addressed as Russian chauvinism. The disappointment was obvious: “About HURRICANE ON THE BALKANS or IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA there has been silence since its Yugoslav premiere. And there has been silence ever since.”49 The silence and hesitation spread to Russia; obviously not only Tito himself, but also the Soviet film about Tito caused trouble.50 After the

47 48 49 50

rik 2006; Youngblood, Denise J.: Russian War Films. On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2007. Leyda suggests that the reason why the film “has dropped from the histories” was its “subject that was to become an extremely delicate matter in coming years” Leyda, Jay: Kino. A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983: 393. Bulgakowa places it in the context of enforced development of Soviet “national cinematographies” in post war times, thus, next to Vera Stroeva’s MARITE (1947, Mosfil’m/Lithuania), Il’ja Trauberg’s mission at the DEFA, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s activities in Hungary, Gerbert Rappaport’s start-up productions in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, etc. – cf. Bulgakowa, Oksana: “Film als Verdrängungsarbeit. Der osteuropäische Film”, in: Rainer Rother (ed.): Mythen der Nationen. Völker im Film, Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum 1998: 201–202. M. Djlias: Jahre der Macht, 87–88. Cf. Volk, Petar: “Balada o trubi i maglama (kratka povijest jugoslavenske filmske proizvodnje)”, in: Branko Belan: Sjaj i bijeda filma. Zagreb: Epoha 1966, 281. “O Uraganu v Balkanah, o Viharju v Jugoslaviji je tedaj ob nejgovi jugoslovanski premieri zavladal molk. O filmu vlada molk tudi poslej.” F. Brenk: Slovenski film, 83. It is remarkable that the Pravda review of the film appeared in the same issue of the paper (Nov. 3, 1946), in which also a large article on Tito’s successful appearance in Zagreb was published. Officially, the Soviet image of Yugoslavia was in best order – Tito’s politics and Room’s film still went hand in hand.

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premiere on October 31st, 194651 and the screening for the main Yugoslav politicians (Tito, Kardelj, Ranković, Djilas), the secretary of the Central Committee Zhdanov was officially informed by the head of the propaganda and agitation department Aleksandrov, about their Yugoslav comrades’ cold reaction and their numerous (“serious”) remarks about the film, causing a decision on the Soviet side: make some additional corrections of the existing version or withdraw the film, which had already (“prematurely”) been released in Moscow?52 In order to avoid a big fuss, ‘operative’ changes were made directly on the few released prints: the peasants’/Partisans’ uprising was no longer caused by some Italians breaking the corn, but by the fact that they (together with Germans and Ustashas) were heard to kill peaceful civilians; the slogan “Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu!” was explicitly ascribed to Tito (instead of Kardelj); a conflict between Babić, the commander, and Ivo, the commissar, was eliminated, because such a conflict was considered uncommon for the Yugoslav Partisans, where Partisan leaders, right from the beginning, were usually commissars themselves; the scene, in which they both discuss Slavko’s possible party enlistment is eliminated; and last but not least, scarce but explicit off-comments were added, with the objective of leaving no doubt about the JKP’s leading role in organizing the Partisan uprising.53 For the Soviet side, the functioning of its political ‘brotherhood’ with Yugoslavia was important and the first Soviet fiction Partisan film adventure shot and set outside the borders of the USSR was not supposed to fail, especially since the ‘glorious fight’ on the Balkans had already become a significant part of the successful Soviet documentary cinema campaign dedicated to the ‘liberation of Europe’. Roman Karmen even wrote a letter to Stalin in March 1944, begging for permission to support the NOV as a “Soviet cameraman-chronicler” and “to record on celluloid the heroic fight, which will enter the history of the fighting brotherhood of the Slavic peo-

51 Cf. Mačeret, A.V. et al. (eds.): Sovetskie chudožestvennye fil’my. Annotirovannyj katalog, tom 2, Zvukovye fil’my (1930-1957), Moskva: Iskusstvo 1961: 365. 52 Cf. Fomin, Valerij/Derjabin, Aleksandr (eds.): Letopis’ rossijskogo kino 1946– 1965, Moskva: Materik 2010: 34, 35. 53 Cf. “No. 273 – Zapiska G.F. Aleksandrova A.A. Ždanovu o reakcii členov pravitel’stva Jugoslavii na prosmotr fil’ma ‘V gorach Jugoslavii’”, in: Kirill Anderson et al. (eds.), Kremlevskij kinoteatr 1928–1953. Dokumenty, Moskva: ROSSPĖN 2005: 777.

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ple”, but his request was denied – instead Vladimir Ešurin, Semen Škol’nikov, and Viktor Muromcev were sent, delivering hundreds of filmmeters which were eventually edited into the feature-length documentary film JUGOSLAVIJA.54 Room and Mdivani, by this time obviously experts in the region, wrote an enthusiastic review of this film, which again should prove their special interest in and knowledge of the region as well as the specificity of the Yugoslav Partisan fight.55 So where is the problem? Why did this first huge, well-financed and well-guarded joint venture in Yugoslav post-war history of visual image turn into an “unhappy episode” that for a long time impeded any transnational coproduction and relegated IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA to the position of an “abject, forgotten and never authoritatively forbidden” film?56 Why is it seen as a disgrace for Yugoslav cinema and the nation as such? Was it because this “child of two mothers” despite the general avantgarde attitude of its creators – Room (director) and Tissė (camera) – was made “superficially and without passion”, “static”, “pathetic”, “stenciled”, as Petar Volk suggests?57 Or because it deliberately (re-)produced the prevailing ambiguity between the two nations, when, in the end, the partisans and their Soviet combatants carry “gigantic portraits of Stalin and absolutely small ones of Josip Broz Tito, the alpha and omega of the new order”?58 Even the programme note of a sovietophile Slovenian ‘Partisan’ film club, which actually screened the film – together with the much acclaimed ČAPAEV – and affirmed the huge significance of Soviet cinema and its 54 Cf. Michajlov, Vladimir /Fomin, Valerij (eds.): Cena kadra. Každyj vtoroj ranen, každyj četvertyj ubit. Sovetskaja frontovaja kinochronika 1941-1945gg. Dokumenty i svidetel’stva, Moskva: Kanon+ 2010: 883–899. JUGOSLAVIJA was directed by Leonid Varlamov (CSDF) and released in 1946. The film is preserved at the RGAKFD, Krasnogorsk (no. 5404). 55 Cf. Mdivani, Georgij/Room, Abram: “‘Jugoslavija’. Novyj dokumental’nyj fil’m”, in: Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 7 June 1946: 4. 56 Cf. D. Kosanović/D. Tucaković: Stranci u raju, 109, 110. “Ova nesrećna epizoda stopiraće za gotovo deceniju svaku moguću saradnju sa inopartnerima, a sam film će ostati zaturen, prezren, zaboravljen i nikada zvanično zabranjen, od obe strane.” 57 Cf. P. Volk: Svedočenje, 10. 58 Cf. D. Kosanović/D. Tucaković: Stranci u raju, 109. “Politički raskol ratnih saveznika koji će kulminirati 1948. može da se sa istorijske distance nepogrešivo dešifruje u filmu, naročito u finalu kada partizani i njihovi sovjetski saborci nose gigantske portrete Stalina i one sasvim male Josipa Broza Tita, alfe i omege novog poretka.”

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songs for Yugoslav Partisan aesthetics in general, comes to the conclusion that the film, a “bizarre curiosity […], does indeed say much about the conflicts accumulating between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union during these years: in Soviet optics, Yugoslavs were depicted in an oriental way; and the Partisans’ fight is shown as some kind of operetta prelude to the decisive battle, handled by Soviet tanks.”59 Last but not least, Tanja Zimmermann’s verdict pulls together all these arguments, concluding with a reproach of ‘orientalism’: “IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA […] shows how the Soviet mission brought the Balkan people from their backwardness to a path of enlightenment. […] In the beginning of the film, a small group of partisans operating in the mountains of Montenegro and in the oriental scenery of Mostar bravely attacks and defeats a much larger enemy but their fight looks like a slapstick battle – unorganized, unprofessional and unconvincing. The Yugoslav people – except for Tito and the closest members of the Central Committee – are shown as simple, strong and impulsive peasants in national costumes and sheepskins. Instead of firearms they prefer to use knives and axes. The leader of the rebellion […], Slavko Babić, bears Tito’s assumed name from 1939 (Tito changed his identity a few times in the 30s), however, he does not represent Tito but rather some Serbian rebel. Whereas in the beginning of the film he could be taken for a peasant from the Caucasus, he already looks like the young Stalin by the end of the film (from homo balkanicus to homo sovieticus, one could say). This way, Babić represents Tito’s Balkan double, a kind of archaic Ego of Tito. […] Tchaikovsky’s music and the news about Soviet victory at Stalingrad, broadcast on the radio, encourage the demoralized and exhausted partisans. At the end, the Red Army, excellently equipped and perfectly organized, helps the partisans to liberate the capital Belgrade. It is thus a naïve image, sometimes even a caricature of the Yugoslav rebels that served as an ideological means to emphasize the supervising role of the Soviets.”

60

The list of complaints seems endless, but the argument of chauvinistic national attributions prevails – the Yugoslav side is ridiculed, the Russian

59 “Partizanarica 9: Čapaev + V gorah Jugoslavije”, see: http://www.klubgromka. org/index.php?mode=program&id=2462, last access: 29 August 2013. “Even the most stubborn Stalinist must admit that after having seen the film, Tito had no other choice but to say ‘No’ to Stalin”, they conclude. 60 T. Zimmermann: “From the Haiduks to the Bogomils”, 63–64.

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side is overstated. However, looking at Room’s film within the context it actually derives from – Soviet (post)war cinema – we might come to a different interpretation. From this perspective the very fact that a ‘simple’ hero takes over the pseudonym of one political leader (Tito) and the looks of another (Stalin),61 is a radical transgression, introducing a precarious level of ambiguity – especially when it comes to questions of hierarchy.

Ill. 1: “Lookalikes”: Stalin in THE VOW and Babić in IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA

Ill. 2: “From shepherd to commander (mediating between the female partisan Anđa and the political commissar Ivo)”: Slavko Babić’s progress in IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA Michail Čiaureli’s KLJATVA/THE VOW (1946), premiered three months before Room’s film, is a major reference, and Slavko Babić does look a lot like this cinematic image of Stalin, but Mordvinov evidently adds some fierceness and wickedness to this image (ill. 1). The transformation works 61 The remarkable resemblance of Babić and Stalin is also mentioned in an entry of “Hrvatski Povijesni Portal” – cf. http://povijest.net/v5/novosti/najave/2011/film ovi-iz-tajnih-arhiva/, last access: 29 August 2013: “Slavko Babić (likom nevjerojatno sličan Staljinu)”.

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in the other direction, too: a Bosnian peasant contributes to the image of the Soviet leader; deconstruction at its best, one could say (ill. 2). Also generally, the course of Slavko’s agency is not really changed by other people’s influence: there are hardly any conflicts with either Ivo or Dušan, since Slavko follows a straight line anyway. Secondly, like Stalin, Babić’s gestures are those of a paterfamilias, which, confronted with the political commissar Ivo, makes him (at least visually) superior to the party member and source of political consciousness – an evident alteration of the ČapaevFurmanov-model. Thirdly, when Babić finally meets Tito, his/Stalin’s superiority is severely challenged – Room’s film might end with small banners of Tito and big ones of Stalin during the victory-parade, but it does install Tito as the one and only leader of the Partisans, not only on a narrative,62 but also on a cinematic level. Tito is the brain of all operations, his decisions frame Babić’s actions right from the beginning, and it is his image (not Stalin’s), which is several times superimposed on the Partisans’ loci communes (ill. 3).

Ill. 3: Tito-images in IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA His portrait (the real Tito’s) is shown in a close-up, whereas only a tiny Stalin portrait can be seen on the wall of Babić’s mountain hut. Which 62 One of the added off-comments is: “Vse proizošlo tak kak zadumal Tito.” (Everything happened like Tito had intended it to.)

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leads to the fourth visual confrontation, the one where the Yugoslav Stalin (Babić) sits at the writing desk (just like Stalin in THE VOW), mirrored by his own (the real Stalin’s) portrait; Babić turns his back on his alter ego. In 1946, minimal gestures like these could become a means of subversion. Continuing our deconstructive reading of IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, also other critical moments are bound to ridicule the Soviet context of reference at least as much as the Yugoslav one. Not only Slavko himself is of a hybrid nature, but also his language. He says “dobry” instead of “chorošo” (good), “myslju” instead of “dumaju” (I think) and such truly hilarious phrases like “velika radost” (great happiness) instead of “Ja očen’ rad” (I am very happy) or “velika chvala” (great thanks) instead of “spasibo bol’šoe” (thank you very much); and, of course, he uses “drugovi” instead of “tovarišči” (comrades). This kind of pseudo-south-Slavic is more like an ironic mocking of orientalism than the actual reproduction of it. In fact, the dialogues and the specific language proposed (or rather prescribed) by script-writer Georgij Mdivani were criticized in the Soviet press even before the film was shot and the scenario was published in the Library of Cinema Dramas under the title The New Yugoslavia (Novaja Jugoslavija).63 “The language is the weakest part. […] [T]he author of the script eagerly takes advantage of the closeness of Serbian and Russian by using Serbian words understood by Russians. This is why in the script one and the same protagonist sometimes speaks Serbian and sometimes Russian, and thus most of the time neither Serbian nor Russian.”64 The protagonists’ characterization in the script is accused of displaying “unpredictable”, “poor epithets” (neožidannye, bednye ėpitety) and “linguistic inaccuracy” (jazykovye progrešnosti), Dušan’s language (“Vy segodnja izumitel’ny, madam!” – “You look astonishing today, madam!”) is described as “vulgar” (pošlo).65 In her text on dialogues in film, Ljudmila Pogoževa (later chief editor of the Soviet Union’s most important film journal, Iskusstvo kino) quotes extensively from IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA in order to demonstrate the negative example of a script “based on a monologist principle”, where the protagonists’ language is “deprived of every individu-

63 Cf. Mdivani, Georgij: Novaja Jugoslavija, Moskva: Goskinoizdat 1946 (Translation BW). 64 Zvavič, Isaak: “Romantika bor’by. Scenarij Georgija Mdivani ‘Novaja Jugoslavija’”, in: Iskusstvo kino 2–3 (1945): 20 (Translation BW). 65 I. Zvavič: “Romantika bor’by”, 20.

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al tinge”, revealing a “schematized inner world” subjected to the “author’s thesis” and “rhetoric pathos” (“Many thanks to you, my chap, many thanks to you!” – “Chvala tebe, junak moj, chvala tebe!”): “Then a conversation of slogans (lozungi) begins, and the whole dialogue obtains a strained didactic appearance.”66 Interestingly enough, Pogoževa compares Slavko Babić’s “verbose pathos” to the short, easy, laconic speech of Čapaev, explaining that a difference in style and expression will also change a character in general.67 Another critical issue mentioned in this discussion of Mdivani’s script concerned the off-comments (diktorskij tekst), which Pogoževa describes as having a “journalese-publicistic style” (gazetno-publističeskij stil’); the “intonation of journalese pathos” (gazetno-patetičeskaja intonacija), she argues, spreads from the language of the script to the language of the protagonists.68 Similar claims about the script (and the film) are brought up twenty years later – in the first Russian monograph on Yugoslav cinema by Igor’ Anochin, who explicitly contributes to the ‘founding myth’ by recalling Room’s preceding film and its influence on the “first native postwar fiction film”, SLAVICA, describing IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, however, as “not devoid of many stock phrases and false pathos, sharing this sin with some other post-war Soviet films” (ne byl svoboden ot mnogich štampov i ložnoj patetiki, kotorymi grešili nekotorye poslevoennye sovetskie kartiny).69 Thus, the film’s problematic aspects – many of which resulted from Mdivani’s script – were clearly understood even on the Soviet side, and they were attributed to the general post-war state of Socialist Realist cinema in the Soviet Union.

66 Pogoževa, Ljudmila: “Dialogi v scenarii i fil’me”, in: Iskusstvo kino 2 (1947): 20. 67 Mordvinov’s comparison of Babić and Čapaev reads quite differently: “Čapaev doesn’t bear any special motion within. Our film has an inner form, dictated by a romantic excitement.” N. Mordvinov: Dnevniki, 242. 68 Cf. L. Pogoževa: “Dialogi v scenarii i fil’me”, 20. 69 Cf. Anochin, Igor’: Kinoiskusstvo Jugoslavii, Moskva: Bjuro propagandy sovetskogo kinoiskusstva 1966: 17. Anochin mentions that, when Avala film studio was established, the Yugoslav organizers of a state cinema system asked “their more experienced comrades in art […] for help and advice”; according to him, Room’s ‘training-camp’ film – despite its obvious shortcomings – “helped to form and cultivate the primary core of Yugoslav cinematographers” (fil’m pomog sformirovat’ i vospitat’ osnovnoe jadro jugoslavskich kinematografistov” (17).

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For nomenclature communists like Mdivani obviously the venture lay in a maximized contribution to the sovietisation of the ‘little brother’s’ cinematography (“The task of every master of Soviet cinematography is to help the young cinema of Yugoslavia, this country so friendly and brotherly towards us, whose people fought so bravely against world-wide fascism.”); the territory, on which this bright future was sketched out for the first time – in “film documents about the great partisan battles of the Yugoslav people shot mainly by Soviet cameramen and director Varlamov’s group”, his scenario “Novaja Jugoslavija”, and finally Room’s film – he describes as “naked” (goloe mesto) – ground zero.70 For Room the situation was different. Next to Ivan Pyr’ev (1942 SEKRETAR’ RAJKOMA/THE REGIONAL PARTY SECRETARY), Fridrich Ėrmler (1943 ONA ZAŠČIŠČAET RODINU/SHE DEFENDS THE MOTHERLAND), Mark Donskoj (1943 RADUGA/RAINBOW) and Lev Arnštam (1944 ZOJA) he had been one of the outstanding directors of Soviet Partisan films during the war, his NAŠESTVIE/INVASION (1944), as I have argued elsewhere, marking a higher “form of diversity and differentiation” and an “essential transgression” of the Partisan genre model by highlighting the “conflict between family and partisanship” and thus setting the focus on the inner moral cruelty of all the necessary decisions of Partisan existence.71 Denise Youngblood’s judgment that the “last serious movies about the war had appeared in 1944 (e.g., INVASION)” whereas the “postwar war films had celebrated the ‘Great Patriotic’ as national triumph, but the war as national tragedy remained virgin territory for directors”,72 might help to understand the new context – of Soviet ‘war film in times of peace’. From this perspective, the very fact that a director of such (after all ‘bourgeois’) grandezza as Abram Room, with his continuous ambition to unite melodrama and the grotesque, and his explicit contempt for films as 70 Cf. Mdivani, Georgij: “Kino Jugoslavii”, in: Iskusstvo kino 2–3 (1945): 43. – Quite ‘naturally’ Mdivani completely ignores the fact that the first film documents about the Yugoslav Partisans were produced by Yugoslav Partisans themselves during the war – see e.g. Gal Kirn’s article in this volume. Also a few documentaries about the liberation war were produced earlier than Varlamov’s or Room’s films – see e.g.: P. Volk: “Balada o trubi i maglama“, 280 (BEOGRAD, KORACI SLOBODE, JASENOVAC, all released in 1945) or Škrabalo, Ivo: Hrvatska filmska povijest ukratko (1896–2006), Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez, V.B.Z. 2008: 43 (OSLOBOĐENIE ZAGREBA, 1945). 71 Cf. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan Films & Genre Mimicry: a Historical Survey”, in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 18. 72 D. J. Youngblood: Russian War Films, 117.

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“chronicles”,73 was commissioned to stage a rather one-dimensional (and historically truthful, ‘authentic’) plot, actually becomes quite unimaginable. And yet there are similarities between INVASION and IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA in the way they confront their uneven characters with a straightforward narration or by easily unifying Partisans and soldiers of the Red Army.74 Seen from the Yugoslav perspective, the film depicted the Partisans in a ridiculing, orientalist, and folkloristic costume drama; for Room and many other Soviet ‘players’ in the hazardous game of post-war war film, however, the representation of ‘the other’ (seen as ‘one’s own’ and different at the same time) was only one issue among many others, since the political status quo remained unstable and the actual ideological tasks of a film like IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA were therefore difficult to define and predict. The Pravda review literally translated the leading Soviet party slogans with Stalin aka Generalissimus as its spearhead into the new cultural set of references by confirming that in Room’s film “Tito is the guiding force of Babić’s power [and] Babić’s power lies in the unanimity of the Partisans”; “Tito’s power […] is the power of the people” – a people represented “by its most typical characters, ordinary Partisans, young men, women”.75 The myth of autochthonic national partisanship in service of global communist politics, Stalin’s “revolutionary war”, had dismissed 19th century Partisan warfare as a playground for anarchy, putting all Partisan operations – and especially those of down-to-earth-mužiks like Slavko Babić – under strict party control.76 Room, on the other hand, was faced with a scenario that another influential public institution, the journal Iskusstvo kino, had praised for its “non-American”, “non-exotic” and “non-touristic” depiction of a hero (Babić) described as “non-idealized”, “human” and “truthful”, whereas it harshly criticized the absence of such a truthful and lively depiction in regard to other characters, like Aleša (the Russian Red Army soldier, dying for the Yugoslav Partisans’ cause), Dušan (the member of the “Vrhovni 73 See his harsh critic of Arnštam’s ZOJA, stated in an open discussion among Soviet directors and script writers taking place on 13–15 February 1945, cf. “Stenogramma tvorčeskoj diskussii ‘Sovetskaja chudožestvennaja kinematografija v 1944”, in: Zak, Mark/Mucheeva, Ju. (eds.): Vojna na ėkrane. Moskva: Materik 2006: 154–157. 74 Cf. B. Wurm: “Partisan Films & Genre Mimicry”, 18. 75 Cf. S. Borodin: “V gorach Jugoslavii”, 3. 76 Cf. C. Schmitt: Theorie des Partisanen, 18.

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štab”), Ivo (the commissar), or General Šmul’c (Schmultz, the Nazienemy); even the portrayal of the “only historical figure”, Tito, is criticized for not being rooted in the Yugoslav leader’s proletarian descent.77 Among all expectations, requirements, and precepts, for Room, class theory as the sine qua non of Socialist Realism was definitely the most negligible element. The Soviet Partisan films of the Great Patriotic War mentioned above had provided other essential narrative, ideological and aesthetic trajectories. One of them concerned the question whether to feature ordinary Partisans, women, and children (the role model between 1941 and 1943) or to replace these guerrillas by soldiers, uniformed officers, and higher ranks (the late war model beginning in 1944). Mdivani and Room opted for a hybrid model by merging Babić and Tito, the ordinary and the exceptional, the sheepskin and the uniform, the mountain guy and the party guy, the Partisan and their general. The other issue was, of course, the authenticity and truthfulness of the protagonists, who at the same time represented the ‘typical’ personnel. In the case of IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA this task was aggravated by the foreignness of the main actors. Seen within the context of Soviet cinema, which had already tested the depiction of ‘Eastern European people’ in many episodes of the early wartime short agit-series BOEVOJ KINO-SBORNIK”/FIGHTING CINEMA ANTHOLOGIES” of 1941 and 1942 – among them Gerbert Rappaport’s Yugoslavia based 100 ZA ODNOGO/100 FOR ONE (1941) – Room not only actually assimilated the regional specificities (from original locations, to regional music, authentic Partisan songs, and the indecisive usage of Serbo-Croatian), but also attached great importance to features of historical authenticity (from real Partisan war sites as shooting locations to real Partisans working as extras and the numerous off-screen comments, taken from chronicles and other existing documents). In her book on Room, Irina Graščenkova points out that for the film director the most difficult agenda was the large scale of the film-script – never had he dealt with such a time span (nearly four years), this kind of hero (the Partisan army of the FNRJ), the documentarian approach (inevitable for the reconstruction of the Partisan war) or the problem of depicting a historical persona of such importance (Tito, whose “colloquial, oratory” nature and 77 Cf. I. Zvavič: “Romantika bor’by”, 19, 20. Tito is not the only historical figure in the film because, obviously, there is also Draža Mihajlović (like Ivo, the commissar, also played by Vjekoslav Afrić) and German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

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“lack of inner motion” she ascribes to the “immature state of the epic documentary art genre of the 40s and 50s” rather than to the impact of director, actor or script-writer).78 According to Graščenkova, the new context of postwar filmmaking was determined by the gigantic existential transformation of the lives of millions of people and several nations during the war, and Room, just like Roberto Rossellini’s PAISÀ, René Clément’s LA BATAILLE DU RAIL or Otakar Vávra’s CESTA K BARIKÁDÁM (all released in 1946), was prepared to take on the challenge of this historical moment. It is precisely this momentariness – in a historical, political and aesthetical sense – which can be regarded as the dominant factor of the film’s interpretative ambiguity. With its prototypical personnel of nearly every Socialist Realist film (patriots/Partisans vs. betrayers/cowards; communists vs. nationalists; political consciousness vs. spontaneity, naivety, impulsiveness; political leaders as metonymical father figures of the people’s ‘one big family’) and its no less prototypical personnel of Soviet war-time Partisan film (armed, fighting children and women vs. high ranking officers; atrocious Nazis vs. self-sacrificing Soviets), IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, on the one hand, fits the appropriate political guidelines, adding, as I have pointed out above, some significant twists and shifts to them. On the other hand, a character such as the ballad-style, amazon-like Simela, riding on a white horse with a gun slung over her shoulder (ill. 4a), not only resembles the allegory of “Motherland” (Rodina), calling to war against the oppressor,79 but can also be seen as a clear reference to the young and attractive looking female Partisan warriors, taking over Yugoslav Partisan iconography from the very beginning of the war80 and appearing on the screen soon after Room’s film – as SLAVICA. Like Milica, Slavko’s wife, Simela contributes to the cautiously feminized and also sexualized imagery of the film, deliberately subverting its general romantic (male) pathos (ill. 4b). In some moments, Room and his cameraman Tissė even manage to grasp the ‘real’ post-war Yugoslavia, undecorated and without the slightest trace of either elegance or pathos: in a scene, reminding the European spectator more of Italian Neorealism than of Michail Čiaureli’s battlefields –

78 Cf. I. Graščenkova: Abram Room, 44. 79 Cf. I. Graščenkova: Abram Room, 45. – One could also add Greek mythology as another layer of meaning, since Semele seduced Zeus, just like Simela – dying – falls into Slavko’s caressing strong hands. 80 See Natascha Vitorelli’s article in this volume.

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ruins of roofless brick houses, an old sorrowful woman on stone stairs, a child crying over its dead mother.

Ill. 4a and 4b:”The Death of an Amazon”: Simela in IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA Whether any of the 800.000 Moscovites, who saw the film during the first two weeks after its release in early November 1946,81 also grasped some of these quirky shifts and nuances that I have tried to point out remains unknown. They were definitely overlooked by the many spectators in postwar Yugoslavia, who were faced with some heavy, pathetic loads of late Socialist Realism, when all they wanted to see was the hardship of the Yugoslav Partisans’ fight, their own, ‘real’, local Partisans, under the guidance of Tito, their leader. But that is, of course, only another mythological speculation. Film history is full of it. Just like visual culture in general and the Partisan narrative in particular.

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What are the essential shifts then from Slavko to Slavica, from the SovietYugoslav Partisans to the Yugoslav-Yugoslav Partisans, from 1946 to 1947, from Room to Afrić? From where should the juxtaposing take off, if already the predecessor seems such an ambivalent unit? Is there any way to

81 These “impressive numbers, given the time” are mentioned by I. Graščenkova: Abram Room, 46. 82 This chapter was conceived together with Tatjana Simeunović, whose unpublished conference paper of July 2011 and a typescript of the revised version of May 2012 also served as major sources of reference for this part of the text.

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take into account the highly sensitive cultural and political instability during the immediate post-war years in Eastern Europe? Let’s start with the mediating figure, Vjekoslav Afrić. In one of his interviews he claimed that SLAVICA was partly conceived in response to IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, a film he considered guilty of a “‘Stalinist’ method in presenting our reality, which was at moments deeply insulting [to us].”83 If in Room’s version the victory parade was led by a bigger portrait of Stalin and smaller ones of Tito, in Afrić’s film, naturally, there could only be a big one of Tito (what remains unsaid, however, is the fact that in IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA Stalin appears in an approximately two seconds shot, surrounded by much longer shots of ‘Yugoslav icons only’ – the monument, the flag, and, finally Tito [ill. 5]).

Ill. 5: Yugoslavia-images only: The last scenes of IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA Afrić emphasized his own Partisan experience as participant in the Yugoslav armed national struggle, and repeatedly referred to the authenticity also of the three stories (he had heard during the war), which were pulled together for the main plot of the film-script: a Partisan armed fishing boat, taking on a superior German unit; a female factory worker joining an association of fishermen, finally losing her life on a Partisan boat; and the career of a Partisan commander. It seems evident that in terms of cultural authenticity, Afrić’s experience was incomparable to the one of the Soviet film team, spending only a few weeks in the country.84 Nevertheless, both

83 Cf. Ostojić, Stevo: “Tužni odjek u Zagrebu. Sećanja na ‘Slavicu’”, in: Politika 30 July 1980: 11. According to Afrić, the first draft of SLAVICA was more explicit in its polemics than the later ones. 84 See also D.J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 20: “Despite its naiveté and crude propagandizing, the film, nonetheless, does capture well the Dalmatian coastal setting and the dialects and authentic culture of that region in a way that is al-

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films start with the same strategy of authentication – in Room’s case of the originality of the location, in Afrić’s case of the participation of real marine Partisans. Another quite comparable aspect was the rush and haste during the shooting, which both directors and studios – no matter how experienced or unexperienced in filmmaking they were – must have considered as extremely difficult due to insufficient equipment, the mass scenes, and the general inconveniences of post-war life. Both directors eagerly followed the immediate reception of their films, be it by party officials or the mass audience. SLAVICA opened on May 13th, 1947 in Belgrade, and was an immediate success, “its reception by audiences throughout the country, at least as measured by numbers of viewers and comments from contemporaries, was strong and enthusiastic”;85 in less than two years over a million people had seen the film and – in great contrast to Room’s film – they could see it for the next twenty-five years. The film was, however, reviewed critically, for its lack of dramaturgical unity, an oversimplified and uneventful plot, naïve black and white characterisations and theatrical acting. If analysed on the level of plot structure and character development, SLAVICA, this ‘first’ native Partisan film in the history of Yugoslav cinema, just like IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, seems a rather peculiar prototype of what was to become the central film genre in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is hybrid in relation to genre (set up somewhere in between war film and folkloristic social melodrama)86, hybrid in relation to nationality issues (a – Serbian – Avala-production, mainly located on Croatian – Dalmatian – territory)87, hybrid in relation to the most prominent topos of partisanship introduced by Carl Schmitt (with simple fishermen instead of simple countrymen, thus, highlighting the Yugoslav Navy, the “Jugoslovenska Ratna Mornica”, within the Yugoslav People’s Army and therefore framing the “tellurian” character of Partisan mountain combat

most entirely lacking in the professionally better-made Soviet film IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA.” 85 Cf. D.J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 19. 86 See also I. Škrabalo: Hrvatska filmska povijest, 49–50. 87 Since most of the actors were Croats and the language spoken was mainly the Chakavian dialect from the area around Split, one critic called SLAVICA “a Croat film, both culturally and mentally”, cf. Šakić, Tomislav: “Hrvatski film klasičnoga razdoblja: ideologizirani filmski diskurz i modeli otklona”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 38 (2004): 13.

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with a clearly maritime, Mediterranean scenario), and finally hybrid in relation to the main aspects brought up by the socialist realist aesthetics of Partisan film (more or less erasing the ‘Soviet share’ in the process of liberation,88 but also dissolving and substituting many important features of the genre in its Yugoslav variety-to-be, like the stressing of the notion of “brotherhood and unity”, the foregrounding of the guiding force of Tito and the “Vrhovni štab”, or the general male – if not macho – stance of “partizanski film”). Let us elaborate on this last aspect, since it is pivotal for the drifting shifts occurring from Slavko to Slavica. If one above-mentioned critic found the class issue missing in Mdivani’s script and in Room’s film, this social (rather than the ethnical or national) dimension seems the backbone of Afrić’s film. But wouldn’t that mean that it was precisely this “moderate variant of socialist realism”, as the Yugoslav model “escap[ing] the worst consequences of Zhdanovism” is described by Goulding, which introduced one of the core concepts of the leading aesthetical paradigm of the Communist states into the genre of Yugoslav Partisan film? Or does Afrić’s seemingly advanced ideological shift derive from a certain anachronism in SLAVICA, in which pre-war class issues (poor fishermen and proletarians vs. the rich bourgeoisie and clergy) are projected onto the war and immediate post-war years? On the other hand, one might argue, that it is rather IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA, and not SLAVICA (as asserted by Goulding), that “built on a structural model which was to be emulated by most of the other early Partisan films of this period. It is a pattern which begins by affirming Partisan-led local initiatives in specific locales, involving the distinctive nationalities of the region, and builds organically to an affirmation of the epic all-Yugoslav character of its leadership and heroes – with Tito presented as the preeminent heroic unifying symbol – and of the allYugoslav character of the Partisan fighting forces, which becomes the

88 See also D.J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 19: “The film is also imbued with an intense nationalism and pride, which, despite all simplifications, is a more accurate rendering of the indigenous all-Yugoslav character of the War of Liberation than that given in the Soviet film, which portrayed the Yugoslav Partisan movement as deriving its force and direction from overarching Soviet leadership and from the might of the Red Army, where the true source of Partisan successes are to be discovered. There is even a sequence in the film in which two extraordinarily brave and resourceful soldiers of the Red Army fight off vastly superior enemy forces to ‘rescue’ an entire unit of Partisans.”

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essential guarantor of ultimate victory in war, as well as the basis upon which to build a completely new Yugoslavia.”89 In this regard, it was the Jewish-Soviet director, Abram Room, and not his ‘Yugoslav’ counterpart, Vjekoslav Afrić, who introduced the “nationalist-inspired thematic orientation” of the genre. Last, but not least: gender issues. It is remarkable that both films tend to modify the principle of the individual, exemplary hero. In IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA Slavko is gradually cross-faded by Tito, whereas in SLAVICA, right from the beginning, the function of the hero is split up between Marin (the ‘apprentice’, undergoing a transformation from fisherman to Partisan), Ivo Marušić (the ‘master’, i.e. Partisan commander, connected to the party and in some scenes even a typological lookalike of Tito) and Slavica (the other ‘apprentice’, sacrificing herself for the sake of her comrades by trying to get the vessel’s bullet hole shut and hereby getting shot herself). Slavica mirrors all three female characters represented in IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA. Like Milica, Slavica becomes the lover and wife of the male Partisan role model (Slavko in the first case, Marin in the second), supporting every step of this new life (including the devoted commitment to these men’s leaders – Tito in the first case, Ive in the second); but she interprets and performs this marriage in a much more progressive way than Milica: she is the active part of the couple, the first to kiss her husband, a driving force of the people’s uprising, demanding to be armed with weapon, appealing to Marin’s and the other fishermen’s conscience, raising money for the boat, never revealing its hiding place, refusing to marry an exploiter, thus confirming her commitment to social justice and gender equality. Like Anđa, who is sent to Mostar as a messenger, she leaves Dalmatia for Bosnia, introducing mobility and secret communication as female Partisan qualities to the plot. Again, like Anđa (but without her maternal obligations), she turns from a woman into a uniformed combatant. In both films the women fighters are being equipped with a weapon, but we don’t see them use it. Furthermore, Afrić decides not to even reveal an image of the armed Slavica, taming her potential and turning her into the more conventional Partisan nurse. The same similarities (messaging and armament), finally, refer to Simela, concluding with the same outcome: a martyr’s death. But the most striking reference is the figural transformation

89 Cf. D.J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 19–20.

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of these women. Whereas Simela can be regarded as an allegorical incorporation of the Soviet mythology of “Mother-Russia” (Rodina-mat’), Slavica – a diminutive of Slavka, the female equivalent of Slavko, becoming the ‘godmother’ of a plethora of newborn girls in Yugoslavia and of a cinema in Belgrade – has a metaphorical (even metonymical) namesake: the fishing-boat-turned-gun-boat, around which the film’s whole plot unfolds. It is the boat that is being polished and brought to a new gloss; it is the boat that becomes the perfect Partisan location and rescue spot, allowing for a faultless mimicry (since it is hidden from the Nazi enemy). Finally, it is the boat that turns into a monument for Slavica’s heroic sacrifice, hit – just like herself a few seconds later – by a bullet, brutally wounded, mercilessly killed, having died for a higher cause, but ‘rescued’ for the lying-in-state of the nation, Yugoslavia aka Slavica. IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA ends with a close-up of the new state’s national flag; the same flag we’ll find on Slavica’s sacrificed body. This people might have cleaned a boat for Tito, but they praise a woman.90 While Slavko Babić successively subordinates himself to the political leader, Slavica symbolically precedes the nation’s father figure. In this sense, SLAVICA does in fact emphasize the aspect of ‘irregularity’ in the Partisan genre, (dis)continuing the cautious (and most likely unconscious) moves, which partially had already been introduced by IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA. Just like its bigger brother in 1946, also SLAVICA, only one year later and thus, one step closer to the great schism, is a “historical and cultural monument”.91 Room’s film reflects the transnational relation between the two ‘brothers in arms’, leaving almost no space for deliberate irregularity on both sides. Afrić’s SLAVICA, on the other hand, clearly represented the chance for actual appropriation and participation – in the process and on the territory of the political as much as on the play-ground of cinema. Apparently soon after the first casting call for extras, 10.000 people from Split joined the shooting. It is they who are marching under the flags of their newly-born country at the end of the film, mourning over Slavica’s death, yet enthusiastically greeting a future full of

90 “Nasrid polja, voda ladna izvirala, voda izvirala, Slavica je cviće zalivala, Slavica je cviće zalivala...” (In the midst of the field cool water rose, the water rose. Slavica has watered the flowers, Slavica has watered the flowers.) 91 Cf. Kosanović, Dejan: “Tri filma Vjekoslava Afrića. ‘Slavica’ – ‘Barba Žvane’ – ‘Hoja, Lero’”, in: Filmska kultura 166 (1987): 13.

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hopes and expectations. They might not have known, but they were in the midst of the birthplace of a new genre in the history of film: the (Yugoslav) Partisan film.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Anochin, Igor’: Kinoiskusstvo Jugoslavii, Moskva: Bjuro propagandy sovetskogo kinoiskusstva 1966. Borodin, Sergej: “V gorach Jugoslavii”, in: Pravda, 3 November 1946: 3. Brenk, Francè: Slovenski film. Dokumenti in razmišljanja, Ljubljana: Partizanska knjiga 1980. Bulgakowa, Oksana: “Film als Verdrängungsarbeit. Der osteuropäische Film”, in: Rainer Rother (ed.): Mythen der Nationen. Völker im Film, Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum 1998: 201–217. Dedijer, Vladimir: Tito speaks. His self-portrait and struggle with Stalin, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1953. Djilas, Milovan: Jahre der Macht. Kräftespiel hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang. Memoiren 1945-1966, München: Molden-Seewald 1983. Fomin, Valerij/Derjabin, Aleksandr (eds.): Letopis’ rossijskogo kino 1946– 1965, Moskva: Materik 2010. Fomin, Valerij (ed.): “‘Političeskij ėffekt fil’ma RUSSKIJ VOPROS propadaet …’ Iz opyta sovetizacii poslevoennogo kinoprokata i kinoproizvodstva v Central’noj i Vostočnoj Evrope”, in: Kinovedčeskie zapiski 71 (2005): 194–247. Golubovič, Nataša: Nastanek Slovenske nacionalne kinematografije v 50tih, [Diploma] Koper: 2009, https://share.upr.si/fhs/PUBLIC/diplomske/ Golubovic-Natasa.pdf, last access: 29 August 2013. Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience, 1945– 2001. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2002. Graščenkova, Irina: Abram Room. Moskva: Iskusstvo 1977. Jakiša, Miranda: “Memory of a Past to come–Yugoslavia’s Partisan Film and Fashioning of Space”, in: Tanja Zimmermann (ed.), Balkan Memories. Media Constructions of National and Transnational History, Bielefeld: Transcript 2012: 113–122. Jakiša, Miranda: “Der ‘tellurische Charakter’ des Partisanengenres: Jugoslavische Topo-Graphie in Film und Literatur”, in: Esther Kilch-

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mann/Andreas Pflitsch/Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.), Topographie pluraler Kulturen. Europa vom Osten gesehen, Berlin: Kadmos 2011: 209–225. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Futur Antérieur of Yugoslav Cinema, or, Why Emir Kusturica’s Legacy is Worth Fighting For”, in: Daniel Šuber/ Slobodan Karamanić (eds.), Retracing Images. Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, Leiden/Boston: Brill 2012: 149–169. “Kak sozdavalsja fil’m ‘V gorach Jugoslavii’”, in: Večernjaja Moskva, 31. October 1946: n/a. Kenez, Peter: Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin, London/New York: Tauris 2001. “Kinematograf Vostočnoj Evropy – proščanie s prošlym, in: Kinovedčeskie zapiski 71 (2005): 6–34. Kosanović, Dejan/Tucaković, Dinko: Stranci u raju, Beograd: Stubovi kulture 1998. Kosanović, Dejan: “Tri filma Vjekoslava Afrića. ‘Slavica’ – ‘Barba Žvane’ – ‘Hoja, Lero’”, in: Filmska kultura 166 (1987): 6–21. Leyda, Jay: Kino. A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983. Mačeret, Aleksandr et al. (eds.): Sovetskie chudožestvennye fil’my. Annotirovannyj katalog, tom 2, Zvukovye fil’my (1930-1957), Moskva: Iskusstvo 1961. Mdivani, Georgij/Room, Abram: “‘Jugoslavija’. Novyj dokumental’nyj fil’m”, in: Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 7 June 1946: 4. Mdivani, Georgij: Novaja Jugoslavija, Moskva: Goskinoizdat 1946. Mdivani, Georgij: “Kino Jugoslavii”, in: Iskusstvo kino 2–3 (1945): 43. Michajlov, Vladimir/Fomin, Valerij (eds.): Cena kadra. Každyj vtoroj ranen, každyj četvertyj ubit. Sovetskaja frontovaja kinochronika 19411945gg. Dokumenty i svidetel’stva, Moskva: Kanon+ 2010. Mikata, Aleksandra: “Sto srpskih fotografija koje su obeležile ovaj vek“, in: Borba 28–29 August 1999: 12. Miller, Jamie: Soviet Cinema. Politics and Persuasion under Stalin, London: Tauris 2010. Mordvinov, Nikolaj: Dnevniki 1938–1966, Moskva: Vserossijskoe Teatral'noe Obščestvo 1976. “Naš prvi domaći umetnički film ‘Slavica’”, in: 20. Oktobar, 9 May 1947.

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“No. 273 – Zapiska G.F. Aleksandrova A.A. Ždanovu o reakcii členov pravitel’stva Jugoslavii na prosmotr fil’ma ‘V gorach Jugoslavii’”, in: Kirill Anderson et al. (eds.), Kremlevskij kinoteatr 1928–1953. Dokumenty, Moskva: ROSSPĖN 2005: 777–778. Ostojić, Stevo: “Tužni odjek u Zagrebu. Sećanja na ‘Slavicu’”, in: Politika 30 July 1980: 11. Parfenov, Lev: Nikolaj Mordvinov, Moskva: Iskusstvo 1981. “Partizanarica 9: Čapaev + V gorah Jugoslavije”, http://www.klubgromka. org/index.php?mode=program&id=2462, last access: 29 August 2013. Perović, Jeronim: “The Tito-Stalin Split. A Reassessment in Light of New Evidence”, in: Journal of Cold War Studies 9.2 (2007): 32–63, http:// www.zora.uzh.ch/62735/1/Perovic_Tito.pdf, last access: 29 August 2013. Pogoževa, Ljudmila: “Dialogi v scenarii i fil’me”, in: Iskusstvo kino 2 (1947): 19–21. Rajgorodskaja, Irina: “Jugoslavskoe kino: temy i problematika”, in: Irina Rajgorodskaja (ed.), Kino Jugoslavii, Moskva: Iskusstvo 1978: 6–35. Šakić, Tomislav: “Hrvatski film klasičnoga razdoblja: ideologizirani filmski diskurz i modeli otklona”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 38 (2004): 6–34. Schmitt, Carl: Der Begriff des Politischen [1932], Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1996. Schmitt, Carl: Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkungen zum Begriff des Politischen [1962], Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1992. Škrabalo, Ivo: Hrvatska filmska povijest ukratko (1896–2006), Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez, V.B.Z. 2008. Stanković, Peter: “Je li mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?” in: KINO! 10.2010: 22–53. “Stenogramma tvorčeskoj diskussii ‘Sovetskaja chudožestvennaja kinematografija v 1944”, in: Zak, Mark/Mucheeva, Ju. (eds.): Vojna na ėkrane. Moskva: Materik 2006: 101–162. Šuber, Daniel/Karamanić, Slobodan: “Mapping the Field”, in: Daniel Šuber/Slobodan Karamanić (eds), Retracing Images. Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, Leiden/Boston: Brill 2012: 1–25. Tito contra Stalin. Der Streit der Diktatoren in ihrem Briefwechsel, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1949.

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Volk, Petar: Svedočenje: Hronika Jugoslovenskog Filma 1945-1970, part 2, Beograd: S. Mašić, P. Volk 1975. Volk, Petar: “Balada o trubi i maglama (kratka povijest jugoslavenske filmske proizvodnje)”, in: Branko Belan: Sjaj i bijeda filma. Zagreb: Epoha 1966: 235–335. Vučo, Aleksandar: “Naša mlada filmska proizvodnja”, in: Film 1 (1946): 1–4. Vučo, Aleksandar: “Velikoruski šovinizam u sovjetskom filmu”, in: Filmska kultura 1 (1950): 15–20. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan Films & Genre Mimicry: a Historical Survey”, in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 13–21. Youngblood, Denise J.: Russian War Films. On the Cinema Front, 1914– 2005, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2007. Zak, Mark/Mucheeva, Ju. (eds.): Vojna na ėkrane. Moskva: Materik 2006. Zimmermann, Tanja: “From the Haiduks to the Bogomils: Transformation of the Partisan Myth after World War II”, in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 62– 70. Zvavič, Isaak: “Romantika bor’by. Scenarij Georgija Mdivani ‘Novaja Jugoslavija’”, in: Iskusstvo kino 2–3 (1945): 19–20.

F ILMOGRAPHY 100 ZA ODNOGO/100 FOR ONE [Fourth Episode of BOEVOJ KINOSBORNIK No. 2] (SU 1941, D: Gerbert Rappaport) BEOGRAD (YUG 1945, D: Nikola Popović) BUCHTA SMERTI/THE BAY OF DEATH (SU 1926, D: Abram Room) ČAPAEV (SU 1934, D: Georgij Vasil’ev/Sergej Vasil’ev) CESTA K BARIKÁDÁM/WAY TO THE BARRICADES (CZ 1946, D: Otakar Vávra) CINEMA KOMUNISTO (SER 2010, D: Mila Turajlić) ĖSKRADIL’JA NO. 5/ SQUADRON NO. 5 (SU 1939, D: Abram Room) JASENOVAC (YUG 1945, D: Gustav Gavrin/Kosta Hlavaty) JUGOSLAVIJA/YUGOSLAVIA (SU 1946, D: Leonid Varlamov) KLJATVA/THE VOW (SU 1946, D: Michail Čiaureli) KORACI SLOBODE/THE STEPS OF FREEDOM (YUG 1945, D: Radoš Novaković)

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LA

BATAILLE DU RAIL/THE BATTLE OF THE RAILS (F 1946, D: René Clément) MARITE (SU 1947, D: Vera Stroeva) NAŠESTVIE/INVASION (SU 1944, D: Abram Room) NAŠI DEVUŠKI/OUR GIRLS (SU 1942, D: Abram Room/Grigorij Kozincev) NEULOVIMYJ JAN/THE ELUSIVE JAN (SU 1942, D: Isidor Annenskij/Vladimir Petrov) ONA ZAŠČIŠČAET RODINU/SHE DEFENDS THE MOTHERLAND (SU 1943, D: Fridrich Ėrmler) OSLOBOĐENIE ZAGREBA/THE LIBERATION OF ZAGREB (YUG 1945, D: Branko Marjanović) PAISÀ/PAISAN (IT 1946, D: Roberto Rossellini) RADUGA/RAINBOW (SU 1943, D: Mark Donskoj) SEKRETAR’ RAJKOMA/THE REGIONAL PARTY SECRETARY (SU 1942, D: Ivan Pyr’ev) SLAVICA (YUG 1947, D: Vjekoslav Afrić) STROGIJ JUNOŠA/STRICT YOUTH (SU 1936, D: Abram Room) SYNOV’JA/SONS (SU 1946 D: Aleksandr Ivanov) V GORACH JUGOSLAVII/U PLANINAMA JUGOSLAVIJE/IN THE MOUNTAINS OF YUGOSLAVIA (SU 1946, D: Abram Room) ZIGMUND KOLOSOVSKIJ/ZIGMUNT KOLOSOWSKI (SU 1945 D: Boris Dmochovskij/Sigizmund Navrockij) ŽIVJEĆE OVAJ NAROD/THIS PEOPLE WILL LIVE (YUG 1947, D: Nikola Popović) ZOJA (SU 1944, D: Lev Arnštam)

On the Specific (In)existence of the Partisan Film in Yugoslavia's People’s Liberation Struggle G AL K IRN

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. WALTER BENJAMIN, ON THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY

(1940)

Il faut opérer en partisan partout où il y a des partisans. GENERAL LEFÈBVRE (1813)

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I NTRODUCTION :

RECENT RETURN TO PARTISAN FILMS

After the break-up of Yugoslavia it was not very well received to speak about the grand narrative of the Partisan struggle, one of the fundamental pillars of socialist Yugoslavia. History had to be rewritten and any evocation of Yugoslavia worked as a ghostly demarcation that threatened the nascent nation-building process. The latter consisted in neutralizing or erasing the traces of the emancipatory past. In this context the Yugonostalgic discourse became a refuge for all those who thought, or rather felt differently than the dominant ideology of anti-totalitarianism, which condemned the entire Yugoslav past as totalitarian and gloomy. It is true that this refuge was not without traps, as very often Yugonostalgia has found itself captured in the service of naïve idealization of the past, rather than formulating real political demands in order to change the present state of affairs. However, a certain political and aesthetical remainder resurfaced and has recently returned in the post-Yugoslav context. This Partisan resurgence took place in different media and different cultural forms: from graphic exhibitions, remakes of theatre plays and books to a revisiting of antifascist memorial sites and a viewing of old Partisan films by a general public.1 More specifically and more recently a body of research started discussing the existence and reception of Partisan films as a part of (post-) Yugoslav popular culture. In 2005 Peter Stanković wrote a book on the Slovenian Partisan film, which announced a new chapter that is to be written in order to re-assess the majority of Slovenian films that dealt with the topic of the People’s Liberation Struggle (Narodno Osvobodilna Borba) henceforth referred to as NOB. One of Stanković’s basic claims is that in order to understand the post-Yugoslav present one also has to analyse the recent past, which was structuring Yugoslav social reality. Partisan film can be seen as an example of ‘authentic local culture’, where different ideological and formal frag-

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For an account of the rising popularity of the Partisan topic see Jakiša, Miranda: “Down to Earth Partisans: Fashioning of YU-Space in Partisan Films”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 54–61; Kirn, Gal: “From partisan primacy of politics to postfordist tendency in Yugoslav self- management”, in: Gal Kirn (ed.), Postfordism and its discontents, Maastricht/Ljubljana: Jan van Eyck Academie and Peace Institute 2010: 253–305 and specially Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? Ljubljana: založba cf./* 2009.

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ments met.2 Miranda Jakiša observes that the majority of people living in socialist Yugoslavia remembered the period of WWII much more through Partisan cinema than through historical textbooks or Partisan memoirs and literary works that spoke about the NOB.3 The most common approach of film theoreticians goes in the direction of understanding Partisan film as a separate (albeit not quite ordinary) film genre.4 Nebojša Jovanović, on the contrary provides a reserved and critical attitude towards the reduction of Partisan films to a cultural vehicle of party propaganda or a specific film genre. Jovanović defends certain aesthetical specificities of Fadil Hadžić’s Partisan films and launches a fresh line into Partisan research.5 Apart of ascribing importance to these studies as a crucial culturalpolitical chapter of recent history, I would suggest pushing the analysis a bit further: further in the past (temporally) and further towards the abstract core of Partisan struggle (politically). This paper deals with the very beginning of Partisan film. I am not so much interested in the post-war Partisan films. I do not want to deconstruct visual and narrative strategies employed by Yugoslav film-makers, or enter into the debate of the Partisan film genre, but will address the question of the specific existence of the Partisan films already during WWII.6 The relationship between the Partisan archive

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Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi. Reprezentcija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu, Ljubljana: založba FDV 2005: 9. M. Jakiša: “Down to Earth Partisans”, 54. Gilić, Nikica: “Ne okreći se sine Branka Bauera: stil i ideologija ratne (partizanske) melodrame”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 82–91; Pavičić, Jurica: “Igrani filmovi Fadila Hadžića”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 34 (2003): 3–38; Musabegović, Senadin: Rat: Konstitucija totalitarnog tijela, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 2008; Stanković, Peter: “Je mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?” In: Kino! 10 (2010): 22–54; during the times of Yugoslavia see especially Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film 1-2, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984, and Munitić, Ranko: Živjet ce ovaj narod, jugoslavenski film o revoluciji, Zagreb: Publicitas 1974. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 65/66 (2011). It was Barbara Wurm (2010), who made the important observation that the first films on Partisans were actually made in the Soviet Union during WWII by Abram Room (Invasion in 1944, or the first Yugoslav feature film In the mountains of Yugoslavia in 1946) and Lev Kuleshov. See: Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan Film & Genre Mimicry: A Historical Survey”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 13–21. However, in this article we will highlight the difference between Partisan film and film on Partisans. Also, the historical and material conditions in the Soviet Union were dramatically different from those in Yugoslavia. The situation in the

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and Partisan art will be at the centre of my research focus. Only very few theoreticians in socialist Yugoslavia in short sections of their books or articles provided us with a cursory history of Partisan cinema, which they admit is difficult to reconstruct.7 The first reason for this impossible reconstruction is obvious: most of the Partisan films were lost, destroyed or scattered. The second reason is theoretical: Partisan films are labelled simply as documents, in terms of filmic archive, which already a priori takes away an aesthetical value and questions the very existence of Partisan films.8 I will proceed in the following way: firstly, I will contextualize my return to the NOB; secondly, I will analyse the role of Partisan art and film in/for the NOB, positing the film as embodiment of the revolutionary promise. And thirdly, I will present some of Partisan filmmakers and their works, concluding with the question of the politicisation of the archive.

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Soviet Union allowed for a relatively stable film production and distribution, whereas Yugoslavia was completely occupied. Brenk, France: “Prispevek k zgodovini slovenskega in jugoslovanskega filma do 9.maja 1945”, in: Dokumenti Slovenskega Gledališkega Muzeja 6–7.2 (1966): 43–61; Brenk, France: “Slovenski NOB film”, in: Dokumenti Slovenskega Gledališkega Muzeja 25.11 (1975a): 48–69; Brenk, France: “Slovenski NOB film - nadaljevanje”, in: Dokumenti Slovenskega Gledališkega Muzeja 25.11 (1975b): 104–124; Brenk, France: “O filmski in fotografski kulturi med narodnoosvobodilnim bojem”, in: Franček Bohanc (ed.), Kultura, revolucija in današnji čas, Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba 1979: 61-67; Golubovič, Nataša: Nastanek slovenske nacionalne kinematografije, Koper: Fakulteta za humanistične študije 2009; Kosanović, Dejan: Kinematografija u Bosni i Hercegovini 1897–1945, Sarajevo: Kino Savez Bosne i Hercegovine 2003; Savković, Miroslav: Cinematography in Serbia during the Second World War 1941–1945, Beograd: Institut za pozorište, film, radio i televiziju Fakulteta dramskih umetnosti u Beogradu/Ibis 1994; Volk, Petar: Hronika jugoslovenskog filma 1896-1945, Beograd: Svedočenje 1973; and Vrdlovec, Zdenko: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, Radovljica: Didakta 2010. The naming itself is already symptomatic: This refers to films as documents, archive, filmic celluloid, newsreels, all of which stress the material dimensions of the medium, without any aesthetic or even propagandistic qualifications: F. Brenk: “O filmski in fotografski kulturi”, 62.

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TO PARTISAN FILM VIA PARTISAN STRUGGLE

My return to real Partisan films should not be read as a hermeneutical or a historicist claim for the origin. Foucault, following Nietzsche, famously refuted the quest for origin, which is presented as something pure that reinstates a primary identity. The origin has usually more to do with projections, with something that never really existed, which in our case could be labelled as a nostalgic dealing with the Yugoslav past. My genealogy of Partisan film will go against this approach and will try to follow Foucault’s endeavour to “cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their pretty malice”.9 My task will be to access these Partisan resources in a new way, beyond existing and scarce comments, beyond tradition that ascribed them a simple documentary function. Launching a new perspective is only possible by “putting into question the very historical subject which one tries to attain”.10 Against positing the archive as the most secure source of the past, which would harbour the ultimate truth, we will follow the lesson on archive developed by Jacques Derrida.11 According to Derrida archive is derived from “arche”, which has a double meaning. The first and more current meaning is the afore-mentioned “commencement” (beginning), but it should be necessarily accompanied by the second, more vital meaning: “arche” as “commandment”. “Arche” has to do with “archonts”, that is, with the political leadership. There is nothing innocent about the beginning, since it is authorized only through a certain commandment over this same beginning; or rather it implies a certain continuation of it. Derrida shows that archive always has to do with an existence of specific space, where it is stored, let us call it the central archive. This is the place where the interpretation of archive and documents takes place, possibly giving them a form of law. Derrida’s insight can help us see the Partisan archive not as some innocent material, which preserves the original truth. What will be highlighted in this quest for beginning and rethinking of the Partisans has much more to do 9

Foucault, Michel: “Nietzsche, genealogy, history”, in: D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977: 139–165. 10 Agamben, Giorgio: “Philosophical Archaeology”, in: Law Critique 20, Springer 2009: 217. 11 Derrida, Jacques: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, in: Diacritics 2.25 (1995): 9–63.

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with the question of return: why and how to return to the Partisan past? And here we cannot but agree with the position assumed by Miklavž Komelj, who, in his brilliant book How to rethink partisan art?, argues that the return should never be only a matter of actuality, of fashion, but a matter of contemporarity.12 Return should show what a contemporary gesture of the Partisans means for us, today and for future. In the light of actually existing Yugo-nostalgia and antitotalitarian discourses this return becomes a necessary task for anyone interested in a genealogical approach or a critical reading of the past. This opens a whole set of more complex questions for any critical inquiry: how to grasp the novelty of Partisan struggle, what were/are the narrative and visual experiments that deal and formalize this novelty? The absence of any serious rethinking of the Partisan struggle is striking and symptomatic in much of the cultural research on Partisan films. It mostly speaks about Partisan films without actually referring to the Partisan struggle, as if cinema does not have anything to say, or is unable to represent history.13 Most often cultural analyses on Partisan films work on the secondary level, on the level of meaning of representations or analysis of film genre. They have a common presupposition, namely, that the NOB is the central myth that structured Yugoslav society.14 This view interprets Partisan films as if their only function (or any art dealing with the Partisan event) was a contribution to the mythologization of the NOB. This position ascribes to the thesis that subjugates art to politics: films on Partisans were instruments in the hands of the ruling elite, of the Communist Party, which assisted in the legitimization of the formerly existing socialist order.15 The reduction of NOB to a mere myth posits researches dangerously close to the dominant ideological scheme of totalitarianism, which erases all revolutionary traces of the past: Yugoslavia becomes a ‘prison-house of nations’, 12 See Ibid. and Smith, Terry: What is contemporary art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009. 13 For theorization of a complex relation between cinema and history see Mazierewska, Ewa: European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2011. 14 Illustrative examples of this type of analysis can be found in J. Pavičić: “Igrani filmovi Fadila Hadžića” and S. Musabegović: Rat. 15 For an important critique of this view see: N. Jovanović: “Fadil Hadžić” and Jovanović, Nebojša: “Breaking the Wave: A Commentary on ‘Black Wave polemics: rhetoric as aesthetic’ by Greg DeCuir, Jr.”, in: Studies in Eastern European Cinema 2. 2 (2011): 161–171.

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socialism a failed, inefficient or utopian experiment, and revolution equated with post-war killings. The NOB was not represented only as a myth in the Yugoslav film production. One needs to see a few from overall 200 films that dealt with the Partisan topic16 to get a more complex grip on this heterogeneous cinematic panorama. Stanković shows in Rdeči trakovi that any view that would reduce Slovenian Partisan films to simple propaganda or state films is incorrect. Moreover, I argue that the films on Partisans did not represent a uniformed genre with unequivocal mythological meaning, but on the contrary, they produced polyvalent meanings and were aesthetically heterogeneous.17 Films on Partisans traversed different genres, many of them were critical towards the dominant historical narrative of the League of Communists, undermining the foundational status of NOB as a myth, some of them went so far as to advocate a reconciliation with the local collaborators, the Chetniks and Home Guards.18 Instead of deconstructing the films of Partisans or simply equating them to a propaganda tool, I suggest returning to the beginning: the beginning of Partisan struggle and Partisan film. This point is inspired by some other recent analyses, which despite their different focuses argue for the revolutionary and crucial status of the Partisan event.19 I would agree with the thesis that the NOB was the most important historical and political event in the 20th century on the Balkans. This event consisted of different stages and should be read as a complex encounter of social forces that waged antifas-

16 200 films on Partisans equal 20% of overall Yugoslav film production. See M. Čolić for a detailed overview with summaries and commentaries on different genres of the PLS film: Jugoslovenski ratni film 1-2. 17 See also: Jakiša, Miranda: “Großes Kino des Subversion und Affirmation. Vom Schlagabtausch im jugoslawischen Film der 1960er”, in: Hannes Grandits/Holm Sundhaussen (eds.), Jugoslawien in den 1960er Jahren: auf dem Weg zu einem (a-)normalen Staat? Wiesbaden: Böhlau 2013: 169-195. 18 Stanković analysed the topics of reconciliation in Slovenian films: P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 42-68. 19 Buden, Boris: “Još o komunistićkim krvolocima, ili zašto smo se ono rastali”, in: Prelom 5.3 (2003): 51–58; Karamanić, Slobodan: “Kosovo after Yugoslavia”. Special edition in English, in: Prelom 8.5 (2006): 23–39; Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, Ljubljana: založba cf./* 2009; Močnik, Rastko: Svetovno gospodarstvo in revolucionarna politika, Ljubljana: založba cf./* 2006; Pupovac, Ozren: “Projekt Jugoslavija: dialektika revolucije”, in: Agregat 4. 9/10 (2006): 108–117; Stojanović, Branimir: “Politika Partizana”, in: Prelom 5.3 (2003): 48–51; and Suvin, Darko: Life in Letter, Washon Island: Paradoxa 2011.

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cist struggle, national liberation and started the socialist revolution. The NOB stood for the politics that affirmed a set of political principles, which were based on equality, internationalism and liberation. The politics of the NOB are diametrically opposed to the principles of both: to the pre-war extreme nationalistic, centralistic, and highly exploitational old Yugoslavia, as well as to the present situation, that is, the post-Yugoslav nationalistic identity communities in transition to neoliberal capitalist production. Undoubtedly, one needs to question the ambivalent effects of the integration of the NOB into the project of a new socialist Yugoslavia. This process was not innocent, but embedded in a certain politics of memory20 that was accompanied by highly ideologized aesthetical forms that legitimized socialist power. However, one should also not forget that the socialist order until the early 1980s carried and promoted the principles of social justice and international solidarity (highlighted in the severe critique of nationalist outbursts, development of different politics in the global relationship between two imperialisms…) to a quite successful degree. And this was not so much thanks to the iron hand of Tito, as mainstream ideologues claim, but thanks to a relatively prosperous Yugoslavian economy that guaranteed a large amount of social and economic rights through the self-management model.21 This short diagnosis of the politico-theoretical conjuncture enables us to argue that returning to a certain past can never be a neutral or closed process. Moreover, it seems that any research on Partisans needs to be done in a Partisan way, that is, it needs to take sides. The mobilization and rethinking of past emancipatory experiences is in no way arbitrary, but has to do with opening the demonized or glorified past to an assertive new future.22

20 I analysed the transformation of memorial sites in (post-)Yugoslav context on various occasions, see: Kirn, Gal: “Spomin na partizane ali misel o partizanstvu?”, in: Zdenka Badovinac, Bojana Piškur (eds.), Catalogue Museum on the stree, Ljubljana: Muzej moderne umetnosti 2009: 104–112; Kirn, Gal: “Antifascist Memorial Sites: Pure Art or Mythologization of Socialist Yugoslavia?” In: WHW (ed.), Art always has its consequences, Zagreb: Zelina 2010: 120– 135. 21 See Samary’s excellent analysis on Yugoslavian self-management: Samary, Cathérine: Le marché contre l’autogestion : l’expérience yougoslave, Paris: Publisud/Montreuil 1988. 22 Works by Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch influence this approach.

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WWII in Yugoslavia started on 6th of April 1941. The Axis forces occupied the whole country and on 17th April the Royal Army of Yugoslavia surrendered unconditionally. From the very beginning the local population was exposed to severe terror: Axis forces and collaborationists sent many Jews, gypsies, but also other local inhabitants Serbs, Slovenes and others to concentration and working camps, many systematic killings and torture occurred already during the early stages of the occupation, which also triggered a strong antifascist resistance. The first antifascist resistance organiorganization was formed on 26th April 1941, in Ljubljana, and was named Liberation Front (OF). Some smaller sabotage actions followed, but it was on 22nd June 1941, the day the Soviet Union was attacked, that the first antifascist military Partisan unit emerged. By the end of war there were more than 800 000 Partisans organized in four Yugoslav armies, which made it the largest resistance movement and army in Europe.23 The intensity and wide popular support of Partisan struggle in Yugoslavia did not come out of the blue, but it was also not a planned political enterprise. It needed to go through a painstaking process in asserting the autonomy of the Partisan resistance during WWII. Apart from the multiple occupation by the Axis (German, Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian forces), Yugoslavia had very strong local collaborationist forces; from the Ustashas in the Independent State of Croatia, Chetniks in Serbia and Bosnia, to the Home Guards in Slovenia and the royalist forces in many parts of the country. Struggle against the occupation meant also struggle against the local collaborators, against the ethnical principle that was inscribed in the core of the above military groups. Contrasted to the emancipatory and multinational principle of the Partisans this meant that a civil war was taking place at the same time as the struggle against the occupation. Except for the very beginning of the Chetnik uprising, the majority of the forces of ‘old Yugoslavia’ collaborated with the Axis forces and waged the fight against Partisans throughout WWII. The Chetniks and their leader Draža Mihailović were recognized as a royal representative of the Yugoslav army and were supported by Western Allies despite their growing collaboration with the Axis. In this respect, it is important to stress that the Yugo23 A detailed overview of data relating to the Partisan struggle in WWII is collected on the page: http://www.vojska.net/eng/world-war-2/yugoslavia/

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slav Partisan forces were not internationally recognized till the Tehran’s conference in December 1943. It was only then that they became formally a part of the Allied antifascist forces. This peculiar situation and tension with the royal old government in London24 meant that the Yugoslav Partisans had to rely on their own forces facing both: occupation and local collaborationist forces. If we take into account these extreme circumstances and the guerrilla fighting of Yugoslav Partisans, it is pertinent to ask a very simple question: did Partisan art exist during WWII? Or, conversely, should we merely take the Partisan art as war propaganda, as something not relevant to the struggle? In his book Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? on Partisan art, Miklavž Komelj argues that only under the condition that we take into account these unfavourable circumstances are we able to understand the crucial role that Partisan art played in the People’s Liberation Struggle. According to Komelj, the novelty of Partisan art should be grasped in its gesture that reinvents the material conditions of art itself. During the occupation the official artistic institutions did not give legitimacy to what art is and how to practice it, or even who does it. Many of the artistic institutions ceased to exist; the remaining ones were subjugated to strict censorship laws and the task of spreading the culture and civilisation of the occupier. In this situation the task of Partisan art was to begin from nothing, that is, to invent a new artistic autonomy, with new institutions and a new canon. Partisan art emerged from its very impossibility: “it created its own conditions from their very absence”.25 This conception of art is radically different from the liberal idea of autonomy, which is always presupposed, or is affirmed by spontaneous artistic ideology. The liberal conception of art is accompanied by a set of presupposed aesthetical criteria, which legitimize what is, and what is not art. A similar set of bourgeois art criteria were re-introduced in Yugoslavia soon after the war. As Adorno noted, the question of art autonomy should never be thought of as a purely artistic question. If Adorno argues that politics of art exist in the very form of art, we should add that in the case of Partisan art it is the very existence of art

24 Not only supported by the British, but also by Stalin. For the complicated and ambiguous relationship of the Allies towards Partisans and collaborators see M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? 25 M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, 47.

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that resists “the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads”.26 Partisan art was from the beginning political, as Komelj puts it, it “inseparably linked its own freedom with the people’s liberation”.27 We should add, not only political in a broader sense of the word, but revolutionary. To be sure, this political dimension of art was not only declaratory, or blindly instrumentalized by the ‘General Command’ of the Partisans. Partisan art should not be understood in pure propagandistic terms, as a simple means in the struggle. Quite the opposite, Partisan art started practising specific form of politics, which attained its own autonomy despite its centeredness in the struggle for liberation. It was not only means, but an end in itself, which produced consequences long after the war was over. In concrete terms, to understand the importance of art, one can only mention one example, how the General Command in Slovenia financed and supported the printing of thousands of copies of avant-garde Partisan poetry by Karel Destovnik Kajuh and Matej Bor, or also how it helped to produce very ornamented (and expensive) graphics for the large collection of poems from France Prešeren. Why and how to explain the push for the avant-garde position of art, if it was much more wise to use the time and material means to spread propagandistic material, or simply to gather food and ‘real’ weapons for the Partisan struggle? Another creative and complex nature of Partisan activities is well situated and explained by a historical account of Partisan women.28 When they joined the Partisans there was no spare time, as women recount, they were involved in military work and fighting, nursing and caring for wounded or in political-cultural work, education and cultural organisation. Last but not least one would be also taking care for food and cattle and very likely you would be doing all these activities in the course of the struggle. The political-cultural work, the education of illiterate peasants and further symbolic empowerment was one of the central pillars of the Partisan struggle. The cultural production was as important as the military struggle, and developed a massive infrastructure in the occupied and liberated territo26 Adorno, Theodor: “Commitment”, in: Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso 2007: 180. 27 M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, 31. 28 See the volume Partizanke, which comprises interviews of different Partisan women that were engaged in the PLS: Milinović, Daško/ Petakov, Zoran (eds.): Partizanke. Žene u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi, Novi Sad: AKO 2010.

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ries that consisted of: illegal printing shops, illegal radio stations, theatre and other workshops, re-appropriations of old material. The cultural work and Partisan art were politically shaping the NOB itself. To subjugate Partisan art and culture to a simple formal prescription as war propaganda or socialist realism would be doing injustice to the historical accounts, reports, documentation and cultural works that appeared during the NOB. It would be much more precise to define the NOB as a revolutionary encounter of politics and art. It was not merely an educated communist elite that was leading the people, instrumentalizating art, but on the contrary it was the first time in Yugoslav history that masses of anonymous poets, music bands and choirs, theatre groups, sculptors, painters and cultural workers came to the fore. Komelj’s analysis refers to the tremendous force and eruption of cultural works among masses: “It was not necessary that masses who spoke up for the first time formulated revolutionary slogans; they were included in the revolutionary process simply by the very gesture of speaking up. Liberation struggle brought also the freedom of expression, that is, to people whom this right was denied before; but they fought for it and started exerting it.”29

These were times when words became weapons, or when words of masses became weapons of mass creation: it was only through symbolic struggles that the military struggle for liberation could be imagined and strengthened. Komelj’s argument is at some points far-stretched, it seems as if what happened was not a revolutionary encounter, but some kind of ‘avant-garde’ trans-national-building process of socialism. His pivotal research asserts the primacy of avant-garde poetry and its effectivity, which follows and upgrades the model of the constitution of ‘small nation state’ of 19th century. The new ‘imagined communities’, those without history of nobility and united state, were created by poetical means, that is, through culture. I would agree with Močnik30, who in contradistinction to Komelj, already before stressed the importance of partisan politics, and I would add, also of other partisan arts (not just poetry).

29 M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, 104–105. 30 Močnik, Rastko. “Partizanska simbolička politika”, in: Zarez 7.161/162 (2005): 12-14.

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Only a small part of Komelj’s book focuses on the existence of Partisan film, actually we find only a few cursory references. Obviously there are good reasons for this absence: Komelj is privileging the Partisan poetry, but also pragmatically, there are almost no film material sources. If material conditions for Partisan literature, poetry, graphic art, sculpture, theatre and photography were extremely precarious, then the situation was even more precarious for Partisan film. It is not difficult to recognize the complex procedures of the film production, which demands a high degree of technical support, material means, expertise, development of proper infrastructure for distribution and viewing of films. This could lead us to the assertion that Partisan films during WWII in Yugoslavia did not exist. Perhaps we should opt for progressive nostalgia,31 arguing that the Partisan film is the perfect embodiment of the Partisan art’s task for the future. Partisan film is this art, which captured and embodied the peculiar temporality of ‘not-yet-existing’, the emancipatory promise that was never fulfilled. Or, we could touch the elusive nature of the Partisan film retrospectively, we should orient it to the past and argue that the Partisan film is a perfect example of what Boris Buden coined “retroutopia”?32 This would put Partisan film in the specific space that fills the gap, the utopian place of a new society. No matter which path we follow, what can be recognized in both approaches is a common core of the Partisan film. At the heart of the Partisan film lies the desire and striving for a new future, that is, the demand to rethink and materialize ways of narrating and visualizing the new emerging society, the transnational and socialist society of the new Yugoslavia.

31 Velikonja, Mitja: Titostalgia, Ljubljana: Mirovni Inštitut 2009. 32 Buden, Boris: Zone des Übergangs: vom Ende des Postkommunismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2009.

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a.) A literary trope or a film for the future? Even if there is a massive absence of Partisan film material, it remains present through its absence. What do I have in mind when referring to this formal absence? It was a widespread phenomenon that Partisans used the metaphor of film. This reference to the cinematic language was quite commonly utilized in many literary Partisan texts.33 These texts opened the dialogue with cinematic language, adapted the plot into a filmic story, followed by a camera and edited using fast motion and images. The literary stories attempted to recreate the absent conditions of film production. When Partisans described their experiences of fights they frequently used their analogy to film; as if in the moment of action the Partisan-eye transformed into the camera-eye and followed the military actions. Perhaps one could object at this point that this is merely a sedimentation of the film culture and that these stories basically remain within the limits of a literary work. Nevertheless, its occurrence speaks of a certain desire, or even demand to transform the story into a different language, as if the story would not suffice to represent, to come closer to the Partisan experience. Perhaps the most touching account of the desire, dream and reflection to make Partisan film comes from the lucid essay by the Partisan and poet Edvard Kocbek. At a specific historical point Kocbek became convinced of the necessity to make Partisan films. Even though he never made a film – he continued to use words (prose and poetry) – it is worthwhile shedding more light on this historical inscription. Let us visit one of the most important political sites in Yugoslavia in the WWII. It was in late November 1943, when delegates from all People’s Liberation Councils were sent to the town Jajce for the second meeting of the AVNOJ (Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation Struggle of Yugoslavia). Kocbek was one of the delegates from Slovenia. Prior to the meeting of AVNOJ, he visited one of the first Partisan photography exhibitions in the Workers’ Home of Livno. In his diary he noted the following:

33 For a typical literarization in filmic terms see the memories of the Partisans: Kovačević, Veljko: V okopih Španije. Spomini španskega borca, Ljubljana: Založba Borec 1959.

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“A large number of people visited a very well conceptualized series of photographs. I saw the photographs that I would want to carry by my side for the rest of my life! How many precious moments will go to oblivion, if all this is lost before the end of the war! How many scenes will go to oblivion also in Slovenia! I saw the exhibition first in the group of people, but later I remained alone with these photos. I could not separate myself from this atmosphere…. Suddenly I wanted to make a film with a friend. I would start shooting in this very space: camera directed to the centre of the room, showing parachutes from the Allied forces used as flags and ornaments, in between horrific and glorious photographs and documents capturing the all-century old character. All this embraced by insecure and flashing lights, between mute visitors of these narrow spaces. These spaces surround the central hall, from where a mass of noises comes out incessantly. It is a real Babylon there: the youth has its choir exercises, women have a very important political meeting, theater amateurs are preparing the play, whereas in the other corner Partisans are playing pool on the green and torn table. Somewhere else, couples are holding each other, and many kids are running around, as they entered the hall from the streets, because it has become dark outside. How many dark and light forces in one place! What kind of richness and feeling of being lost! Between these people there might be many spies of enemies that will trigger tragic future events in Livno, this is how we could complicate the story in a tragic act in the so-called my film…”34

This section should be read as a first draft, in fact as a first script of the Partisan film. It comprises of fiction and documentary, memory and anticipation of events in the liberated area of Bosnia, evoking details from the social life that turned into a thriller at the end. This is also one of the first texts that promote an elaborated conception of film, filmic means that would deal with the Partisan struggle. Against a general tendency to see the film as documentation (archiving) in times of war, Kocbek opted for a broader conception of film.35 As we know from the political history, in autumn of 1943,36 the General Command ordered a directive to archive and 34 Kocbek, Edvard: Listina. Dnevniški zapiski od 3.maja do 2.decembra 1943, Ljubljana: Slovenska Matica 1982: 515–516; translation mine. 35 France Brenk, who in October 1944 became head of Department for photography and film at the People’s Liberation Council in Slovenia. He promoted a more realistic plan for a film production that would wait for more favourable material conditions of cinematography in post-liberation Yugoslavia. See: F. Brenk: “Prispevek k zgodovini slovenskega”, 51–60. 36 P. Volk: Hronika jugoslovenskog filma.

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photograph and film the Partisan struggle. If we read Kocbek’s text closely, we can see an inherent tension: on the one hand we can detect a deep fear of loss, of oblivion of the present Partisan struggle if they will not film the events. This concern would to a certain degree fit into the conception of the film as archive, as remembrance of the revolutionary event. On the other hand we can detect a conception that goes beyond mere documentation. The fear of loss and the fear of oblivion were expressed by many other Partisan poets, not only by Kocbek. The task of the survivors, the living and oppressed was turned into the obligation of remembering and continuing the fight for the cause. Kocbek’s call for memorializing the very present they were living in stemmed from the immanent threat of (fascist) annihilation on the one hand, and Partisan rupture on the other. Against Benjamin's Angel of History that could be blown into fascist oblivion, (filmic) memory of the present was a call worth maintaining. Much more than a simple conservation of the past, which would memorialize a certain event, it wanted to grasp this moment for the future, in order not to be absent from the future. And simple archiving does not guarantee its afterlife. It was this tension, this symbolic endeavour, which pushed Kocbek to move from his past poetry and present photography to the future (of) film. His script for a Partisan film already embodies a need to narrate and connect the scattered photo-material of the Livno exhibition. His past poetry was simply not enough to grasp and align a wide range of stories flickering on the photographs in front of his eyes. This move – from images to moving images, from Malerei to Poesie and back – articulated the political and aesthetical need to develop the Partisan film. It was not much later that another Partisan painter Božidar Jakac, himself a producer of still existing film footage of Partisans, correctly distinguished between the film as documentation and films as a new (art) form. Jakac connected film documentation to the daily reportage, whose main task is to describe the daily events, whereas a true Partisan film should deal with a new form, that is, it should create new visual forms and a deeper image and story for everyone who will follow after the end of the NOB.37 Kocbek’s and Jakac’s views go hand in hand with the thesis of Benjamin, who cherished the film (and photography) as “the most serviceable exemplifications” of a new artistic function, as well

37 See Jakac’s lecture in: M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, 123– 124.

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as film being the most powerful agent relating to and affecting the “mass movements”.38 The strategic need for film was confirmed also in Jajce, during the formation of the provisionary government NKOJ. It is not a coincidence that the Partisan poet Edvard Kocbek became the Minister of Education (and Culture). Already during that time there was a first Partisan film unit that filmed both the meeting in Jajce and some other events in the liberated territories. Petar Volk (1973) claims that a substantial amount of film material was produced, but unfortunately the Nazis destroyed all the film material. The Partisan Ivo Lola Ribar allegedly carried these films in the airplane that was shot down. He died in the incident and all the material was burnt. An important film theorist, Dejan Kosanović, is sceptical about the existence of this first film material and concludes that it was more a part of the legend, of the myth, than an accurate historical fact. b.) Partisan cinema However, even if we retain a degree of healthy scepticism about these legendary first steps of the new (Partisan) Yugoslav cinema, there are historical archives, documents and testimonies that show us the existence of the ‘real’ Partisan film and even rudimentary film teams that started working during the war. Contrary to Kosanović (2003), I distinguish between three (instead of two) periods of Partisan cinema: • • •

I. Spontaneous Partisan cinema (1941-1943); II. Beginning of organized Partisan cinema (1943-1944); III. Institutionalized Partisan cinema (1944-1945).

I. The first period is that of a ‘spontaneous cinema’, because at the time the NOB and its political committees did not have any official film policy and also very scarce material means and expertise to produce any film documentation. Thus, the filming activity happened completely on individual 38 See especially thesis V from Benjamin: Benjamin, Walter: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1998), http://www.marxists.org/reference/ subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm. The whole discussion on Benjamin's implications on technology and film would deserve another essay. For now we can only refer to a critical overview of his positions in: Rancière, Jacques: Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso 2009.

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initiative, in a non-organized way. The very first filmic inscription occurred on December 12th, 1941 in Italian-occupied Ljubljana, on the date when the last night of a cultural performance took place. The Academic Choir France Marolt organized an anti-occupation event in the guise of cherishing Italian culture, as they placed the last song Lipa (lime)39 on the program, which represented the very core of the national awakening of the people in Slovenia. When the Italian occupation forces saw what was going on, they dissolved the choir and started carrying out increasingly repressive policies against any cultural expression and political resistance.40 The last performance of the choir was recorded by Rudi Omota, actually he recorded the concert, the sound of cultural resistance. Materially this sound inscription was recorded on the film tape that can be called the first Partisan film document of WWII. Omota secretly planted the microphone on the chandelier in the Union hall a day earlier, as he was the only one having the access to it, because he worked for the film company before and during WWII. He became an activist of the Liberation Front.41 The next important chapter occurred on April 11th, 1942. The night before, the Liberation Front activist, a member of the Communist Youth, Vilko Kopecki, raised the red flag on the Franciscan Church, which is located in the very centre of Ljubljana. The next day the Italian Fascists tried to pull it down, but because of fears that Partisans had mined the roof of the church they performed many acrobatics that brought together a sub39 For a detailed view on the cultural activities of the choir see http://www.apz-tt. si/en/o-zboru/zgodovina/1926-1941/. 40 The call for cultural silence in January 1942 by the Liberation Front meant that there should be no collaboration in cultural affairs; with that gesture many cultural workers started their activities in the Partisan struggle. Ljubljana was one of the biggest resistance cities in occupied Europe, where more than 90% of population cooperated with the Liberation Front. In February 1942, Italian forces erected barbwire with checkpoints and bunkers around the entire city. It stayed there till the end of the war (1171 days), with no one being allowed to pass. For an impressive account of the barbed-wired Ljubljana see Komelj, Miklavž: Ljubljana. Cities within a City, Ljubljana: Likovne Besede 2009: 54–95. 41 He was a film technician developing new forms for sound inscription, transmission and filming already before WWII. He worked at the film company Emona. During this time he unintentionally produced a sound tape on 17.5 mm film tape, which some years later became a world standard. For more see a brilliant documentary, part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61gsn8Eyaok&feature= related. He remained a pioneer, a Partisan in the Yugoslav audio (tonski) production, developing the magnetographic and other reproduction devices after WWII.

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stantial number of Ljubljana’s residents, who laughingly observed the event. Rudi Omota and Milan Kham filmed this event secretly and pretended in front of each other that they were shooting for purely documentary reasons; at the time they were both cooperating with the Liberation Front (‘organisation’), which demanded strict secrecy. During the development of this material somebody from the Emona film company denounced them to the Italians and they succeeded in destroying this first film tape at the last moment.42 Substantial film footage was also recorded on the front of Pohorje on 8 mm film43 by a Partisan Dušan Kveder-Tomaž.44 The Germans destroyed all of the material in their offensive against Partisan forces in Gorenjska in 1943. During the same period the first film footage on the territory of Bosnia was made. Petar Volk argues that already in 1943 there was a Partisan film unit active in Bosnia, however, with more historical data at his disposal, Dejan Kosanović asserts that it was more of an individual effort than a collective organizational one. He dates the first film footage to November 1942, more specifically during the first meeting of AVNOJ in Bihač, where Nikola Popović shot a film with a small 9.5 mm camera. He continued to film, but unfortunately everything got lost.45 A more lively filmic activity in Slovenia took place in the time of the “interregnum”, that is, after the capitulation of Italy until October 1943, when the German offensive pushed Partisan forces back. It was three Partisan film-makers Miloš Brelih, Čoro Škodlar and Božidar Jakac, who documented the military and political events within the NOB: the Partisan assault on the central White Guard (Slovenian collaborationist) fortification in Turjak; the first meeting of the Slovenian Council of Liberation Front in Kočevje: the 9th October and later trials against the national traitors. These

42 See the interview of Stanković with Milan Ljubič (personal archive of Peter Stanković). Ljubič made a documentary about Kham Zadnja kino predstava (2007; eng. ‘Last film show’), where he reconstructed the first scene of the first Partisan film. Reconstruction of real Partisan events, places and people was a frequent technique in films on Partisans, see: F. Brenk: “O filmski in fotografski kulturi”, 65. 43 F. Brenk: “Slovenski NOB film”: 1975b, 119; see also F. Brenk: “O filmski in fotografski kulturi”; and M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?. 44 F. Brenk: “O filmski in fotografski kulturi”. 45 For a detailed view see D. Kosanović: Kinematografija u Bosni i Hercegovini, 212–213.

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are also the oldest conserved Partisan film documents from the times of the NOB and are accessible in the Archive of Slovenia.46 II. The second period of Partisan cinema can be placed between the autumn 1943 and the autumn of 1944. Already in October 1943 the “General Command” of the Partisan forces issued the directive to document with the help of film and photography all sorts of material evidence of the Partisan struggle. This was important not only from the perspective of archiving its own struggle, but also for the international recognition of the Partisans, which took place some months later. According to Mihailo Švabić, an anonymous Partisan from the international brigade made a systematic documentation on Drvar and the meeting of the communist youth in April and May of 1944.47 Ana Peraica might have recently uncovered this anonymous Partisan, when she discovered nine Partisan films in the sealed bunker of her grandfather.48 Her grandfather, Antonio Peraica worked for Italian Cinecittà before 1943 and after the capitulation of Italy he joined the oversea brigade and Partisans. According to Ana Peraica, soon after joining the Partisans he became a first “Commissar for Film” in the 1. Proletarian Brigade. Most of the film material consists of shots of Partisan marches and wounded Partisans, demolished cities and portrayals of everyday life in the liberated territories.49 Despite the great lack of technical means and expertise there were many known and unknown propagandists in Slovenia that filmed the events during 1944. They were using mostly German confiscated cameras or some Italian cameras, most often 8mm cameras. The most exciting and innovative films were made by a talented photographer, Čoro Škodlar, who made his first full-length reportage on the life in and out of battles of the Partisan IX. corps. As Ambrožič remarked (referring to the commander Novljan): “Škodlar filmed all units, on the march, in action, at work and occupied with different duties, also when resting.”50 He made photo-portraits of different Partisans and also of the Partisan hospital Franja. One of the most 46 F. Brenk: “Slovenski NOB film”: 1975b, 119. Božidar Jakac edited most of these films under the title PARTISAN DOCUMENTS in 1972. 47 See also D. Kosanović: Kinematografija u Bosni i Hercegovini. 48 Until today the films were never shown and are currently being restored. Peraica published documentary material with her own documentary TAKE CARE OF THE FILM (CRO 1945/2012, D: Antonio/ Ana Perajica). 49 From my personal correspondence with Ana Peraica. 50 Ambrožič, Lado ml.: Novljanovo stoletje, Ljubljana: Modrijan 2008: 291.

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impressive footages comprises the Partisan attack on the fortification of the Home Guard at Črni Vrh above Idrija on September 1st, 1944. Much of this material is missing, while other documentaries were sent to Moscow, some speculate that they are located in the archive of Samara in Russia, and according to people working in the Archive of Slovenian Television51 some of this material was used for Soviet documentary films on the war. Another important part of this period were Emona films that were shot for the anticommunist propaganda and in this respect it might at first glance seem contradictory to label them as ‘Partisan’ films. However, Milan Kham and Rudi Omota needed to film THE OATH OF SLOVENIAN HOME GUARDS (1944), THE BIG NATIONAL ANTICOMMUNIST MANIFESTATION in Ljubljana (29.6.1944), JELENDOL’S VICTIMS (1944) and ORGANISATION TODT (1944).52 According to Stanković, Kham filmed the film OATH OF SLOVENIAN HOME GUARD after the agreement with the Partisans. The film crew was actually a part of the Liberation Front. This material proved to be very useful in the trials against the local collaborationists after the war. III. In the autumn of 1944 we enter into the final stage, that is, into the institutionalized Partisan cinema. On October 7th, 1944, the Executive Council of the Liberation Front in Slovenia announced the formation of the “Section for Film and Photography”. France Brenk became a head of this section and immediately started with the organisational activities. Continuous and more frequent air connections with the Allied forces enabled the Section to acquire more film material. Božidar Jakac, Čoro Škodlar and Stane Viršek filmed many events which were subsequently given the following titles: Transport of the Wounded, Srednja Vas, Allied Aid, Construction of the Bridge on Kolpa, The Coming of the Oversea Brigade to Bela Krajina, Manoeuvres of I. Slovenian Artillery Brigade in Suha Krajina, Transport of War Material and Wounded with Allied Aircrafts, Funeral of American Pilots, Evacuation of the Civil Population and The Partisan March on Trieste, Sušak and Rijeka. Some shots of the liberation of Trieste were made in colour.53 Most of these films were developed only after the

51 From my personal correspondence with Polona Balantič. 52 Šimenc, Stanko: Panorama slovenskega filma. Ljubljana: DZS 1996: 57. 53 F. Brenk: “Slovenski NOB film”: 1975b; Duškovič, Dejan: “Nekaj pripomb k naši obzorniški dokumentarni produkciji”, in: Zdenko Vrdlovec (ed.), 40 udarcev: Slovenska filmska publicistika o slovenskem in jugoslovanskem filmu v obdobju 1949–1988, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1988: 17;

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war, whereas in the liberated territory in Črnomlje the Partisan cinema operated from 1944 onwards.54 The above-mentioned footage survived. It measured 1563 meters of 8mm film that in 1946 was transformed into the normal 35mm format in Zlin’s laboratory (Czechoslovakia).55 It is accessible in the Slovenian Archive. Later on Božidar Jakac gave to the Archive of Slovenian Television his own personal collection of Partisan films which, in addition to PARTISAN DOCUMENTS (400 m or 43 min, SLO 1972, D: Božidar Jakac) and PARTISAN DOCUMENTS 1941-1945 (SLO 1965, D: Stane Viršek), represent the oldest and also very valuable conserved material.56 After the liberation of Belgrade, the General Command issued on December 13th, 1944 a directive for the formation of the “Film Section” in Serbia.57 Radoš Novaković,58 who had already worked relentlessly on film activities, was put in charge of the Section. In January 1945 Vasiljević filmed the first Yugoslav newsreel that circulated in the liberated territories and was screened in Belgrade. A very important assignment of the Film Section was given to Stevan Mišković, who had to document the fights in Bosnia. Most of his material was taken away by Chetniks, some of it was later developed incorrectly. The “Film Section of Serbia” imported hundreds of films from the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union and guaranteed for their distribution and screenings. It was necessary to completely reorganise and renovate the majority of cinemas or set up new improvised cinemas. On Croatian territory, Kosta Hlavaty59 and Oto Hervol made the only Partisan animated film on 16mm film accompanied by the sounds of birds. Together with other cultural activists they screened Partisan films in Croatian villages in the region of Kordun60. Ana Peraica speaks about Karel

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Nedič, Liljana: “Film v NOB”, in: A. Dermastia (ed.), Enciklopedija Slovenije. 3. zvezek, Ljubljana 1989; and Šimenc (1996: 57). N. Golubovič: Nastanek slovenske nacionalne kinematografije, 33. The original documents were published in F. Brenk: “Prispevek k zgodovini slovenskega”, 53. F. Brenk: “Slovenski NOB film”: 1975b, 120. For a more detailed view see Savković (1994). He also filmed after the war and wrote some scripts for films on Partisans like some other Partisans Gustav Gavrin, Kosta Hlavaty, Nikola Popović, Žorž Skrgin, Franc Kosmač, France Štiglic… In 1945 Hlavaty, in cooperation with Gustav Gavrin, shot the first documentary on the biggest concentration camp in Yugoslavia (Jasenovac). I. Škrabalo: 101 godina filma u Hrvatskoj 1896–1997: 134.

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Ravnić, who apart from being a commander of the Partisan unit also filmed with a camera, but the material got lost, perhaps nearby Korenica. The last films before the end of the war were recorded by Anton Smeh. The first film documented an Antifascist women organisation in Sarajevo (number 6 newsreel), then the arrival of the 6th Partisan Division in Sarajevo and also the People’s Council on Romanija (number 8 newsreel). All films are conserved in the archive of Filmske Novosti in Beograd. Some other reportages were done in other liberated cities, in Zagreb and in Ljubljana. The latter organized quite a systematic film action covered by two film crews. The first crew consisted of Stane Viršek, Franci Bar, Ivan Zalaznik and Janez Pogačnik who made the film LIBERATION OF LJUBLJANA (SLO, 1945). The second more famous documentary was done by the film crew of the production company Emona, where Milan Kham organized a group of experienced cameramen Rudi Omota, Metod Badjura, Janko Balantič and Marjan Förster. They fixed the camera on the car and filmed LJUBLJANA SALUTES THE LIBERATORS (SLO 1945). It was edited by Badjura and first shown on July 15th, 1945 as a supporting film for Eisenstein’s IVAN GROZNY (SU 1944).61 Some film material on the liberation of Trieste is still accessible in Filmske Novosti in Belgrade, further film footage can be found in the Archive of Slovenian Television in Ljubljana. Finally we should mention that some very important documentation material was produced by the Allied delegations and war-journalists during the diplomatic expeditions and cooperation with the Yugoslav Partisans. Perhaps the first film footage was done by the British film-maker Max Slade (FIRST MOVIES OF GENERAL TITO, UK 1944), and later his short film PARTISAN OUTPOST (UK 1944), Francis Burges’s THE NINE HUNDRED (documentary drama, UK 1944) and Jack Chamber's BRIDGE (UK 1946). The Soviet journalist Solomon Kogan probably made the documentary material LIBERATION OF BIHAĆ (UK 1945) and some other films in Bosnia.62 Perhaps the most important film for future research was done by the Soviet director and journalist Jelusin in 1945. It was called YUGOSLAVIA (SU 1945) and combined confiscated German material with the Soviet and Partisan film archive. Many of these documents can be called Partisan

61 Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 162. 62 For a detailed overview see D. Kosanović: Kinematografija u Bosni i Hercegovini, 86–89.

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documents, because they represented the Partisan struggle from the Partisan perspective.

C ONCLUSION :

THE PARTISAN ARCHIVE

The extreme conditions of war condemned most of the Partisan filmography to the status of film documents or archival material, which in some cases succeeded in portraying also Partisan social life outside the military struggle: political and cultural events, exhumations, judiciary trials, transport of the wounded, functioning of hospitals, the cooperation with the Allies. Stating this, it is difficult to affirm the existence of the Partisan film as such: apart from some short Allied films there was no real fiction film, although we are still waiting to see some restored or displaced film material (Peraica’s and Škodlar’s films). Notwithstanding the lack of Partisan film, the lack in expertise and material, what matters is already the mere existence of Partisan art and film. Despite its formal weakness, there was a strong drive to develop the Partisan cinema already during the WWII, which also resulted in the first filmic institutions. The expectation and the new awareness of the necessity of film for the NOB emerged during WWII. All this heralded the progressive task and role of Yugoslav film in the new socialist reality. From the literary ‘topos’ to the Partisan documents these artistic works carried the future revolutionary promise of both: new Partisan film and new society. There is a strong analogy between the Partisan struggle and Partisan film. Both were marked by “Jetztzeit”, by this experiencing of the now, which constantly brought the questions of “to be or not to be”, where the precarious moment of actuality can be blown into the wind or turned into monumental effects. Precariousness of the archive resembles the precariousness of the struggle itself. Our departure point was the question of the archive, how to archive something as rare and exceptional as Partisan history? As Derrida teaches us, the archive itself points to the dimension of the beginning and commanding over the very material in question. During the analysis a very interesting interpretative line has opened up. Anyone who is interested in the search for Partisan films encounters extreme difficulties in finding any such material. Most of the material got lost or was destroyed during and after WWII. Also important is the fact that the remaining archive is widely

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scattered literally in most of the countries of ex-Yugoslavia,63 one can find it in private, public and state institutions, but also abroad, especially in the Royal Imperial Museum in London (Great Britain) and in some archives in the former Soviet Union. Can’t we argue that this faith of the Partisan archive, its scattered and lost traces, which live their after-life, follow, support and carry the inner core of the Partisan struggle itself? If there is any truth about the Partisan struggle, it is its universality, the ‘deteritorializing’ nature of the enterprise, which founded itself on the anti-, or rather non-sovereign principle of equality of all nations and all those who fought against Fascism. Doesn’t the ‘Partisan’ archive itself imply a certain scattered, non-localizable entity? The scattered Partisan archive points precisely to the non-sovereign, decentralized nature and principles of the Partisan struggle itself, which was constantly propelling its mobile and irregular political forces on new liberated territories. Partisan struggle was designed never to stop, but to continue the path towards the building of a new society. This is a future, communist society, which does not leave behind its archive, but carries the radical demand of contemporarity that all the past struggles are embodied in the new political forces. The return to the Partisan beginning should be only a new beginning oriented towards the future and should never be reduced to the function of commemorating the past. It is known that an allYugoslav archive on art never existed; it remained a phantasy of the socialist political establishment. What is highlighted by this ambivalent nature of the Partisan archive, but also by Partisan art in general, is one of its fundamental deadlocks, difficulties of the Partisan afterlife. It points to the impossibility of the memorialization of the Partisan struggle. The moment we start with a certain memory politics, the Partisan will already start losing its very core. Shouldn’t we say that a vast majority of the subsequent postwar films on Partisans were more or less creative failures to grasp the radicality of the Partisan event? There is certainly something peculiar with the memory of revolution: it seems that whenever the Partisan (poem) film grasps history, 63 In the whole history of socialist Yugoslavia there was no museum or gallery of Yugoslav art, only galleries and museums of national cultures. The exceptions are former museums of Revolution and People’s Liberation Struggle, which carried the universality of the antifascist struggle. To my knowledge no institution attempted to bring together, exhibit or analyse scattered Partisan film documents.

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whenever words are written or images set in motion, they are already writing from the position of the ‘fait accompli’, from the realized project. At the moment when this is joined with a simplistic memory that functions as a mere commemoration and glorification of the NOB, the whole radicality of the project is erased. The memory and archive become emptied, as it seems that the whole drama of the event is reduced to caricature: either a heroic epic spectacle embedded in the State narrative, or an existentialist psychologistic drama calling for the reconciliation of the collaborators (individual drama). Nonetheless, many films on Partisans visualize and narrate very complex and aesthetically refined stories. Apart from this we sketched the existence of the traces of Partisan documents, Partisan films, which will be reactualized in the specific historical periods, in all the future revolutions, from the position of an unfinished project, of a ‘fait a accomplir’. If there is something like a Partisan film for today, then this new Partisan document needs to express the mass expectation of a new society, and at the same time, it opens the question of the ambivalent structuring of temporality. It poses the fundamental tension, the non-anticipated course of Partisan struggle, the future, which is impossible to predict, but nevertheless necessary to risk for, the future that many of Partisans sacrificed their lives for. The peculiar in-existence of Partisan films and a more determinate shape of Partisan films are speaking to us not only about the past and the present. In a much more essential way they stand here as ‘monuments to the future’. As Ernst Bloch once meditated on Erbe: the question of how to use the cultural past is there to remind us to build and open the international culture and politics of and for the future.64

B IBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor: “Commitment”, in: Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso 2007: 177–195. Agamben, Giorgio: “Philosophical Archeology”, in: Law Critique 20, Springer 2009: 211–231. Ambrožič, Lado ml.: Novljanovo stoletje, Ljubljana: Modrijan 2008.

64 I would like to thank Nebojša Jovanović for his valuable comments on this text.

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Benjamin, Walter: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1998. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/ benjamin.htm Brenk, France: “Prispevek k zgodovini slovenskega in jugoslovanskega filma do 9.maja 1945”, in: Dokumenti Slovenskega Gledališkega Muzeja 6–7.2 (1966): 43–61. Brenk, France: “Slovenski NOB film”, in: Dokumenti Slovenskega Gledališkega Muzeja 25. 11 (1975a): 48–69. Brenk, France: “Slovenski NOB film – nadaljevanje”, in: Dokumenti Slovenskega Gledališkega Muzeja 25.11 (1975b): 104–124. Brenk, France: “O filmski in fotografski kulturi med narodnoosvobodilnim bojem”, in: Franček Bohanc (ed.), Kultura, revolucija in današnji čas, Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba 1979: 61-67. Brenk, France: “Slovenski film. Dokumenti in razmišljanja”, in: Kino! 17/18. (2012): 79-95. Buden, Boris: “Još o komunistićkim krvolocima, ili zašto smo se ono rastali”, in: Prelom 5.3 (2003): 51–58. Buden, Boris: Zone des Übergangs: vom Ende des Postkommunismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2009. Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film 1-2, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984. Derrida, Jacques: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, in: Diacritics 2.25 (1995): 9–63. Duškovič, Dejan: “Nekaj pripomb k naši obzorniški dokumentarni pro dukciji”, in: Zdenko Vrdlovec (ed.), 40 udarcev: Slovenska filmska publicistika o slovenskem in jugoslovanskem filmu v obdobju 1949–1988, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1988. Foucault, Michel: “Nietzsche, genealogy, history”, in: D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977: 139–165. Gilić, Nikica: “Ne okreći se sine Branka Bauera: stil i ideologija ratne (partizanske) melodrame”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 82–91. Golubovič, Nataša: Nastanek slovenske nacionalne kinematografije, Koper: Fakulteta za humanistične študije 2009. Jakiša, Miranda: “Großes Kino des Subversion und Affirmation. Vom Schlagabtausch im jugoslawischen Film der 1960er”, in: Hannes Grandits/Holm Sundhaussen (eds.), Jugoslawien in den 1960er Jahren: auf

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dem Weg zu einem (a-)normalen Staat? Wiesbaden: Böhlau 2013: 169195. Jakiša, Miranda: “Down to Earth Partisans: Fashioning of YU-Space in Partisan Films”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 54–61. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 65/66 (2011): 47–60. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Breaking the Wave: A Commentary on ‘Black Wave polemics: rhetoric as aesthetic’ by Greg DeCuir, Jr.”, in: Studies in Eastern European Cinema 2. 2 (2011): 161–171. Karamanić, Slobodan: “Kosovo after Yugoslavia”. Special edition in English, in: Prelom 8.5 (2006): 23–39. Kirn, Gal: “Spomin na partizane ali misel o partizanstvu?”, in: Zdenka Badovinac/ Bojana Piškur (eds.), Catalogue Museum on the street, Ljubljana: Muzej moderne umetnosti 2009: 104–112. Kirn, Gal: “From Partisan primacy of politics to postfordist tendency in Yugoslav self- management”, in: Gal Kirn (ed.), Postfordism and its discontents, Maastricht/Ljubljana: Jan van Eyck Academie and Peace Institute 2010: 253–305. Kirn, Gal: “Antifascist Memorial Sites: Pure Art or Mythologization of Socialist Yugoslavia?” In: WHW (ed.), Art always has its consequences, Zagreb: Zelina 2010: 120–135. Kocbek, Edvard: Listina. Dnevniški zapiski od 3.maja do 2.decembra 1943, Ljubljana: Slovenska Matica 1982. Komelj, Miklavž: Ljubljana. Cities within a City, Ljubljana: Likovne Besede 2009. Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? Ljubljana: založba cf./* 2009. Kosanović, Dejan: Kinematografija u Bosni i Hercegovini 1897–1945, Sarajevo: Kino Savez Bosne i Hercegovine 2003. Kovačević, Veljko: V okopih Španije. Spomini španskega borca, Ljubljana: Založba Borec 1959. Mazierewska, Ewa: European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2011. Milinović, Daško/Petakov, Zoran (eds.): Partizanke. Žene u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi, Novi Sad: AKO 2010. Močnik, Rastko. “Partizanska simbolička politika”, in: Zarez 7.161/162 (2005): 12-14.

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Močnik, Rastko: Svetovno gospodarstvo in revolucionarna politika, Ljubljana: založba /cf* 2006. Munitić, Ranko: Živjet ce ovaj narod, jugoslavenski film o revoluciji, Zagreb: Publicitas 1974. Musabegović, Senadin: Rat: Konstitucija totalitarnog tijela, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 2008. Nedič, Liljana: “Film v NOB”, in: A. Dermastia (ed.), Enciklopedija Slovenije. 3. zvezek, Ljubljana 1989. Pavičić, Jurica: “Igrani filmovi Fadila Hadžića”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 34 (2003): 3–38. Pupovac, Ozren: “Projekt Jugoslavija: dialektika revolucije”, in: Agregat 4. 9/10 (2006): 108–117. Rancière, Jacques: Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso 2009. Samary, Cathérine: Le marché contre l’autogestion : l’expérience yougoslave, Paris: Publisud/Montreuil 1988. Savković, Miroslav: Cinematography in Serbia during the Second World War 1941–1945, Beograd: Institut za pozorište, film, radio i televiziju Fakulteta dramskih umetnosti u Beogradu/Ibis 1994. http://www.rastko. rs/filmtv/msavkovic-1941-1945.html#_Toc5526192 Smith, Terry: What is contemporary art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009. Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi. Reprezentcija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu, Ljubljana: založba FDV 2005. Stanković, Peter: “Je mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?” In: Kino! 10 (2010): 22–54. Stojanović, Branimir: “Politika Partizana”, in: Prelom 5.3 (2003): 48–51. Suvin, Darko: Life in Letter, Washon Island: Paradoxa 2011. Šimenc, Stanko: Panorama slovenskega filma, Ljubljana: DZS 1996. Škrabalo, Ivo: 101 godina filma u Hrvatskoj 1896–1997: Pregled povijesti hrvatske kinematografije, Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Globus 1998. Velikonja, Mitja: Titostalgia, Ljubljana: Mirovni Inštitut 2009. Volk, Petar: Hronika jugoslovenskog filma 1896-1945, Beograd: Svedočenje 1973. Vrdlovec, Zdenko: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, Radovljica: Didakta 2010. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan Film & Genre Mimicry: A Historical Survey”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 13–21.

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F ILMOGRAPHY BRIDGE (UK 1946, D: Jack Chamber) FIRST MOVIES OF GENERAL TITO (UK 1944, D: Max Slade) IVAN GROZNY (SU 1944, D: Sergej M. Ejsenstejn). JASENOVAC (YUG 1945, D: Kosta Hlavaty/Gustav Gavrin) JELENDOL’S VICTIMS (SI 1944, D: Milan Kham/Rudi Omota) LIBERATION OF BIHAĆ (SU 1945, D: Solomon Kogan) LIBERATION OF LJUBLJANA (SI 1945, D: Franci Bar/Stane Viršek/Ivan Zalaznik/Janez Pogačnik) LJUBLJANA SALUTES THE LIBERATORS (SI 1945, D: Metod Badjura/Janko Balantič/Milan Kham/Rudi Omota/Marjan Förster) ORGANISATION TODT (SI 1944, D: Milan Kham/Rudi Omota) PARTISAN DOCUMENTS (SI 1972, D: Božidar Jakac) PARTISAN DOCUMENTS 1941-1945 (SI 1965, D: Stane Viršek) PARTISAN OUTPOST (UK 1944, D: Max Slade) TAKE CARE OF THE FILM (CRO 1945/2012, D: Antonio & Ana Perajica) THE BIG NATIONAL ANTICOMMUNIST MANIFESTATION (Ljubljana, SI 1944, D: Milan Kham/Rudi Omota) THE NINE HUNDRED (UK 1944, D: Francis Burges) THE OATH OF SLOVENIAN HOME GUARDS (SI 1944, D: Milan Kham/Rudi Omota) YUGOSLAVIA (SU 1945, D: Elusin)

Narrative and Genre Influences of the International Classical Cinema in the Partisan Films of Živorad-Žika Mitrović N IKICA G ILIĆ

The hypothesis that Partisan films can be considered as one of the equivalents to the genre films in American and Western-European cinema seems worth testing, since the idea is very much present both in the traditional and in the contemporary discourse on Partisan films in former Yugoslavia and beyond, particularly with regard to some of the films by Živorad-Žika Mitrović. Some of these films have often been referred to as “Partisan Western” and “Kosovo Westerns”.1 This has even become a part of common, general perception of Mitrović’s films, as we can clearly see in interviews with the director, republished on the Novi kadrovi internet site.2 One could easily suspect that such comparisons with the Western genre might be no more than a convenient cliché, in order to deal with quite complex cinematic phenomena (or, possibly, to disparage them or limit their appeal and significance). The time therefore seems ripe, in this very much post1

2

Boglić, Mira: “Spektakularna historičnost Živorada Mitrovića”, in: Mira Boglić (ed.), Mit i antimit. Povijesno kritičke bilješke o jugoslavenskom filmu. Zagreb: Spektar 1980: 36; Volk, Petar: 20. vek srpskog filma, Beograd: Institut za film and Jugoslovenska kinoteka 2001. Radojević, Saša: “Intervju: Živorad-Žika Mitrović”, in: Novi kadrovi, 2010, http://www.novikadrovi.net/razno/4-razno.php, last access: 25 July 2011; Crnjanski, Vladimir: “Intervju: Živorad-Žika Mitrović”, in: Novi kadrovi, 2010, http://www.novikadrovi.net/razno/3-razno.php, last access: 25 July 2011. See also http://zikamitrovic.blogspot.com/, last access: 25 July 2011.

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Yugoslav era, to go back and focus on the films that allegedly tried to adapt (or adopt) the political narrative of the forging of Yugoslavia in the fires of war to one of its most complex regions that has time and again proven its great potential for historical, political, ethnic and other conflicts. However, since there is more than one model of Partisan films in the history of Yugoslav cinema, Mitrović’s most Western-like feature films (particularly the narratives about Captain Leshi)3 can also be compared to certain canonical Partisan films of wider thematic and narrative scope. An excellent example of such films is Stipe Delić’s SUTJESKA/THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA (1973),4 an epic tale of the commander-in-chief Tito, his warriors and his people in one of the most famous battles in Yugoslavia, although Veljko Bulajić’s BITKA NA NERETVI/BATTLE OF Neretva (1969) and even Žika Mitrović’s UŽIČKA REPUBLIKA/GUNS OF WAR (1974) – also containing the same political and cultural drive towards a Yugoslav national(ist) cinema5 – would have served equally well for comparison. But why focus solely on the influences of the Western genre? Why not concentrate instead on the Eastern genre cinema in all its diversity – for instance on the influence of the Soviet war films?6 After all, Yugoslav and Serbian film historian Petar Volk reminds us that after WWII not only the contemporary, recent Soviet films were distributed and screened in Socialist Yugoslavia, but also all the other Soviet films made from the beginning of the 1930s onward,7 which constitutes quite an invasion of Yugoslav cinema theatres by Soviet films. There was consequently a stronger possibility that these films should influence local filmmakers. After all, something had to fill the cinema repertoire at the time the rich production of the 3

4 5

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Leshi is often called Lechi, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172643/releasein fo#akas, last access: 20 July 2011. In Italian distribution Leshi has been transformed from Albanian to Macedonian: http://cinema-tv.corriere.it/film/boris-illeggendario-macedone/35_99.shtml, last access: 24 July 2011. The German title of SUTJESKA was DIE FÜNFTE OFFENSIVE/THE FIFTH OFENSIVE. As opposed to black-wave (‘crni talas’) and modernist tendencies. For an intriguing perspective on the populist and the elitist cinema see: Turković, Hrvoje: Filmska opredjeljenja. Zagreb: CEKADE 1985; Turković, Hrvoje: “Karijera na prijelomu stilskih razdoblja”, in: N. Polimac (ed.), Branko Bauer, Zagreb: CEKADE 1985. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan films & Genre Mimicry: a historical Survey”, in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 13–21. Volk, Petar: Savremeni jugoslavenski film, Beograd: Univerzitet umetnosti, Institut za film 1983: 12

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Western European countries and United States of America was politically unacceptable (which naturally changed significantly after the break-up of the alliance between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union). Mainstream film critic Mira Boglić also mentions (but does not elaborate on) Eastern influences on Mitrović’s films.8 Boglić’s writing, however, is often politically charged, so she may have overstated the Eastern influences in order to diminish ideologically ‘unseemly’ influences from the West. However, both Žika Mitrović himself 9 and the film critics or/and historians10 have primarily focused on the influences from the western cinema(s) on his Partisan (and sometimes other) films and, since these influences are more often discussed, it seems reasonable, at this stage of research, to dwell in more depth on these, without disregarding the eastern influence. Basically, we need to investigate how much of a Western genre there actually is in a Partisan/Kosovo Western by Živorad-Žika Mitrović, and for this we will concentrate primarily on his most famous film, CAPTAIN LESHI/KAPETAN LEŠI (1960), with reference to other works as well. But, in addition to the question of genre, we must also take into consideration the question of style, very often quite comparably dealt with in the Western (capitalist) and Eastern (socialist) conditions of production. As a rule, genre films of any era quite easily influence each other across national boundaries and there is no reason to assume that political borders completely prevent such influences and contacts. Basically, the classical narrative style is the first and most important thing that Westerns, war films and other genre films from the West have in common with the classical (some of them socrealist) films made in the Eastern European block (Soviet Union and its allies), as well as the films made in socialist Yugoslavia. This is the question we might need to start with in order to make the discussion clearer and more useful for future analysts of the Yugoslav Partisan film, a very

8 M. Boglić: “Spektakularna historičnost Živorada Mitrovića”, 38. 9 V. Crnjanski: “Intervju: Živorad-Žika Mitrović”. 10 Ranković, Milan: “Za produbljeno filmsko viđenje revolucije”, in: S. Ostojić et al. (eds.), Rat revolucija ekran, Zagreb: Spektar 1977: 69; Stanković, Peter: “Je li mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?” in KINO! 10.3 (2010): 26; Vojnov, Dimitrije: “Istorijski tobogan, drugi dio”, in: http://www.prozor.cdtmn.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id =208:istorijski-tobogan-drugi-dio&catid=37:stav&Itemid=88, last access: 25 July 2011.

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large body of films made during several decades of socialist Yugoslavia’s existence.

T HE

ISSUE OF STYLE AND NARRATION IN MITROVIĆ ’ S FILMS The beginnings of the Yugoslav feature films in the 1940s, predated by very few feature-length fiction films in the region (particularly in the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the chaos of WWII), also mark the beginnings of the classical narrative style, as defined, for instance, by David Bordwell or Ante Peterlić.11 Although the classical narrative style was practiced before WWII as well, there was, due the war, no continuity of production12 which meant that it had to be learned and developed almost from the scratch. It was formed less successfully in the first postwar Yugoslav feature films of Vjekoslav Afrić (SLAVICA 1947) and Nikola Popović (ŽIVJEĆE OVAJ NAROD/THIS NATION WILL LIVE 1947), but more so in the later films of Branko Bauer or Vladimir Pogačić.13 It may come as no surprise to many, but it still seems important to note that Živorad Mitrović’s films show a very high level of mastery of the classical style. The motivation of characters through cinematic rhythm, virtuoso usage of stereotypes,

11 Bordwell, David: Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Routledge 1985; Peterlić, Ante: Povijest filma: rano i klasično razdoblje, Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez 2009. 12 Volk, Petar: Istorija jugoslovenskog filma, Beograd/Ljubljana: Institut za film/IRO “Partizanska knjiga” 1986. 13 See, for instance, Gilić, Nikica: Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma. Drugo, izmjenjeno izdanje, Zagreb: Leykam International 2011² (2010). It is important to bear in mind the international nature of cinema – Yugoslavia has exported directors Vlado Kristl, Dušan Makavejev and Marijan Vajda, but it has imported, for instance, František Čap, quite a talented classical-style oriented director from Czechoslovakia, while Andrzej Wajda and Giuseppe De Santis made a feature film each in Yugoslavia. For more political details of the events in Socialist-type film production, see Škrabalo, Ivo: 101 godina filma u Hrvatskoj, 1896–1897, Zagreb: Globus 1998 (this book focuses on Croatia, but it is indicative of entire Yugoslavia, in spite of differences between federal units). For a more comprehensive view of cinema in Yugoslavia see Volk, Petar: Istorija jugoslovenskog filma, Beograd/Ljubljana: Institut za film/IRO “Partizanska knjiga” 1986; Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience 1945-2001, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002.

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empathy for the heroes, high level of suspense – all these are typical features of Mitrović’s best works and the composition of Mitrović’s popular film CAPTAIN LESHI is quite prototypical in this respect. The film’s story begins, quite classically, with the establishment of the setting, clearly showing (with a voice-over introduction) Prizren, the Kosovo town with the large Albanian population (of Muslim religion) where the combats against the last remaining German troupes in WWII were taking place. Very soon the ethnic Albanian Partisan hero Ramiz Leshi (Ramiz Leši; played by Aleksandar Gavrić) is introduced to this setting, accompanied by heroic film music, his appearance preceded by other characters’ verbal listing of his virtues and triumphs. The film is quick to establish Leshi’s goals (also prototypical in classical narration): Leshi’s brother is affiliated with the pro-fascist gang of hoodlums terrorising the common people of the region, so the hero wants to catch this group and redeem both his brother’s and the Leshis’ family name. In accordance with the norms of the classical style, the hero has also minor, secondary goals, which he acts upon accordingly, making the narration more impressive in spite of many one-dimensional characters and stereotypical situations, which rarely hamper a good classically narrated film. Sleeping with beautiful women is, for instance, such a goal, but in addition to sexual goals, Leshi also has romantic ones. Various helpers and aids are at Leshi’s disposal (Partisans as well as old family friends), which is partly due to his virtues and partly due to the fact that he comes from a rich and influential family. This last circumstance is perhaps especially interesting, particularly from the point of view of Yugoslav socialist ideology: as a hero of the poor, Leshi has, more or less, betrayed the interests of his class – he even gives away his old family piano. Naturally, Leshi’s path is strewn with obstacles as well, including his own brother and the gang of bandits he joined. There are also other, less prominent characters, for instance the small episode of an aggressive war smuggler in the barroom brawl scene (the smuggler is played by Pavle Vuisić, who is considered to be one of the best if not the best Yugoslav film actor). The function of these characters is, of course, to suggest to the viewers a world that is as complex

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as the one they themselves inhabit, regardless of their factual differences and the prominence of narrative conventions and stereotypes.14 In accordance to Bordwell’s concept of the classical narrative style, practically all of the scenes in CAPTAIN LESHI are presented in such a manner as to ensure the optimal visibility of key content – actions, events, character features and other contents of every shot, with the cause-and-effect structure well elaborated and the motivation of characters clearly illustrated through action. For instance, when Captain Leshi hears that his brother’s gang had managed to evade his troops by only a hair’s breadth, he breaks the glass doors in frustration, which is a stereotypical action-man’s reaction to frustration: action instead of words. The sequel of Mitrović’s very popular film, OBRAČUN/GUNFIGHT (1962), has a far more complex narrative strategy, comprised of several flashbacks, governed by different characters’ testimonies in a court, which is not unheard of in the Westerns of that period – John Ford’s SERGEANT ROUTLEDGE from 1960, starring Woody Strode, Jeffrey Hunter and Constance Towers, is based on the very same narrative principle. Naturally, since the moviegoers of a sequel as a rule already know who the film’s hero is and how he looks like, this narrative composition is not confusing to the wider audiences, while the fact that the war is now technically over does not hinder the identification with the Partisan film, enriched with the structures of the Western. It would probably be premature at this point to say that Ford had a direct influence on Mitrović, but it is interesting to note how close Mitrović’s style is to the mainstream of international classical narrative (and genre) cinema of the period. While the first ‘Captain Leshi’ film is close to the prototypical imagery and poetics of the Western genre from 1920s onward, the second film about the Kosovo Albanian Partisan hero is quite close to the more ‘advanced’ (but still classical) contemporary narrative style of SERGEANT ROUTLEDGE, where events are clearly presented, although in a form of a network of testimonies, questionable by definition since these

14 To put it briefly – conventions and stereotypes do not diminish the power of great classically narrated films since conventions and stereotypes are actually analogous to the manner in which humans perceive and categorize the world.

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accounts of events are delivered by, obviously, very different characters (they are therefore at least potentially unreliable).15

T HE

GENRES OF MITROVIĆ ’ S FILMS

Initially an author of Western genre comics16 and avid reader of film magazines imported from the West,17 the great film director Živorad-Žika Mitrović (1921–2005) entered the socialist film industry in its early stages, during the 1940s. In addition to being very popular, Žika Mitrović’s films also became to be quite highly appreciated. Mira Boglić for instance, one of the most influential film critics of socialist Yugoslavia, wrote in the late 1970s that Mitrović is, basically, one of the best Yugoslav (and Serb) directors, and also one to provoke the least amount of controversy in the evaluation of his films. His consistence in style and artistic vision, Boglić claims, is evident throughout his film oeuvre.18 That opinion was, however, not universally held. Petar Volk, the historian of Serbian and Yugoslav cinema, finds many of Mitrović’s films to be lacking in artistic value, although he names Žika Mitrović as one of the directors responsible for mature approach in depicting the events of WWII in Serbian and Yugoslav cinema (the group includes, among others, Žorž Skrigin and Vladimir Pogačić). In Volk’s view, MARŠ NA DRINU/THE MARCH ON THE DRINA RIVER (1964), a film about an earlier, pre-Yugoslav 15 It is important to note, however, that such testimonies, also an essential feature of a court-room drama genre, are also incorporated into John Ford’s great success in the biographical (biopic) genre YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939), a film equally constitutive of American identity as are this director’s Westerns. Ford’s THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962), another significant Western, also relies on the power of the flashback. 16 Draginčić, Slavko/Zupan, Zdravko: “Istorija jugoslovenskog stripa 1 – do 1941. godine”, in: Projekat Rastko. Biblioteka srpske kulture na internetu, http://www. rastko.rs/strip/1/zupan-draginicic_1/paja-patak_l.html, last access: 25 July 2011. 17 V. Crnjanski: “Intervju: Živorad-Žika Mitrović”. 18 “Ličnost je ovog režisera vjerojatno među najcjelovitijima koje posjeduje jugoslavenski a zatim i srpski film, među onima koji su izazivali najmanje dubioza, ličnost izrasla iz strpljive ambicije i nepokolebljive vjernosti jednom shvaćanju filma i pogleda na svijet istovremeno, kojih se ovaj autor nije u stvari odrekao ni u jednom od svojih ostvarenja, ni tamo gdje su mu ambicije bile veoma skromne, a ni tamo gdje su bile velike!” See: M. Boglić: “Spektakularna historičnost Živorada Mitrovića”, 33–34.

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event in Serbian history (battle from WWI) is significant for underlining the universalist nature of the war film, transcending the boundaries of individual events.19 In films such as EŠALON DOKTORA M./DR. M’S ECHELON (1955), the director’s feature film debut, Mitrović, as film critic Dimitrije Vojnov puts it, treats war as if it was a Western, bringing a tradition of cavalry Western to the tumultuous and at the time southern Serbian province of Kosovo,20 where several of Mitrović’s films take place. Although not very happy with such comparisons to the genre of Western, Živorad Mitrović has still very openly (even proudly) admitted his strong ties to the American (U.S.) cinema. Discussing Dr. M’S ECHELON, he says that its commercial success in Yugoslavia was caused by the fact that the audiences could now see in a home-made (Yugoslav) film something that was previously offered only in American products; this time filmed in local language and in familiar, local surroundings.21 The inherent exoticism of Islamic architecture from the point of view of many nonMuslim viewers in no way undermines the familiarity of language or parts of the iconography (red star!); it only enriches them and makes them more attractive. However, when we look at the genre of the Western, we can easily discern several models at the borders of that genre as well. For instance, there is the Italian model of Spaghetti Western (with its Spanish and other variants), marked by a highly spectacular style. A more important type of film for the question raised here is the epic model of CIMARRON (1931)22 and its 1960 remake (carrying the same name).23 Showing the historical national narrative of forming the Nation through the expansion to the West, these films can very well remind us of the ‘chronicle’ direction (wide-scope model) of the Partisan film, such as Stipe Delić’s BATTLE OF SUTJESKA or Veljko Bulajić’s BATTLE OF NERETVA. With BATTLE OF SUTJESKA Stipe Delić, who started as a second-unit director on BATTLE OF NERETVA was 19 Volk, Petar: 20. vek srpskog filma, Beograd: Institut za film/Jugoslovenska kinoteka 2001: 135–138. 20 D. Vojnov: “Istorijski tobogan, drugi dio”. 21 V. Crnjanski: “Intervju: Živorad-Žika Mitrović”. 22 This, at the time successful but now often forgotten Academy Award winner was, apparently, directed for the most part by Wesley Ruggles. 23 Sharing the fate of its predecessor, this CIMARRON was directed by Anthony Mann and at least one other director (Charles Walters).

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offered the opportunity of a lifetime to direct another film aimed at becoming a national and international block-buster, featuring Richard Burton, one of the more respected movie stars, as Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav resistance movement (and after the war Yugoslavia’s president until his death in 1980). As far as possible Eastern influences go, the Serbian film critic Vojnov correctly notes that BATTLE OF NERETVA, BATTLE OF SUTJESKA and GUNS OF WAR are actually similar to Sergei Bondarchuk’s VOYNA I MIR/WAR AND PEACE (1967), quite an ambitious and spectacular account of the famous Russian defensive war against Napoleon Bonaparte. However, we shall probably not be wrong if we regard Bondarchuk’s film as a part of international war film and historical film tendencies, rather than a part of the Soviet Partisan film, although Milutin Čolić,24 one of the canonical Serbian and Yugoslav critics of the socialist era, discusses Partisan films in the wider context of war films in Yugoslavia (in this approach – war film is defined by its theme alone). Čolić’s motivation for this thematic approach might be quite political – if we imply that Partisan films are a genre, that might mean they are primarily constructed as films and as narratives, but if we look at them as ‘war films’, it is easier to imagine that they are true to the historical war, one of the ideological stalwarts of Yugoslav mainstream/regime criticism and filmmaking. Films about the Partisans’ struggle and revolution (WWII in Yugoslavia) should tell the truth about history and therefore define Yugoslavia’s identity both in the present and in the future.25 To put it briefly, not stressing the genre nature of Partisan films is functional in avoiding the undermining of the films’ claim to historical truthfulness or, at least, verisimilitude. Stipe Delić’s THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA will probably not remind the viewer of a Western, at least not in the sense that CAPTAIN LESHI will, but it seems useful to remember that war films also have several sub-genre models. The international audiences were often unaware of the particularities of the Yugoslav genre of Partisan films, but were quite ready to link the war

24 Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslavenski ratni film I, II, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984. 25 Zvijer, Nemanja: “Ideologija i vrednosti u jugoslovenskom ratnom spektaklu: prilog sociološkoj analizi na primeru BITKE NA NERETVI Veljka Bulajića”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009): 27–41.

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theme and style of these films to the theme and style of literally hundreds of war films being made in various countries (partly playing into Čolić’s thematic approach to Partisan films as war films).26 When watched in the West, the Partisan films were usually associated with the war film genre, the genre that probably directly influenced the Partisan film as well, as Stanković rightly states,27 and it would be interesting to examine what genre Partisan films were associated with when watched in China and other socialist/communist countries. In addition to the stories concentrating on a war hero or a single (often small) army unit, such as John Ford’s THE LOST PATROL (1934), there are also more spectacular features, showing great many characters, often representative of various generations, ethnic groups and nationalities, for instance THE LONGEST DAY (1962), featuring an impressive cast of stars and superstars, (this casting strategy is clearly similar to that for THE BATTLE OF NERETVA): Richard Burton, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Peter Lawford, Gert Fröbe, Bourvil, Red Buttons, Curd Jürgens, Robert Wagner, Mel Ferrer, Jeffrey Hunter and Arletty (this spectacular and overblown production was directed by Ken Annakin and a few other directors). Bondarchuk’s equally overblown although less entertaining historical war film WAR AND PEACE would probably fit into this category as well and it may very well be that the international nature and prospects of a war film genre often additionally encouraged Yugoslav producers and directors to venture into the field of Partisan films (in addition to the ideological and political benefits that one can reap from being involved in such a production). Also, films such as Mitrović’s MARCH ON THE RIVER DRINA have demonstrated that this broader-scope poetics can be applied to other historical wars, just like the later films (in case of Dejan Šorak’s ŠAMPION/CHAMPION as late as 1989) have shown the applicability of Partisan film poetics to peace time stories, particularly those set in the milieu of the Yugoslav army; in Šorak’s film a professional officer from Belgrade chooses to work in a provincial army unit in Bosnia Herzegovina, where he

26 This process of dubious attribution of genre is quite similar to that of eventually losing the codes necessary for recognizing the (sub)genre of colonial films, such as George Stevens’ GUNGA DIN (1939). 27 P. Stanković: “Je li mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?”, 47.

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meets people of different ethnicities and proves the superiority of the Yugoslav integralist (and socialist) ideology.28 The influence of Westerns on Akira Kurosawa’s films (and vice versa), their influence on John Sturges’s BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955), the traces of the Western in melodrama, such as George Stevens’ GIANT (1956), or the stylistic allusion to the Western genre that creeps in when the hero meets a guy with a cowboy hat in the middle of nowhere in NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) are ample proof of the versatility of genre structures. They can be used in various settings, and in later periods they can inform such films as the ‘post-Western’ films like Kevin Costner’s DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990) in which the historical narrative model can be interpreted as the updated (probably postmodern and definitively multicultural) version of CIMARRON – a central narrative of American society. However, Costner’s film does not mean that the genre structures are dead – DANCES WITH WOLVES actually predates both Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN (1992) and the Coen brothers’ pseudo-Western (or Western?) TRUE GRIT (2010), both built directly on the structures of Western genre. The brilliant TV series DEADWOOD (2004-2006), ‘created’ by David Milch, where historical and mythical personas of the Wild West freely interact, is another case in point of strong traces of the Western genre even in the 21st century. Taking all that into consideration, the relationship between Mitrović’s films and Delić’s SUTJESKA (or Bulajić's BATTLE OF NERETVA) is actually similar to the relationship between the emblematic examples of the Western genre – STAGECOACH (1939, D: John Ford) or RIO BRAVO – to the CIMARRON films or, for that matter, the Western spectacle How THE WEST IS WON (1962), an omnibus directed by John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall (apparently, with the aid of Richard Thorpe as well). Of course, this would support the hypothesis that the Partisan film is indeed a genre, because it has its own variants and porous borders similar to those of other genres, but BATTLE OF SUTJESKA and similar Partisan films are probably closer to international war films than to the genre of the Western. It is therefore no wonder that this type of film received wide international recognition and, at least in some cases, had significant box-office appeal. 28 In the same sense one can observe the influence of Western on other genres, such as science fiction and, although Ang Lee’s queer melodrama BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN has a very small number of features similar to the Western, it was still often considered as some sort of a ‘gay Western’ or ‘queer Western’.

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Since Stanković29 already offers a useful stucturalist comparison of Western and Partisan films, based on an article of Will Wright (“The structure of myth & the structure of western film”),30 we can at least hint at some sort of an influence-oriented or intertextuality-oriented analysis. Shot in wide-screen and colour, starting with long shots of a town dominated by a mosque and shattered by explosions, CAPTAIN LESHI, covered by the mixed choir, is followed by the hero’s first person voice-over, announcing the story of liberation of the Kosovo province (‘Kosmet’ in Serbian terminology).31 Three Partisans talk about Ramiz Leshi, praising his virtues and, when he appears, an uplifting musical motif announces something special and he brings them treats acquired from the German convoy. Leshi, an ethnic Albanian, is therefore doubly encoded as an above-the-average fighter: he is even given the narrative authority of voice-over and, before he appears, his comrades convincingly praise his intelligence and cunning in battle. Bearing all that in mind, we can say that this type of hero introduction is similarly organised as, for instance, the highly romanticised introduction of Ringo (John Wayne), the hero of John Ford’s western STAGECOACH, who greets the stagecoach from the wasteland covered in romantic shadows. However, Ringo’s individual virtues are more clearly delineated from the rest of the characters who are building the frontier civilization than Leshi’s are from the rest of the Partisans – Albanians and others – who are fighting the German army and its local (ethnic Albanian) allies. Just like in STAGECOACH or numerous other films, CAPTAIN LESHI boasts two leading ladies – one is a teacher – a prototypical Western role (cf. Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE 1946), another is the women of dubious moral values – which is another typical Western stereotype (sometimes ethnically linked to ‘foreign’ cultural and ethnic elements of Native Americans, Latinos, Creoles from the South or even Europeans).

29 Stanković, Peter: “Je li mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?”, 36–41. 30 Published in: Starey, J. (ed.): Cultural theory and popular culture. A reader, New York: Harvest Wheatsheaf 1994. Stucturalist inspiration is often at the very heart of genre studies and stars studies in cinema theory. 31 While in Serbia there is a preference to call the province Kosovo and Metohia (or Kosmet), Albanians usually prefer Kosovo (Kosova). By the end of May 2013, the independence of the Republic of Kosovo was recognized by 101 states (including the majority of EU states).

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In order to distinguish these two female characters more easily, but also in accordance with many stereotypical Western situations, the teacher, who wants the Leshi family piano for the school, is blond, while the barroom entertainer (and spy with a heart of silver if not gold), who wants the piano for the bar, is dark-haired, probably suggesting the element of ethnic division as well. Serbs, as Slavic people are closer to the WASP ideals of the US westerns, while ethnic Albanians, Muslims/Bosnians and ethnic gypsies in Mitrović’s Kosovo cycle are used as an equivalent to the racially plural or mixed elements of the world of Mexicans, Latinos, Indians (Native Americans), African Americans and ‘mongrels’ (people of mixed ethnic origin, as for instance in THE SEARCHERS). One need only think of John Ford’s saga THE SEARCHERS (1956) that deals directly and critically with the trauma of integrating ‘mongrels’ into the prototypically white family, with John Wayne’s hero being unable to adapt to the new, more tolerant rules of American society! Like in many Western films, there is a comical sidekick to the Mitrović’s hero Leshi – Shok/Šok (played by Petre Prličko) is, contrary to the hero, very much coloured by his ethnic Albanian identity (in his attire, speech and general attitude), thus serving as a possible counterpart to comical Mexicans of Westerns, such as the hotel keeper Pedro Robante (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez) in Hawks’ seminal Western RIO BRAVO (1959), but also to the numerous colourful ethnic characters in Ford’s Westerns (played by Ward Bond, John Qualen, Victor McLaglen and others). Shok can also be compared to the grumpy and limping old side-kick Stumpy (Walter Brennan) from RIO BRAVO, who helps the hero in the final shootout, just like Shok helps Captain Leshi in the finale of Mitrović’s GUNFIGHT. There is also the Western-style barroom (saloon) scene in this film, the morally questionable but voluptuous barroom entertainer Lola, with the genre motif of firing the pistol into the ceiling, as well as the collective singing scene,32 complete with the brawl comparable to the best collective fights in John Ford’s Westerns (but also his other films). There is also a pursuit with handguns on the streets of Prizren, with medium close-up inserts of shots of the horses who twitch at the sound of gunfire, which is a prototypical western genre image. Various characters ride their horse across the plains, among high cliffs and deep gorges hiding the ‘bandits’, often

32 The song they sing is about Captain Leshi, a true local hero.

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grotesque in appearance, with parts of uniforms and marks of traditional ethnic clothes, in the best tradition of renegades and outlaws in the Western genre. There are also clear mountain streams for the hero and other characters to drink from and fight in, with several fist-fights and shoot-outs in other surroundings as well, all of this reminiscent of numerous Westerns. In addition to CAPTAIN LESHI’s sequel, GUNFIGHT, we can notice that another film from Mitrović’s Kosovo cycle, BRAT DOKTORA HOMERA/DOCTOR HOMER’S BROTHER (1968) also shares many traits of the Western genre (or, one can say, it is very much based on the model of the Western). For instance, the hero Simon (Velimir Bata Živojinović) returns home after the war only to find his house burned, his parents dead and his brother, doctor Homer, not at all willing to search around for the gang that killed his father (this post-war situation mirrors the characters in Westerns who return from the Civil war or from the ‘Indian campaigns’). The old gipsy Hassan who wants to help Simon is immediately killed by the diabolical bad guy, who betrays his law-and-order duties so, in order to exact his revenge, Simon will have to go against all odds, although not without the help of a nice, clean-cut lady (played by Jelena Jovanović), contrasted by the brothel keeper, again with a heart of silver, if not of gold, played by Zdravka Krstulović. All these ethnic components and their consequences in Mitrović’s Kosovo cycle films lend themselves well to comparison with similar situations in the US-based genre of the Western. Just as Mexicans, African Americans or, for that matter, women or North European immigrants can be said to be misrepresented and/or underrepresented in American Westerns, it is quite clear that Albanians, gypsies (Roma) and other Yugoslav minorities can lay the same claim. The fact that a Serb, albeit a very talented one, directs the story of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and that two main Albanian characters are played by a Serb (Aleksandar Gavrić) and a Macedonian (Petre Prličko) can point to the (Yugo)Slavic nationalist attempts to direct and form the minorities’ voice in the new, supposedly ethnically tolerant circumstances of socialist Yugoslavia. To put it bluntly, contrary to the narrative of Yugoslav brotherhood and unity, one could say that the Kosovar Albanians and other minorities were sometimes treated in Yugoslav films in the nationalist

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manner similar to the treatment of American minorities in the Western genre.33

C ONCLUSION

AND SUMMARY

Since a comparison with the Western genre cinema was the starting point of this article, with the focus on western cinema as a major source of inspiration and influence, we can say that certain films by Živorad Mitrović have passed this test with flying colours. Since various ‘action-based’ genres have different models, comparable to the models of the Western, this looks like a promising area for future comparisons, where other genres and subgenres can also be used in the analysis. Since the Western genre was crucial for defining the American national identity, while Partisan films had a similar role in Yugoslavia, it is not really very surprising that a Yugoslav author would use models of this internationally popular American-based genre. At the same time, of course, there is no point in denying the usefulness of the comparisons with the Eastern European film, particularly Soviet films that also developed in several different directions (for example the films of Grigoriy Chukhrai, or Mikhail Kalatazov). But this belongs to a field of research that is beyond the scope of this paper. CAPTAIN LESHI and some other of Mitrović’s films are openly and unmistakably based on the stylistic and iconographic conventions of the Western genre, thus proving how well internationally connected genre cinema generally is, regardless of the political divisions and social differences of the countries that produce such films.34 33 The fact that Yugoslavia tried (and at least partly succeeded) to forge a new, Yugoslav nation seems to me underrepresented in the work of some critics of post-Yugoslav nationalist paradigms, such as that of the film scholar Nebojša Jovanović, or, for that matter, the linguist Snježana Kordić. See Jovanović, Nebojša: “Kinematografija bunkera. O ‘crnim knjigama’ jugo-filma”, in: I. Prica/T. Škokić (eds.), Horror-porno-ennui. Kulturne prakse postsocijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2011: 309–310; Kordić, Snježana: Jezik i nacionalizam, Zagreb: Durieux 2010. 34 I would like to thank Rajko Petković and Nemanja Zvijer for their help in obtaining the material necessary for research. The discussions in the Berlin conference (by Gal Kirn, Barbara Wurm, Peter Stanković and others) have proved very instrumental for forming the final version of the text. Face-to-face and

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Boglić, Mira: “Spektakularna historičnost Živorada Mitrovića”, in: Mira Boglić (ed.), Mit i antimit. Povijesno kritičke bilješke o jugoslavenskom filmu. Zagreb: Spektar, 1980 (1974): 33–56. Bordwell, David: Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Routledge 1985. Crnjanski, Vladimir: “Intervju: Živorad-Žika Mitrović”, in: Novi kadrovi 2010, http://www.novikadrovi.net/razno/3-razno.php, last acess: 25 July 2011. Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslavenski ratni film I, II, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984. Draginčić, Slavko/Zupan, Zdravko: “Istorija jugoslovenskog stripa 1 – do 1941. godine”, in: Zoran Stefanović (ed.), Projekat Rastko. Biblioteka srpske kulture na internetu, http://www.rastko.rs/strip/1/zupan-draginic ic_1/paja-patak_l.html, last access: 25 July 2011. Gilić, Nikica: Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma. Drugo, izmjenjeno izdanje, Zagreb: Leykam International 2011² (2010). Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience 19452001, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002 (Croatian translation: Jugoslavensko filmsko iskustvo 1945-2001: Oslobođeni film, Zagreb: V.B.Z. 2004.) Jovanović, Nebojša: “Kinematografija bunkera. O ‘crnim knjigama’ jugofilma”, in: I. Prica/T. Škokić (eds.), Horror-porno-ennui. Kulturne prakse postsocijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku 2011: 309–310. Kordić, Snježana: Jezik i nacionalizam, Zagreb: Durieux 2010. Peterlić, Ante: Povijest filma: rano i klasično razdoblje, Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez 2009. Radojević, Saša: “Intervju: Živorad-Žika Mitrović”, in: Novi kadrovi, 2010, http://www.novikadrovi.net/razno/4-razno.php, last access: 25 July 2011. Ranković, Milan: “Za produbljeno filmsko viđenje revolucije”, in: S. Ostojić et al. (eds.), Rat revolucija ekran, Zagreb: Spektar 1977: 63–70.

online discussions with Bruno Kragić, Tomislav Šakić, Hrvoje Turković, Damir Radić and Nebojša Jovanović also offered very valuable insights.

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Stanković, Peter: “Je li mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?” in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 22–53. Škrabalo, Ivo: 101 godina filma u Hrvatskoj, 1896-1897, Zagreb: Globus 1998. Turković, Hrvoje: Filmska opredjeljenja, Zagreb: CEKADE 1985. Turković, Hrvoje: “Karijera na prijelomu stilskih razdoblja”, in: N. Polimac (ed.), Branko Bauer, Zagreb: CEKADE 1985. Vojnov, Dimitrije: “Istorijski tobogan, drugi dio”, http://www.prozor.cdt mn.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=208:istorijsk i-tobogan-drugi-dio&catid=37:stav&Itemid=88, last access: 25 July 2011. Volk, Petar: 20. vek srpskog filma, Beograd: Institut za film/Jugoslovenska kinoteka 2001. Volk, Petar: Istorija jugoslovenskog filma, Beograd/Ljubljana: Institut za film/IRO “Partizanska knjiga” 1986. Volk, Petar: Savremeni jugoslavenski film, Beograd: Univerzitet umetnosti/Institut za film 1983. Wurm, Barbara: “Partisan films & Genre Mimicry: a historical Survey”, in: KINO! 10.3 (2010): 13–21. Zvijer, Nemanja: “Ideologija i vrednosti u jugoslovenskom ratnom spektaklu: prilog sociološkoj analii na primeru BITKE NA NERETVI Veljka Bulajića”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009), 27–41.

F ILMOGRAPHY BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (USA 1955, D: John Sturges) BITKA NA NERETVI/THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (YUG/ITA/West Germany 1969, D: Veljko Bulajić) BRAT DOKTORA HOMERA/DOCTOR HOMER’S BROTHER (YUG 1968, D: Žika Mitrović) BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (USA/Canada 2005, D: Ang Lee) CIMARRON (USA 1931, D: Wesley Ruggles) CIMARRON (USA 1960, D: Anthony Mann/Charles Walters) DANCES WITH WOLVES (USA/UK 1990, D: Kevin Kostner)

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DEADWOOD (USA 2004-2006, D: Ed Bianchi/Daniel Minahan/Davis Guggenheim/Gregg Fienberg/Mark Tinker/Steve Shill/Alan Taylor/Walter Hill) EŠALON DOKTORA M./DR. M’S ECHALON (YUG 1955, D: Žika Mitrović) GIANT (USA 1956, D: George Stevens) GUNGA DIN (USA 1939, D: George Stevens) HOW THE WEST WAS WON (USA 1962, D: John Ford/Henry Hathaway/George Marshall/Richard Thorpe) KAPETAN LEŠI/CAPTAIN LESHI (YUG 1960, D: Žika Mitrović) LONGEST DAY, THE (USA 1962, D: Ken Annakin/Andrew Marton/Bernhard Wicki/Darryl F. Zanuck) MARŠ NA DRINU/THE MARCH ON THE DRINA RIVER (YUG 1964, D: Žika Mitrović) MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (USA 1946, D: John Ford) NORTH BY NORTHWEST (USA 1959, D: Alfred Hitchcock) OBRAČUN/GUNFIGHT (YUG 1962, D: Žika Mitrović) RIO BRAVO (USA 1959, D: Howard Hawks) SERGEANT ROUTLEDGE (USA 1960, D: John Ford) SLAVICA (YUG 1947, D: Vjekoslav Afrić) STAGECOACH (USA 1939, D: John Ford) SUTJESKA/THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA (YUG 1973, D: Stipe Delić) ŠAMPION/CHAMPION (YUG 1989, D: Dejan Šorak) THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, D: John Ford) THE SEARCHERS (USA 1956, D: John Ford) THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (USA 1962, D: John Ford) TRUE GRIT (USA 2010, D: Ethan Coen/Joel Coen) UNFORGIVEN (USA 1992, D: Clint Eastwood) UŽIČKA REPUBLIKA/GUNS OF WAR (YUG 1974, D: Žika Mitrović) VOYNA I MIR/WAR AND PEACE (SU 1967, D: Sergei Bondarchuk) YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (USA 1939, D: John Ford) ŽIVJEĆE OVAJ NAROD/THIS NATION WILL LIVE (YUG 1947, D: Nikola Popović)

1970s Partisan Epics as Western Films. The Question of Genre and Myth in Yugoslav Partisan Film P ETER S TANKOVIĆ

I NTRODUCTION In recent years, Yugoslav Partisan films have witnessed a notable revival of interest. They are shown on various TV channels, many of them are also available on DVD reissues and YouTube, while their new audience is in many instances too young to have actually experienced socialist Yugoslavia first hand. It would seem that the renaissance of Yugoslavian Partisan films is related to the general disappointment with capitalism, which was introduced in East Europe after the collapse of the Berlin wall. This is an interesting topic by itself, but here I am more specifically interested in a very simple and basic question of what Yugoslav Partisan film actually is. Films made during the period of socialist Yugoslavia, from 1945 to 1989, are usually taken for a consistent genre, defined by their content (glorifying the struggle of Yugoslav Partisans against the foreign invaders during WWII) as well as by their stylistic conventions. But are things really that simple? Elsewhere I have tried to show that Yugoslav films about the Partisan uprising are actually remarkably diverse.1 Stylistically, one can find among them everything from dynamic action films to introverted art films; ideo1

Stanković, Peter: “Partizanski filmi in partizanarice: analiza žanrskih prvin jugoslovanskega partizanskega filma”, in: Teorija in praksa 49.2 (2012): 302– 314.

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logically there are extremely simplified accounts, where Partisans stand as little less than modernised saints, as well as more serious films that were not afraid to address various complexities during the troubled period of WWII in Yugoslavia. With regard to the level of scale, some films were made in an extremely grandiose manner with literally thousands of extras, while others were very minimal, often with little more than a few actors. Furthermore, some films were influenced by Hollywood genres such as war films and Westerns; while others were much closer to the less structured principles of European films. Finally, there are also notable differences in the overall atmosphere of various Yugoslav Partisan films: some are extremely enthusiastic and optimistic, while others are introverted, contemplative, symbolist, or even melancholic. My point in this respect was that Yugoslav Partisan films are simply too diverse to be taken as a consistent film genre. They obviously share a general topic – the Partisan uprising during WWII in Yugoslavia – but that is basically it. In virtually all other respects they are comprised of elements that are very heterogeneous and even incompatible, up to the point that one could argue that there are more differences among them than similarities. Things are not, however, entirely contingent. Namely, among these films there is an important and above all very influential segment that is, in fact, stylistically quite unified. What I have in mind here are Partisan spectacles from the 1970s. Since these films were very popular at the time (and still are), they are in many instances understood as the paradigmatic examples of Partisan films in general. However, as much as this does not seem to be true (there is no reason why these films should be considered more important than others), they nevertheless display a degree of substantial generic stability. I would like to propose, therefore, that when talking about Yugoslav Partisan films, a basic distinction between Partisan films in general and 1970s Partisan epics should be made. The first term would be used for all Yugoslav Partisan films made in socialist Yugoslavia, while the second would designate only the lavish Partisan film spectacles from the 1970s. More specifically, I propose that we call the 1970s spectacles Partisan Westerns, as this is (as partizanarice) at least in Slovenia an already established popular label2 for this kind of film and seems to effective2

With the exception that it does not apply exclusively to the 1970s Partisan spectacles: usually it is used for overblown Partisan films in general. Partizanarice is essentially an ironic twist on one of the oldest terms for western

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ly address some of the most important characteristics of these films (narrative structure, dramatic conflicts, heroic bravado, etc.). There should be no question about the stylistic consistencies of Partisan westerns. What binds these films together are clearly not only general stylistic characteristics, but also repeated narrative structures, stable ideological subtexts, consistent casting, use of the same sound effects, extensive reliance on the help of the Yugoslavian People’s Army, etc. It should be legitimate, therefore, to address at least this part of the Yugoslav Partisan film tradition as typical genre films, but the question is how precisely. An obvious possibility would be a simple description of their recognisable features. This might be interesting, but on the other hand pure description as such does not necessarily produce interesting insights about the in-depth workings of a genre. Therefore, I would like to proceed in a slightly different manner, by taking seriously the popular preconception of Partisan spectacles as some sort of localised western film. From this point of view, I will use one of the most classic theoretical encounters with western film, Will Wright’s structuralist analysis of westerns as myths, and apply it to the Yugoslav Partisan westerns of the 1970s. My point is that in doing so we can disclose some of the most basic narrative and ideological mechanisms that bind all these films into a coherent whole, as well as proving that – at least on certain levels – these films are in fact both formally and ideologically structured precisely as Hollywood westerns (as a consistent formal structure and a myth). Before proceeding, however, I would like to say a few words about what kind of Partisan films I understand as Partisan Westerns. Basically, I use the term for the Partisan films that have been made after the example of BITKA NA NERETVI/THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (1969, D: Veljko Bulajić). NERETVA was a spectacular account of one of the most dramatic battles fought by Tito’s Partisans during the war and as such was financed by the federation, republics, factories from all over Yugoslavia, a foreign distributor, as well as by massive material help from the Yugoslavian People’s Army (with guns, planes, tanks and thousands of extras). It was actually so expensive that even today it stands as one of the most expensive European films ever made. However, the huge financial investment paid off:

films in Slovenia indijanarice (which literally refers to films about native Americans).

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NERETVA became the film with the greatest attendance in the history of Yugoslav cinema, was sold to 84 countries, and was also nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Even the premiere of the film in Sarajevo was a special occasion as the city reportedly almost failed to accommodate a mass of important guests from all over the world (these included Sophia Loren, Omar Sharif, distinguished Cannes Film Festival director Robert Favre Le Bret and many others).3 The success of NERETVA has encouraged the production of several similar Partisan epics. As a whole, these represented a return to the more propagandistic Partisan cinematography from the late 1940s and 1950s, at least in respect to their simplistic content. The immediate political context that has also contributed to the surge of Partisan epics in the 1970s was the reintroduction of the orthodox ideological and political agenda by the Yugoslav Communist Party in the early 1970s. This process has followed the suppression of the liberal and nationalist factions among the Croat and Slovene communists, whereas cinematography was expected to provide at least some ideological support. It did so, primarily in the form of Partisan epics. Among the most important Partisan epics of this kind are SUTJESKA/THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA (1973, D: Stipe Delić), an obvious yet not entirely successful attempt at repeating the winning formula of NERETVA (a telling detail about the similarly epic ambitions of SUTJESKA is that in the film Tito is played by none other than Richard Burton); PARTIZANI/TACTICAL GUERRILLA (YUG 1974, D: Stole Janković), a dubious film spectacle about the Partisans’ military superiority over the Germans; UŽIČKA REPUBLIKA/THE GUNS OF WAR (1974, D: Žika Mitrović), a film about the first larger liberated area in occupied Yugoslavia during WWII; VRHOVI ZELENGORE/THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA (1976, D: Zdravko Velimirović), a re-enactment of one of the decisive clashes during the Battle of Sutjeska; POVRATAK OTPISANIH/THE WRITTEN OFF RETURN (1976, D: Aleksandar Đorđević), a film version of one of the episodes from the massively popular TV series about a group of resourceful Belgrade underground resistance fighters; BOŠKO BUHA/BOŠKO BUHA (1978, D: Branko Bauer), another film adaptation of a popular TV series, this time about a group of teenage orphans who had become specialised in taking out enemy bunkers; and PARTIZANSKA ESKADRILA/THE PARTISAN SQUADRON (1979) by 3

Škrabalo, Ivo: 101 godina filma u Hrvatskoj, Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Globus 1998: 360-367.

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Hajrudin Krvavac, an over-zealous tribute to the first Partisan fighter pilots. There are also two other important Krvavac films from this period that could be added to this list, even if they do not correspond exactly to their pattern. These are MOST/THE BRIDGE (1969), which flirts substantially with the stylistic conventions of Hollywood Westerns, and VALTER BRANI SARAJEVO/WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO (1972), a dramatic parable about the Sarajevo resistance fighters’ attempts to disrupt German plans for the organised retreat from the Balkans. What makes these two films slightly different from the majority mentioned above is their distinctively individualistic central character: in the Partisan epics of the 1970s the hero tended to be a collective (a larger group of Partisans or even Partisans in general). On the other hand, the elements that make THE BRIDGE and WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO part of this larger Partisan epics film aesthetics are their strict Manichean narrative structure, pathos-heavy dramaturgy, and film language that is indebted more to classical Hollywood than to European cinematographies. Partisan epics of the 1970s were very successful both at home and abroad, but at least some of the film critics could not resist noticing their inherently Manichean structure that made them in many respects inferior to the complex and artistically refined takes on the Partisan struggle from the previous decade. Some even labelled these new Partisan spectacles as ‘the red wave’, which was a subversive twist of the term ‘black wave’ (crni val) used at the time by regime film critics to degrade Serbian ‘novi’ film (the latter’s bleak portrayals of socialist reality became undesirable in the period of ideological ‘normalisation’ in the 1970s). On the other hand, with the same sense of irony Rajko Munitić called Partisan epics from the 1970s “cinematography of quantity”4.

W ILL

WRIGHT AND THE STRUCTURE OF WESTERNS

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when film theory started to focus on the question of film genres, several researchers turned to the principles of LeviStraussian structuralism. On the one hand, structuralism offered an attractive analytical framework for understanding any set of related texts, while 4

Munitić, Ranko: Obdobja jugoslovanskega filma: film socialistične Jugoslavije. Ljubljana: Dopisna delavska univerza Univerzum 1978: 76.

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on the other hand it also promised to disclose their hidden mythological content. Some applications of structuralism to the analysis of film genres inevitably turned out better than others, but in general there is a consensus that ‘genre structuralism’ produced several interesting insights when applied to the Western. The most important of the structuralist encounters with Westerns is Will Wright’s book Sixguns and Society from 1975. Wright’s argument is that the Hollywood Western is basically just a Levi-Straussian myth, as it does exactly what myths are supposed to do according to Levi-Strauss: communicate basic social concepts and values. Yet here Wright is doing more than just applying an established concept to a different set of texts. The reason for this is that he does not agree with Levi-Strauss’ conclusion that myths are in essence nothing but an expression of universal mental structure. To Wright, this seems too narrow, so he combines a basic LeviStraussian approach with slightly different presumptions made by Kenneth Burke, who has argued that characters in genre films always represent (beside themselves, that is particular characters in particular stories) social types that act out a drama of social order. In this way, interaction – such as the conflict of sexual attraction – is never simply an interaction between individuals, but always involves the social principles that the characters represent. “Thus, a fight in a narrative would not simply be conflict of men but also a conflict of principles – good versus evil, rich versus poor, black versus white.”5 Proceeding from the argument that the function of Western films is (just as in the case of Levi-Straussian myths) the support of the established social order, Wright maintains that we should not ground our analysis on the formal characteristics of the genre. Rather, what should interest us is the box office success of particular films: the films that are the most profitable must contain certain mythic qualities as people apparently recognise in them something that helps them to make sense of the confusing symbolic/cultural universe. Wright analyses the most successful Westerns on two basic levels. On the one level, he identifies typical characters in Western films, as well as basic binary oppositions according to which these characters are set against one another in relation to the basic mythological themes 5

Wright, Will: “The Structure of Myth & The Structure of Western Film”, in: John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1994: 118.

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of American society. On the other level, he constructs a typical sequence of events that lies beneath the superficial diversity of plots that can be found in the genre. According to Wright, analysis of these two levels should allow us to understand how American society communicates to itself with the help of the myth of the Wild West, but more on this later on. First, let us take a closer look at how he explains the structures of Western films. On the first level, Wright discusses typical characters. His point is that there are essentially just three sets of principal characters in Western films: the (lonely) gunman, homesteaders, and ranchers. These could be abstracted to the three mythic figures of hero, society, and villains, respectively, where they form between themselves a triangle of three basic binary oppositions. The first opposition is between the individual and the collective. Here the hero as a typical self-reliant individualist is positioned against the society and villains, who are collective agents. The second opposition is between good and bad, a dichotomy that separates the society and the hero from the villains. And finally, there is the opposition between the strong and the weak, which distinguishes the hero and the villains from the society (the homesteaders are not good with weapons).6 Thus, what we have here is a basic triangle of three principal characters, as well as of three binary oppositions that are formed in dynamic relationships between the characters. Wright argues that there is, in fact, another opposition in Westerns, the dichotomy between wilderness and civilisation, but he says that this opposition in most respects corresponds to the first one, between the individual and the collective.7 On the second level, Wright claims that Western films are also highly structured as narratives. In spite of the fact that each of the films has its own peculiarities, they all rely on just one basic – or ‘classical’, as he calls it – plot. In his opinion, this plot is exemplified by George Stevens’ SHANE (1953), so that its sequence could be used to construct a more abstract narrative matrix that reveals the narrative dynamic of Western films in general. This sequence comprises the following ‘functions’: The hero enters the social group. The hero is unknown to society. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability. 6 7

W. Will: “The Structure of Myth & The Structure of Western Film”, 126-127. W. Will: “The Structure of Myth & The Structure of Western Film”, 127.

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The society recognises the difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status. The society does not completely accept the hero. There is a conflict of interest between the villains and the society. The villains are stronger than society. There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain. The villains threaten the society. The hero avoids involvement in the conflict. The villains endanger a friend of the hero. The hero fights the villains. The hero defeats the villains. The society is safe. The society accepts the hero. The hero loses or gives up his special status.8 Obviously, there are many exceptions with individual films, but Wright insists that this sequence of events, abstracted form SHANE, represents the archetypical narrative matrix of Westerns in general. What is most important in this respect, however, is that all these structural regularities point to the fact that Westerns function as a myth: their simple binary structure on the one hand translates the complex, uncertain and anxiety-ridden experience of living in a culture into simple, meaningful and comforting interpretative frameworks, while on the other hand these frameworks themselves are nothing but the dominant social values of the society that has produced them. Thus, according to Wright, the classical plot of western films corresponds to the dominant individualistic understanding of society that has been developed in the context of the market economy; the sub-plot of revenge is related to the changes that have taken place after the introduction of capitalism; while the sub-plot of individual professional responsibility, which is also typical for Westerns, naturalises the contemporary corporate organisation of capitalism.

8

W. Will: “The Structure of Myth & The Structure of Western Film”, 122-126.

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PARTISAN FILMS AS PARTISAN WESTERNS

If we accept Wright’s assumption that westerns are basically just myths and try to apply his structural analysis to Yugoslav Partisan Westerns, we will notice that, while there are inevitably some dimensions of Partisan films that do not fit this analytical framework, Wright’s scheme also works surprisingly well for this kind of film too. One of the characteristics of Partisan Westerns revealed in this context is the structural regularity of the construction of the principal characters. Just as in Hollywood Westerns, there seem to be just three principal characters (the ones that drive the narrative) in Partisan Westerns: the Partisans, the Germans, and (‘barehanded’) ‘narod’ (an established Serbo-Croatian expression for people and/or nation in Partisan films). The only difference in respect to the Western films is that all these characters are collective, which means that one of Wright’s oppositions of values, individual versus collective, does not apply to Partisan Westerns, but the other two are exactly the same. The story is driven by the changing relationships between the characters, whereby binary oppositions of good versus bad (Partisans and ‘narod’ against the Germans) and strong versus weak (the Partisans and the Germans against the ‘narod’) take on the whole weight of structuring the narrative matrix. The latter is consequently somehow less complex than in the case of Hollywood Westerns, which is structured by three (or even four) oppositions, but in most general terms this doesn’t change the fact that Partisan Westerns are a highly structured set of films and that this structure resembles the structure of Western films in many respects. Another important similarity between Yugoslav Partisan Westerns and Hollywood Westerns is their highly standardised narrative sequence. Just as in the case of Wright’s analysis, also in the Partisan Westerns one can identify a highly standardised sequence of events that organise the narratives, although I would not go as far as Wright and try to point out a film which functions as an archetype in this respect (if there actually was one, then it should be NERETVA). Our typical sequence of events in Partisan Westerns is therefore just a simple abstraction of the common narrative elements of all Partisan Westerns. These are usually organised as follows: The Partisans are ‘doing their thing’: disrupting the German communications, attacking their outposts, etc.

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The Partisans or the Germans receive a new mission. The Germans’ actions or attempts to counter the Partisan mission are initially successful, whereby they always find some extra time to terrorise the ‘narod’. ‘Narod’ does not waver and continues to support the Partisans. The Partisans, impressed by the ‘narod’s’ dedicated support, find strength to finally defeat or at least to stop the Germans. The Partisans are recovering from the fighting. They have suffered significant losses, but now there is an unmistakable spark discernible in their eyes: a realisation that they will prevail at the end. An army that has proved itself with such heroism simply cannot be subdued. There are two more collective characters that are usually implicated in the sequence of events, the Italians and the Quislings (members of different local militias or armies that were collaborating with the foreign occupiers; in the Partisan Westerns these are usually Serbian Chetniks and/or Croatian Ustasha). This might give an impression that the structure of Partisan Westerns is more complicated, but in fact the Italians and Quislings appear in the films almost exclusively as dependant variables and are consequently not important as dynamic antagonists (the only army that counters the Partisans with some efficiency is German). The reason for the negligible role of Italians and Quislings in the narrative development is different for each case. While the representation of the Italians seems to be derived from the wider – not only Yugoslav – stereotypes about the cowardly essence of the Italian armies, the representation of Quislings as utterly incompetent soldiers appears to be primarily in the function of systematic discrediting of the Partisans’ ideological opponents. The Guns of War, for example, dedicates much of its time to the detailed portrayal of the Chetniks’ debauchery and treacherousness even if Chetniks do not have any significant role in the progress of events (while the Partisans are eventually driven from the first liberated area in and around Užice by the Germans, in the meantime they do not have any problems dealing a devastating blow to the Chetniks). As this goes against the basic film rules that the characters are presented in direct relation to their significance in the narrative sequence, the detailed depiction of the Chetniks who exercised no influence on the events in the film appears to serve no other function than to present the Partisans as the only good side in the conflict. After all, at least during the war the Chetniks

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were important ideological rivals of the Partisans with far from negligible popular support. The structural analysis obviously cannot explain each and every aspect of the Partisan Westerns. What it can do is open up a perspective from which we can approach the genre and identify at least some of its structural characteristics. In the previous sections, I have tried to do something like that, but actually things get interesting only after doing so. Namely, Will Wright argues that the primary function of myths – and therefore also of Westerns – is the support of the dominant ideological constructs by way of translating complex social reality into simple binary oppositions that naturalise the established cultural order. That Partisan Westerns also serve a similar ideological function should be obvious: in sharp contrast to Hollywood Westerns, which are (just as any other mainstream film genre) made according to the commercial interests and where the latent ideological content must therefore be identified by attentive analysts, Partisan Westerns have been made in an openly ideological framework and with a clear propagandistic intent. In this sense, their social function should not be in question, which means that in the case of Partisan Westerns the interesting detail is not – as is the case of Hollywood Westerns – what they are secretly saying about their social context, but rather what they are trying to hide about it. Things are, of course, not simple, but in most general terms I would like to propose that the element that they try to hide – or at least to significantly simplify – is the level of complexity of the struggles in the territories of the former Yugoslavia during WWII.

C OMPLEXITIES As I do not have enough space here to go into a detailed reconstruction of the ‘real’ events during WWII in Yugoslavia (not to mention that this is not a history article and that an entirely neutral interpretation of the events is probably impossible anyway), I will point out just a few details that complicate the simplified accounts about the heroic Partisans as they are presented in the Partisan Westerns, or were even before that one of the basic elements of the official ideology during socialism. One of them is the fact that the period of WWII in Yugoslavia was actually a period of the most diverse ethnic, political, ideological, cultural,

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and even pragmatic identifications and affiliations. In practice, this means that many social groups had not endorsed the Partisan uprising or were even actively opposed to it, which makes one of the most central conventions of Partisan Westerns highly questionable, namely that ‘narod’ supports the Partisans with unwavering dedication. Another detail that is not in accord with the simplified accounts of the Partisan uprising in Partisan Westerns is that the Partisans eventually won because they were part of the winning alliance and that the decisive battles were fought elsewhere. This should be obvious, but in Partisan Westerns there is very little reference to the other theatres of war, which in combination with spectacular Partisan victories in these films leaves the impression that it was the Partisans themselves who defeated Nazi Germany and its allies. While it would be extremely unfair to neglect the enormous effort and substantial contribution of the Yugoslav Partisans in the epic struggle against Nazism, it is also at least historically quite unfair to neglect – just as the Partisan Westerns do – the fact that for most of the time the Germans simply did not have the resources to engage the Partisans in any serious manner (these were more urgently needed at the other fronts). Therefore, it should be pointed out that the Partisans have by no means won all of their battles and that even those they did win, they did so often simply because their opponents were very weak. The German occupying forces in Yugoslavia were, for example, almost exclusively comprised of second- or third class divisions, units that were sent to Yugoslavia to recover from more difficult theatres of war (among them was a division that was almost annihilated at Stalingrad),9 police units, training battalions, and reservists, too old to be used in proper units.10 Furthermore, one could point out that in contrast to the established representations, the Germans (and their allies) were for the most part in a tactically disadvantageous position. Because of the lack of resources, they could not do much more than try to hold communications and similar strategically important positions and were consequently left to the mercy of the Partisans’ unpredictable attacks. The exceptions were occasional offensives against the Partisan-held territories, where it soon turned out that the Partisans (also in contrast to the established representations in Partisan West-

9 Malcolm, Noel: Bosnia: A Short History, London: MacMillan 1996: 182. 10 Cf. Ferenc, Tone: Okupacijski sistemi na Slovenskem: 1941-1945, Ljubljana: Modrijan 1997.

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erns) were simply no match for an opponent of at least approximately equal strength. Yet another important point is that on many occasions the Partisans had not actually fought the Germans (or at least not only the Germans), but to a large extent various local militias and armies that were collaborating with them. These military formations, Slovenian MVAC and domobranci (Home Guards), Croatian Ustasha, Serbian Chetniks and members of collaborating (German-controlled) Serbian army (nedićevci), Kosova balisti (Balists), etc., collaborated with the occupying forces openly in most cases and were consequently uniformly interpreted in socialist Yugoslavia (and Partisan Westerns) as nothing but ‘traitors’, yet things were not that simple in this respect either. First, the collaboration was purely pragmatic for several of these military formations. Many actually sympathised with the Western allies and hoped for the restoration of the pre-war order, which was recognised also by the Germans themselves, who supported them very cautiously and armed them with only light arms. This obviously goes against the established representations in the Partisan Westerns, where the collaborating local troops work with the Germans with utmost enthusiasm, but there is also the second point, namely that even the Partisans tried to collaborate with the Germans and that this did not happen only because negotiations in this direction were stopped by Hitler personally. The initiative for collaboration came from Tito in 1943 when he feared the rumoured allied landing in the Balkans.11

G ENRE

AS A MYTH

The points that I have made in the previous chapter do not mean, of course, that the Partisan struggle was irrelevant or in any respect unimpressive. On the contrary, what I would like to propose here is only that things were not as simple as they are shown in the Partisan Westerns and that their simplifications are in fact the basic mythological dimension of this kind of film. Regarding the Partisan struggle itself, it should be stressed that, while things were not really simple, it is nevertheless probably still the best thing 11 More on that in: N. Malcolm: Bosnia, 183; Greisser-Pečar, Tamara: Razdvojeni narod. Slovenija 1941 – 1945: okupacija, kolaboracija, državljanska vojna, revolucija, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga 2004: 359-361.

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that happened during WWII in Yugoslavia. If nothing else, it is as impressive precisely because it managed to find a way for a determined action in spite of the various complicating contexts that forced many others to collaborate with the occupiers, or to remain passive and leave the fighting to be done by the others (if everybody had acted like this, there would have been no one left to defeat Nazi Germany). In this context, it might be concluded that Partisan Westerns are also myths and that consequently they do not testify to the real circumstances during WWII in Yugoslavia, but rather to the period of ideological backlash in the 1970s when the communist rulers tried to reignite the idea of thorough social revolution and deal with all possible ideological and political opposition. However, there are several elements of Partisan Westerns that the structural analysis does not address. As these are also important, let us at least mention them. One is also a binary opposition and is related to the fact that in Partisan Westerns the Partisans and the Germans are also constructed around the dichotomy of warm versus cold (that is not just around the opposition of good versus bad). While the Partisans in these films are always shown as friendly, warm-hearted people who sincerely care for each other and are driven by the emotions of hope, enthusiasm and belief in freedom, the Germans typically appear as a profoundly cold and anonymous fighting machine with no individualistic – let alone human – characteristics. In between the fighting the Partisans typically talk, joke, dance, encourage each other, and, after all, also suffer (when realising that one of their comrades or relatives has been killed), while the Germans are never shown outside the fighting context or are, if this nevertheless happens, exclusively portrayed as marching or sitting silently on the trucks that are headed to the frontlines. After all, the fact that the German army was actually a wellordered fighting machine does not mean that the German soldiers were incapable of communicating or joking at least in the periods between the fighting. Significant in this respect are also the depictions of battles themselves. While on the Partisan side, if one of the fighters is hit, his comrades immediately rush to him (or her) and try to help him (or her), the Germans always die silently among the apparent disinterest of their comrades.12

12 Cf. Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi. Reprezentacija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu, Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede 2005: 50-66.

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Another important element of Partisan Westerns is heroic bravado. There are actually very few films that are dramaturgically not structured around a tense moment when it appears that the Germans will win the decisive battle (or action), but are in the last moment stopped by a heroic action of the group of Partisans. When the Partisan line seems to be breaking up under the weight of enemy attack in NERETVA, for example, the decimated Partisan unit does not retreat but – attacks. The Germans are so bewildered that they themselves fall back. The image of Partisan bravado typically include one of the most popular Yugoslav film actors (Velimir ‘Bata’ Živojinović, Ljubiša Samardžić, etc.), who leads the charge with the heavy German machine gun MG 42 in his hands and with at least a few buttons of his military shirt heroically unbuttoned. Yet another typical element of Partisan Westerns is predictable casting. The Partisan heroes (and to a certain extent also their German enemies) are played in the majority of cases by the same film actors. On the Partisan side the most famous was already mentioned, Velimir ‘Bata’ Živojinović. The popular Bata has established himself through a succession of roles as the archetypical Yugoslav Partisan hero (determined, dedicated, hard-fighting, cunning, etc.), but he had an important counterpart in Ljubiša Samardžić, who apparently represented the more gentle side of the ‘Balkan heroes’. While in his roles Bata is unshakable and determined up to the point that he cares for nothing but the completion of the mission, Samardžić complements this figure with a touch of heartfelt gentleness, charm, and even ‘Weltschmerz’. That Bata himself was undefeatable as the archetypical Yugoslavian Partisan hero goes without saying.13 Among other film actors that have usually acted in Partisan westerns one could also mention Milena Dravić, Pavle Vujisić, Dragan Nikolić, and several others, among them the Slovene Stevo Žigon, who typically played German officers. Partisan Westerns are also very coherent stylistically. In respect to the use of cinematic and narrative conventions, for example, they all rely on the established film rules of Hollywood Westerns and war films. While it would be possible to argue that Bulajić’s KOZARA from 1962 was still at least partially indebted to the principles of Soviet war films, Partisan Westerns drew almost exclusively on the conventions of Hollywood mainstream in terms of technical solutions, organisation of mise en scène, and narrative 13 According to the author’s knowledge Bata has ‘died’ in only one Partisan film, in PARTIZANI.

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structure. One of the elements that they generally took from contemporary Hollywood war films, e.g. PATTON (1970, D: Franklin J. Schaffner), TORA, TORA, TORA (1970, D: Richard Fleischer/Kinji Fukasaku), THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE (1965, D: Ken Annakin), A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977, D: Richard Attenborough) etc., was the principle of narrative organisation where spectacular mass scenes are intertwined with several small narratives about the fate of particular individuals. This allows the spectators to understand the development of a battle as a whole, as well as to identify with concrete characters. There is also one other binary opposition that lies at the heart of the narrative structure of almost all Partisan Westerns: opposition between planning and improvisation. Umberto Eco has pointed out that this opposition is one of the most important elements of the James Bond movies, where the bad guy always works according to a detailed master plan that should allow him to take over the world (or at least to extort huge sums of money from the governments), while James Bond consistently counters him with a series of improvisations.14 It is very similar in the case of Partisan westerns. Here, the Germans typically proceed with a carefully prepared plan and the Partisans react with spontaneous improvisations, although at least in this case it should be stressed that this characteristic is not simply an appropriation of Western popular culture, but also a reflection of the Yugoslav popular stereotypes about the supposed Teutonic inflexibility and Balkan spontaneity. In reality, things were not that simple, of course. Many foreign military observers noted, for example, that the Partisans actually fought heroically, yet that their tactics in many cases consisted of little more that unimaginative and costly head-on charges en masse.15 The German army was, on the other hand, known to be superior to all others precisely in terms of its tactical flexibility. Its officers were trained from the very beginning in the principles of adaptability to ever changing circumstances, which gave their units substantial advantage both in attack and in defence, and if there is one instance that proves this point then it must be the capability of the German troops to reorganise soon after they were defeated into new ad hoc units – Kampfgruppen – that were able to counter their opponents even 14 See Strinati, Dominic: Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London in New York: Routledge 1998: 102-104. 15 See BATTLEFIELD - CAMPAIGN IN THE BALKANS. TV DOCUMENTARY (UK 2002, D: Dave Flitton/Andy Aitken /Justin McCarthy).

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before the latter were able to exploit their initial successes. The Allies were frustrated with this German tactical superiority up to the very end of the war.16 Yet another important element of Partisan Westerns is the inevitable German recognition of the Partisans’ fighting skills. There is always a moment in these films when one of the German commanders explicitly expresses his admiration for the Partisan heroism, determination, and fighting skills. The most famous of these is probably the popular quote from WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO. When a commander of German units in Sarajevo is asked by his superior, who is this famous Valter after all, he replies: ‘Sehen Sie diese Stadt? Das ist Valter!’ The point here is that all people from Sarajevo are so united and determined in their resistance to the occupiers that it might be entirely appropriate to understand the whole city as Valter (Valter – played by Bata Živojinović, of course – is actually a charismatic resistance fighter sent to the city to disrupt the Germans’ plans for ordered retreat from Bosnia). The characters of the German generals are also very standardised. While in most cases the German field commanders in Partisan Westerns are portrayed at least slightly sympathetically (as tough professionals, who respect their Partisan opponents), their own superiors in most cases just sit around in their comfortable headquarters, drink expensive cognacs, and flirt with their young secretaries. Needless to say, these commanders are typically overweight and dressed in fancy uniforms. What we see here is an obvious attempt to add the dimension of class war to the conflict: the films in this respect suggest that the fighting in Yugoslavia during WWII was not only between the foreign occupiers and popular resistance, but even before that between the ruling class (bourgeoisie exemplified by the German generals) and the proletariat. This is emphasised by the consistent portrayal of the most important Partisan characters as typically coming from a working class background (in spite of the fact that in reality the majority of Partisans were peasants) and the silent respect between the Partisans and the hardworking German field commanders (the no-nonsense approach of the latter implies that they are also from the working class). Finally, among the consistent characteristics of Partisan Westerns one should mention the substantial support of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army. It

16 More on that: Bunglay, Stephen: Alamein, London: Aurum Press 2003: 18-40.

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would be simply impossible to make such epic films without free use of thousands of extras, military equipment and technical supervisors.

C ONCLUSION :

THE IMPORTANCE OF PARTISAN FILMS

The structural analysis has identified several highly standardised stylistic, formal, and ideological characteristics that bind Partisan Westerns into a coherent whole. This makes them a separate part of the wider tradition of Yugoslav Partisan films in general, which is as such simply too diverse to be treated as a consistent film genre. It should be stressed, however, that the analysis of Yugoslav Partisan film by no means ends with this distinction. If anything, the present analysis is meant as an initial conceptualisation of the research field, where more substantial research on particular topics will follow. One of the most obvious of such topics would be the question of the contemporary relevance of Partisan films. Partisan films are not only relevant as a substantial – although now unfortunately all too quickly forgotten – part of Yugoslav film history, but also as a vision of an alternative symbolic universe. After the fall of socialism and the dissolution of Yugoslav peoples from these territories, the capitalist economic system and its values have all too readily been embraced as an unquestionable norm, but the harsh realities that these have produced (nationalist wars, social inequalities, etc.) remind us that they are not necessarily as attractive as they might have appeared. If anything, they seem to be just a symbolic platform that naturalises the relations of power in societies, and in this respect Partisan films could be taken as an important reminder that things can be different and that people have the power to change them. What one has to be wary of is only that this alternative does not become dogma itself: the alternative should be left open to permanent questioning and thus to dynamic development within the ever changing circumstances. This point is important, because the lack of this kind of openness was most likely one of the reasons why socialism failed in former Yugoslavia (although a degree of criticism was allowed during the socialist era of Yugoslavia, it was nevertheless in many respects limited and – even more importantly – rarely taken into account). It also allows us to conclude that while the Partisan Westerns have been (and still are) the most popular type of Partisan film, they are as an emancipatory impulse probably less

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promising than the types of Partisan films that are not based on such blatant simplifications. If we do not seek a dogmatic alternative, we should appreciate above all those films that do not shy away from the complexities of the social reality that they deal with, yet at the same time manage to steer a way between these complexities to promote a meaningful action.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Bunglay, Stephen: Alamein, London: Aurum Press 2003. Ferenc, Tone: Okupacijski sistemi na Slovenskem: 1941-1945, Ljubljana: Modrijan 1997. Greisser-Pečar, Tamara: Razdvojeni narod. Slovenija 1941 – 1945: okupacija, kolaboracija, državljanska vojna, revolucija, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga 2004. Malcolm, Noel: Bosnia: A Short History, London: MacMillan 1996. Munitić, Ranko: Obdobja jugoslovanskega filma: film socialistične Jugoslavije. Ljubljana: Dopisna delavska univerza Univerzum 1978. Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi. Reprezentacija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu, Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede 2005. Stanković, Peter: “Partizanski filmi in partizanarice: analiza žanrskih prvin jugoslovanskega partizanskega filma”, in: Teorija in praksa 49.2 (2012): 301–332. Strinati, Dominic: Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London/New York: Routledge 1998. Škrabalo, Ivo: 101 godina filma u Hrvatskoj, Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Globus 1998. Wright, Will: “The Structure of Myth & The Structure of Western Film”, in: John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1994: 117–132.

F ILMOGRAPHY A BRIDGE TOO FAR (USA/UK 1977, D: Richard Attenborough) BATTLEFIELD – CAMPAIGN IN THE BALKANS (UK 2002, D: Dave Flitton/Andy Aitken /Justin McCarthy)

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BATTLE OF THE BULGE, THE (ES/USA 1965, D: Ken Annakin) BITKA NA NERETVI/THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (YUG 1969, D: Veljko Bulajić) BOŠKO BUHA/BOŠKO BUHA (YUG 1978, D: Branko Bauer) KOZARA (YUG 1962, D: Veljko Bulajić) MOST/THE BRIDGE (YUG 1969, D: Hajrudin Krvavac) PARTIZANI/TACTICAL GUERRILLA (YUG 1974, D: Stole Janković) PARTIZANSKA ESKADRILA/THE PARTISAN SQUADRON (YUG 1979, D: Hajrudin Krvavac) PATTON (USA 1970, D: Franklin J. Schaffner) POVRATAK OTPISANIH/THE WRITTEN OFF RETURN (YUG 1976, D: Aleksandar Đorđević) SHANE (USA 1953, D: George Stevens) SUTJESKA/THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA (YUG 1973, D: Stipe Delić) TORA, TORA, TORA (USA/JP 1970, D: Richard Fleischer/Kinji Fukasaku) UŽIČKA REPUBLIKA/THE GUNS OF WAR (YUG 1974, D: Žika Mitrović) VALTER BRANI SARAJEVO/WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO (YUG 1972, D: Hajrudin Krvavac) VRHOVI ZELENGORE/THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA (YUG 1976, D: Zdravko Velimirović)

Bodies That Shudder. Disability and Typhus Sufferers in Partisan Films I VAN V ELISAVLJEVIĆ

This essay is based on an attempt to combine two critical methods. First of all, I will try to interpret the films under discussion – KROZ GRANJE, NEBO/THROUGH BRANCHES, THE SKY (1958, D: Stole Janković), POGLED U ZJENICU SUNCA/LOOKING INTO THE EYES OF THE SUN (1966, D: Veljko Bulajić), BITKA NA NERETVI/THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (1969, D: Veljko Bulajić) and VRHOVI ZELENGORE/THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA (1976, D: Zdravko Velimirović) – along the lines of “voprekist” Marxism, which Terry Eagleton revives in Marxism and Literary Criticism, and which comes from “the principle of contradiction”. This principle basically means that, in certain cases, it is possible to find a contradiction in the work of art consciously intended to be the proponent of dominant ideology. We can find a distinction between its surface and interior, ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ dimension, a distinction that is “essentially one between the explicit social ‘message’” of a certain work, and “what, despite that, it actually discloses”.1 This critical model is useful if we want to move out of the boundaries set by the recent attempts to read Yugoslav partisan films exclusively through the lenses of the “totalitarian model” or “totalitarian para-

1

Eagleton, Terry: Marxism and Literary Criticism, London/New York: Routledge 2002: 45

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digm”2. Major flaws of these attempts arise not only from the fact that ‘mainstream’ partisan films are wrongly viewed only as coherent works made to support dominant narratives of the Communist Party, which cuts them off of the complex meanings and crossings of conflicting discourses inside these films, but also in the practice of undermining their form and analyzing merely their content, or more often – incorrectly paraphrased content. For example, a chapter on Sutjeska from the book War: the Constitution of the Totalitarian Body by Senadin Musabegović contains that kind of inattention. After he describes the scene of Vera’s (Milena Dravić) arm amputation and death in the presence of her husband Nikola (Velimir Bata Živojinović), Musabegović interprets it as an optimistic communist vision of death in war that can be overcome by collective moving forward in spite of everything. He then claims there are no moments in partisan films when a person is abandoned and alone, in isolation, faces the death of his loved ones.3 Yet, just a paragraph before this generalization, Musabegović himself has correctly described such a moment:4 we see Vera’s face waiting for amputation in the foreground, at the same time as, in mise-en-abyme, through the window, the camera reveals Nikola’s figure, nervously walking alone. In the next shot, there is a close-up of Nikola’s face, while the group of soldiers passes by. Musabegović simply puts aside film language, the camera and mise-en-scene, and focuses on the content ready for an overtly generalized explanation: for him, the group of soldiers represents the idea of moving forward despite the victims, in the collective fight for communism. But, if we take into account the framing and the direction of the movement, this scene actually suggests Nikola’s isolation, his loneliness at the time of his wife’s probable death. He is framed by the window, separated from his wife, and his nervous, senseless walking up and down, in sharp contrast to the marching group underlines this isolation. Moreover, for a second he takes a glance at the group, but soon turns his face in an opposite direction and focuses on the window of the room where the amputation is taking place. Nikola is clearly singled out in the shot, detached from the 2 3 4

See: Jovanović, Nebojša: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 65/66 (2011): 47-60. Musabegović, Senadin: Rat: konstitucija totalitarnog tijela, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 2008: 265. Although he makes a minor error by calling Vera's and Nikola's daughter Vera (her name is Jelena).

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group of partisans (blurred in a couple of shots), and the whole setting has an explicit meaning that Musabegović claims non-existent in Sutjeska: Of course the partisans move forward, but because they are forced to do it by the war situation and the enemy’s attack. Moreover, when Nikola faces his wife after the amputation, we see him in close-up, swallowing, and Vera tells him: “Don’t, Nikola,” in order to prevent him from crying. If that is not enough to prove the point, what should one say about a scene where Nikola confronts his best friend’s death (Boris Dvornik) in a totally deserted landscape? Or when Barba (Bert Sotlar) loses his fourth and youngest son, after the other three were killed by the Nazis, and the German officer says to a soldier: “Don’t [kill the old man]. Life will be the greatest punishment for him.” It might be life Barba will live after the victory of partisans – will that victory decrease the ‘punishment’? Yet, Musabegović ignores these moments or interprets them one-sidedly. The situation is much more complex. In her book on the representation of masculinity in novels and films during Stalinist reign, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade, Lilya Kaganovsky brings evidence to her thesis that “under Stalinism, exemplary masculinity, at least as it appears in the literature and films of the period, consists of two contradictory models: the virile and productive male body on the one hand and the wounded, long-suffering invalid, on the other”.5 When analyzing Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered, Kaganovsky notices a masochistic drive in its hero Pavka Korchagin, who is fascinated with disabilities that he pays his commitment to the Party with: “Pavka never gives up on his desire to ‘move forward’, to (re)join the ranks of the party, to remain a soldier on the front lines of the battle for socialism, always ready to give a ‘little more of himself’ to the party. This masochistic relationship underscores the psychic economy of debt that marks exemplary Stalinist masculinity. Payment for participation in the system is made explicit by Pavka’s progressive disabilities.”6

5 6

Kaganovsky, Lilya: How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2008: 22. L. Kaganovsky: How the Soviet Man Was Unmade, 11.

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With Kaganovsky’s insights in mind, I argue that in the socialist Yugoslavia “cultural fantasy” of the bodies with disabilities is very different from the socialist realism and Soviet art under Stalin, although they share some characteristics. Disabled bodies are a part of socialist Yugoslavia’s narrative of war and revolution exactly because they place the contradiction in the centre, thus bringing the teleological side of that narrative into question and differing from Stalinist ‘psychic economy of debt’. Essentially linked to the images of the ‘normal’, virile and heroic bodies of partisan fighters, officers and party leaders, the characters with some sort of disability that go through senseless agony, suffer wounds and injuries, experience heavy damage inflicted on their bodies, represent the other side of the victorious version of national liberation. Precisely because of the meaningless destruction and disintegration of their bodies caused by the war and Nazism, because of the very idea that there can be no justified ‘payment for participation’ under the circumstances of such a destructive war and agony of the body, characters with disability actually never let the films form a stable, harmonic narrative about some sort of ‘collective communist body’ that will be created after the war and revolution, and without any dialectical process and problematic excess give sense to pain, suffering and deaths built into the national liberation and the success of revolution. This ambiguity is deeply rooted in the cultural narratives of the Yugoslav communist revolution and actually enables them to take characteristics of a tragedy, thus making room for the more universal points in films and literary works on the topic. Typhus sufferers are one of the excesses that bring all these contradictions ahead. There is a scene in THE BATTLE OF NERETVA that stood out as very popular and often quoted in everyday life and pop culture of Yugoslavia until this day. It is a scene that takes place right after the famous destruction of the bridge on the river Neretva, ordered by the Supreme Command of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, in an explosion set by the miner Vlado (Yul Brynner). In that scene, the bewildered crowd of civilians and wounded soldiers is shocked by the fact that the bridge has been blown up by the partisans, which means they must go back towards enemy forces. Still, on the command of Vlado, the crowd turns away from the bridge and starts leaving the Neretva’s bank. After a couple of seconds, Crazy Boško (Fabijan Šovagović) shows up, a character, who claims there is a bullet in his head and is relentless in his will to fight Nazis without

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pause. He leads the group of typhus sufferers and yells: “I’m the commander here!” Boško informs Vlado about their intention: “We will swim over the Neretva”, and shouts the famous sentence: “Follow me, typhus sufferers! Across the water and into freedom!” While Vlado somehow manages to stop typhus sufferers from jumping into the river, Boško nevertheless doesn’t give up of his impossible plan, and drowns in the waves of the Neretva. Although Boško’s behavior is often read as an effect of either some sort of mental disorder (he is labeled “crazy”, “insane”) or delirium caused by typhus,7 there is actually no reliable explanation for it in the movie. Yet, his symptoms have a lot in common with “partisan hysteria” described in a book by the Yugoslav psychoanalist Hugo Klajn. The book was written in 1945, but published in 1955, under the title The War Neurosis of Yugoslavs (Ratna neuroza Jugoslovena). In an article on the phenomenon, Branimir Stojanović calls this war neurosis/hysteria “the truth of Yugoslav socialism”, and argues it reflects a dichotomy essential for understanding the post-war state of Yugoslavia: “The truth of partisan hysteria is simple: The political subject of the NOB (Narodnooslobodilačka borba, the People’s Liberation War) was removed in May 1943, it ceased to exist, and what’s left of it was a form of hystericized individuals […] who transmit the truth about their appearance through materialization in symptom – the grit, the will to fight, the fighting determination. Namely, hysteria is a reaction to the moment of renaming the subject of politics – NOB, in the name of the military formation – NOV (“Narodnooslobodilačka vojska”, the People's Liberation Army).”8

Stojanović debates that the whole socialist Yugoslavia was built on this ambivalence made visible by the inability of the government and doctors to explain, cure and integrate partisan hysteria: an unbearable antinomy between official statements “revolutionary politics exists” and “there is no revolutionary politics (anymore).”

7 8

He has been called “archetypical typhus sufferer”. See: N. Jovanović: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”. Stojanović, Branimir: “Partizanska histerija – istina jugoslovenskog socijalizma”, Up &Underground 17/18 (2010): 103. (Translated by I. V.)

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Now, if Boško is a partisan hysteric, what is this subversive symbol of the crack in partisan’s revolutionary logic doing in a film that has been called “coherent ideological work entirely in the dominant code,”9 directed by “the favorite director of the communist regime”, who shot THE BATTLE 10 OF NERETVA as a “contribution to the cult of Tito’s personality”? Even if we don’t interpret Boško’s fanatical desire to shoot, attack and give orders as signs of partisan hysteria, it is obvious that in the partisan army he is seen as dangerous and therefore must be tied up most of the time. Although he is a brave fighter whose insane courage leads him to enter the house through the roof and solve the problem of the Nazi machine gunners by killing them all, partisan officials want to take the rifle from him, but he won’t let them, even if he needs to shoot at them, which he eventually does. Soon after that he is tricked by the commander Stole (Velimir Bata Živojinović), who fools Boško with kind words, only to take his rifle and give order to tie Boško up again. In other words, Boško is in many ways an exception to partisan solidarity and humanism that led both military and party leaders to “fight for the wounded” in spite of everything: as a disabled person, “ill in the head”, he cannot be integrated, cannot be trusted and must be excluded, despite his fighting qualities. Therefore, the character of Boško is a discrepancy in the movie that has been traditionally read as a consistent work created and officially supported with an aim to promote the dominant ideology of the Yugoslav Communist Party. The first question we have to ask is how are we going to understand this contradiction in the film? The other interesting question is why Boško leads the group of typhus sufferers and why only typhus sufferers follow him? According to The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, “Hippocrates applied the word ‘typhus’ (from Greek ‘smoky’ or ‘hazy’) to confused or stuporous states of mind associated with high fevers”.11 Since the typhus epidemic is caused by lice and spread by the human body louse that lives in clothes and reproduces well in poor sanitary conditions, it is con9

Zvijer, Nemanja: “Ideologija i vrednosti u jugoslovenskom ratnom spektaklu”, Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009): 39. (Translated by I. V.) 10 Compare to: Škrabalo, Ivo: Hrvatska filmska povijest ukratko (1896–2006), Zagreb: V.B.Z. & Hrvatski filmski savez 2008: 108; Šakić, Tomislav: “Filmski svijet Veljka Bulajića: poprište susreta kolektivnog i privatnog”, Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009), 14-26. 11 Kipple, F. Kenneth (ed.): Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, New York: Cambridge University Press 2003: 352.

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nected to poverty, wars, revolutions and other situations when people are forced to live together in crowds: “During a particularly severe outbreak in Silesia, the German physician Rudolph Virchow observed that the disease afflicted the poor, the uneducated, and the unclean, and he called for democracy, education, and public health measures as proper ‘treatment’ for the epidemic.”12 Therefore, typhus is the typical disease of the proletariat (it is interesting to note how the change of social circumstances can effect its treatment), while on the other hand it produces high-fever delirium, delusions and irrational behavior. These three characteristics – hazy, blurry ideas, proletarian background, the need for a social change as a cure, and a possibility of unpredictable, eccentric actions – tie typhus sufferers to Boško. All three could be applied to what Stojanović calls “the political subject” of the revolution before its renaming by the regulatory practices of the military. It is possible that this subject of revolutionary zeal and uncontrolled political spontaneity of resistance has entered the narrative of THE BATTLE OF NERETVA from social events of the period. When Bulajić shot NERETVA it was the period of the 1968 turmoils and student rebellion, and the Praxis school of Marxism criticized some of the courses Yugoslav socialism took, while the cultural scene was affected by the influence of the Yugoslav New Film and its grim stories of war and revolution, preceded by the literary works in similar style (many of these, such as The Mount of Lament/Lelejske gore, by Mihailo Lalić, were adapted for the screen). On the other hand, in THE BATTLE OF NERETVA typhus is also used to label the strategy of the partisan headquarters as sheer lunacy. When Vlado informs the civilians and some of the partisan officers that he will blow up the bridge, they don’t believe him and one of the peasants (Dragomir Felba) suggests to the partisans that Vlado is probably infected by typhus. This accusation escalates the conflict and Vlado even draws his gun, because nobody believes he is healthy – the second situation when partisans threaten each other with fire arms. Again, Stole comes and solves this conflict with his resolute action. The third situation when Stole arrives as the representative of reason is also in relation to typhus. When partisans enter the city of Prozor, and celebrate the victory with music, Nikola (Oleg Vidov), obviously struck by typhus, suddenly starts dancing alone. His weak body that dances isolated, out of rhythm, seen in a long shot against the back-

12 F. K. Kipple: Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, 354.

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ground of a crumbled building, is in sharp contrast to the healthy bodies of the partisans gathered in a cheerful round-dance nearby. Again, this scene tells us that typhus sufferers are excluded from victory, and since the editing shows us the round dance first, before the presentation of Nikola’s delirious movements, it underscores how the partisans’ triumphant battles have their reverse side. Of course, Nikola is soon sent to the hospital by Stole. We can clearly see that in all cases when typhus shows up, it is an excess that not only threatens the health of partisans, but also the political decisions and the authority of the Supreme Command, and therefore must be expelled by the immediate reaction of the most healthy and authoritative army commander. In addition to that, first shots of typhus sufferers in Bulajić'’s film show them segregated and imprisoned in a “Restricted Area for Typhus”, as the sign says. When the bombings by the German aircrafts start, typhus sufferers beg their comrades to let them out of prison, otherwise they will certainly die in the bombings. Hence, it can be said that in THE BATTLE OF NERETVA the narrative of ‘dominant ideology’ is not able to incorporate the bodies of typhus sufferers and their disordered leader Boško into a congruent community, because they represent excess, they are too much of the proletariat led by too much of a partisan. For this reason, the decisive, masculine military commander played by the film star with greatest authority (Bata Živojinović) must be brought to restrain this violent energy that endangers military tactics. Bulajić’s artistic desire to show the ‘reverse side’ of the war for liberation was evident to one of the major film critics at the time, Milutin Čolić of Belgrade’s Politika newspaper. In his review of LOOKING INTO THE EYES 13 OF THE SUN, Bulajić’s movie shot before THE BATTLE OF NERETVA, Čolić even calls that desire “fashionable”, because it is not, in his opinion, situated in an adequate dramaturgical context. Instead of trying to achieve the necessary tragic vision, the film, according to Čolić, misuses the disease to show, in a cold and “clinical” manner, the “grotesque” vision of characters downgraded to bare instincts of survival.14 The film tells a story about three typhus sufferers: Matija (Bata Živojinović), a sailor and a former machine gunner, Vemić (Antun Nalis), a father of two girls, and Grujica (Faruk 13 Produced by the now famous Hollywood producer Branko Lustig. 14 Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984: 429.

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Begolli), a very young partisan wounded in the arm. They lost their unit and are trying to survive in a snowstorm. A young partisan named Vid (Mladen Ladika) has a mission to bring the three men back to the squad – he carries food in his backpack and knows the way, yet, the three men are loosing their mind slowly, and their delirium makes them egoistic and uncooperative, especially Vemić. He demands Vid to give them food immediately, doesn’t care for Grujica who is the weakest among them, and thinks it would be best if everyone would go on their own. And while Vid tries to persuade Vemić and Matija to follow him, show some solidarity and sympathy, they sink more and more into the typhus ‘hazy’ state of mind, hallucinate constantly and try to escape on a horse they find by chance. Even though Vid stops them and brings them to the shack, a temporary shelter, at the end, after Vemić escapes, steals the horse and kills it for food, Matija goes after him, they fight and Matija strangles Vemić. Matija also dies in the snow, haunted by the hallucinatory figure of himself. In the meantime, Vid is looking for the two, but also contracts typhus, hears voices, shoots randomly, struck by the cold goes back to the barrack, only to see the death of Grujica. Vid steps out of the shack, walks aimlessly and soon dies in the snow. What is interesting about this low-budget film is not so much that it was written by the same screenwriters who worked on a spectacle such as THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (Stevan Bulajić/Ratko Đurović), but the impression it leaves of Veljko Bulajić’s directing effort to show the gradual mental downfall of the protagonists by the use of audio-visual style, typical for the modernist art film of the period: oneiric sequences accentuated with intense music, naturalistic acting, extreme camera angles etc. For example, in the beginning typhus sufferers are shot from low angle, looking big and scary, while their dark figures are contrasted with the white snow: with blankets over their heads, covering what’s left of the partisan uniforms, typhus sufferers resemble the archetypal film image of lepers (such as those in Wyler’s BEN HUR, 1959), which is how they will look in THE BATTLE OF NERETVA as well as in THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA. After this introduction, Bulajić cuts to the extreme close-ups of mouth and eyes, while we hear voices asking for water and fire. This way of combining antonyms continues throughout the movie. Of course, the most prominent antagonism is the one between reality and delirium – an antagonism that guides the visual setting in the film. At one point, the camera shows Matija in medium shot,

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resting on the snow in his sailor shirt, obviously thinking the weather is sunny. Then we see him from Vid’s point of view shot, before the whole picture disappears and we realize it was all Matija’s dream. Matija, actually, dreams about himself through the perspective of Vid: his depersonalization is made visible not only in reality but in his hallucinations as well. Bulajić deploys a number of other techniques in the same manner, the most symbolic one being the emphasis of the typhus ‘smoky’ and ‘hazy’ effect with blurry POV shots and scenes that show characters almost invisible in the snowstorm. Yet, the most interesting parts are those that contain the questioning of what we called teleological narrative of the revolution and war. Again, typhus sufferers are enlisted to perform the task. “This is not the first time typhus sufferers are abandoned,” says Vemić in the very beginning of the movie, thus accusing healthy partisan fighters of pragmatism and selfishness. “I must be healthy,” says Vid, “otherwise, who will care for you?” Vemić cynically answers: “Phrases again! ‘Protect yourself because of the others.’ Give us food and I will cooperate!” Vid’s argument about solidarity and equal share of food finds no understanding with Matija and Vemić, so Vid has to take measures we will later recognize in THE BATTLE OF NERETVA: he ties Matija up. “While I was attacking bunkers I was good”, says Matija bitterly. “We are all victimized”, adds Vemić. “Where are our comrades now to see me starving? You say ideals, but I’d ask you about ideals after a single louse bites you!” Furthermore, Matija’s image of his former self as a brave fighter reminds him of his poor condition – he tries to catch up the figure he sees on the horizon, his heroic and healthy body that moves away from him, and when he finally meets it, this Matija with a strong body and a machine gun despises him. “You'll never be the man you used to be!” shouts the strong Matija and starts shooting at his terribly ill double. From all this, we can draw a conclusion that typhus sufferers are necessary to criticize the means and the purpose of revolution, yet this critique is seen as possible only in delirium. Typhus delirium uncovers the truth about characters and their relation to the idea of the revolution: Matija will be forgotten, because he lost his ability to use the machine gun; Vemić is an egoist who values his family more than the revolutionary process; Grujica is haunted by the image of himself as a traitor and a deserter; Vid cannot condemn Matija and Vemić for treason, since his communist beliefs force him to understand the suffer-

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ing his comrades survived because of freedom, and value the sacrifice they made. Since Vid is not able to do it, especially after Grujica dies, which leaves Vid in despair, alone and ill, he goes to the dark side of typhus sufferers which cannot see “the Sun, the purity of freedom” behind the erosion of their bodies. In other words, if we want to play around with the title, they look into the eyes of the revolutionary sun – but that look leaves them blind. What is at stake here is the fact that this critique of the revolutionary process in war comes from illness, from the weak, disabled bodies, it is caused by those bodies, so it is inseparable from the corporeality of the characters. Therefore, in the ideological framework of Bulajić’s films, those characters must be either cured, which is not possible in the dramaturgical circumstances that the films establish, or expelled by reason or death, which is what happens. With these two films by Veljko Bulajić in mind, disability studies direct us toward another expectation in the narratives of disability: if we can recognize the somewhat modified political points of the ‘medical model’ for disability in the mainstream films of the 1960s, then we have an indication for the ‘moral model’ that usually comes first. For that we must go back into the late 1950s. In addition to different production models and a different cultural situation, an indicative fact shows up: in 1961 the Yugoslav Association of War-Disabled Veterans ceased to exist as a separate organization and merged with the Yugoslav Association of the People’s Liberation War Fighters. That meant the attitude towards disability gained in war changed: war disabled didn’t need their own association, because they were completely integrated into the community and not different from other fighters, while the socialist government provided care for all its war veterans without the need for the separate representatives of the disabled. This change of cultural attitude enabled the merging of the wounded and disabled with healthy and heroic partisans, and traced the path for typhus characters as corporeal surplus and political anomaly. But before this segregation, there was a film where the disabled and typhus sufferers worked together, as a group in a ‘moral model’, and served the purpose of creating ethical doubts for non-disabled partisans. Stole Janković’s THROUGH BRANCHES, THE SKY (or SS STRIKE AT DAWN, which was its title in foreign distribution) was adapted from a short story of the same title by Antonije Isaković. Isaković joined the partisans as

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the youngest fighter in the First Proletarian Brigade.15 His first collection of short fiction, containing stories about the war experience, was published in 1953 to critical acclaim and very soon his fiction became the source for many adapted screenplays (he was working, among others, with such directors as Aleksandar Saša Petrović and Živojin Pavlović). The plot of his story and Janković’s film is centered around a partisan commander named Zekavica who was left in the woods with a group of wounded soldiers and civilians, surrounded by Germans, fated to wait for help. However, the group of blind, crippled and bandaged characters is not so homogeneous, since some of them believe that the stoic endurance of pain is necessary for the communist victory, while some don’t. There’s an idea in the movie that, as Anne Lewis says, “even if one was legitimately disabled, it was understood that only disreputable failures trying to exploit society’s collective guilt would reference their physical conditions.”16 In THROUGH BRANCHES, THE SKY, both in a short story and in its film adaptation, the main character Radoš (Predrag Pepi Laković), a Communist Party commissar, hides his wounded legs and doesn’t reference his physical condition, while “the guy with a broken hip” (Branko Pleša) constantly makes statements about his injury, trying to exploit the collective guilt of the partisan division for leaving them behind, at the same time questioning the belief in a better, communist society paid for, as he says, “with my broken hip”. Pleša’s character despises even the ‘pyramids’ that would be built as in memoriam monuments of the victims: “I don’t need pyramids. I need my leg!” says Pleša ironically. This example of the pyramids tells us how strong the motif of the possibility that partisan victims will be forgotten was. Of course, the film we are watching is an obvious proof that oblivion did not occur, or at least proof of an effort to remember: but that doesn’t challenge the ‘broken hip guy’ and his contempt towards the historical pyramids built by the winners, on the grounds of disintegrated and humiliated bodies. Yet, Pleša’s words are also dubious, since he is being shown as an egoistic fighter for survival, which is underlined after we see him blackmailing the “guy with the black hair” (who ‘shushes’ everyone all the

15 Vulić, Zorica: “Ko je ovaj čovek? Antonije Isaković (partizan)”, in: Glas javnosti, 16 November 2000. 16 Lewis, Victoria Ann: “Introduction”, in: Victoria Ann Lewis (ed.), Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights, New York: Theatre Communications Group 2006: xix.

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time, played by Pavle Minčić), to renounce his share of water. But between all these individuals there is a group which is constantly labeled as a group: of course, the typhus sufferers. The commander at the beginning of the film orders: “Typhus sufferers will carry the wounded.” The leading typhus sufferer (Stojan Aranđelović) answers: “I ain’t carrying anyone! Who’s gonna carry me?” Another order says the fire arms should be taken from the typhus sufferers because they could commit suicide. Slowly, the dire situation brings the wounded and the typhus sufferers together and they all cooperate in their efforts to escape the German troops – in the end, they all take guns and rifles ready to resist the Nazis together. In analyzing Isaković’s stories that soon became a part of the Yugoslav school program in literature, critics considered this doubt in victory as desirable and necessary: “Isaković shows no intention of idealizing human characteristics. His heroes find themselves in extreme conditions where great moral tests can show up and many human weaknesses appear. […] Yet, even in the short stories where he forms a very grim artistic vision of human defeat, degradation and despair, […] Isaković finds a way to imply, in a sophisticated way, the invincibility of human (and humaneness) in the world where, it seems, only a degrading and senseless experience of ‘the great death’ exists.”17

The sophisticated ways are visible in the film visuals as well. The symbol from the title, the sky seen through the branches (i. e. freedom and better life), is at the heart of the camera movements and framings that show nature around the partisan group. Mihajlo Al. Popović, the cinematographer and the director who had worked in Yugoslav cinema since the silent period, with an excellent eye for landscape, creates vivid shots of woods and mountains which the director Janković and the editor Miodrag Jovanović combine with medium-shots, close-ups and pans of the wounded, while the soundscape alternates between unbearable noises of airplanes, pea whistles and guns, and the echo of those noises in the long and extreme long shots of nature. At one point, we see a German soldier hit by a bullet, and as he dies 17 Ribnikar, Vladislava: “Pripovedačka umetnost Antonija Isakovića: Velika deca u svom i našem vremenu”, in: Antonije Isaković (ed.), Velika Deca Beograd: Prosveta/Nolit/Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva 1984: 17. (Translated by I. V.)

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there is a cut to his point of view shot in which he sees – the sky through the branches. As Vladislava Ribnikar would put it: “In THROUGH BRANCHES, THE SKY there is an insight into the tragedy of the human destiny during the war, and it is built by signifying futility of the human crave for beauty and plenitude of life, in a nightmarish world of degradation, loss and death.”18 Ideological fluctuations in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and conflicts in society such as the rebellion of 1968, the cases of the Croatian Spring and Serbian liberals, as well as the polemics over the ‘black wave’ in film, to name a few, influenced film narratives on disability or with disabilities of various kinds. In the time of stronger ideological coherence, in 1973, SUTJESKA came out: a war spectacle beautifully shot and directed, probably one of the technically most marvelous achievements of Yugoslav cinema. This film stresses the role of the supreme commander Tito in the war and the revolution, and praises him not only for his leadership qualities, but for his ability to recognize and lead the spontaneous resistance movement of the people who seek liberation and social change. But although the film shows events during the battle of Sutjeska, just as THROUGH BRANCHES, THE SKY and THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA do, there are no typhus sufferers in it. Senadin Musabegović interprets that absence with the idea that, in reality, during the battle of Sutjeska the typhus sufferers were “the biggest victims of the Nazi terror,” which was the fact that the communist government in the 1970s wanted to keep out of the film. On the other hand, typhus sufferers have a prominent role in THE BATTLE OF NERETVA since, again according to historical facts, Tito and the Supreme Command managed to save the wounded, which, adds Musabegović, gave meaning to partisan solidarity.19 Nevertheless, if we stick to our interpretation of the typhus sufferers in the center of many crossing discourses and ideological contradictions of Yugoslav socialism as seen in films, then we can say their subversive excess was successfully integrated in the narrative of Delić’s movie. They became one with the wounded, thus opening the possibility for a two-sided bodily image: the bodies of the strong and the disabled now work together with the wise Supreme Commander Tito in charge (played by Richard Burton), who is both strong and wounded. But if you expel the typhus 18 V. Ribnikar: “Pripovedačka umetnost Antonija Isakovića, 21. 19 S. Musabegović: Rat, 227.

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sufferers as a delusion, they will come back as a nightmare. That’s what happens in THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA. The film was directed by Zdravko Velimirović, born in Montenegro, who at the time shot a number of documentaries and four feature films, produced by Montenegrian companies, and mainly in cooperation with writers of Montenegrian origin, such as Borislav Pekić (1960, DAN ČETRNAESTI/DAY FOURTEENTH), Branimir Šćepanović and Mihajlo Lalić (1968, LELEJSKA GORA/THE MOUNT OF LAMEN).20 It came as no surprise that his fifth feature took its theme from the famous Montenegrian heroic episode in the battle of Sutjeska. The plot of the film revolves around the members of the Fourth Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade and their task to hold Nazi forces for 24 hours on the location called Ljuba’s grave (Ljubin grob), until Tito and the Supreme Command can attempt to escape with the wounded. On the other hand, the screenplay was written by the journalist Đurica Labović, who in his later career wasn’t immune to sensationalist books on conspiracies and “hidden truths of communist history”, and Mladen Oljača, a writer who, like Isaković, joined the partisan forces as a youngster, and before THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA wrote an acclaimed novel Kozara, in an epic Tolstoy-like style about his experiences during the war. All these authorial voices can be heard in Velimirović’s film: It is an attempt to film the reconstruction of the brave event of partisan history, in a large scale production (6 companies from Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo and Montenegro), structured like an epical mosaic in the manner of Bulajić, yet with some inventions in narration and visual style (new motifs and a lot of symbolical and metaphorical scenes), and enough shocking material that recommends the film to foreign distribution rights market.21 New motifs are just a ‘fashionable’ contribution to the controversies of the partisan fight, and even Milutin Čolić notices them without excitement (the themes of deserters, uncalled-for vigilante shooting of the prisoners of war, “humanization of the enemy in the character of a young German sol20 It is interesting that in his first film Velimirović collaborated with Vladimir Kraus-Rajterić, who wrote music both for LOOKING INTO THE EYES OF THE SUN and THE BATTLE OF NERETVA. Another connection with Bulajić is Sergey Bondarchuk, who plays important roles in THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA as well as in THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (in THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA he was the cowriter). 21 The latter can be seen on the film’s official DVD copy used for this essay: all titles, opening and closing, are written in English.

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dier”), but shocking moments are the duty of typhus sufferers: they perform, as Čolić suggests, “the morbid dance” in THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA. They appear suddenly halfway into the movie, walking in a group towards the foreground, growling, trying to sing a partisan song about the red communist flag waving on the mountain: a German soldier who spots them is horrified by this image. When the typhus sufferers come closer, we see they almost have no human characteristics, and resemble zombies. We cut to the scene of German soldiers tying partisans to the trees and burning them: when everyone leaves the wood, a young German (Zoran Cvijanović) unties the two partisan lovers, but typhus sufferers arrive and attack them all. The German soldier shouts: “Help! Typhus! Typhus!”, while the group of partisan-zombies dances around the fire, cut out of reality, eyes wide open. This bizarre horror scene is shown to be the nightmare of one of the fighters (Miodrag Miki Krstović) who defends Ljuba’s grave. Nonetheless, that is not where traumatic visions, bad dreams and insanity stop. Soon we hear a blind soldier telling about the man in black trying to take him away. Veljko (Veljko Mandić), a fighter whose one side of the face is burnt, looses his mind after it becomes evident that he and his comrades have successfully accomplished their mission: he announces his decision to go on a trip and with two bombs goes off to challenge the German soldiers alone.22 To summarize the analysis, in the four films considered for this essay we can follow the transformation of the typhus sufferers motif: from the clearly different group among the wounded, but the group that gets integrated in the fight, and whose motivation in the narrative is to cause the moral dilemma for the non-disabled partisans (THROUGH BRANCHES, THE SKY), over the excluded and problematic bunch that puts the harmonic explanation of the revolution in question (LOOKING INTO THE EYES OF THE SUN, THE BATTLE OF NERETVA), to the zombified and inhuman crowd set in the nightmare of the healthy partisan fighters (THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA). Guided by different theoretical frameworks, I gave some cautious suggestions how this transformation can be read politically, drawing from the

22 A subtle reference to this scene can be found in Srđan Dragojević’s war film LEPA SELA, LEPO GORE/PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME (1996), set in Bosnia during the 1990s, when Viljuška (Milorad Mandić Manda) says: “It was enough, I’m going home” and exits the tunnel where the soldiers were trapped. Velimirović was also a professor of directing to Dragojević in the Belgrade Academy for Film, Theatre, Radio and Television.

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social contradictions of the period when the films were shot, which in no way excludes different readings of these films.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film, Beograd/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984. Davis, Lennard, “Cripps Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies”, in: American Literary History 3.11 (1999): 500–512. Eagleton, Terry: Marxism and Literary Criticism, London/New York: Routledge 2002. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 65/66 (2011): 47–60. Kaganovsky, Lilya: How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2008. Kipple, F. Kenneth (ed.): Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, New York: Cambridge University Press 2003. Lewis, Victoria Ann: “Introduction”, in: Victoria Ann Lewis (ed.), Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights, New York: Theatre Communications Group 2006. Musabegović, Senadin: Rat: konstitucija totalitarnog tijela, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 2008. Ribnikar, Vladislava: “Pripovedačka umetnost Antonija Isakovića: Velika deca u svom i našem vremenu”, in: Antonije Isaković (ed.) Velika Deca, Beograd: Prosveta/Nolit/Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva 1984. Stojanović, Branimir: “Partizanska histerija – istina jugoslovenskog socijalizma”, in: Up&Underground 17/18 (2010): 98–103. Šakić, Tomislav: “Filmski svijet Veljka Bulajića: poprište susreta kolektivnog i privatnog”, Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009), 14—26. Škrabalo, Ivo: Hrvatska filmska povijest ukratko (1896–2006), Zagreb: V.B.Z. & Hrvatski filmski savez 2008. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: University of Columbia Press 1997.

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Vulić, Zorica: “Ko je ovaj čovek? Antonije Isaković (partizan)”, in: Glas javnosti, 16. November 2000. Zvijer, Nemanja: “Ideologija i vrednosti u jugoslovenskom ratnom spektaklu”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57/58 (2009): 27–41.

F ILMOGRAPHY BEN HUR (USA 1959, D: William Wyler) BITKA NA NERETVI/THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (YUG/ITA/West Germany 1969, D: Veljko Bulajić) DAN ČETRNAESTI/DAY FOURTEENTH (YUG 1960, D: Zdravko Velimirović) KROZ GRANJE, NEBO/THROUGH BRANCHES, THE SKY (YUG 1958, D: Stole Janković) POGLED U ZJENICU SUNCA/LOOKING INTO THE EYES OF THE SUN (YUG 1966, D: Veljko Bulajić) LELEJSKA GORA/THE MOUNT OF LAMENT (YUG 1968, D: Zdravko Velimirović) LEPA SELA, LEPO GORE/PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME (FRY 1996, D: Srđan Dragojević) VRHOVI ZELENGORE/THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA (YUG 1976, D: Zdravko Velimirović)

We Need to Talk About Valter. Partisan Film and the Anti-Leftist Odium N EBOJŠA J OVANOVIĆ

T HE

DOUBLE AFTERLIFE OF VALTER

Its original socio-political context may be dead and gone for more than two decades now, yet the Yugoslav Partisan film continues to cast an ambiguous spell on post-Yugoslavia. It is not just that it roams the Yugoslav daughter states by means of DVDs, television, and internet. As the major cultural signpost of the socialist legacy it is popping up every now and then in the post-socialist cultural production, from high art to popular and mass culture. Take, for example, VALTER BRANI SARAJEVO/WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO (1972, D: Hajrudin Krvavac, ill. 1), arguably the most popular Partisan film ever.1 The references to it abound from the prose of Dubravka Ugrešić and Aleksandar Hemon, to Lazar Stojanović’s documentary about Škorpioni, the notorious Serbian death squad in the wars of the 1990s, to the beats of Dubioza Kolektiv, a Sarajevo rock band that is popular all over Post-Yugoslavia.2 Even while I am finishing this article, the news pour in 1 2

See Šešić, Rada: “Valter brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo”, in: Dina Iordanova (ed.), The Cinema of the Balkans, London: Wallflower Press 2006: 107–116. See Ugrešić, Dubravka: The Ministry of Pain, Translated by Michael Henry Helm. New York: Harper Collins 2006; Hemon, Aleksandar: “Imitacija života”, in: Život i djelo Alphonsea Kaudersa, Sarajevo: Bosanska knjiga 1997: 101– 111; ŠKORPIONI: SPOMENAR/THE SCORPIONS: A HOME MOVIE (SRB 2009, D: Lazar Stojanović); the song Valter by Dubioza Kolektiv can be downloaded

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about a documentary VALTER/WALTER (2012, D: Andrej Aćin), a biopic on the actor Velimir Bata Živojinović, whose status as the greatest Yugoslav male star was cemented by the film’s titular role. In a nutshell, Walter – the synecdoche of Partisan film if there ever was one – seems to be more alive than ever.

Ill. 1: Walter (Bata Živojinović, right) and his sidekicks (Ljubiša Samardžić, left, Slobodan Dimitrijević) pose as the Nazis in WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO This analysis, however, will not pursue this resilient fascination, but its dark twin, the opprobrium that designates Partisan films as the celluloid repository of totalitarian dogmas: “Within Yugoslav communism, cinema and (especially) the partisan war epics played a role similar to the role of cathedrals in medieval Christianity”, conveying “the absolute essence of the Titoist spirit”.3 Any inquiry of such a dismissal has to start from acknowledging the major ideological feature of the post-Yugoslav condition: the

3

from the band’s web site, http://dubioza.org/5-do-12-free-download/, last access: 20 December 2012. Pavičić, Jurica: “From a cinema of hatred to a cinema of consciousness: Croatian film after Yugoslavia”, in: Aida Vidan/Gordana P. Crnković (eds.), In Contrast: Croatian Film Today, Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez 2012: 49. Originally published in: Aida Vidan, Aida/Gordana P. Crnković (eds.), KinoKultura, special issue 11: Croatian Cinema 2011, http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/11/ pavicic.shtml, last access: 20 December 2012.

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anti-Yugoslav and anti-socialist backlash which reduces the socialist Yugoslavia to a totalitarian regime.4 Integral to this backlash is the thorough and all-pervasive revision of the historical narratives about the Second World War as the moment of birth of socialist Yugoslavia. The Partisan antifascist struggle, praised in socialism as the revolutionary ‘People’s Liberation Struggle (Narodnooslobodilačka borba)’, nowadays is systematically maligned, while the quislings, repudiated as the ‘domestic traitors (domaći izdajnici)’ in socialism, are patently absolved and elevated into the real heroes and martyrs.5 Serbian historian Olivera Milosavljević aptly summarizes the issue: “the key question today is not why, back in the 1941–1945 period, some people decided to become quislings, and others to fight fascism. The key question is: why [nowadays] the former have become the victims, whereas the latter the criminals[?]”6 The most obvious answer lies in the ethnic– national gist of the post-Yugoslav totalitarian paradigm. Ever fervent guardians of the ethnic imperative, the backlashers loath interethnic solidarity, the core value of the Yugoslav socialist project, and vilify Partisans for succumbing to the Babylonian impetus of revolutionary politics and betraying the national cause. The very same point of view pardons the quislings as the defenders of the national cause: they have sided with the Axis powers only in order to protect – ‘our own’ – nation in stormy times. The cutthroat racism and anti-Semitism that were integral to their politics are explained away as a pragmatic coping with the historical circumstances. 4

5

6

For a general critical account of the totalitarian paradigm in post-Yugoslavia, see Luthar, Breda/Pušnik, Maruša: “The lure of utopia: Socialist everyday spaces”, in: Breda Luthar/Maruša Pušnik (eds.), Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2011: 1–33. I have tackled the effects of totalitarian paradigm on history of Yugoslav cinema in: “Bosnian cinema in the socialist Yugoslavia and the anti-Yugoslav backlash”, in: Nataša Milas/Cynthia Simmons/Trevor L. Jockims (eds.), KinoKultura, special issue 14: Bosnian cinema, 2012, http:// www.kinokultura.com/specials/14/jovanovic.shtml, last access: 20 December 2012. For a detailed overview of the wide range of the revisionist practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, see Karačić, Darko/ Banjeglav, Tamara/Govedarica, Nataša: Re:Vizija prošlosti: Politika sjećanja u Bosni i Hercegovini, Hrvatskoj i Srbiji od 1990. godine, Sarajevo: ACIPS/Friedrich Ebert Stiftung 2012. Milosavljević, Olivera: Potisnuta istina: Kolaboracija u Srbiji 1941–1944, Beograd: Helsinški komitet za ljudska prava u Srbiji 2006: 12.

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Far from being endemic to post-Yugoslavia, this besmirching of interethnic and international solidarity is conterminous with the European rise of the political right. Similarly, the post-Yugoslav thrashing of socialism is related to the European equidistance between Nazism and communism as the two totalitarian systems, which, in the current right-wing dominance, effectively boils down to the demonization of the political left (‘the leftist terror’). That makes the Partisan film even more important than might appear at first. True, being the “integrationalist Yugoslav genre” and the “joint tradition of all [...] Yugoslav republics”,7 it is the indivisible celluloid remainder of Yugoslavia, which stubbornly withstands the dismantlement of the history of Yugoslav cinema into separate histories of ethno-national cinemas.8 Yet it is also the celluloid reminder of the antifascist struggle as the last great political struggle that constituted modern Europe. Slovene film critic Marcel Štefančič Jr. deems the Partisan film the major Yugoslav contribution to the European pop culture;9 today, more than ever, we have to spell out that this is the case not only due to its generic features, but also because it celebrates the values and principles that made the Second World War, to use the famous American phrase, the last good war. One should not be surprised, then, that the Partisan film today is stigmatized precisely by those who identify with the forces defeated in that war. Due to Western hostility towards the socialist legacy, the dismissals of history of Yugoslav cinema are not coming from post-Yugoslavia alone. The recent derision by John Patterson, film critic in The Guardian, is exemplary in that regard: “After the war, [Tito] instituted the massive Avala film studios in Belgrade, hoping it might become a Yugo-UFA, and put his now idle army to work as extras in a series of well-financed propaganda films about partisans wasting Nazis (with Tito front and centre).

7 8 9

Gilić, Nikica: Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma, Drugo, izmjenjeno izdanje, Zagreb: Leykam International 2011² (2010): 15. See Iordanova, Dina: “The Cinema of Eastern Europe: Strained Loyalties, Elusive Clusters”, in: Anikó Imre (ed.), East European Cinemas, New York/London: Routledge 2005: 229–249. See Štefančič Jr., Marcel: “Partizanski film – Jugo darilo europopu”, in: Vladimir Arsenijević/Đorđe Matić/Iris Adrić (eds.), Leksikon YU mitologije, Belgrade/Zagreb: Rende/Postcriptum 2004: 297–302.

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It still didn’t make their movies any good, and the impressively succinct and comprehensive CINEMA KOMUNISTO earns laughs with idolatrous tracking shots of partisans on parade all holding exactly the same small photo of Tito, and suspiciously Slavic-looking Nazis lecturing their troops on how Tito must be destroyed be10

cause Yugoslavia is so heavenly.”

It is not a coincidence that this account is inspired by CINEMA KOMUNISTO (2010, D: Mila Turajlić), a documentary that fudges the history of Yugoslav cinema along the premises of a totalitarian model.11 What the blissfully ignorant viewer praises as “impressively succinct and comprehensive” actually is a hotchpotch of insufficient data, misguiding anecdotes, and crass reductions. Patterson’s astonishing fizzle shows that the Cold War clichés are not only alive and kicking but have become something of a common wisdom. However, the fact that the totalitarian paradigm is uncritically adopted even by the scholars who cannot be accused of chauvinism and surely know more about Yugoslav cinema than an ignorant journalist is the testimony to its triumph. It is precisely for this reason that we should critically explore the anti-Partisan odium and its effects in more detail.

T HE

RED AND THE BLACK

The dismissal of the Partisan films as the paramount mechanism of the totalitarian manipulation relies on the dichotomy ‘Propaganda versus Art’, the fundamental binary postulated by the totalitarian paradigm in the sphere of arts and culture. That bipolar frame conveniently reduces Yugoslav cinema to the two sets of films and filmmakers. The Art pole is by rule reserved for some of the most acclaimed works of the Yugoslav ‘New Film (novi film)’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s, often symptomatically yet wrongly reduced to the ‘Black Wave’ brand and the anti-regime critique. Opposed to that dissentient pantheon is what appears as the cinematic 10 Patterson, John: “Yugoslavia, paradise on earth, just a shame about the films”, in: The Guardian, 16 November 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/ nov/16/cinema-komunisto-yugoslavian-film, last access: 20 December 2012. 11 For a criticism of CINEMA KOMUNISTO in that vein, see Šuber, Daniel/Slobodan Karamanić: “Mapping the field: Toward reading images in the (post-)Yugoslav context”, in: Daniel Šuber/Slobodan Karamanić (eds.), Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, Leiden/Boston: Brill 2012: 8, fn. 9.

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netherworld inhabited by the filmmakers whose works allegedly incarnate the heinous kernel of Titoism. These directors are deemed the proverbial cogs of the regime, the totalitarian drones incapable of any authentic criticism, or simply the “party hacks”.12 Illustrative in this regard is a backlash portrait of the writer and filmmaker Fadil Hadžić: “[Hadžić] was not, like many other prominent masters of the East European cinema, a dissident on any scale. On the contrary: he was an insider of the system, a well respected communist, who, as a party member/cultural worker, often delivered reports and papers in official meetings and published these in daily newspapers. He was an active opinion maker towing the party line in culture, very often criticizing it, yet from a benign position—from within... Although the lion share of his theatrical satires and films dealt with the malformations of communist practice and everyday life, he was often perceived as the regime artist […] It seems as if Hadžić, either through his theatrical satires or socially critical films, could not convince his contemporaries of having his own critical discourse, simply for this was always shadowed by Hadžić’s private position of an insider of the system.”13

Although the 1960s were Hadžić’s most prolific decade, there are good reasons for not acknowledging him as a novi film auteur, the most obvious one his own flamboyant snubbing of auterism in cinema. But does that automatically exclude any possibility to recognize Hadžić as a social critic? I would say not. One does not have to consider his films such as SLUŽBENI POLOŽAJ/OFFICAL POST (1964), PROTEST (1967), or TRI SATA ZA LJUBAV/THREE HOURS FOR LOVE (1968), a part and parcel of novi film, to appreciate their social commentary. Yet in order to acknowledge this fact, we need to get rid of the binary logic of “either party hack, or dissident master”, and permit the possibility that party members were also capable of criticizing their society. The reference to Hadžić is not incidental. Two of his films – DESANT NA DRVAR/PARACHUTE RAID ON DRVAR (1963, D: Fadil Hadžić) and KONJUH PLANINOM/A SONG FOR THE DEAD MINER (1966, D: Fadil Hadžić) – are usually seen as precursors of the so-called ‘Red Wave’, a streak of the Second World War epics and action films in the late 1960s and 1970s. 12 J. Patterson: “Yugoslavia, paradise on earth”. 13 Pavičić, Jurica: “Igrani filmovi Fadila Hadžića”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 34 (2003): 4–6.

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Along with Hadžić’s films, KOZARA (1962, D: Veljko Bulajić) is regularly acknowledged as the ‘Red Wave’ predecessor due to its epic scale. The ‘Red Wave’ label was originally used as a sardonic moniker: since these pyrotechnic spectacles were generally recognized as the Party-supported response to the ‘Black Wave’, the mocking label was virtually inescapable. Thirty years later, however, this two-colour joke turned into the fearful symmetry that shapes the backlash accounts of Yugoslav cinema. In order for the Yugoslav variation of the ‘Propaganda vs. Art’ dichotomy to function conveniently, both of its poles are homogenized and imbued with their respective ideological essences, while the colloquial labels of ‘Red Wave’ and ‘Black Wave’ are elevated into analytical categories. Let me briefly illustrate this with Greg DeCuir’s account of the Partisan film in his (selfproclaimed) ‘autopsy’ of the ‘Black Wave’. DeCuir deems the Partisan film a handmaiden of the socialist ideology, only in order to extol the ‘Black Wave’ as its opposite: “The Partisan war film solidified and forwarded a dogmatic national ideology and a collective myth, in doing so becoming the basis for an oppositional cinema to depart from”.14 According to him, Partisan film was “a national dream, utilized so that Yugoslav citizens would sleep peacefully knowing that the heritage of heroes past was protecting them”.15 To boil down any genre to a single effect is an achievement in itself, yet to do so with the most varied genre platform in Yugoslav cinema is beyond the exquisite. DeCuir also asserts that the lavishness of THE BATTLE OF NERETVA “transformed the Partisan war film, ironically enough, into a commodity spectacle”.16 And yet, this irony exists only in the eye of the beholder who seems not to realize that the commodity-spectacle effect was anything but unintended. The film’s big budget and the stellar international cast that included Yul Brynner, Franco Nero etc. – just like casting Richard Burton and Irene Papas in THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA, Rod Taylor in TACTICAL GUERRILLA, and Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg in NINETEEN GIRLS AND A SAILOR – were precisely a means to glamorize the war, testifying that the commodity spectacle is exactly what ‘Red Wave’ was primarily about. Most remarkably, DeCuir gets even the most elementary 14 DeCuir, Greg: Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963–72 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Jugoslovenski crni talas: Polemički film od 1963. do 1972. u Socijalističkoj Federativnoj Republici Jugoslaviji, Belgrade: Filmski centar Srbije 2011: 35. 15 G. DeCuir: Yugoslav Black Wave, 28. 16 G. DeCuir: Yugoslav Black Wave, 33, my emphasis.

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chronology wrong. He sees THE BATTLE OF NERETVA and WALTER DEas “fine examples of the dominant output of the Yugoslav film industry from the post-war period through the 50s until the 60s and the advent of Yugoslav New Film”,17 which is a puzzling statement given the fact that they are made in 1968 and 1972, respectively. Maybe that way DeCuir tries to conceal that these two particular films actually came a bit late to be the basis for the ‘Black Wave’ to depart from: indeed, novi film surged before the ‘Red Wave’. FENDS SARAJEVO

E VERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SOCIALIST REALISM ( BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK ORSON WELLES ) Dismissive accounts like DeCuir’s are anything but rare in recent scholarship on Yugoslav cinema.18 In order to analyze how their rewrite the history of Yugoslav film culture along the totalitarian lines, let me discuss in more detail two recent and, to the best of my knowledge, the most elaborated negative assessments of the Partisan films. The first comes from a booklength study of “the totalitarian body” by Senadin Musabegović, professor at Sarajevo University.19 Arguing that a specific image of the ‘totalitarian body’ comprises one of the fundamental tenets of each totalitarian system, he explores ways in which these imaginary bodies are constituted in Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany, and socialist Yugoslavia. In “Totalitarianism and the Yugoslav socialist experience”, the second part of the study, he foregrounds the Partisan film as the principal politico-cultural instrument 17 G. DeCuir: Yugoslav Black Wave, 35. 18 See, for example, an attempt in definition of ‘Red Wave’ as the distinct genre in Pavičić: “Igrani filmovi Fadila Hadžića”. I have extensively criticised Pavičić’s argument in: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 65/66 (2011): 47–60. For a far more nuanced classification of Partisan film, see Stanković, Peter: “Je mogoče o jugoslavenskom partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?”, in: KINO! 10 (2010): 22–53. Although I do not find all of Stanković’s arguments and conclusions convincing – e.g. his syntactic analysis of partizanarice (the ‘Red Wave’ epics) – his account is arguably the most concise and theoretically founded one when it comes to recent post-Yugoslav scholarship on Partisan films. 19 Musabegović, Senadin: Rat: Konstitucija totalitarnog tijela, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 2008.

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for the creation of the Yugoslav totalitarian body. Asserting that it was socialist realism that decisively moulded this body, Musabegović informs us that he will analytically zero in on the socialist realist Partisan films. However, the treatise gets a surprising turn when the author reveals his major showcase is THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA (ill. 2), with other usual ‘Red Wave’ suspects as tangential examples. For, although the socialist realism certainly dominated the very beginnings of Yugoslav cinema, it effectively evaporated by the end of the 1950s, only to be traced residually since then. When Mira and Antonín Liehm unearthed this fact to the Western academia in their Most Important Art,20 they simply repeated what the mainstream Yugoslav film critics and historians knew all along.

Ill. 2: Irene Papas as the Partisan Pieta in THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA In his review of DALEKO JE SUNCE/DISTANT IS THE SUN (1953, D: Radoš Novaković), the influential film critic Milutin Čolić succinctly sums up the flaws of the previous Partisan films. Greeting Novaković’s film as a game changer that decidedly offered a more complex view of the antifascist struggle, he described the first “eleven partisan films” as effectively the same socialist realist film: despite the variety of their plots and characters, they all shared:

20 Liehm, Mira/Liehm, Antonín J.: The Most Important Art: Soviet and Eastern European Film after 1945, Berkeley: University of California Press 1977.

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“the same or similar view and spirit, feelings, dramaturgy, form of expression. [They also had] a single psychological level, with no antagonistic inner conditions, personal dilemmas or crises. There was neither a conflict between the persons, nor conflict within themselves. Since everything is, as it were, given in advance, both people and things serve mainly to illustrate these a priori ideas. […] This twelfth film about the war is [innovative]. Unfortunately, not much in the way of an artistic achievement, but as, we would say, an exceptionally important commitment: an attempt to provide us with a more complete insight into the People’s Liberation Struggle, in its multilayers and antagonisms, in its somewhat darker gamut and not only the bright one.”21

The backlash accounts, however, prefer to pass over these developments in silence. That Musabegović does the same is not really surprising since this silence – censorship, effectively – is a necessity for him: it is the very bedrock of his study. He had to conceal this elemental detail in order to maintain his thesis about perseverance of the “totalitarian body” as moulded by socialist realism. If Musabegović had admitted that socialist realism had fallen into disrepute in Yugoslav cinema already in the early 1950s, his central premise on the longevity of the Titoist “totalitarian body” would evaporate in thin air. Musabegović’s censorship is of a broad sweep, to say the least. In a manoeuvre scandalous by any academic account, he offers neither a single bibliographic reference on Yugoslav cinema in the 1950s, nor on Yugoslav cinema in general. That erasure makes it easier for him to reshuffle the history of Yugoslav cinema for his own purposes. Thus, among other things, he also obfuscates other relatively well-known facts about the ‘Red Wave’: first, that within this ilk one can distinguish the two broad generic modes, and second, that these films actually emulated Hollywood and British war films, and not the totalitarian, Stalinist-style propaganda. Štefančič’s appraisal of Krvavac combines these two points: “Krvavac’s westerns truly differed from both psychological partisan dramas and military epics and frescos like KOZARA, THE BATTLE OF NERETVA and THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA.

[…] They were pure mission action films – sufficiently romantic,

attractive, spectacular, dynamic and adventurous to be impressive and really popu21 Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film, Belgrade/Titovo Užice: Institut za film and Vesti 1984: 349.

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lar. Without metaphoric pretence and social ambitions, without purporting for the visionary, humanism and the revolution, without analyses and philosophizing. And yes, they were hysterical, cartoonish, fluid, peripatetic, unreal, absurd and economical just like the contemporaneous spaghetti westerns. […] Krvavac’s Partisan films of the 1960s have to be acknowledged their legacy of the Western, remaining, alongside the spaghetti Western and Packinpah school, the last shield protecting the vitality of the Western in general.”22

Although this account might seem a bit overenthusiastic, for Krvavac’s work is more one of macaroni combat than of spaghetti western, I find Štefančič’s thesis irrefutable. To pass in silence over the fact the Partisan action films owe more to THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961, D: J. Lee Thompson) and THE LONGEST DAY (1962, D: Ken Annakin/Andrew Marton/Bernhard Wicki) than to THE FALL OF BERLIN (1950, D: Mikhail Chiaureli) is a patent distortion of the history of Yugoslav cinema specific of the totalitarian optics that subdues the Western influences and beefs up the Eastern ones. For the same reason, it seems to me, the backlashers are not keen on remembering that the Yugoslav tradition of Partisan film and the ties between the West and Yugoslavia made possible for the Western filmmakers to make their war films in Yugoslavia, relying on local film companies for technical support: KELLY’S HEROES (1970, D: Brian G. Hutton), CROSS OF IRON (1977, D: Sam Peckinpah), FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (1978, D: Guy Hamilton), and BREAKTHROUGH (1979, D: Andrew V. McLaglen). Musabegović’s reshuffling of Yugoslav cinema, however, does not affect only the alleged propaganda. He refers to the war films that are not socialist realist relatively early in the chapter (though marginally, in a footnote), pointing to the films that came ‘later’ (i.e. after THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA), in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as OKUPACIJA U 26 SLIKA/OCCUPATION IN 26 PICTURES (1978, D: Lordan Zafranović), PAD ITALIJE/FALL OF ITALY (1981, D: Zafranović), and MIRIS DUNJA/SCENT OF 23 THE QUINCES (1982, D: Mirza Idrizović). Only later Musabegović will mention that already in the 1960s some films – “under the guise of auteur [sic!] film” – subverted the dominant representation of Partisan struggle

22 M. Štefančič: “Partizanski film”, 297–8. 23 S. Musabegović: Rat, 222, fn. 17.

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and its underlying values.24 He mentions in passing few of them and, predictably, reduces them to the ‘Black Wave’ formula, concealing that they were the integral part of the broad novi val current.25 One more dubious argument considerably clouds the treatise: the core aspect of socialist realism in Yugoslav cinema resides in the ‘Us vs. Them/‘Good vs. Evil’ divide. According to Musabegović, the very fact that Partisan films designate that dichotomy as an insurmountable gap between the good Partisans and the fascist villains is what makes them so integral to Yugoslav totalitarianism: “Hence it is a typical characteristic of the Partisan socialist realist films to represent black and white differentiation of the characters into ‘our’ combatants and those coming from the outside, the occupiers. Their socialist realist poetics neither explains motifs, nor enters the psychology of the characters, especially those belonging to the occupier, nor does it create a deeper analysis of the situations and the times in which fascism emerges.”26

Now, the clear-cut pattern certainly can be discerned in the first Yugoslav war films of the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, it was recognized quite early as a rather obvious shortcoming, and accordingly criticized quite harshly. The fact that, for example, MAJOR BAUK (1951, D: Nikola Popović) was eagerly awaited as the first feature film produced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, could not prevent it from being critically lambasted precisely for its clear-cut divide between the good guys and the villains: “So, how many more times will a German, a chetnik, a saboteur and other ‘villains’ in our scenarios stand as the pure extracts of snake evil, while the mothers, fighters and commissars will fly high up in a trance of sublime heroism – as in Branko Ćopić’s MAJOR BAUK scenario […] the blacks are all equally black, and the whites

24 S. Musabegović: Rat, 277; 295–296, fn. 96; 297, fn. 100. 25 The most elaborated account of the shifts in Partisan film is offered by Munitić, Ranko: Živjet će ovaj narod: Jugoslavenski film o revoluciji, Zagreb: SK ROH/Publicitas 1974; see also: M. Čolić, Jugoslovenski ratni film. 26 S. Musabegović: Rat, 222.

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are all the same as well. Do [chetniks] Gajo and Vranić differ in any way – other than by the length of their moustaches?”27

Musabegović omits not only this sort evidence which testifies that the stark ‘Us vs. Them’ dichotomy was criticised quite early in Yugoslav cinema, but also a number of Partisan films showing that this sort of criticism was not in vain. From the mid-1950s on, as a part of the developments so carefully censored by the backlash optics, not all Partisans’ adversaries were equally black, just as not all Partisans were untainted white. In POD SUMNJOM/UNDER SUSPICION (1956, D: Branko Belan), Partisans are divided among themselves with mutual distrust and animosity, while the main Partisan protagonist befriends the Italian officer with whom his sister is in love. The main protagonist of TUĐA ZEMLJA/LAND OF THE OTHERS (1957, D: Jože Gale) is an Italian squad, receiving the news of Italian capitulation somewhere in the depths of the Bosnian forests; in their desperate attempt to reach the Adriatic coast, the squad breaks up while the characters of Italian soldiers diversify, ending up in mutual antagonisms. In PET MINUTA RAJA/FIVE MINUTES OF PARADISE (1959, D: Igor Pretnar), a benevolent Nazi soldier from Austria not only helps the couple of main protagonists to escape from the clutches of the Nazis, but himself runs away with them. The main Partisan protagonist of MAČAK POD ŠLJEMOM/THE CAT WITH THE HELMET (1962, D: Žorž Skrigin) becomes befriended with a ‘domobran’, member of Croatian Home Guard, who had previously shot at him in panic. If we are to stick to Krvavac as the emblematic ‘Red Wave’ director, suffice it to recall the part “Ada”/“River Island” in his debut feature, omnibus VRTLOG/WHIRL (1964, D: Krvavac/Gojko Šipovac). It is set on the titular island in the middle of the river that separates the Partisans and the chetniks. Unable to get to the Partisan side, a fatally wounded young Partisan hides in the island woods where he is found by his father, who is a chetnik. The father decides to save the son and take him away from the island, but the sight of their boat in the midstream only triggers the fire from both sides. All these examples – and this list is anything but definitive – show that the Musabegović’s clear-cut ‘Us vs. Them’ binary is a rather exaggerated one. 27 D. Dj.: “Filmska hronika: MAJOR BAUK”, in: Politika, 14 October 1951: 4. The reviewer also underlined the responsibility of Ćopić, the acclaimed Yugoslav writer, for donning the scenario with a Zhdanovite air.

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It is tempting, however, to give this argument one more twist. Although Musabegović patently erased all evidence that would defy the absolute ‘Us vs. Them’ polarity, that drastic move should not distract us from even the more problematic aspect of the thesis. It is the very decision to single out this polarity as the core feature of socialist realism. Let me illustrate this point with comments provided by a ‘script doctor’ who worked on THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA, Musabegović’s showcase: “I think the attempt to make the German forces appear humane [in the film] would be a weak and feeble take on BATTLE ON THE NERETVA. This is why the Nazi forces have to be, for the Partisans (and for the viewers), faceless, grey wall of metal and a red wall of fire. (By the way, the scene of the rim of fire in the screenplay is extraordinary!) The only encounter, the only moment when in this sheet of ‘metal’ we glimpse at a human being is during the chest-to-chest battle, in the ‘embrace’ in which both [the Partisan and the Nazi soldier] roll down the muddy slope in agony.”28

From the vantage point of the totalitarian model such a radical dehumanization of the enemy inevitably looks as the proof of a ‘totalitarian consciousness’ of a Zhdanovist type. And yet, the comment does not come from some presupposed Yugoslav Zhdanovite but from Orson Welles.29 Since he had already played in the BATTLE OF NERETVA, the SUTJESKA producers hoped that he would be interested in playing Winston Churchill in the film; he declined the offer, yet agreed to comment on the early draft of the script. Perfectly aware of the shortcomings of the scenario, he grouped them into two categories, the western-style ones and the socialist realist ones. However, as his suggestion shows, the sweeping reduction of Nazi soldiers to the elements – the extreme widening of the ‘Us vs. Them’, i.e. of the ‘Good vs. Evil’ divide – is not socialist realist as such. In other words, if we are to explore socialist realism in Yugoslav cinema we must acknowledge it as a phenomenon far more complex than Musabegović would probably like to admit. Instead of pinning down its alleged essence to a something like the ‘Good vs. Evil’ polarity (hardly differentia 28 Quoted in Husić, Džavid: Filmska Sutjeska: Hronika jednog snimanja, Sarajevo/Titograd: FRZ Sutjeska and Zeta Film 1973: 63–4. 29 Since Welles’ quote was given in Serbo-Croatian, here we have its translation into English, not Welles’ original note.

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specifica of any particular aesthetics or genre), we would do better to analyze a variety of its features.30 That would also include taking on the mother of all questions of socialist realism in Yugoslav cinema: are flaws (the crude didacticism, the black-and-white patterns, the unbounded pathos etc.), the genuine markers of socialist realism, or, to some extent, the un– intended outcomes of inexperience of the pioneer filmmakers? For, let us not forget that the socialist realist sequence of Yugoslav cinema coincided with its infancy, when the filmmakers were learning to make films the hardest possible way, many times through trial and error (it goes without saying that many errors make it into the final cut).31

E VERYTHING

MUST GO

Another set of dubious assertions on the Partisan films unfolds in the article Spaces of ideology in South Slavic films by Harvard scholar Aida Vidan.32 She might prefer the ‘Red Line’ label to the standard ‘Red Wave’, but her basic outline follows the standard ‘totalitarian’ suite: one more time Yugoslav cinema is shoe-horned into the clear-cut ‘Blacks vs. Reds’ matrix, with the ‘Red Line’ films being framed as the genuine tool of the Yugocommunist propaganda.33 Curiously, Vidan introduces the Partisan films in 30 For studious analyses of socialist realism, see, for example, Clark, Katerina: The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 1981; Lahusen, Thomas/Dobrenko, Evgeny (eds.): Socialist Realism Without Shores. Durham/London: Duke University Press 1997; Gutkin, Irina: The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic: 1890-1934, Evanstone, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1999; Bordwell, David: The Cinema of Eisenstein, New York: Routledge 2005; Gupta, Suman: “Conceptualising the Art of Communist Times”, in: Third Text 24.5 (2010): 571–582. 31 For an outline of socialist (‘nationalist’) realism in Yugoslavia, see Šakić, Tomislav: “Hrvatski film klasičnoga razdoblja: Ideologizirani filmski diskurz i modeli otklona”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 38 (2004): 11–13; also Turković, Hrvoje: “Filmske pedesete”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 41 (2005): 122–31. 32 Vidan, Aida: “Spaces of ideology in South Slavic films”, in: Studies in Eastern European Cinema 2.2 (2011): 173–92. 33 Sketching the ‘black’ pole of the dichotomy, Vidan also skews even the most elementary facts. Out of seven ‘oppositional’ directors that she lists – Branko Bauer, Dušan Makavejev, Krsto Papić, Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar Petrović, Lazar Stojanović, Želimir Žilnik – only Stojanović was never awarded at the Yugoslav national festival in Pula, while Papić, Pavlović and Petrović were awarded more than once for some of the most iconic ‘black’ films. Out of nine

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her article in order to explain “the local population’s generally negative disposition towards domestic films” in post-Yugoslavia: “This scepticism had its roots in the socialist era, whose celluloid products […] were often used for propaganda purposes and saturated in Titoist ideology. There is no shortage of examples to illustrate this category of films from the 1960s and 1970s, whose scripts were subservient to the agenda of the Communist Party administration and whose primary function was to glorify the processes that established the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Many of these films were psychologically one-dimensional, and, despite their war orientation, filmed in such a way that they could be shown regularly even to young audiences and included in prime time slots on national television. […] The inferiority complex, as perceived by audiences, did not stem from the practical aspect of these works. […] Rather, the rejection of the domestic war genre was brought about by the thematic limitations and ideological suprastructure that had been imposed on films by the ruling segment of the society.”34

The Partisan film of the 1960s and 1970s thus turns out to be the major culprit for the habits of the post-Yugoslav cinemagoers in the late 1990s, as if the (alleged) animosity that Yugoslav audience had for the Partisan film back in the Titoist epoch somehow evolved into the general animosity for the domestic films in post-Yugoslavia. There are only two problems with Vidan’s thesis: the Partisan pictures were quite popular back in the socialist days, and the post-Yugoslav audiences, far from displaying some absurd “inferiority complex”, continue to enjoy them today as well.35 Unperturbed by such trifles, Vidan hastens to lock up the Partisan films in yet another dichotomy. At the very crux of her magisterial thesis, she pits films that Vidan deems “far from being trumpeted as model achievements of the socialist film industry”, four won the main prize, two won the second prize for directing, one was awarded the special award for the “courageous directing”, while two films did not enter the festival. 34 A. Vidan: “Spaces of ideology”, 174–5. 35 The recent broadcastings of THE BATTLE OF NERETVA and THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA on Croatian Television, for example, broke spectator records, besting not only other films but the primetime news and live sport events, usually the most watched TV program. See: “Bitka na Neretvi potukla sve rekorde! Gledanije od Ivice i Dnevnika HTV-a”, in: Jutarnji list, 12 January 2011, http:// www.jutarnji.hr/-quot-bitka-na-neretvi-quot--najgledaniji-na-nacionalnojteleviziji/917394/, last access: 20 December 2012.

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Partisan films against the colourful dozen of the post-Yugoslav films. Elaborating the titular space–ideology nexus, Vidan asserts that the postYugoslav films “allow for ideological heteroglossia, [and] also introduce an entropic organization of space as a commentary on both the actual and fictive political spatial categories”.36 Somewhat simplified, Vidan couples this post-Yugoslav ideological “heteroglossia” with the abundance of “heterotopias” – as Michel Foucault would have it – that range from the claustrophobic sites of confinement and isolation to the wide open and disorientating vistas. Accordingly, these heterotopias are populated by directionless and nomadic, or immobilized and confined characters whose types of (im)mobility corresponds with their ways of coping with the ideology. On the opposite pole of the dichotomy, Vidan deems the spatiality in Partisan films an altogether different affair: “Whether it is encirclement by enemy troops, the need to cross a river or more generally a breaking away from some other kind of entrapment, one could argue that the teleology of movement in Partisan films reflected the general ideology of progress that the socialist society was trying to convey. [Hence] the characters in Partisan films of the earlier era (be they individuals or groups) always arrived at a very specific and well-defined point in space. How could it be otherwise? After all, socialism was an elaboration of a Marxist utopia, a transitional phase, a movement towards the very specific goal called communism. If one is able to move through an encirclement of German troops, these films seem to say, then one is also able to work through any other type of obstacle on the road to communism. The sense of goal-defined movement and unquestioned purpose was what distinguished this category of films.”37

The argument thus boils down to a glaring non sequitur: if socialism was designated as a developmental, transitional stage toward elusive communism, then the celluloid Partisans were always to traverse the clearly defined paths to reach a specific location. “How could it be otherwise?” Well, not only that it could, but it most certainly was, as Vidan could have demonstrated herself if only she wanted to analyse the “Red Wave” films more closely. Instead, she makes a sweeping point about “the final scenes [in which] the combination of panning and extreme long shots […] subsu36 A. Vidan: “Spaces of ideology”, 180. 37 A. Vidan: “Spaces of ideology”, 180.

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mes the previously fragmentary movement and offer it as a vision of a unified and stable place”.38 These finales function more as an ideal-type scene in which the Partisans and refugees, in the winding lines of the moving silhouettes or dots in extreme long shot, snake their way into the depth of the visual field, heading toward the horizon. However, a closer look at the ‘Red Wave’ films reveals two things. First, some films complicate or altogether dispense with the optimistic heading-toward-the-horizon finale, and second, the horizon happy endings can be interpreted quite differently from Vidan’s reading. Let me illustrate the first point by sifting a few examples, starting with THE BATTLE OF NERETVA as the ‘Red Wave’ behemoth. What follows the final battle is not an optimistic walk towards the bright and flowery horizon, but the extended sequence soaked in pain and loss. The Partisan commander Martin is forced to destroy what he treasures most – his artillery. The nurse Neda dies in agony, and ‘survives’ in the hallucination of her lover, himself (terminally?) plagued by typhus. One of the most likeable characters is being completely degraded: when Partisan Stipe, blinded by rage, starts shooting at the chetnik prisoners, his commander promptly punishes him by striping his epaulettes, threatening him with the court marshal, and expelling him from the Partisan unit altogether. No wonder that in his incisive overview of Bulajić’s oeuvre, Tomislav Šakić praises the open ending of THE BATTLE OF NERETVA as “probably the most impressive shot in the film [otherwise] marred with incoherent dramaturgy”.39 How about the finale of GUNS OF WAR, another ‘Red Wave’ juggernaut? Staging the defeat of the Labour battalion at Kadinjača, the film’s final battle is among the most devastating Partisan debacles in Yugoslav cinema. In socialist Yugoslavia, however, the slaughter is commemorated as “the Partisan Thermopylae”: the Partisan resistance slowed down the Nazi forces and enabled the people from the free territory of ‘Užice republic’, as well as the Partisan Supreme Command, to flee the Nazis. The final scene of the refugees in flight is formally quite different from the typical horizon scene in extra long shot. The camera is virtually in the flight stream; the medium shots and medium close-ups of the people fleeing do not capture any specific backdrop or panorama, but give the people their 38 A. Vidan: “Spaces of ideology”, 181. 39 Šakić, Tomislav: “Filmski svijet Veljka Bulajića: Poprište susreta kolektivnog i individualnog”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57–58 (2008): 24.

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faces, and thus trigger the dialectics between the individual and the collective. Yet, the crucial detail here is that Tito, the communist leader, himself enters the flight. One could thus say that GUNS OF WAR is interested more in time than in space. It attempts to designate a specific point in time, the moment when Tito entered the masses, transforming himself from the Party leader to the leader of the people. And yet, even the restaging of Kadinjača seems like a minor hubbub if compared with THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA. All hell is let loose in another ‘Partisan Thermopylae’ variation about the Montenegrin unit defending the secluded point Ljubin grob at Sutjeska, thus enabling the wounded and the Supreme Command to escape the encirclement. Already the name of the locale – Ljubo’s grave – signifies the doom that awaits the Partisans. As if not tragic enough in themselves, the historical events are merely a pretext for a story replete with nightmarish scenes that draw equally from medieval imaginary and the horror film. The devil and ‘the heavenly force’ are explicitly evoked every now and then, the Nazis burn the imprisoned Partisans live at the stake, while the pack of people infected with typhoid walk the thin line between the madmen from Flemish art and Romero style zombies. The downward spiral of the chaos hits rock bottom when the youngest Partisan, an effete sensual boy more interested in arts than fighting, descends into madness after being accused of cowardice too many times. In a psychotic fit, the boy accuses his father – the commander of the unit – and ‘the fatherland’, with their imperatives of bravery and sacrifice, of igniting his bestial rage. In the final scenes the boy is killed in the suicidal attack on the Nazis, with burning trees falling around him. A crucial detail is not to be missed: the descent into madness and the final mayhem happen after the wounded and the fighters have escaped the Sutjeska encirclement, i.e. at the moment when the boy could have left Ljubin grob (as some of his comrades actually do). There is no bright horizon in the final scenes of A SONG FOR THE DEAD MINER either. The film that follows the brigade composed of the miners in Northeast Bosnia, turns, in its second part, into a series of defeats and losses, while its last part – again after the last battle (anything but victorious for the Partisans) – depicts the agony of the brigade’s commander. The final scene shows the brigade surrounding his dead body in the dark woods, the Partisans petrified by grief and the surrounding elements (ill. 3). With no open, inviting vista before them, the mourning ensemble is shown in a high

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angle crane shot that additionally emphasizes their immobility, pinning them to the ground, as it were.

Ill. 3: A far cry from happy-ending in A SONG FOR THE DEAD MINER And yet, there are certainly cheerful horizon finales as well. The endings of Krvavac’s action romps are exemplary in that regard. The horizon scene of THE DEMOLITION SQUAD shows the Partisan brigade carrying the wounded over the endless plain, after the members of an improvised special unit destroyed the Nazi planes that had controlled the terrain (ill. 4).

Ill. 4: The vital disorder of the Partisans in THE DEMOLITION SQUAD

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In THE BRIDGE, similarly, the horizon scene also follows a ‘mission impossible’: another improvised demolition unit has just destroyed the titular edifice that was to be used for the transport of the Nazi troops. In WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO the Partisan protagonists wander off toward the horizon – an atypical one for the Red Wave finale: urban landscape – after destroying the railway and the Nazi train. In other words, it is crucial to notice that all these optimistic walks toward the horizon are preceded by the Partisan actions that just have abolished the Nazi control over the territory. For, if there is an agency that embodies close and meticulous control over space in Partisan films, it is not the Partisans but the Nazis. Their spatial dominance ranges from their very plans of territorial expansion and their compulsive attention to the omnipresent maps, to the concrete military operations that did not simply seize the terrain but re-shaped or re-ordered its topography to suit their needs. The Yugoslav Partisans, like all guerrilla movements, were subverting that order: targeting the airfields, railways and bridges controlled by the occupiers, they were actually defying the Nazi spatial regime, demolishing the occupied space into a space beyond coordinates, maps, control, the Order... Only in such a dis-ordered space, the space interspersed with gaps and devoid of the clear coordinates, could the Partisan guerrilla warfare be fought. For that reason, to inscribe in the horizon scenes some impulse for spatial integration and stabilization is to miss the basic principle of guerrilla spatiality altogether. The very existence of the Partisan unit or the refugee flight that meanders toward the horizon suggests that revolutionary spatiality is by definition out-of-joint. This volatile spatiality is coupled with the relentless revolutionary subjectivity. In a supreme example of irony, when Vidan praises the postYugoslav films for “depict[ing] some form of travelling and the impossibility of arriving”, and asserts that “[c]ircular or ostensible movement leading nowhere points to non-arrival as a permanent condition”,40 she unwittingly delivers an apt formula of motility in Partisan films. Indeed, most of them generally challenge, if not directly cancel, the notion of arriving to a certain, well-defined destination: they are certainly about leaving and keeping in motion, sometimes about roaming dis– orientedly (ill. 6), but hardly about arriving and settling down. Their celebration of the revolutionary subjectivity that pays no heed to arriving at

40 A. Vidan: “Spaces of ideology”, 181.

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some ‘well-defined point in space’, can be illustrated with the new references to Krvavac, this time with the films that bookend his directorial career.

Ill. 5: The deadly order of the Nazis in NOĆI I JUTRA/NIGHTS AND DAYS (1959, D: Pjer Majhrovski)

Ill. 6: The disoriented Partisan (Dušan Janićijević) in WHIRL In the penultimate moment of the airborne spectacle PARTISAN SQUADRON, Krvavac’s last feature, the commander Major gets fatally wounded on his last flight. His plane proceeds toward the horizon and yet we do not see it descending. In a long take the plane disappears in the distance while the

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sound of its engine slowly fades, as if suggesting that Major will continue to fly infinitely. Major, thus, transcends his own mortality and turns into the unstoppable revolutionary subject at its purest, caught in its ‘circular movement as a permanent condition’. No wonder that another Partisan aviator instructed his protégé earlier in the film: “Keep up the speed! It keeps you! It is life!” Or, let us again recall the part “River Island” of Krvavac’s debut omnibus WHIRL, which ends with a variation of the same motif. With the son already virtually dead and the father mortally wounded in the crossfire, the boat flows down the stream and slowly rotates in the whirl in the midst of the river. Thus, already at the very origins of Krvavac’s universe one discerns an endless, unstoppable gyration that, paying no heed to biological death, suggests a model of relentless revolutionary subjectivity. Hence my thesis is opposite to Vidan’s: far from stabilizing the space and offering well-defined aims, the Partisan films actually postulate that revolutionary struggle cannot be fixed to a specific territory. Its foundational principle is the one of setting the revolutionaries in motion and removing them from the strictures of a particular milieu (a domestic turf, the old, ‘organic’ ways of living). The revolutionary subject is often represented as a collective – guerrilla unit and refugee flight – which is defined by its capacity to re-locate itself, traversing the endless, unpredictable, evershifting paths. Thus many a Partisan plot pivots on the unconditional protection of this constitutive mobility. The prospective final destinations of the Partisans and refugees might have a utopian air around them, yet nonetheless they also stirred anxiety and caused traumas as unknowns and uncertainties do. Cut off from the old ways, and faced with the unforeseen future, the Partisans must have relied on their own revolutionary desire. Thus, opposite to promoting the final and well-defined goals, many Partisan films attest desire as such, the desire at its most relentless, hysterical: the desire to have desire, and not to fulfil it by resorting to some too-well defined goal that would block its continuous circulation.41 The celluloid Partisans thus can be seen as the hysterical subjects par excellence: not only do 41 In developing the notion of the hysterical Partisan subject I draw substantially on the cases of a specific Partisan neurosis described in the late 1940s by Hugo Klajn, a psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrist (see Klajn: Ratne neuroze Jugoslovena, Beograd: Tersit 1995), and their formidable Lacanian interpretation by Branimir Stojanović (“Partizanska histerija – istina jugoslovenskog socijalizma”, in: Up&Underground 17/18 (2010): 97–103).

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they chase their desire only to never fulfil it, but the war itself functions as the massive mechanism for keeping this desire in motion. Hence Štefančič’s perspicuous remark about Krvavac’s heroes: “in these films, the war was both a means and an end: we cannot even envisage what these guys would do in peace? […] These were simply the guys who could not live without war”.42 This question takes us directly to the most subversive edge of novi film representations of the Second World War and its aftermath. As if responding to Štefančič’s question, they depict the Partisans caught in the postrevolutionary stasis, devoured by the stagnation, banality and pragmatics of everyday life. In the final part of the banned omnibus GRAD/THE CITY (1963, D: Pavlović/Rakonjac/Babac), a war veteran, invalid, is caught in his post-war, alcohol-drenched, bleak quotidian, which culminates in the scene in which he gets beaten by a group of thugs in the dark alley. The title of the part – directed by Pavlović – is “Obruč”/“The Rim”: its protagonist might have broken out of all Nazi encirclements, but eventually gets encircled by the peace-time dreariness. The same post-revolutionary deadlock is varied in other novi film works, such as the final act of THREE, the frenzy of the Partisan brothers in THE TOUGH ONES, or the turmoil of the war orphans in PLAYING SOLDIERS. None of these films leave room for doubt: the Partisans who stop roaming and settle down, who are deprived of their revolutionary hysteria, as it were, are doomed to decline and death. Paradoxically, for all their alleged mutual incongruence, the ‘Red Wave’ and ‘Black Wave’ are complementary in this regard. Far from being caught in a clear-cut antagonism, both groups of films actually foreground the hysterical relentlessness of the Partisans. It is only that they stress two different moments thereof: whereas the ‘Red Wave’ dominantly foregrounds the revolutionary motility, the new film depicts the post-revolutionary arrest. And yet, such depictions of the post-revolutionary stalemate and corruption were not endemic to novi film. A number of films, not being considered ‘oppositional’, also show the effects of peace and post-war modernity in terms of physical, psychic and moral deterioration of the Partisan fighters, and the broad societal anomie. They include, to name a few, the disturbed and handicapped war veteran in VRATIĆU SE/I WILL BE BACK (1957, D: Jože Gale), the paranoid uncle of the main protagonist in DOBRA

42 M. Štefančič: “Partizanski film”, 297–8.

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KOB/WARTIME

HUNTER (1964, D: Kosovac), or the morally degraded, embittered former Partisan who is gambling with his wartime enemy in DRUGA STRANA MEDALJE/THE OTHER SIDE OF MEDAL (1965, D: Hadžić). In some films, the habits and values of the ex-revolutionaries are challenged in the perspective of generational or professional conflict, e.g. U SUKOBU/THE CONFLICT (1963, D: Jože Babič), or NEKA DALEKA SVJETLOST/SOME DISTANT LIGHT (1969, D: Josip Lešić).

Y UGOSLAV

CINEMA RELOADED

What underlies all aforementioned accounts about the Partisan films is not simply ignorance about Yugoslav cinema, but also the notion of ideology as substantially a bundle of lies that functions principally by means of repression and manipulation. Vidan’s analysis is especially telling in this regard. While cherry-picking one of Foucault’s relatively marginal concepts, she turns a blind eye to the fact that the Foucauldian theoretical edifice is substantially incongruent with such a crude concept of ideology that she effectively relies upon. His classical attack on the “repression hypothesis”43 does not aim solely at the assumption about the Victorian repression of sexuality, but also at the notion of ideology as something that one can mainly grasp in negative terms of falsity and oppression. For, indeed, is not the totalitarian paradigm, at its most elemental, actually a variation of the repression hypothesis in the sphere of politics? To deem a socio-political system as totalitarian basically equals to denouncing it as a massive system of subjugation in which the repressive agencies are more or less distinct from the repressed subjects. It is for this reason that the totalitarian lot loves dichotomies and binaries so much. The possibility that even the most critical films might reinforce some of the dominant ideology, or that the most benign or even propaganda films could support social criticism, seems to elude them. As they demonstrate with every new text, it is either ‘black’ nor ‘red’. The impetus to vindicate socialist Yugoslavia and its cinema thus could be described along Foucault’s phrasing: “it is time to put an end to this kind of dualism, of Manichaeism, which puts discourse, freedom, truth, broad 43 See Foucault, Michel: History of Sexuality, Volume 1: Introduction, Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books 1978.

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daylight on one side, and on the other silence, repression, ignorance, night”.44 Neither a bag of lies, nor an ideological monolith, Yugoslav socialism was a complex politico-ideological, economic and cultural enterprise suffused with a variety of antagonisms which Yugoslav cinema can help us discern. Due to its popularity, variety, and persistence, the Partisan film is surely among the most idiosyncratic and privileged domains of the Yugoslav ‘historical imaginary’ that paves the road for an inquiry of the contradictions of Yugoslav socialism. The reference to Thomas Elsaesser’s felicitous concept is not an academic ornament.45 Just as he splendidly threw much needed additional light on Weimar cinema, exonerating it from the Kracauer-style narratives that had relegated it to the menacing precursor to Nazism, we should finally reassess Yugoslav cinema in general and Valter in particular, and replace the bipolar vision with the multifocal optics that would diversify both of its alleged ideological-aesthetical monochromes. Instead of the slapdash totalitarian model that degrades films from complex cultural artefacts to conduits that channel ‘the absolute essence of the Titoist spirit’, we should deploy a set of a range of approaches and methodologies that make film studies such a plentiful variety in the first place. The very existence of the studies of Yugoslav cinema depends on this epistemological shift.

B IBLIOGRAPHY “Bitka na Neretvi potukla sve rekorde! Gledanije od Ivice i Dnevnika HTVa”, in: Jutarnji list, 12 January 2011, http://www.jutarnji.hr/-quot-bitkana-neretvi-quot--najgledaniji-na-nacionalnoj-televiziji/917394/, last access: 20 December 2012. Bordwell, David: The Cinema of Eisenstein, New York: Routledge 2005. Clark, Katerina: The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 1981.

44 Foucault, Michel: Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, Sylvère Lotringer (ed.). Translated by Lysa Hochroth/John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e) 1996: 162. 45 Elsaesser, Thomas: Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary, New York/London: Routledge 2000.

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Čolić, Milutin: Jugoslovenski ratni film, Belgrade/Titovo Užice: Institut za film/Vesti 1984. DeCuir, Greg: Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963–72 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Jugoslovenski crni talas: Polemički film od 1963. do 1972. u Socijalističkoj Federativnoj Republici Jugoslaviji, Belgrade: Filmski centar Srbije 2011. Dj., D.: “Filmska hronika: MAJOR BAUK”, in: Politika, 14 October 1951: 4. Elsaesser, Thomas: Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary, New York/London: Routledge 2000. Foucault, Michel: Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Translated by Lysa Hochroth/John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e) 1996. Foucault, Michel: History of Sexuality, Volume 1: Introduction, Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books 1978. Gilić, Nikica: Uvod u povijest hrvatskog igranog filma, Drugo, izmjenjeno izdanje, Zagreb: Leykam International 2011² (2010). Gupta, Suman: “Conceptualising the Art of Communist Times”, in: Third Text 24.5 (2010): 571–582. Gutkin, Irina: The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic: 18901934, Evanstone, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1999. Hemon, Aleksandar: “Imitacija života”, in: Život i djelo Alphonsea Kaudersa, Sarajevo: Bosanska knjiga 1997: 101–111. Husić, Džavid: Filmska Sutjeska: Hronika jednog snimanja, Sarajevo/Titograd: FRZ Sutjeska/Zeta Film 1973. Iordanova, Dina: “The Cinema of Eastern Europe: Strained Loyalties, Elusive Clusters”, in: Anikó Imre (ed.), East European Cinemas, New York/London: Routledge 2005: 229–249. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Bosnian cinema in the socialist Yugoslavia and the anti-Yugoslav backlash”, in: Nataša Milas/Cynthia Simmons/Trevor L. Jockims (eds.), KinoKultura, special issue 14: Bosnian cinema, 2012, http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/14/jovanovic.shtml, last access: 20 December 2012. Jovanović, Nebojša: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 65/66 (2011): 47–60. Karačić, Darko/Banjeglav, Tamara/Govedarica, Nataša: Re:Vizija prošlosti: Politika sjećanja u Bosni i Hercegovini, Hrvatskoj i Srbiji od 1990. Godine, Sarajevo: ACIPS/Friedrich Ebert Stiftung 2012.

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Klajn, Hugo: Ratne neuroze Jugoslovena, Beograd: Tersit 1995. Lahusen, Thomas/Dobrenko, Evgeny (eds.): Socialist Realism Without Shores, Durham/London: Duke University Press 1997. Liehm, Mira/Liehm, Antonín J.: The Most Important Art: Soviet and Eastern European Film after 1945, Berkeley: University of California Press 1977. Luthar, Breda/Pušnik, Maruša: “The lure of utopia: Socialist everyday spaces”, in: Breda Luthar/Maruša Pušnik (eds.), Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2011: 1–33. Milosavljević, Olivera: Potisnuta istina: Kolaboracija u Srbiji 1941–1944, Beograd: Helsinški komitet za ljudska prava u Srbiji 2006. Munitić, Ranko: Živjet će ovaj narod: Jugoslavenski film o revoluciji, Zagreb: SK ROH/Publicitas 1974. Musabegović, Senadin: Rat: Konstitucija totalitarnog tijela, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 2008. Patterson, John: “Yugoslavia, paradise on earth, just a shame about the films”, in: The Guardian, 16 November 2012, http://www.guardian.co. uk/film/2012/nov/16/cinema-komunisto-yugoslavian-film, last access: 20 December 2012. Pavičić, Jurica: “Fadil Hadžić u optici totalitarne paradigme”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 65/66 (2011): 47–60. Pavičić, Jurica: “From a cinema of hatred to a cinema of consciousness: Croatian film after Yugoslavia”, in: Aida Vidan/Gordana P. Crnković (eds.), In Contrast: Croatian Film Today, Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez 2012: 49-58. Pavičić, Jurica: “Igrani filmovi Fadila Hadžića”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 34 (2003): 3–38. Stanković, Peter: “Je mogoče o jugoslavenskom partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?”, in: KINO! 10 (2010): 22–53. Šakić, Tomislav: “Filmski svijet Veljka Bulajića: Poprište susreta kolektivnog i individualnog”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 57–58 (2008): 14– 26. Šakić, Tomislav: “Hrvatski film klasičnoga razdoblja: Ideologizirani filmski diskurz i modeli otklona”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 38 (2004): 6–33.

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Šešić, Rada: “Valter brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo”, in: Dina Iordanova (ed.), The Cinema of the Balkans, London: Wallflower Press 2006: 107–116. Štefančič Jr., Marcel: “Partizanski film – Jugo darilo europopu”, in: Vladimir Arsenijević/Đorđe Matić/Iris Adrić (eds.), Leksikon YU mitologije, Belgrade/Zagreb: Rende/Postcriptum 2004: 297–302. Stojanović, Branimir: “Partizanska histerija – istina jugoslovenskog socijalizma”, in: Up&Underground 17/18 (2010): 97–103. Šuber, Daniel/Karamanić, Slobodan: “Mapping the field: Toward reading images in the (post-)Yugoslav context”, in: Daniel Šuber/Slobodan Karamanić (eds.), Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, Leiden/Boston: Brill 2012: 1–25. Turković, Hrvoje: “Filmske pedesete”, in: Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 41 (2005): 122–31. Ugrešić, Dubravka: The Ministry of Pain, Translated by Michael Henry Helm. New York: Harper Collins 2006. Vidan, Aida: “Spaces of ideology in South Slavic films”, in: Studies in Eastern European Cinema 2.2 (2011): 173–92.

F ILMOGRAPHY 19 DJEVOJAKA I MORNAR/NINETEEN GIRLS AND A SAILOR (YUG 1971, D: Milutin Kosovac) BITKA NA NERETVI/THE BATTLE OF NERETVA (YUG/ITA/West Germany 1969, D: Veljko Bulajić) BREAKTHROUGH (West Germany 1979, D: Andrew V. McLaglen) CINEMA KOMUNISTO (SRB 2010, D: Mila Turajlić) CROSS OF IRON (UK/West Germany 1977, D: Sam Peckinpah) DALEKO JE SUNCE/DISTANT IS THE SUN (YUG 1953, D: Radoš Novaković) DELIJE/THE TOUGH ONES (YUG 1968, D: Mića Popović) DESANT NA DRVAR/PARACHUTE RAID ON DRVAR (YUG 1963, D: Fadil Hadžić) DIVERZANTI/THE DEMOLITION SQUAD (YUG 1967, D: Hajrudin Krvavac) DOBRA KOB/WARTIME HUNTER (YUG 1964, D: Milutin Kosovac) DRUGA STRANA MEDALJE/THE OTHER SIDE OF MEDAL (YUG 1965, D: Fadil Hadžić)

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FALL OF BERLIN, THE (SU 1950, D: Mikhail Chiaureli) FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (UK/USA 1978, D: Guy Hamilton) FROSINA (YUG 1952, D: Vojislav Nanović) GRAD/THE CITY (YUG 1963, D: Živojin Pavlović/Kokan Rakonjac/ Marko Babac) GUNS OF NAVARONE, THE (UK/USA 1961, D: J. Lee Thompson) KELLY’S HEROES (USA 1970, D: Brian G. Hutton) KONJUH PLANINOM/A SONG FOR THE DEAD MINER (YUG 1966, D: Fadil Hadžić) KOZARA (YUG 1962, D: Veljko Bulajić) LONGEST DAY, THE (USA 1962, D: Ken Annakin/Andrew Marton/ Bernhard Wicki) MAČAK POD ŠLJEMOM/THE CAT WITH THE HELMET (YUG 1962, D: Žorž Skrigin) MAJOR BAUK (YUG 1951, D: Nikola Popović) MALI VOJNICI/PLAYING SOLDIERS (YUG 1967, D: Bato Čengić) MIRIS DUNJA/SCENT OF THE QUINCES (YUG 1982, D: Mirza Idrizović) NA SVOJI ZEMLJI/ON THEIR OWN GROUND (YUG 1948, D: France Štiglic) NEKA DALEKA SVJETLOST/SOME DISTANT LIGHT (YUG 1969, D: Josip Lešić) NOĆI I JUTRA/NIGHTS AND DAYS (YUG 1959, D: Pjer Majhrovski) OKUPACIJA U 26 SLIKA/OCCUPATION IN 26 PICTURES (YUG 1978, D: Lordan Zafranović) PAD ITALIJE/FALL OF ITALY (YUG 1981, D: Lordan Zafranović) PET MINUTA RAJA/FIVE MINUTES OF PARADISE (YUG 1959, D: Igor Pretnar) POD SUMNJOM/UNDER SUSPICION (YUG 1956, D: Branko Belan) PROTEST (YUG 1967, D: Fadil Hadžić) ŠKORPIONI: SPOMENAR/THE SCORPIONS: A HOME MOVIE (SRB 2009, D: Lazar Stojanović) SLUŽBENI POLOŽAJ/OFFICAL POST (YUG 1964, D: Fadil Hadžić) SUTJESKA/THE BATTLE OF SUTJESKA (YUG 1973, D: Stipe Delić) TRI SATA ZA LJUBAV/THREE HOURS FOR LOVE (YUG 1968, D: Fadil Hadžić) TRI/THREE (YUG 1965, D: Aleksandar Petrović) TUĐA ZEMLJA/LAND OF THE OTHERS (YUG 1957, D: Jože Gale) VALTER BRANI SARAJEVO/WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO (YUG 1972, D: Hajrudin Krvavac)

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VALTER/WALTER (SRB 2012, D: Andrej Aćin) VRATIĆU SE/I WILL BE BACK (YUG 1957, D: Jože Gale) VRHOVI ZELENGORE/THE PEAKS OF ZELENGORA (YUG 1976, D: Zdravko Velimirović) VRTLOG/WHIRL (YUG 1964, D: Krvavac/Gojko Šipovac)

TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE. A Slovene Partisan Story from the 50s and 80s M ATTEO C OLOMBI

The cultural debate on Partisans and their heritage undoubtedly plays an important role in independent Slovenia today, but it was present in the People’s/Socialist Republic of Slovenia as integral part of Yugoslavia, too.1 Although the discussion followed different strategies in socialist times than today, the arts played a crucial role at that time as well. This article focuses on the alternative – that is to say on the unofficial or the not completely official representations of Partisans in the art production of Slovenia in Yugoslav times. First I shall briefly introduce the features of the present debate, then I am going to examine more in detail the situation in the period 1945-1991. Afterwards I will analyze the differences between the official master narrative of that period and the alternative representation of Partisans in the movie TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE by František Čap (1955) and in the art video of the same name by Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid (1985) that 1

The territory that forms today the Republic of Slovenia (Republika Slovenija, independent from 1991) was from 1945 one of the constituent countries of the post-WWII Yugoslav state. The change of the official name in 1963 – from People’s Republic of Slovenia (Ljudska Republika Slovenija) to Socialist Republic of Slovenia (Socialistična republika Slovenija) corresponds to the official redenomination of Yugoslavia from Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbocroatian: Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavija) into Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbocroatian: Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija) in the same year.

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programmatically relies on the film. I shall conclude with some general considerations about alternative Partisan discourses before and after the Slovene proclamation of independence in 1991. The ‘official’ master narrative on Partisans that state institutions promoted within the Yugoslav state presented WWII as a struggle between “the communist-led people’s revolution” whose fighters were “heroes”, while “all other groups, like the Domobranci (Home Guard),2 the church, the bourgeoisie and upper social strata” had to be considered “traitors.”3 As “alternative” narratives I define all those representations of the Partisan struggle that in some ways differed from the institutional narrative (not necessarily denying it neither completely nor radically).4 Both terms “official” and “alternative” have to be understood within this study as heuristic categories of analysis: I do not postulate that alternative narratives on Partisans are automatically less schematic than the official one, I rather want to figure out which origins and structures they have and examine their degree of complexity. My exclusive focus on the Slovene context should not be understood as the claiming of a specific ‘Slovene slant’ to represent Partisans and their opponents in alternative ways. I also do not want to claim that there were no points of contact, transfer processes and general tendencies that tied together the Partisan narratives from the various parts

2 3

4

The right-wing Slovene Home Guard collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Godeša, Bojan: “Social and cultural aspects of the historiography on the Second World War in Slovenia”, in: Sabine Rutar/Rolf Wörsdörfer (eds.), Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen in Slowenien/Social History and Social Movements in Slovenia, Essen: Klartext 2009 (= Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 41): 111. Non-official discourses are not necessarily left-wing oriented. Yet here I do not deal with the right-wing positions on Partisans. Analyzing Slovene culture before 1991, I mention some non-communist authors, yet most of them cannot really be defined as conservative. For the period after 1991, I deal only with the leftwing non-official discourse. My limited focus depends on the actual stage of my research. For the same reason I examine here – with the exception of Gržinić’s and Šmid’s art video – exclusively cinema and literature, although not-official Partisan discourses were developed also in visual art and music. I have partly extended my research also on these fields in: Colombi, Matteo: “Andere Geschichten. Das Nachleben der Partisanen in der slowenischen Kunst und Literatur”, in: Christine Gölz/Alfrun Kliems (eds.), Spielplätze der Verweigerung. Gegenkulturen im östlichen Europa nach 1956, Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau 2014, 174-201.

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of Yugoslavia. This contribution has therefore to be read in connection with other essays of this collection in order to compare and to link the shaping of Partisan narratives in Slovenia with the one(s) in the Yugoslav state as a whole and in its other single parts.

S LOVENE

PARTISAN NARRATIVES AND SLOVENE INTELLECTUALS TODAY

The ‘clash’ of memory cultures that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia has also led to numerous discussions on the Partisan narrative in Slovenia. These are taking place both in academic circles and through several different initiatives for a larger public, including cultural events and political demonstrations. The historian Jože Pirjevec claims that the Catholic Church and the Right have promoted from the 1990s on a strong historical revisionism of WWII, justifying the Home Guards’ collaboration as a patriotic act and reducing the Liberation Front to a mere expression of the communist’s will to power.5 The reaction to right-wing revisionism seems to be manifold. Some scholars and intellectuals plead for a less ideological and more balanced attitude toward history in order to “ensure as integral and substantial a depiction of the wartime events as possible”.6 On the other hand, several leftist social actors consider their polemics against the right wing interpretation of partisan history as an act of political engagement. Gal Kirn recently wrote that “to affirm the Yugoslav revolution means to repeat” an “emancipatory gesture”, that is to stress the revolutionary meaning of “antifascist and communist politics”. Yet Kirn recognizes that it would be nonetheless a simplification to make a myth out of the Partisan fight and indulge in “a reversion to Yugonostalgia or a blind attempt at recreation of what evidentially no longer exists – heroic past or not”.7 However Kirn’s position is 5

6 7

Pirjevec, Jože: “Sloweniens Geschichte: Die Eigenstaatlichkeit und der Umgang mit der Vergangenheit”, in: Sabine Rutar/Rolf Wörsdörfer (eds.), Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen in Slowenien/Social History and Social Movements in Slovenia, Essen: Klartext 2009 (= Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 41): 195. B. Godeša: “Social and cultural aspects”, 125. Kirn, Gal: “Why return to Yugoslavia and Yugoslav partisan film and video art today?”, in: Gal Kirn/Vedrana Madžar/Nataša Tepavčević, Unrealized Project:

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that the question of Partisans and Partisan memory is not only a matter of knowledge of the past. It also means facing the coming time, since Partisans as an emancipatory movement represent also a “utopian project oriented towards the future”.8 Therefore, a critical reflection upon Partisan history should also lead to enquiring about social goals and strategies that have to be pursued in the future we are politically responsible for: “It seems that any research on partisans needs to be done in a partisan way, that is, it needs to take sides.”9 Both the demand for a better knowledge of the past and the political engagement that links the past and the future show that the Partisan debate in Slovenia has quite a serious background. It nourishes a significant metalevel of cultural production questioning the nature, the role and the processes of memory and past reconstruction.

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ART AND PARTISANS BEFORE

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The historian Bojan Godeša strongly stresses the hegemonic role of the Yugoslav communist master narrative in Slovenia after WWII. According to it Partisans could not be but flawless positive heroes of the Slovene nation, the Yugoslav state and the communist revolution. This equation between Partisans and communists covered up the fact that many Slovene Partisans had other political orientations10 and it also simplified the various political conflicts within Slovene society during WWII: “The pre-1990 historiography on the Second World War and the post-war communist regime in Slovenia (1945-1990) drew its legitimacy directly from the occupation period and the period immediately after the war […], and purposefully subjected the

Partisan Revisiting of the Yugoslav Past, Berlin: Universität der Künste Berlin 2011: 9. The publication is a result of the partisan film retrospective Yu Go Banditen! at the Cinema Arsenal in Berlin (6–8 and 12–14.10.2011). 8 G. Kirn: “Why return to Yugoslavia”, 8. 9 G. Kirn: “Why return to Yugoslavia”, 11. 10 Mostly Christian-socialist and liberal orientation. See also Štih, Peter/Simoniti, Vasko/Vodopivec, Peter: Slowenische Geschichte: Gesellschaft – Politik – Kultur, Graz: Leykam 2008: 362–369 and Lešnik, Doroteja/Tomc, Gregor: Rdeče in črno. Slovensko partizanstvo in domobranstvo, Ljubljana: Znanstveno in publicistično središče 1995: 16–20.

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historiography of the time to that aim. Under communist rule a remarkable number of works was published […] confirming, either explicitly or implicitly, the officially authorized depiction of developments during World War II.”11

Given that, one could assume that the public debate on partisans in Slovenia and the questioning of the Yugoslav communist master narrative first began with the declaration of independence in 1991. Yet Godeša reminds us that “Slovenian historiography had begun to challenge the obsolete postWorld War II patterns already in the mid-1980s” when “the political relaxation […] made for an important contribution to transcending monolithic opinions and laid the ground for a new assessment of ideologically stereotyped and one-sided views.”12 In fact the 1980s are today generally considered as the period of the democratic opening of Slovene society both in scholarly research and in the arts. In 1988 France Bernik and Marjan Dolgan concluded their survey Slovenska vojna proza: 1941-1980 (Slovene war prose: 1941-1980) observing that some literary works that appeared already in the 1970s seemed to redefine the way of representing WWII in Slovene culture. Novels like Menuet za kitaro (Minuet for the guitar, 1975) by Vitomil Zupan and Ljubezen (Love, 1979) by Marjan Rožanc staged a narrator with “a critical attitude toward the legitimate, socially valid conception of the war past”. This narrator “avoids the exclusive [communist] ideology or refuses it downright,”13 highlights the political heterogeneity of the Partisan movement and gives more attention to the Home Guards’ life environment. Both Menuet za kitaro and Ljubezen were transposed into movies in the 1980s: the former constituted the literary base for Živojin Pavlović’s NASVIDENJE V NASLEDNJI VOJNI/SEE YOU IN THE NEXT WAR (1980) and the story of the latter was reused in a film of the same name, LJUBEZEN by Rajko Ranfl, in 1984. Peter Stanković remarks in his survey Rdeči trakovi. Reprezentacija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu (Red ribbons. Representation in Slovene Partisan cinema, 2005) that both these movies maintained the distance from the Yugoslav communist master narrative found in their literary sources.14 11 B. Godeša: “Social and cultural aspects”, 111–113. 12 B. Godeša: “Social and cultural aspects”, 111. 13 Bernik, France/Dolgan, Marjan: Slovenska vojna proza, Ljubljana: Slovenska matica 1988: 338 (quoted from the English summary, 332–340). 14 Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi. Reprezentacija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu, Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede 2005: 59.

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Yet alternative representations of the Partisan struggle did not appear for the first time in the 1970s and 1980s. It is an important achievement both of Bernik’s/Dolgan’s and Stanković’s surveys to show that such nonofficial representations were shaped in earlier times as well. One of the most important examples of a non-conformistic representation of Partisans is the story collection Strah in pogum (Fear and courage) published by Edvard Kocbek in 1951. This work does not characterize Partisans as onesidedly strong and self-confident heroes but it highlights their doubts and some inconsistencies of their behavior. Kocbek had been a leading figure of the Christian Socialist Partisans during WWII and he deals in Strah in pogum with their internal conflict between Church and Revolution, piety and violence.15 Kocbek’s heterodox position in relation to the Partisan struggle was perceived by the political and cultural establishment as potentially subversive and dangerous: the author was forced to retire and could not publish for some years.16 According to Bernik and Dolgan, the official repression campaign against Kocbek had important consequences on the development of Slovene prose on WWII: “All who wanted to follow it [the example of Strah in pogum], remained more or less blocked by the repression with which it had met.”17 On the other hand, the two scholars soften this statement concluding that the example of Strah in pogum after all worked on the literary representation of partisandom although Slovene writers preferred a mimicry play with the Yugoslav master narrative to direct confrontation.18 Thus they were able to gradually introduce more complex points of view on WWII in their texts until the publication of works such as Menuet za kitaro and Ljubezen could openly challenge the master narrative in the 1970s. Stanković confirms Bernik’s and Dolgan’s remarks about literature analyzing Slovene cinema. He highlights that Slovene movies tended to shape figures of Partisans that were not “completely classical heroes”19 already in the 1950s and especially from the 1960s

15 F. Bernik/M. Dolgan: Slovenska vojna proza, 155. 16 Cf. Virk, Tomo: “Uvodne upombe, in: Edvard Kocbek”: Strah in pogum, Ljubljana: DZS 1996: 22-23; Vrdlovec, Zdenko: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, Radovljica: Didakta 2010: 279-80. 17 F. Bernik/M. Dolgan: Slovenska vojna proza, 336. 18 F. Bernik/M. Dolgan: Slovenska vojna proza, 340. 19 “povsem klasični junaki” (P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 52). All translations from Slovenian in this text are mine.

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on. “Several examples of existential and political uncertainty”20 can be found in Partisan films of that period, constituting a link between these movies and the characters of Kocbek’s tales in Strah in pogum.21 The researches of Bernik/Dolgan and Stanković lead to the conclusion that the characterization of Partisans in Slovene literature and cinema did not always conform to the black-and-white master narrative of self-confident communist heroes proposed by the authorities of the People’s/Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Although the Partisans’ image was, until the end of the 1980s, “relatively consistent in the sense of their presentation as the ‘good’ side in the war”22 there were a few clear exceptions. Moreover, the Partisans’ goodness was in several cases asserted only after having been tested and sometimes even relativized. Such alternatives to the master narrative became more common in the 1980s but they played a (minor) role in Slovene culture already before. The apparently suppressed but in some cases just masked or softened tradition of pre-1990s alternative Partisan narratives constitutes an interesting topic that should be systematically examined and possibly connected with the later development of the Partisans’ discourse after 1991. This article would like to contribute to this investigation through the comparison of the movie TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE by František Čap from 1955 and its reelaboration in the homonymous art video by Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid from 1985. Gržinić and Šmid directly refer to Čap’s film as an important example of contested non-main-stream representation of the Slovene Partisan struggle: “The film TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE […] was deeply pushed and hidden into the film bunker23 since it was the first to deal with the question about the reconciliation between Partisans and Home Guards (domobranci) […] and it introduced the problem of the individual position […]. Because of that the film was like commissioned for a video experiment”.24 Gržinić’s 20 “mnog[i] primer[i] eksistencialne in politične negotovosti” (P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 52). 21 P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 52–53. 22 “relativno konsistentna v smislu njihovega predstavljanja kot ‘dobre’ strani v vojni”. (P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 59). On the larger context of Yugoslav partisan film see also Meden, Jurij et al. (eds.): Kino! (Partizanski Film) 10 (2010). 23 The expression “film bunker” was used in Yugoslavia in relation to ideologically undesirable films that were ‘forgotten’ and not shown in the movie theatres although they had not been prohibited by censorship. 24 “Film TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE […] so v sedemdesetih letih porinili in skrili globoko v filmski bunker, saj je načel temo sprave med partizani in domobranci

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and Šmid’s video was expression of a specific alternative cultural milieu of the 1980s, the Ljubljana underground culture that polemized against the Yugoslav official culture and protested against its authoritarian discourses and practices problematizing its ideological instrumentalization and simplification of history.25 Gržinić’s and Šmid’s video can thus be seen as a product of this critical attitude toward the past and as a result of the cultural openness of the 1980s. The comparison with Čap’s movie is stimulating, first of all because his film was shot in a period of stronger cultural closeness, the 1950s, and secondly because Čap did not belong to an oppositional milieu as Gržinić and Šmid. On the contrary, he was part of the Slovene film establishment of the 1950s, as a prominent film-maker of Triglav Film, the major Slovene film company of the time. Yet he was for some reason not completely accepted among colleagues and critics, apparently because he had a different filmic background. Čap was Czech by birth (the original spelling of his name is therefore Čáp) and had made a long carrier at Prague Barrandov Studios and later on in Munich shooting genre films. He moved to Slovenia when he was about 50 years old and could not cope with the filmic aesthetics of Slovene cinema, oriented towards the elitist notions of art and strongly related to the Slovene theater and literature commitment to nation building.26 Čap’s classical film à la Hollywood did not necessarily deal exclusively with light topics, yet not only his comedies but also his dramas, like for example TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE, were primarily intended to entertain. Therefore Čap’s movies were generally successful with the public but they were disliked by the experts. TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE was no exception: […] ter pozicijo posameznika […], zato je bil kot naročen za videoeksperiment” (Gržinić, Marina, “Performativno, politično in tehnološko”, in: Marina Gržinić /Tanja Velagić (eds.), Trenutki odločitve. Performativno, politično in tehnološko. Umetniški video, filmska in interaktivna večmedijska dela Marine Gržinić in Aine Šmid 1982-2005, Ljubljana: ZAK 2006: 24). 25 About the historical background of the Slovene underground, its development and its complex relationship with the Slovene national discourse on the one hand and with the Yugoslav system on the other hand see also Erjavec, Aleš/Gržinić, Marina (eds.): Ljubljana, Ljubljana. Osemdeseta leta v umetnosti in kulturi, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga 1991. Gržinić and Šmid belonged to the punk underground. 26 P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 46. Stanković claims that Slovene partisan films share the general closeness to theatre and literature and the elitism of Slovene cinema, but he also underlines that these films, as well as Slovene cinema in general, cannot be reduced to a single coherent trend.

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it had a problematic reception due not only to its way of staging the Slovene Home Guard but also due to its stylistic features, since it was a genre film. It was only 30 years later that Čap enjoyed a first revival and that his film served as an inspiring starting point for Gržinić’s and Šmid’s politically committed experimental underground video art: a fact that deserves a deeper analysis.

1955:

TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE BY FRANTIŠEK ČAP

The movie tells the story of the middle-class and middle-aged doctor Koren who decides to join the Slovene resistance during the war. The film plot is constituted of two sequences of moments of decision all related to the fight between Partisans and Home Guards and divided by a narrative transition that moves the setting from the city to the countryside. • First moment of decision: Home Guards wound and capture an important member of the Partisan resistance. They order doctor Koren who works at the hospital in Ljubljana to operate and hand him back. Yet one of the nurses, a member of the resistance, asks the doctor to save the Partisan. The doctor decides to help and suggests drugging the Home Guards and bringing the Partisan away while the Home Guards sleep. The doctor makes his decision although he knows that he will have to abandon his family and escape to join the Partisans.27 • Second moment of decision: The sleep-inducing drug does not work well on one of the Home Guards. He wakes up and tries to prevent the rescue of the Partisan. The Home Guard kills the hospital receptionist and is thereupon killed by doctor Koren. • Narrative transition: the doctor and the Partisans with their wounded mate manage to leave Ljubljana and attempt to cross a river. On the other side the resistance is in complete control of the territory. They have to convince a ferryman to bring them to the other side by boat. Yet the ferryman is not a member of the resistance. By coincidence he is the father of the Home Guard that doctor Koren killed in the hospi27 The film refers to the Slovene resistance using the expressions “naši” (ours) and “organizacija” (organization), avoiding the term “Partisans”. Similarly there is no mention of concrete geographical names. The word “domobranci”, however, is used once (cf. footnote 39).

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•

•

•

tal. He has been already told about his son’s death and has seen pictures of Koren and his travel mates, thus he recognizes them. Third moment of decision (by the ferryman): the ferryman decides to kill the doctor, deceiving him and his mates. He agrees to bring the resistance fighters to the other river side but he claims that doctor Koren is too heavy for his small boat and has to wait in the house until the ferryman comes back for him. Fourth moment of decision (by the doctor): Doctor Koren finds a midwife in the ferryman’s house because the ferryman’s daughter-in-law – the wife of the Home Guard killed by the doctor – is giving birth to a child. The midwife is desperate because mother and son are both dying. She laments the bitter destiny of the ferryman that has just received the news of the death of his son, a Home Guard killed by a doctor. Thus the doctor understands that the ferryman recognized him and wants to revenge his son. Yet he decides not to escape but to stay and operate the ferryman’s daughter-in-law and her child. Fifth moment of decision (by the ferryman): The ferryman comes back and sees the doctor saving his daughter-in-law and his grandchild. He decides to forgive the killer of his son and helps him to cross the river.

Čap’s TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE was quite a success and received three awards at the second Pula Film Festival in 1955.28 Yet the movie was also criticized from an ideological point of view. Two contributors of the partisan review Borec (The fighter) reviewed it writing that it was not admissible that “the father of a Home Guard becomes reconciled with a Partisan doctor and even gives him a moral ‘absolution’”.29 As a matter of fact, such a positive description of the Home Guards’ milieu is quite unusual for Slovene cinema. Peter Stanković points out in his study on Slovene Partisan film that catholic and anticommunist Home Guards were usually represented in Slovene movies in a very negative way according to the ideology of the Yugoslav state: “if someone is arrogant, unpleasant and ugly, he cannot be a Partisan. Only […] Home Guards are evil and ugly.”30 28 Zlatna arena (Golden Arena) for the best director, the best leading and the best supporting actor. 29 “[…] se oče domobranca pomiri s partizanskim zdravnikom in mu celo podeli moralno odvezo”. Quoted from Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 258. 30 “Če je nekdo aroganten, neprijeten in grd, potem že ne more biti partizan. Zli in grdi so zgolj […] domobranci”. P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 72. This representa-

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Actually TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE stages Home Guards themselves in a similar negative, ideologically conform way. It is just the Home Guard’s father, the ferryman, who is depicted in a different way, yet his characterization alone is challenging enough for the official ideology of Yugoslavia. The ferryman’s decision to forgive the doctor represents him in the movie as a person capable of high moral actions. Therefore it suggests that not only Partisans or Partisan-close people but also Home Guards’ relatives, if not Home Guards themselves, can have positive values and conduct. The last scenes of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE strongly humanize the Home Guards’ milieu showing the interior struggle of the ferryman, who has to decide between revenge and forgiving. It was probably this scene that brought to Stane Potokar, the actor who played the ferryman, one of the three awards at the Pula Film Festival and the admiration of his colleagues.31 Čap’s directing in the scene clearly aims for a climax of both physical and verbal intensity centered on Potokar/ferryman. The film-maker shot some closeups in which the ferryman stares at doctor Koren with wide-open eyes (Ill. 1) until he stands up, gives his rifle to the doctor and tells him in simple but forceful words “vi niste morilec” (you aren’t a murder), “ta čas niste mogli drugače” (at the time you couldn’t do anything else), “zdaj ste mi pač še vnuka dali” (yet you give me a grandchild), “vse to moram pa pozabit, vse se mora pa glihat v moji glavi” (I have to forget everything, everything must be evened in my mind).32

tional pattern is partly modified in alternative Partisan films such as PETA ZASEDA (1968) and CHRISTOPHOROS (1985). 31 Koch, Vladimir: “Smisel rutine”, in: Zdenko Vrdlovec/Jože Dolmark (eds.): František Čap, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1981: 58. See also Vrdlovec, Zdenko: “František Čap – sprava bez spora”, in: Zdenko Vrdlovec/Jože Dolmark (eds.): František Čap, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1981: 92. 32 The first meaning of “glihati” is “to haggle” but this verb can be used also in the sense of “zravnati” (make even). The practical and concrete vocabulary of the ferryman stresses his humble origins and increases the forcefulness of his words: since he wants to correctly haggle over his son’s death he forgives the doctor because he settled his debt of blood by saving the ferryman’s grandchild and daughter-in-law. The contrast between the morality of the character and his low social position and education is suggested not only by his vocabulary but also by his vernacular pronunciation of the Slovene language that I cannot transcribe here.

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Ill. 1: Stane Potokar as the ferryman in TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE (František Čap, 1955), film frame. © Slovenski filmski center The last scene of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE relativizes the moral exceptionality of the Partisans and leads the spectators to identify with the figure of a Home Guard’s father who is able to find the right way “in the moral dilemma between the pathological desire of revenge and the pressure of the moral superego”.33 Although there are understandable reasons according to which the film could be criticized from the official point of view, one could also object that Čap’s ideological incorrectness was actually not that great. Finally, the ferryman of his film decides to help the Partisan doctor, thus he chooses to be on the good side, the side of the Partisans. Moreover, his “absolution” of the doctor means an implicit acknowledgment of the doctor’s behaviour. Yet the figure of the ferryman is just a part of the problem that the film could constitute for Partisan ideology in the 1950s. The film scholar Zdenko Vrdlovec already pointed it out in the 1980s. According to him, Čap’s film represents a challenge for Slovene Partisan cultural memory from its very first scene. Here a circular tracking from above shows a panoramic view of a city easily recognizable as Ljubljana, while the voice-over comments:

33 “v moralnem razcepu med patološko željo po maščevanju in pritiskom moralnega nadjaza”. In: Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 258.

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“It happened during the war when it seemed that humanity would be stamped down. Yet very mighty characters appeared during this frightening fight. It is not at all important who they were and where they were from, prominent or not, well known or not. Important is just that they were people who conserved the feeling for justice and truth. Our story would like to speak of them. Once there was a city, one as many other, and there was a river that represented the frontier of justice and truth. It was a bloody river, since every truth demands a large amount of human lives and much blood.”34

Quite an idyllic image of a river appears on the screen at the very point when the voice-over mentions it (Ill. 2). The historical meaning of the river becomes clear in the course of the film: it symbolizes the division between the partisans and the Home Guards, it is bloody because of the split in the Slovene society during WWII.

Ill. 2: The river in Čap’s film TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE (František Čap, 1955), film frame. © Slovenski filmski center

34 “Zgodilo se je med vojno, ko se je že zdelo, da bo človeštvo poteptano. In prav v tistem strahovitem boju so se oblikovali mogočni značaji. Prav nič ni važno, kdo so bili in odkod so prišli, neznatni ali pomembni, znani ali neznani, važno je le, da so bili ljudje, ki so hranili čut za pravičnost in resnico, in o teh bi rada govorila naša zgodba. Bilo je neko mesto, mnogo je bilo takih mest, in bila je reka, ki je pomenila mejo med resnice in pravice. Krvava reka je bila to, kajti sleherna resnica terja grmade človeških življenj in mnogo krvi” (my transcription and translation from the film).

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Čap’s emphasis on this conflict was new in Slovene cinema. Home Guards had already been shown in the first Slovene Partisan film NA SVOJI ZEMLJI/ON OUR OWN LAND by France Štiglic (1948) but they had not been represented there as the main enemy of the Partisans, this role belonging to the Germans.35 Their negative characterization in NA SVOJI ZEMLJI worked nearly as a trivialization of the importance and danger they posed for the Partisans. Home Guards were in this movie not only arrogant, unpleasant and ugly. They seemed also quite careless towards the fight they got into and definitively more interested in drinking and eating at the expense of poor village people than in defeating the Partisans. Home Guards did not appear in NA SVOJI ZEMLJI as the core problem to solve – the Germans were the real obstacle – but as an unfortunate mishap to get rid of.36 On the contrary, the first sequences of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE propose a very serious consideration of the conflict between the Partisans and the Home Guards, as not only Gržinić and Šmid have remarked.37 Yet already the first sequences of the film make clear that TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE does not intend to represent its historical topic – the clash between Partisans and Home Guards – from a strictly historical point of view: the story is presented rather as a kind of moral exemplum, a parable on humanity in trouble. The voice-over does not refer to history at all: there are neither Partisans nor Home Guards, there are just a destructive war and people that are “mighty”, that “have a feeling for justice and truth”. There is no Ljubljana, but a certain town and a certain river, the ferryman’s river that represents the dividing line between truth and lies, justice and injustice. There is no doubt that truth and rightness are according to the film’s value system on the side of the Partisans. Yet the very core of the movie’s problem seems not to be that they have to defeat the evil Home Guards. It appears more important that Home Guards and Partisan resistance become reconciled as the doctor and the ferryman do. Vrdlovec calls this way to

35 TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE was the third film on Partisans produced in Slovenia after NA SVOJI ZEMLJI, the first full-length fiction film of Slovene cinema, and TRST/TRIESTE, also by Štiglic (1951), a movie that focused on the communists’ resistance in Trieste against Nazis and fascists during WWII and did not mention the Slovene Home Guard. 36 For an exhaustive analysis of Home Guards and Nazis in Slovene Partisan film see P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 60–66; 70–76. 37 Valič, Denis: “František Čap: Trenutki odločitve ali trenutek ‘podobe-akcije’”, in: Ekran 42.1-2 (2005): 14.

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represent the Slovene civil war during WWII “mythical”: it constitutes a universalization of history and makes out of the Home Guards’/Partisans’ conflict a grand récit on the hatred among brothers.38 It is perhaps the reason why the resistance fighters are never called Partisans in the film but always “naši” or “organizacija”. They are only partly presented as an historical actor. Rather, they embody a universal principle – these “mighty characters” are able not only to make the right decisions but also, like doctor Koren, to convert the enemy to the right side through their superior moral behavior. Thus the voice-over of the beginning seems to suggest that good and evil fight primarily not on the political but on the ethical level: here the moral naši struggle against the unmoral drugi (the others). Yet the one-off mention of the word domobranci (Home Guards) is enough to keep history and politics within the film’s frame.39 One could even take this mention as a provocation by Čap: Slovenes should think more about the identity of domobranci because they were also a part of the nation, that is, brothers of Slovene partisans, although ‘sick’ brothers. They are “‘ill’ tissue of the same body. A body that therefore needs to be healed or better to cicatrize in order to be entire again in its quality as body of the nation”.40 Although Čap’s movie does not claim it directly, it possibly displays this political message through the extremely symbolic (mythical) figures of a doctor that heals a Home Guard’s wife and a ferryman – the father of a Home Guard – that can cross and let others cross the river that divides naši and Home Guards. Although it is important to focus on the political implications of Čap’s filmic approach to the conflict between Partisans and Home Guards, it would certainly be a mistake to read TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE exclusively 38 Vrdlovec, Zdenko: “František Čap – sprava bez spora”, 33; and Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 256. 39 The word is mentioned at the beginning: the doctor says to the nurse that it were “domobranci” who phoned him. Vrdlovec claims that neither Partisans nor Home Guards are mentioned as such in the movie and that the latters are referred as tile (those) (Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 256). It is possible that Vrdlovec did not notice the word in the dialogue between doctor and nurse, but I cannot exclude the possibility that I watched a later version of the movie in which this part (and some more?) of the film was rewritten and dubbed to make the film more explicit. 40 “‘nezdravega’ tkiva istega telesa. Telesa, ki ga je torej treba ozdraviti, ali bolje, zaceliti, da bi bilo kot telo naroda spet celo, eno” (Z. Vrdlovec: “František Čap – sprava bez spora”, 33).

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from a political point of view. Čap may have really thought that Slovene society did not want to face the Home Guards issue critically. He may also have wanted to show in his film that another attitude towards history was possible. Yet Čap was not a politically committed film-maker but an experienced director of genre films, dramas and comedies for a large public based on suspense and entertainment. The director of Triglav film, Branimir Tuma, invited Čap to work in Slovenia exactly because he had acquired considerable professional competence in classical film à la Hollywood in Prague and Munich.41 At the beginning of the 1950s, Triglav film was trying to produce movies according to a more commercial aesthetics: less ideologically codified products, technically quite accurate and more entertaining than the first Slovene post-war films. Tuma wanted Čap to share his knowledge with the Slovene film directors and workers since they did not have any experience in genre films.42 Given that, the analysis of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE has to take into account that it was conceived as a genre movie. Though genre films often deal with history, they do not do it at the expense of suspense and entertainment. Čap strongly relied on suspense effects in the montage of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE. For example, the confrontation between doctor and ferryman at the end of the film is entirely based on the counterpoint of alternating sequences taking place in two different rooms. One sequence line shows through many short scenes how doctor Koren saves the ferryman’s daughter-in-law and her child. The different parts of the medical interventions follow in quite rapid succession suggesting the urgency of the doctor’s work. These scenes are interpolated by the sequence line of the ferryman coming back home, watching (unseen) the doctor working and waiting in the next room for the result of the operation while he wonders if he has to kill or to forgive the doctor. The several close-ups of the ferryman’s face and of the objects close to him (the pictures of the doctor and the ferryman’s rifle) slow down the movie’s tempo 41 Čap, František: “Čap o sebi”, in: Zdenko Vrdlovec/Jože Dolmark (eds.): František Čap, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1981: 95-100. On Čap’s filmic activity in Czechoslovakia see: Bilík, Petr: Panorama českého filmu, Olomouc: Rubico 2000: 75–76 and 95. Čap's filmic activity not only in Czechoslovakia but also in Western Germany and in Yugoslavia has been the topic of a recent retrospective organized by the Czech National Film Archive at cinema Ponrepo in Prague. See: Kofroň, Václav (ed.): Čáp, Praha: Národní filmový archiv 2013. 42 On the role of the “Hollywood touch” in Slovene cinema of the 1950s and Čap’s contribution see: Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 243–281.

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and stress the character’s dramatic interior struggle in such a strong way that the spectator waits with bated breath to know the ferryman’s decision. The technique of the alternating sequences is used here both to generate suspense and to show technical mastery, an essential distinguishing mark of genre movie makers. Also the film dialogues connect TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE with the genre films: they are quite simple and have the function to stress what the spectators see and to stir their emotions. Although Slovene filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s usually commissioned the script of their films to well-known literati, Čap ended up writing them himself to be sure that they suited the exigencies of the film’s visual material and tempo.43 Looking at the historical content of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE from a filmic point of view makes it possible to assume that the movie comes to humanize the life milieu of the Slovene Home Guard not only for political but also for proper filmic reasons. Čap wanted to shoot a drama on WWII in Slovenia according to the rules of this film genre: a drama plot that gave the possibility to identify with both the Partisan doctor and the Home Guard’s father and to achieve a final catharsis through their reconciliation simply helped the film to achieve a stronger emotional impact on the spectators. Anyway, the critics that disliked Čap’s plot and the positive humanization of a Home Guard’s father would not have had more comprehension for filmic than for political reasons. Post-war Slovene film must have – at least according to film critics and other intellectuals of the 1950s – a national political and educational function and its main rhetorical goal should not be delectare but creatively reflect upon Slovene present reality as well as the old and recent national past in order to docere the spectators about the meaning of Slovene history.44 Though movere was allowed, it had to be related to the gnoseological and pedagogical intentions of cinema. Both film critics and film-makers criticized Čap’s works according to the argument that he was a good artisan of cinema (since he could movere and delectare) but not an artist (for he could not critically and creatively doce43 Koch, Vladimir: “Smisel rutine”, 58–59. 44 About the aesthetics of post-war Slovene film and the debates on its pedagogic and artistic goals on the one hand, and its entertainment function on the other cf. Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 243–281 and Furlan, Silvan: “Kratka predstavitev slovenskega čelovečernega filma”, in: Silvan Furlan/Bojan Kavčič/Liljana Nedič/Zdenko Vrdlovec (eds.), Filmografija slovenskih čelovečernih filmov 1931-1993, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej: 7-15.

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re). France Brenk defined Čap in his Kratka zgodovina slovenskega filma (Short history of Slovene film) as a clever artisan (izdelovalec) in opposition to the film creators (ustvarjalci): “At the time when Slovene film oscillated between amateurism and dilettantism, between dilettantism and professionalism, František Čap certainly showed what the production of technically well-running films really means. The younger generation of Slovene film workers learned much from his stay in Slovenia. And they learned how you have to produce a film, and how it is not possible [in the sense of “how you cannot succeed in”] to creatively make movies.”45

The ambivalent relationship of the Slovene film establishment with Čap constitutes a complex topic that is actually not directly related to Čap’s attitude towards the Partisans. Yet one cannot avoid suspecting that TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE’s challenge to the official Partisan narrative may be partly read as Čap’s reaction to the ambivalent opinion of his Slovene colleagues on his film work. He shot a movie that was politically provocative (although with moderation) in order to answer to criticisms against his filmic style. TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE aimed to show that also genre movies were able to offer alternative views on important historical topics. Therefore it questioned not only the idea that genre films lack artistic quality but also the prejudice that they miss historical or political commitment.

45 “V času nihanja slovenskega filma med amaterizmom in diletantizmom, med diletantizmom in profesionalizmom, je František Čap nedvomno pokazal, kaj se pravi obrtniško tekoče izdelovati filme. Ob njegovem gostovanju v Sloveniji se je učila mlajša generacija slovenskih filmskih delavcev. In učila se je, kako je treba izdelovati in kako ni mogoče filme ustvarjati” (Brenk, France: Kratka zgodovina slovenskega filma na Slovenskem, Ljubljana: Dopisna delavska univerza Univerzum 1979: 110. Quoted in Z. Vrdlovec: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, 252).

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1985:

TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE BY MARINA GRŽINIĆ AND AINA ŠMID The reservations of the Slovene film establishment against Čap played an important role in the oblivion he fell into after his death.46 Čap was quite neglected until the 1980s when he was rediscovered as an innovative filmmaker of his time. A seminal work for Čap’s revival was the essay collection on him published by Vrdlovec and Dolmark that opened – significantly enough – the study series Slovenski film (Slovene film). This is where Vrdlovec published his interpretation of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE as a mythological film in 1981, claiming that Čap introduced a new way of narrating into Slovene cinema: “his story-telling mythologized the Adamitic fiction based on the stereotype of a ‘natural’, ‘innocent’ film language deeply buried in the heritage of a certain [classic Hollywoodian] film tradition, whereas Slovene film strove for the fiction of (preferably historical) reality and it was lacking in the myth of the story and its narration”.47 The art video TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE by Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid was another signal of the renewed interest for Čap and was meant to be a critical return (“kritična vrnitev”)48 to his Partisan movie. The first images of the video programmatically show the aesthetic pattern along which Čap’s film was critically reused. The whole video is made by the combination of original sequences from the movie and other visual material. This can be interpolated as at the beginning of Gržinić’s and Šmid’s video, where the movie title TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE is combined with the original music of Čap’s film (by Bojan Adamič), but it is superimposed on a painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Das Kreuz im Gebirge (The cross in the mountains, 1808). It follows a caption presenting the film: “Video moments of decision reconstructs acting and situations taken from the film, which in a very specific way marked the cultural climate of the 50s when it was 46 “There were nearly no film workers at the funeral, there were even no members of his team” (“Na pogrebu filmskih delavcev skoraj ni bilo, celo članov njegove ekipe ne”, see: V. Koch: “Smisel rutine”, 62). 47 “njegovo pripovedovanje zgodb je mitologiziralo adamsko fikcijo, ki je temeljila na stereotipu ‘naravne’, ‘nedolžne’ filmske govorice, globoko zakopane v dediščino določene filmske tradicije, medtem ko se je slovenski film prizadeval za fikcijo realnosti (najraje zgodovinske), pa mu je pri tem manjkal ‘mit’ zgodbe in njene naracije” (Z. Vrdlovec: “František Čap”, 40). 48 M. Gržinić: “Performativno, politično in tehnološko”, 22.

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made”.49 Not only the interpolation but also the superimposition of images contributes to Gržinić’s and Šmid’s “critical return” to Čap’s film. Thanks to the bluescreen technique50 Gržinić and Šmid appear themselves in the video dressed like ladies of the 1930s and take actively part in Čap’s plot or comment it playing the role of characters related to the film story. Gržinić ‘jumps in’ the movie when her face is superimposed on that of the nurse that pushes Doctor Koren to make his first decision (Ill. 3). Later on Gržinić (as nurse) and Šmid (as her sister) comment the doctor’s behavior adding some particulars that we do not find in Čap’s film: Gržinić-nurse tells that she was fond of doctor Koren but did not have any success with him. Gržinić herself declares in an auto-analysis of the video TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE that one of its aims was to shift the focus from the male protagonists of Čap’s film to women and to transform the Partisan story into a melodramatic love story between the nurse and the doctor. Thus the video had to work as a profanizacija of the Partisan topic usually presented as a (male) war epos.51 49 “TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE video projekt ki rekonstruira igro in situacije iz filma ki je na specifičen način obeleževal čas in kulturno klimo v kateri je nastajal”. I quoted from the English subtitles of the video, but I corrected the wrong time indication “of the 60s”. It is very probably an oversight since the Slovene caption does not give any precise time indication (see also DVD supplement of Gržinić, Velagić). 50 To be exact, the bluescreen does not allow a simple superimposition but a real insertion of images: “The blue-key [bluescreen] is one among a variety of technical and esthetical video-strategies of color-key (chroma-key), i.e. the insertion of a certain color into the video. The expression blue-key is also used instead of chroma-key, blue usually being the color used. During the video montage, this procedure makes it possible to change the chosen color with every kind of small image inserted from whatever source and space.” (“Modri ključ je ena od različic tehnične in estetske videostrategije barvnega ključa (chroma-key), ki pomeni vpeljavo določene barve v video, navadno modre, zato se namesto izraza chroma-key uporablja tudi blue-key. Pri montaži videa omogoča ta postopek zamenjavo izbrane barve s katerokoli sličico, vstavljeno iz kateregakoli vira ali prostora”. M. Gržinić: “Performativno, politično in tehno– loško”, 20). 51 M. Gržinić: “Performativno, politično in tehnološko”, 23. Stanković stresses that women play an important role in the Partisan filmic epos and are often represented as not less independent and resolute than male Partisans, although female characters are not always staged in Slovene cinema as Partisans themselves. But as Partisans’ supporters (for example as courageous mothers, see also P. Stanković: Rdeči trakovi, 94–103). Therefore Gržinić’s and Šmid’s profanization does not relies on the mere fact that they insist on the character of the

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Ill. 3: Gržinić/nurse and doctor Koren in Gržinić’s and Šmid’s art video in TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE (Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, 1985), video frame © publisher ZAK The expansion of Čap’s plot through the introduction of a certain female perspective, that is the change of gender focus, is not the only way in which the video relativizes the Partisan narrative. Gržinić and Šmid do not simply add new aspects to the film’s plot, they also modify the story of the film at one point. In the movie, doctor Koren must leave his family in order to join the Partisans, whereas his voice-off in the video claims that he has been alone for 20 years. The voice even remarks that the nurse can probably understand him since she is a fighter and fighters sacrifice their life for their country. Gržinić claims that this sentence was part of Čap’s original script for the film but it was changed on the set because it stressed too much the opposition between collective and individuals. It implicitly suggested that the Partisan ideology repressed the intimate ties among people, therefore it could not be accepted by communist Yugoslav state propaganda.52 (Re-) Introducing the (self-censored?) sentence in the TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE’s story Gržinić and Šmid hinted both at the suppression of the individual in Partisan ideology and at the control over freedom of speech and expression in socialist Yugoslavia. partisan nurse, for such figures were quite common in Partisan cinema. The very novelty of their video is rather the fact that the nurse does not appear here in her function as a valorous member of the resistance, like in Čap’s movie, but as the sentimental female character of a melodrama. 52 M. Gržinić: “Performativno, politično in tehnološko”, 21.

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The very dense and also quite enigmatic last sequences of the video also contribute to relativizing in some way the official Partisan narrative of socialist Yugoslavia. Superimposed Gržinić and Šmid first appear inside a painting of the soc-art artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, What Is To Be Done? from the series Nostalgic Socialist Realism (1981-82).

Ill. 4: Gržinić and Šmid inside Vitaly Komar’s and Alexander Melamid’s painting What Is To Be Done? in TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE (Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, 1985), video frame © publisher ZAK

Ill. 5: Komar’s and Melamid’s painting Nostalgic View on the Kremlin from Manhattan in TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE (Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, 1985), video frame © publisher ZAK They say the following sentence: “We have turned the whole world into a blooming garden”. A second painting of Komar and Melamid, Nostalgic

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View on the Kremlin from Manhattan, hints at the ‘garden world’ of socialism (Ill. 4 and 5). This might be symbolized also by the following part of the video that introduces some frames from Čap’s film showing river and nature (very similar to Ill. 2). Later on Šmid is quoting on a rock the words that the ferryman says to the doctor in Čap’s film when he forgives him. “I have to forget everything”. Yet she transforms the ferryman’s second sentence “Everything must be evened in my mind” into “Everything has to be repeated”. Her message is followed by the last subtitle sentence “It is already late” and the image of the ferryman and the doctor crossing the river by boat that concludes the video.53 What do the final sequences and the video as a whole actually mean? Gržinić writes: “someone from the present time and perhaps the future (in any case two marginal punk video artists) can occupy the (film and social) past and even conceptualize a new (political) future for it”.54 Yet it is not easy to understand which new political future the “marginal punk video artists” Gržinić and Šmid are conceptualizing here. First of all it is necessary to identify and decipher the numerous quotations and allusions to visual art, film and literature that are present in the video.55 Yet the meaning of the video and particularly its end remains still quite ambivalent also for those that are aware of its high degree of intertextuality. On the one hand the sentence about the world being like a blooming garden seems to suggest a distance from communism because it is combined with soc-art paintings and therefore with the tradition of critical double meaning. Yet the last sentences of Gržinić’s and Šmid’s video are contradictory: they state the necessity both to forget and to repeat everything. What has to be forgotten

53 The last sentence is only part of the English subtitles and is not spoken by any character of the video. It could be another oversight, yet it would be a very interesting one because the sentence exactly translates the last words of Čap’s film (“pozno je že”) that the ferryman says, inviting the doctor to follow him to the boat. I do not know if the English subtitles were also part of Gržinić’s and Šmid’s original video from 1985 or if they were added later (they are not mentioned in the credits). 54 “nekdo iz sedanjosti ali morda prihodnosti (vsekakor dve obrobni punkovski videoumetnici) lahko zasede to (filmsko in družbeno) preteklost in celo konceptualizira novo (politično) prihodnost zanjo” (M. Gržinić: “Performativno, politično in tehnološko”, 23). 55 A great knowledge is required to recognize all of them. I am able to indicate some because I read Gržinić’s explanations about the video before and after watching it.

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and repeated? The nurse’s melodramatic love for the doctor? Yet why should it be repeated, if it implies the still subordinate role of women in the Slovene society? Is this to be understood as an ironical statement or even as an exhortation to repeat and change the story in a new and more emancipatory way? Though, the sentence could also mean that the story of partisans and Home Guards has to be forgotten and repeated. But which part of this story – their reconciliation, symbolized by the doctor and the ferryman in Čap’s movie, or the fight between right and left and the siege of the partisans? And again: in which sense should these events be forgotten and repeated? The spectator does not know for sure. In any case he is told by the last subtitle that “it is already late”: an utterance of pessimism or an exhortation to act quickly? A great attention for the past and the ambivalence of its meanings, quotations and double coding are all features that recall the aesthetics of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), the Slovene alternative underground postavant-garde artistic movement of the 1980s.56 Gržinić has stressed many times how much her and Šmid’s video art was influenced by NSK, especially by the IRWIN group of visual artists.57 Its members as well as the Laibach music band and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek even appear as protagonists of some videos of Gržinić and Šmid.58 Therefore we can consider their work on Čap’s TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE as a part of the way alternative culture in Slovenia approached and problematized the past in the 1980s. On the one hand it recalled this past and concentrated on taboo topics like the inner split of Slovene society between ex-Partisans and ex-Home Guards, on the other hand it displaced the old discourse through new ones like for example feminism. The deliberate focus on the past and its recontextualization according to new frames is at the very core of the NSK’s concept of retroprincip that was defined by the IRWIN group in 1984. The philosopher and art scholar Mojca Puncer sums up it as follows: “Ret-

56 See for instance: Arns, Inke (ed.): Neue Slowenische Kunst – NSK: Laibach, Irwin, Gledališče sester Scipion Nasice, Kozmokinetično gledališče Rdeči pilot, Kozmokinetični kabinet Noordnung, Novi kolektivizem: eine Analyse ihrer künstlerischen Strategien im Kontext der 1980er Jahre in Jugoslawien, Regensburg: Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie 2002. 57 M. Gržinić: “Performativno, politično in tehnološko”, 25. 58 IRWIN: Transcentrala/ NSK država v času (IRWIN: Transcentral/ NSK country in time) 1993 and Postsocializem + Retroavantgarda + IRWIN (Postsocialism + Retro-avant-garde + IRWIN) 1997.

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roprincip argues for a permanent change of language and figurative expression and eclectically relies on art history with a special attention to the historical experience of Slovene art history. Hereby it strives for the permutation of ways of viewing and for the reinterpretation and the reshaping of existing figurative models”.59 Although the retroprincip was originally defined in relation to figurative or, better, to visual art history its validity extends to the whole artistic production of the NSK’s milieu.

P ARTISAN ( AND )

ALTERNATIVES : QUESTIONING MASTER NARRATIVES AND SHIFTING UTOPIAS

Gržinić’s and Šmid’s 1980s post-avant-garde video art does not appear to have much in common with Čap’s classical cinema of the 1950s. The former is very political and self-reflecting whereas the latter relies on identification and makes emotional dramatic entertainment out of a delicate and provoking political topic. Yet alternative culture from the 1980s was (not only in Slovenia) very attracted by popular culture, for example by genre movies. Popular culture was supposed to be a container of cultural representations and practices that were not the official ones or could be used against them. Thus Gržinić and Šmid became interested in Čap not only because he devoted his attention to the Slovene Home Guard but also because he enacted the Partisan narrative in a Hollywoodian ‘popular’ way that in the result was provocative for his time. It is hard to say how aware the director of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE was of the provocative potential of his film from a political point of view. It is also difficult to figure out if some personal discontent with the Slovene film establishment influenced his choice of an awkward historical and political topic. Anyway: the punk video-artists Gržinić and Šmid worked both on the historical-political and the aesthetic potential of the film and contributed to counterculture with their video.

59 “Retroprincip zagovarja stalno menjavo jezika in likovnega izraza in se eklektično navezuje na zgodovino umetnosti, s posebno pozornostjo do zgodovinske izkušnje slovenske likovne umetnosti. Pri tem si prizadeva za permutacijo načinov gledanja ter za reinterpretacijo in poustvarjanje obstoječih likovnih modelov” (Puncer, Mojca: Sodobna umetnost in estetika, Ljubljana: ZAK 2010: 113).

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The example of the ‘double’ TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE is therefore intriguing at least for three reasons: 1) First of all it confirms the fact that the official master narrative of Partisans as heroes was put in question in the 1980s and shows that alternative representations appeared in Slovene culture also before, for instance in the 1950s. 2) Secondly both Čap’s film and Gržinić’s/Šmid’s video show how complex the relationship between politics and aesthetics can be. Čap’s first aim seemed to be the introduction of a new filmic style yet this attempt enlaced with the political discourse, as Gržinić and Šmid want to underline. They exploit the dramatic narrative style of Čap and reshape his film into a melodramatic love-story. On the other hand, they prevent the spectator to fully identify with the nurse’s perspective since the video’s fragmentary combination of different visual and discursive paths induces a critical fruition open to many meanings. 3) The very fact that Gržinić and Šmid directly appealed to Čap’s version of the Partisan narrative raises the question of possible ‘alternative narrative patterns’ on Partisans in Slovene culture. The comparison between the film and the video TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE suggests that it could be useful to expand the work Dolgan/Bernik and Stanković did in their surveys and collect all examples of alternative Partisans’ images in art from the 1950s to the 1980s and see how they refer to each other as well as to not-artistic discourses and practices in their variation or deviation of the official discourse. Such a research should not only prove the existence of an alternative line of representation of Partisans but also highlight the different contexts, intentions and artistic premises from which single narratives originate. As I have shown, Gržinić and Šmid deliberately refer to Čap and inscribe their art video both in the 1980s rediscovering of his work and in the debates around civil war in Slovenia during WWII. Nevertheless, their rewriting of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE differs deeply from the film. The latter is based on the affirmative introduction of genre movie features into Slovene cinema, and its moderate deviation from the official Partisan narrative seems to be rather a side effect of Čap’s Hollywood aesthetics. On the other hand, the critical potential of NSK’s retroprincip and the technical possibilities of video art programmatically link the aesthetical and the political discourse in Gržinić’s and Šmid’s TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE.60

60 This kind of research on alternative Partisan narrative patterns in Slovene culture should be necessarily integrated with the examination of these patterns both

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Another stimulating question is how the alternative Partisans’ images of the past like those of both Čap and Gržinić/Šmid are considered and reused in post-1991 Slovenia. As far as I know no rewriting of Čap’s TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE was produced after Gržinić’s and Šmid’s art video. Yet I would like to briefly suggest how this story could be told today according to the features that the non-official discourse on Partisans has assumed in Slovenia after 1991. Kirn’s plea to consider the Partisans’ fight as an emancipatory gesture rich of potentiality for the future does not represent an isolated position. While Kirn co-organized a festival on Partisan film in Berlin in 2011, the militant art historian Miklavž Komelj organized 2009/2010 in Ljubljana an exhibition on Partisans’ art during WWII and wrote a welldocumented essay on this subject.61 He claims that the aim of his analysis is to present Partisan art as “art that does not exist yet […] as a break in the art, as a setting of new coordinates of thinking the art in relation between the existent and the not-yet-existent, as the empty space for the not-yetexistent”.62 There are several other leftist cultural actors in today’s Slovenia besides Kirn and Komelj, both also represented in this volume, who stress the positive significance of Partisans.63 At first glance, their stance seems to be quite different from that of Čap and Gržinić/Šmid. Both the film and the video TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE do not deny the positive role of Partisans in Slovene history, yet their intention is not to express support for Partisans but rather to explore some problematic aspects of the topic. Yet there is a link between Čap, Gržinić/Šmid and the positions of Kirn, Komelj and others: they all want to provide an image of Partisans that is on the comprehensive Yugoslav level and in the other single parts of the federal state. 61 Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? Ljubljana: Mala galerija, 22.12.2009–17.1.2010. The homonymous essay was published by *cf. in Ljubljana in 2009. 62 “kot umetnost, ki je še ni […] kot prelom v umetnosti, kot postavitev novih koordinat mišljenja umetnosti v odnosu med obstoječim in še-ne-obstoječim, kot prazen prostor za še-ne-obstoječe” (M. Komelj: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost, 496). See also his article in this volume. 63 Some choirs even specialized in Partisan songs, for instance veterans’ choirs (in which younger people also sing) or the female choir Kombinat from Ljubljana. In 2010, Andraž Pöschl shot an interesting documentary film on Partisan songs and Partisan memory culture in today’s Slovenia: PESEM UPORA/REBEL SONG. The film shows how broad and manifold the interest for Partisans is: from intellectuals to workers, from veterans to their grandchildren, from the Slovenes from Slovenia to the Slovene minority in Italy etc.

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alternative to the master narrative of their time. Čap and Gržinić/Šmid questioned the Yugoslav communism master narrative that depicted Partisans as flawless heroes and presented their ascent as the ultimate panacea for Slovene history and society. Kirn and Komelj put into question the western master narrative of contemporary Slovenia that dismisses communism and the Yugoslav system as entirely negative experiences of the past. Crucial elements of the master narrative of yesterday have therefore become part of the alternative culture of today. They look for a way to survive and spread in a social environment that does presently not support them. It is the very reason why Kirn and Komelj insist on the Partisan fight as a disruptive future-oriented emancipatory gesture. Quoting Frederic Jameson, one could speak of Partisans as utopia: “Disruption is, then, the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes […] the experience of the total formal break and discontinuity”.64 Thus, I think, a contemporary version of TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE would be more strongly on the side of Partisans then Čap’s and Gržinić’s/Šmid’s ones were. It would very probably highlight the very fact that the doctor finally does cross the river – that is, he breaks with his old life and begins something new. It is possible that also the ferryman would join the Partisans in a present version of the story in order to stress the disruptive force of every utopian project. Yet utopia is an ambivalent phenomenon: it is supposed to provide the imaginative condition for a better alternative to a given society, but it is also something that has “the fundamental structural characteristic […] to remain an unrealizable phantasy”.65 It seems that every attempt to realize a grand-scale utopia necessarily corrupts itself with power and ends up betraying the utopian idea. Then new narratives appear in order to challenge the gap between the original utopian idea and its alleged realization. These narratives protest against the state of affairs of history and society, delegitimize self-proclaimed ‘existing’ utopias and shift the utopian focus on 64 Jameson, Frederic: Archeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London/New York: Verso 2005: 231. The link between Partisans and utopia seems to be particularly strong in contemporary Slovene culture. Yet it does not mean that it always has a completely affirmative slant. Mirt Komel shows in his analysis of the short film TRST JE NAŠ/TRIESTE IS OURS (2010) in this volume, that the representation of the utopian charge of the Partisan topic can assume a decidedly ambivalent form. 65 F. Jameson: Archeologies of the Future, 227.

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something new. Nevertheless, Partisans do not seem to risk any shift of position in Slovenia at the moment: as long as no institutional and/or conservative power relies on them to legitimize itself they will remain on the utopian side for leftist alternative culture. Let’s see how long they will occupy this position.66

B IBLIOGRAPHY Arns, Inke (ed.): Neue Slowenische Kunst – NSK: Laibach, Irwin, Gledališče sester Scipion Nasice, Kozmokinetično gledališče Rdeči pilot, Kozmokinetični kabinet Noordnung, Novi kolektivizem: eine Analyse ihrer künstlerischen Strategien im Kontext der 1980er Jahre in Jugoslawien, Regensburg: Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie 2002. Bilík, Petr: Panorama českého filmu, Olomouc: Rubico 2000. Bernik, France/Dolgan, Marjan: Slovenska vojna proza, Ljubljana: Slovenska matica 1988. Brenk, France: Kratka zgodovina slovenskega filma na Slovenskem, Ljubljana: Dopisna delavska univerza Univerzum 1979. Čap, František: “Čap o sebi”, in: Vrdlovec, Zdenko/Dolmark, Jože (eds.): František Čap, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1981: 95-100. Colombi, Matteo: “Andere Geschichten. Das Nachleben der Partisanen in der slowenischen Kunst und Literatur”, in: Christine Gölz/Alfrun Kliems (eds.), Spielplätze der Verweigerung. Gegenkulturen im östlichen Europa nach 1956, Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau 2014, 174-201. Erjavec, Aleš/Gržinić, Marina (eds.): Ljubljana, Ljubljana. Osemdeseta leta v umetnosti in kulturi, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga 1991. Furlan, Silvan: “Kratka predstavitev slovenskega čelovečernega filma”, in: Silvan Furlan/Bojan Kavčič/Liljana Nedič/Zdenko Vrdlovec (eds.), Filmografija slovenskih čelovečernih filmov 1931-1993, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej: 7-15. Gale, Jože: “František Čap in slovenski film” in: Zdenko Vrdlovec/Jože Dolmark (eds.): František Čap, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1981: 91–94. 66 The author would like to thank Johanna Noske, Mirt Komel and Peter Stanković for their help and assistance.

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Godeša, Bojan: “Social and cultural aspects of the historiography on the Second World War in Slovenia”, in: Sabine Rutar/Rolf Wörsdörfer (eds.), Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen in Slowenien/Social History and Social Movements in Slovenia. Essen: Klartext 2009 (= Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 41): 111-125. Gržinić, Marina/Velagić, Tanja (eds.): Trenutki odločitve. Performativno, politično in tehnološko. Umetniški video, filmska in interaktivna večmedijska dela Marine Gržinić in Aine Šmid 1982-2005, Ljubljana: ZAK 2006. Gržinić, Marina, “Performativno, politično in tehnološko”, in: Marina Gržinić Tanja Velagić (eds.), Trenutki odločitve. Performativno, politično in tehnološko. Umetniški video, filmska in interaktivna večmedijska dela Marine Gržinić in Aine Šmid 1982-2005, Ljubljana: ZAK 2006: 10-61. Jameson, Frederic: Archeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London/New York: Verso 2005. Kirn, Gal: “Why return to Yugoslavia and Yugoslav partisan film and video art today?”, in: Gal Kirn/Vedrana Madžar/Nataša Tepavčević, Unrealized Project: Partisan Revisiting of the Yugoslav Past, Berlin: Universität der Künste Berlin 2011: 7–11. Koch, Vladimir: “Smisel rutine”, in: Zdenko Vrdlovec/Jože Dolmark (eds.): František Čap, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1981: 53–63. Kofroň, Václav (ed.): Čáp, Praha: Národní filmový archiv 2013. Komelj, Miklavž: Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? Ljubljana: *cf 2009." Cf. footnote 61. Lešnik, Doroteja/Tomc, Gregor: Rdeče in črno. Slovensko partizanstvo in domobranstvo, Ljubljana: Znanstveno in publicistično središče 1995: 16–20. Meden, Jurij et al. (eds.): Kino! (Partizanski Film) 10 (2010). Pirjevec, Jože: “Sloweniens Geschichte: Die Eigenstaatlichkeit und der Umgang mit der Vergangenheit”, in: Sabine Rutar/Rolf Wörsdörfer (eds.), Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen in Slowenien/Social History and Social Movements in Slovenia, Essen: Klartext 2009 (= Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 41): 18–196. Puncer, Mojca: Sodobna umetnost in estetika, Ljubljana: ZAK 2010.

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Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi. Reprezentacija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu, Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede 2005. Štih, Peter/Simoniti, Vasko/Vodopivec, Peter: Slowenische Geschichte: Gesellschaft – Politik – Kultur, Graz: Leykam 2008. Valič, Denis: “František Čap: Trenutki odločitve ali trenutek ‘podobeakcije’”, in: Ekran 42.1-2 (2005): 14. Virk, Tomo: “Uvodne upombe”, in: Edvard Kocbek (ed.): Strah in pogum, Ljubljana: DZS 1996: 15-36. Vrdlovec, Zdenko: Zgodovina slovenskega filma, Radovljica: Didakta 2010. Vrdlovec, Zdenko: “František Čap – sprava bez spora”, in: Zdenko Vrdlovec/Jože Dolmark (eds.): František Čap, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1981: 11–41.

F ILMOGRAPHY CHRISTOPHOROS (YUG 1985, D: Andrej Mlakar) NASVIDENJE V NASLEDNJI VOJNI/SEE YOU IN THE NEXT WAR (YUG 1980, D: Živojin Pavlović) NA SVOJI ZEMLJI/ON OUR OWN LAND (YUG 1948, D: France Štiglic) PESEM UPORA/REBEL SONG (SI 2010, D: Andraž Pöschl) PETA ZASEDA (YUG 1968, D: France Kosmač) TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE (YUG 1985, D: Marina Gržinić/Aina Šmid) TRENUTKI ODLOČITVE (YUG 1955, D: František Čap) TRST/TRIESTE (YUG 1951, D: France Štiglic) TRST JE NAŠ/TRIESTE IS OURS! (SI 2009, D: Žiga Virc)

TRST JE NAŠ! Post-Socialist Slovenian Partisan Cinema M IRT K OMEL

The following article discusses a contemporary Slovene movie, TRST JE OURS! (2009) directed by Žiga Virc. This movie is of particular concern here, because it is the only Partisan movie in independent, post-socialist Slovenia. The traditional Yugoslav Partisan cinema created the Partisan myth for ideological purposes promoting the supra-national Yugoslav unity, while the post-socialist Slovenian cinema production that gave birth to TRIESTE IS OURS! deconstructs this myth and at the same time re-launches it in a new form by means of comedy and parody. NAŠ!/TRIESTE IS

I NTRODUCTION TRIESTE IS OURS!/TRST JE NAŠ! (27 min) is a short movie of student production, more precisely a project of Ljubljana’s Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT) in coproduction with the national RadioTelevision Slovenia (RTV). The script was provided by Žiga Virc, who is also the director of the movie. The synopsis is relatively simple: in the year 2009 a group of Partisan soldiers under the command of the main protagonist Franc traditionally repeats the IX. Corps liberation of Trieste to set right the injustices of the Second World War, when the city was lost to Yugoslavia and therefore also to Slovenia. There is, of course, a long tradition of Partisan movies from the period of Yugoslavia, but in contrast to the

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classical Partisan movies the distinctive traits of TRIESTE IS OURS! are its date of production and the time/place in which the story is set. It was made after the fall of the socialist regime, and because the story of the movie itself places the Partisans in an independent Slovenia, this implosion of the past in the present functions as a subversive element par excellence. The subversive effect the movie produced can be palpably grasped in the dust that was raised during the discussions in the aftermath of the showing – and even before the very first one – by the Slovenian and Italian public respectively. In this regard, it is important to note that most of the comments did not come from film critics or film connoisseurs but rather from the general public and most of all from people involved in mainstream politics. Many Italian commentators and politicians have designated TRIESTE IS OURS! as something that can be labeled ‘Titostalgia’, meaning nostalgia for Tito’s Yugoslavia, a specific version of ‘Yugostalgia’, which amplifies the figure of Tito,1 while ‘Yugostalgia’, itself being a phenomen similar to the German ‘Ostalgie’, meaning nostalgia for life and culture in East Germany before the fall of the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ (a term coined in the West, by Winston Churchill, to be precise). Among the most fervent critics on the Italian side there was the Italian Istrian’s Union, the foreign minister Franco Frattini, the mayor of Trieste, Roberto Dipiazza, and one of the most prominent Triestine members of Berlusconi’s party ‘The People of Freedom’, Roberto Menia.2 Dušan Udovič, editor of Primorski dnevnik, a

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Velikonja, Mitja: “Titouage: nostalgia for Tito in post-socialist Slovenia”, in: Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen in Slowenien 41 (2009): 159–169. A ferocious criticism was launched by the president of the Istrian’s Union, Massimiliano Lacota, while the fact that it was a co-production with the Slovenian national television astonished the Italian foreign minister Frattini, who said that the movie with its “revival of the sufferings of the population of Dalmatia and Istria by the hand of the Yugoslav dictator” is only reopening certain wounds that should be healed. Lacota thanked Frattini for his intervention against the “unacceptable provocation, which threatens to disturb the peaceful co-habitation of the region.” Menia, a distinguished member of the Italian rightcenter ruling Berlusconi’s party The People of Freedom, said that the movie is “an apology to the communist massacres” and is nothing more the a case of ‘Titostalgia’. Moreover, in the Il Piccolo we can read that the major of Trieste, Dipiazza, feels that TRIESTE IS OURS! confirms that “Slovenian democracy is still a very young one and less European than the Italian” On the other hand, a leftcenter member of the parliament, Ettore Rosata, also from Trieste, said that “we should be careful that a student-joke does not become a political event”. Needless to say, the movie had already become a political event.

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Slovenian paper from Trieste, responded to the polemics about the movie with the in my view most relevant comment: “No one of the disgusted public has seen the movie yet, for the premiere is still to come, and this says everything about the criticisms and about those that are launching them.”3 Speaking in terms of genre – as far as we can speak about a Partisan movie genre proper in Yugoslav cinema4 – TRIESTE IS OURS! is not a proper Partisan movie, it is not even a historical movie (as was the pretension of the Partisan cinema in general), first and foremost, because it is set in the present. It tells us the story of a group of people who in post-independent Slovenia annually enact the battle of Trieste as the IX. Corps of the People’s Liberation Army led by Franc, the main protagonist, who must fight three fronts: the battle against the occupier itself, the police that tries to prevent the re-enactment of the battle, because Obama is coming to visit the country, and last but not least his own intra-familiar struggle. Nonetheless, it can be considered a Partisan movie because of its formal structure, for most of the elements upon which the story is built fit the general structure of the genre as was consolidated in the past Yugoslav and Slovenian Partisan cinema respectively. On a formal level, in TRIESTE IS OURS! we have the same binary oppositions that were the cornerstones of old Partisan movies, such as the classical mythological oppositions between good and bad, individual and collective, power and weakness etc. The analysis will thus focus on these structural elements and the comparison between TRIESTE IS OURS! and Yugoslav Partisan cinema in general and Slovenian Partisan cinema in particular, to highlight the similarities as well as differences on this merely formal level. The most distinctive trait of the movie here in question is that it obviously defies the genre by means of parody, which of course is not where its subversive potential comes from (a parody of the Partisans would be subversive if the movie had been made in Yugoslav times). The true subversive character lies in its emancipatory potential, namely, that the movie appeals to the Partisan tradition in present times, when its collective values are forgotten in the name of the new individualistic neoliberal ideologies. 3 4

Udovič, Dušan: “Hajka na film, ki ga še niso videli” (uvodnik=editoriral), in: Primorski dnevnik, 6 November 2009. Stanković, Peter: “Je mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 22–53.

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But at the same time it is also conservative, for it promotes the same ideological message as its forerunners, but in such a twisted way that it is completely in tune with our contemporary political reality and its ideology. If one of the main purposes of the Yugoslav Partisan movie was to achieve trans-national unity under the Yugoslav pan-Slavic umbrella, then TRIESTE IS OURS!, with its underlying ideological message, promotes Slovenian national unity. In short: TRIESTE IS OURS! is set in the present and tells a story about the past, but has a lot more to tell us about present than about the past. The analysis will therefore consist of two basic steps: the first step will comprise a formal analysis of the structure of the movie in comparison to the past Partisan movies in Yugoslav cinema in general and Slovenian cinema in particular, while the second step will focus on the movie’s narrative structure where both its conservative as well as its subversive character will be revealed.

T RIESTE JE NAŠ IN THE CONTEXT OF YUGOSLAV / SLOVENE PARTISAN CINEMA I will start with a general overview of the topics and then proceed to a formal structural analysis of the elements that form the content of the Yugoslav/Slovene Partisan cinema, comparing the Yugoslav with the Slovene Partisan movie production, so that we can see how TRIESTE IS OURS! fits into the broader picture of what can be defined in terms of ‘Yugoslav Partisan cinema’ as a genre in itself. The point of this first part of the discussion is not to make any kind of résumé of Yugoslav cinematic history, neither to problematize or theorize the genre in question, but rather to highlight the most important characteristics that are found in what is regarded and labeled as ‘Yugoslav/Slovene Partisan cinema’. The most relevant characteristics and differences between Slovenian and Yugoslav Partisan movies are according to Peter Stanković mainly two: first, the choice of the main character; and second, the choice of the main theme; 5 the third is a peculiarity of Slovenian Partisan cinema, namely its distinctively theatrical or literary character. 5

Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi: reprezentacija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu. Ljubljana: Založba FDV 2005: 39–43.

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First: the choice of the main character. In Slovenian movies there is a central, individual figure – in Yugoslav movies the main character is the collective as such (an often used expression is ‘goloroki narod’, ‘barehanded nation’), and even if there is a single protagonist, he is a metaphor for the collective (“Who’s Valter? This is Valter!” showing the city of Sarajevo itself, a scene from VALTER BRANI SARAJEVO/WALTER DEFENDS SARAJE6 VO). TRIESTE IS OURS! follows this pattern perfectly: the main protagonist is Franc around whom the whole story with its public and private aspects revolves and evolves (he is shown both on the ‘battlefield’ and at home), while the collective, the ‘nation’, is only called upon as the reason and purpose of the action itself. Second, the choice of the main theme: Yugoslav Partisan movies in general cover a variety of themes, mainly the major Partisan battles of the past (Sutjeska, Neretva, Kozara, desant on Drvar, etc.). Slovenian Partisan movies (with almost only one exception, NA SVOJI ZEMLJI/ON ONE’S OWN LAND, which tells the story of the Partisan offensive on German positions in Baška grapa in 1944) avoid these classic battle themes and treats more modest stories of the ‘little man’, a distinctive feature of Slovenian literature as well. Again, TRIESTE IS OURS! fits the pattern of the personal struggle of the ‘little man’. Franc is depicted against a broader background, namely the re-enactment of the battle of Trieste. The second leads us directly to the third characteristic, the theatrical or literary tone of Slovenian Partisan cinema. This trait is characteristic of Slovenian movies in general and has to do with the fact that – even today – most of the television and cinema actors were and still are primarily trained as theatre actors. One of the possible interpretations can be that the Slove6

There are of course exceptions: the movie TRI/THREE directed by Aleksander Petrović (1965), a representative of ‘srpski crni val’ (Serbian Black Wave), or NA SVOJI ZEMLJI/ON ONE’S OWN LAND by France Štiglic (1948), the first Slovenian Partisan movie, are two typical cases of an almost soviet way of telling the story of the collective (the nation) fighting the occupier. But with TRST/TRIESTE by France Štiglic (1951) and DOBRI STARI PIANINO/THE GOOD OLD PIANINO by France Kosmač (1959), the Slovenian movie distinctively enters into “subjective-existential waters”. See: Munitić, Ranko: Živjet će ovaj narod. Jugoslavenski film o revoluciji. Zagreb: RK SOH 1974: 69; Furlan, Silvo: “Kratka predstavitev slovenskega celovečernega filma”, in: Silvo Furlan/ Boris Kavčič,/ Lilijana Nedič/ Zdenko Vrdlovec (eds.), Filmografija slovenskih celovečernih filmov 1931-1933, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej, 1994: 14.

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nian nation was ‘imagined’ more through literature (especially poetry) and less through journals, which were the primary media of the European nation-building processes.7 From this perspective it is understandable why many of the Slovenian Partisan movies were based on a literary work. As far as the movie TRIESTE IS OURS! is concerned, it does not fit this literary Slovene tradition, for the script was created by the director himself, but still, most actors come from the theatre and this gives a distinctive ‘theatrical’ note to the acting and the movie as such, which is a common trait of Slovenian cinema in general.8 If TRIESTE IS OURS! fits the general picture of what is considered Slovenian/Yugoslav Partisan cinema, then it fits in a very broad way, and therefore must be taken – together with the already mentioned and very important fact regarding the date/place of production – as a unique case of post-socialist Slovenian Partisan cinema.

T HE

RE - CREATION OF THE PARTISAN MYTH IN TRIESTE IS OURS ! Before a more detailed analysis is undertaken, a few remarks about the question of ‘genre’ are necessary. What follows here is based on an article by Peter Stanković, in which the author argues that in the case of Yugoslav Partisan cinema we cannot speak of a genre in the proper sense of the word, for it encompasses a too broad variety of styles and approaches, from epic parades to simple dramatic stories about individuals, from Hollywood-style action movies to serious artistic attemps in the European style. What defines Yugoslav Partisan cinema in the last analysis is the topic of the Partisan struggle itself, and in this sense TRIESTE IS OURS! fits the broader concep-

7 8

Anderson, Benedict: Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London/New York: Verso 2006: 36–50. As have many people from the stock argued countless times, the main problem of Slovenian cinema production is its anchorage in the world of theater and therefore not having a separate world of cinema. The fact that in Ljubljana there is only one academy – the Academy for Theater, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT) – is noteworthy in itself, even more if we know that most of the actors in Slovenia combine theater/cinema/television engagements to earn a living, for the relativly small and narrow cultural space in Slovenia does not allow anybody to survive in one sphere only – and this is true also for other arts.

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tion because the central topic is ‘the Partisan struggle’, although – as I will try to demonstrate – in a very different way than its predecessors. Stanković argues that all of Yugoslav/Slovene Partisan cinema can very well fit the broader term of ‘Partisan movies’, while if we try to look at a specific, genre-coherent production, only the so-called ‘red wave’ Partisan movies can be labeled as genre in the strict sense of the word. The distinctive trait of the ‘partizanarice’, a common name for the Partisan action movies of the 70s, is their unmistakable style that resembles the Hollywood Westerns, a trait that eventually produced the nickname for these kind of movies: ‘Yugoslav Westerns’.9 Now, in the case of TRIESTE IS OURS!, we are, of course, not dealing with the same style of Partisan movie, but if anything more with some kind of witty ‘Yugoslav spaghetti Western’. Nonetheless, the parallel structural analysis Stanković made – based on Will Wright’s theoretical work on American Westerns10 – to build a conceptual apparatus proper for the ‘red wave’ Yugoslav Partisan movies, will be here used in as much as it serves the purpose of identifying the main structural elements of TRIESTE IS OURS! that in the end define this movie as a ‘Partisan movie’. The main triangle (articulated by Wright in a good old Lévi-Straussian fashion) at work beneath Hollywood Westerns is formed by three typical characters: the good lonely gun, the innocent community and the evil villains. In the second step, Wright puts forward three basic binary oppositions: individual/collective, good/bad, power/weakness. Stanković applies these formal structural elements from American Westerns to the Yugoslav ones and finds out that also here we deal with three main characters, the only difference being that the characters are now collective and therefore the opposition between individual and collective is not valid: the Partisans, the fascists, the nation. One the other hand the rest of Wright’s three binary oppositions fits the structure very well: the good Partisans and the bad fascists, power being on the side of the Partisans and the fascists, while the nation is the passive, weak subject in the story. In the case of TRIESTE IS OURS!, and even more so in the case of Slovene Partisan movies (if we

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P. Stanković: “Je mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?”, 35–36. 10 Wright, Will: “The Structure of Myth & The Structure of Western Film”, in: John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1994: 117–132.

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consider its distinctive trait that differs from Yugoslav Partisan cinema in general, namely its focus on the individual rather then the collective), the structural matrix can be used to explain the various elements that intertwine during the story: here also we have the good Partisans (the IX. corps) and the bad fascists (Italians and Germans occupying or trying to occupy Trieste), while the nation is passive, waiting to be conquered by the evil guys or awakened by the good ones. Moreover, in TRIESTE IS OURS! we have the conflict between the individual and the collective, which is the conflict between Franc and the police trying to prevent the re-enactment of the historical battle, as well as an additional dramatic conflict between Franc and his family, his wife Marija and his daughter Mateja, which is – at least according to the director himself – the true purpose of his movie;11 namely, to show the discrepancy between the old and young generations when the historical topic of Partisans is raised. On a general structural level of analysis TRIESTE IS OURS! is therefore an almost perfect match, but a problem arises when we take a look at what is the basic function of such a constructed mythological structure. According to Wright, the American Westerns are comparable to what Levi-Strauss said about the archaic myths, namely that they communicate to a given society their basic social values and conceptions of reality. This ideological function of the myth and the Western movie (and any given cinema genre for that matter), is always the same: to reproduce the social order and to reenact its basic contradictions in the form of a drama on an individual or at 11 Žiga Virc on many occasion said about his movie that the story about Trieste serves merely as context in which to tell a family story about the young Slovenian generation which does not want to accept the thinking of the older, ‘Partisan’ generation. For the director TRIESTE IS OURS! is a “modern gaze at events of the past. It does not want to recapitulate real events or to argue about them.” – “I think the spectator has enough room for thinking” says Virc, for whom the movie is “a parody and it should also be viewed and interpreted in this humoristic context.” The polemic that was raised in Italy is for Virc merely a contribution to its popularity in the media. Contrary to this self-declared ‘political neutrality’ of the author, we could argue at length together with Althusserian-Lacanian cinema theoreticians that “every movie is political”. See: Comolli, JeanLous/Narboni, Jean: “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”, in: Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings, Mark Jancovich (eds.), The film studies reader, London: Arnold Publishers Ltd. 2000: 197), but for the purpose of this article let it suffice to say that all these sentences from the director himself were a clear case of selfdefense against hard political pressure, first from the Italian side, and afterwards also from the Slovenian.

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least collectively limited level (depicting a group or several groups of persons). The conflicts between individuals or different groups are not merely conflicts between individuals or different groups, but also more general conflicts between basic contradictions in a given society (a black man fighting against a white man is the black society as a whole fighting against the white society as a whole, or in the case of TRIESTE IS OURS!, the conflict between Franc and his daughter Mateja is a conflict between the old and the young generation). In the case of the Yugoslav Westerns, such an ideological function is of course fulfilled as well: their primary function is to legitimize the Partisan struggle and the social order that resulted from it in the aftermath of the World War II. On the other hand, TRIESTE IS OURS! does not fulfill such an ideological purpose, for the whole contemporary ideological foundation in Slovenia is not compatible with what the movie promotes as a Partisan ideal. Or is it? The problem is that the movie itself is fundamentally ambivalent, for, on the one hand, it has a subversive and emancipatory dimension in the very introduction of Partisans and their ideal/ideology (which for practical reasons I propose to call ‘Partisanism’) in a post-socialist Slovenia, a space marked by the neoliberal ideology of individualism, egoism and consumerism – on the other hand, it reproduces the nationalistic unitarian ideology through which old Yugoslavia was destroyed and its successor nation-states emerged. In the following it is these two aspects, the one subversive and the other conservative, that I wish to explore further by means of a psychoanalytical interpretation.

T HE THREE - FOLD

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF TRIESTE IS OURS !

There is an important aspect of the Wright/Stanković structural analysis I have intentionally left till now, namely the narrative structure of the American/Yugoslav Western movies. Here it could have been useful only partially, for the story told by TRIESTE IS OURS! uses three narrative levels and only the one that concerns the Partisan struggle fits in the scheme proposed above, while the other two have very specific and fluid genre characteristics, moving from drama to comedy. Moreover, in certain crucial moments they affect each other and even come into conflict, a conflict that – to be

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sure – is not a weakness of the movie, quite the contrary, it is its very internal moving principle. The movie here in question therefore has three main narrative levels: first the re-enactment of the Partisan battle of Trieste; second the conflict between the main protagonist with his family members; and third the conflict between the main protagonist and his Partisans with the police. First, the re-enactment of the Partisan battle of Trieste. When we look at the very first few minutes of the movie before the arrival of Franc’s wife Marija, we could easily think it is a real battle the characters are talking about. The same is valid throughout the whole movie: if the obstructive moments of the other two narratives (the family and the police) wouldn’t interfere with the battle, there would be absolutely no clue whatsoever from which to deduct that it is not just a theatrical re-enactment and not a poorly depicted battle. The men and women and boys and girls, wearing Partisan uniforms in the movie, are taking their roles very seriously, almost to such an extent that we as spectators not only do not know if it is play or a real battle, but also, further into the movie, if the characters themselves know they are just ‘playing Partisans’.12 The problematic part of this Partisan battle, apart from the historical aspect, of course, is its distinctive nationalist ideology: the Partisan struggle is not a mere struggle for liberation, but a nationalist struggle as well, for if in the historical past the movie refers to the term ‘narod’ was used as a synonymous for ‘people’ (in ‘Narodnoosvobodilni boj’ – ‘National liberation struggle’ for instance), in the movie, the term is used to determine a specific nation, the Slovene nation.13 In short: 12 The opening dialogue between Franc and one of his Partisan soldiers Marko at the beginning of the movie is very indicative for it sets the coordinates to understand the reality of the play they are enacting: “What’s the situation?” asks Franc – “The situation is dangerous. The Germans want to occupy Trieste.” replays Marko – “And whose is Trieste, really?” – “The Italians’!” – “No!” – “The Germans’!” – “No!” – “Well, then it must be ours.” – “Exactly! And who are we?” – “The fighters of the 9th corps of the People’s Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia.” – “The Italians have occupied Trieste, the Germans won’t.” 13 Still in the very first dialogue we can see how a very contemporary nationalist ideology is overlapping Partisanism: “A new history unfolds. It is time for the Slovenian nation to regain its former glory.” Somewhere in the middle of the movie Franc gives a speech to his “comrades, fighters, friends!”: “The time, when the Slovenian nation was suppressed and no one cared, is over. The battle approaches. The battle of Trieste! The battle for the heart and the glory of the Slovenian nation.”

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the re-enactment of the battle of Trieste is not only a struggle from the past that is present in our own time as Partisanism, but also a quasi-historical play marked by the present nationalism. Second, the conflict between the main protagonist and his family. This conflict itself has two levels, the first regarding the wife Marija, the second his daughter Mateja. The arrival of Marija at the very beginning of the movie, just after Franc makes his serious speech, turns the seriousness of the situation upside down and poses new coordinates for reality: the reality of contemporary every day life, the reality of work and family. The scene where Mateja is introduced shows us the deeper dimension of the familiar conflict: the intergenerational gap between the old generation, which wants to remember and the young generation that wants to forget. This conflict is best materialized in Franc’s Partisan hat, which he repeatedly takes from his head and in utmost seriousness tells its story throughout the most crucial parts of the movie (the technique of repetition is a common and very useful means in comedies):14 He wants the daughter to respect the hat but she plainly ignores it, and even when he gives it to her, she is not moved until the end of the movie, when she wears it and takes the ‘flags of our fathers’ to the final victorious ride on the horse. In short: the Partisan past is integrated into the future through the now resolved conflict between the old and the young generation. Third, the conflict between the main protagonist and his Partisans with the police. Since this re-enactment is – according to the story – a traditional annual celebration, the police intervenes somewhere in the middle of the movie on this particular occasion, because Obama is visiting the country and all “this circus doesn’t fit the concept,” as the chief policeman on the field remarks to his friend Franc. This conflict between the theatrically reproduced Partisans from the past and the police of the present-day Slovenia takes the story onto a whole new level, for now the Partisan struggle becomes a struggle with the present ideological constellation. Speaking in contemporary geopolitical terms, in 1991 Slovenia has left the socialist past 14 The first time Franc’s hat and its story is introduced is still part of the first scene when he is talking to Marko and before the wife’s arrival: “See this hat? My father wore it when he was a Partisan.” – and the soldier continues: “He gave that hat to you when you went to school for the first time. And he said this war must never be forgotten.” – “Precisely! How did you know?” – “Everyone knows that.” (In the Slovenian original the phrase sounds even more hilarious: “To se ve.” A more precise translation therefore would be: “It is known.”)

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and started to walk along a path carved by neoliberal ideologies and values where there can be no trace of Partisanism. In short: to walk the new path, one must forget the past, and the march of the new IX. corps looks exactly like a march of spirits from the past invading our contemporary idyllic present with its ideological uneasiness. I will now try to merge the three narratives using Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical concepts of the language-based Symbolic (the realm of the signifier), the phantasmatic Imaginary (the realm of the signified), and the indestructible Real. In the XXIII Seminar named Sinthome Lacan uses the Borromean knot to exemplify how these three registers form the basic coordinates for the subject’s perception of reality: the intervention of the signifier into the world produces the imaginary register as the moment which overrides reality and makes it inaccessible in the form of a left-over, the Real, which in turn can show up unexpectedly as something that the signifier cannot fully signify and therefore as something that is a threat to any given symbolic order.15 The main point here is that human or social reality is not simply ‘imaginary’ in the sense of fiction, but rather a reality interwoven with the symbolic texture in such a way that its imaginary character is fundamentally inaccessible to the subject (and this is what Lacan calls ‘phantasm’ in the final analysis). Even more, these three registers are tied together in such a way that no ‘clean cut’ can untie them so that we could, for example, gain access to the imaginary as such and simply grasp its phantasmatic coordinates. The only cut possible is a cut similar to the one Alexander the Great used in the case of another famous knot, the Gordian one, where he violently solved the task of untying it by simply cutting it with a sword, therefore losing it as it was – similarly, if we cut the Borromean knot in like fashion, we lose not only the knot but all the three dimensions we wanted to gain through the process. Or, speaking less metaphorically and more theoretically, the Borromean knot is a dialectical concept where only all the three dimensions together form the whole of the subject’s experience of the world and thus must be thought simultaneously in their interdependent relation. If we now take a look at the narrative structure of TRIESTE IS OURS!, we can attribute to each narrative line a specific psychoanalytical register, where the status of the Real varies according from which of the two pre15 Lacan, Jacques: Le séminaire livre XXIII: Le sinthome, Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2005: 9–10.

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dominant perspectives we perceive it as reality (the perspective of the Partisan struggle and their actors or the perspective of the family/police). If we take a look at the movie from the standpoint of the imaginary Partisan struggle, then it is the intervention of the family/police on the scene that disrupts its symbolic order. In the scene, when the chief police officer in vain tries to dissuade Franc, his reply is: “This means you’re one of them?” This replay shows very well how the phantasm as the product of the relationship between the symbolic and the imaginary works: whatever disrupts the symbolic order is transformed so that it can be incorporated into the phantasm itself. In this case Franc perceives the police as being part of the enemy and gives it the same oxymoron status of fascists as the Italians and Germans occupying Trieste.16 But if we now put ourselves in the position of the family/police, it is the re-enactment of the battle of Trieste that functions as the intrusive moment of the Real, disrupting the existing symbolic order and this is precisely where the subversive and emancipatory potential of the movie derives from. The point here is that, from a psychoanalytical point of view, we are able to look at the standpoint of the family/police as an imaginary perception of reality that is no more real then the Partisan phantasm: both standpoints are part of the same reality and are trying to coexist in vain. The symptom that emerges from this failed co-existence is precisely Franc’s daughter Mateja who takes her grandfather’s Partisan hat given by her father and rides on the horse with the banner in hand precisely in the middle of both incompatible realities. There is more in the movie then this simple reconciliation of two realities and with this I will conclude: if the subjective motive of the main protagonist, as well as the movie itself (if we take the director’s claim seriously), is a reconciliation between the old and the young generation and with it the past Partisan world with our contemporary reality, then at the movie’s 16 Here I am referring to the idea of the oxymoral structure of Yugoslav Cultural Politics as has been put forward by Andrew B. Wachtel: Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford: University Press 1998: 128–134, and further developed by Miranda Jakiša: “Down to Earth Partisans: Fashioning of YU-Space in Partisan Film”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 54–61, who writes on page 57: “The Partisan's inner diversity also existed on the side of the Partisan's enemies [...] fused into one homogenous new group: ‘the fascists’ (‘fašisti’). One could say that the slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’ (‘bratstvo i jedinstvo’) and its oxymora structure of being many (=brothers) and one (‘unity’) at the same time, in film and literature was applied to both fronts: the invaders and the defenders”.

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very end we can see the indestructible uneasiness of the Real insisting even after the reconciliation took place. At the very end we see Marija and Franc in bed, her reading what appears to be a popular novel and him reading a book on Tito. At one moment, when everything seemed harmoniously reconciliated, the wife says to her husband: “Well, now you have finally freed Trieste.” – “Yes, and now comes... Istria!”

C ONCLUSION The question if TRIESTE IS OURS! is in fact a subversive or a conservative movie therefore remains. It is conservative, as far as it reproduces the contemporary predominant Slovenian nationalistic ideology, transforming the Partisan struggle and its values into nationalistic struggle and values, thus transforming the past into a projection made from the present. But at the same time it is also subversive, for the re-enactment of the Partisan struggle in the present functions as a disruptive moment in the existing sociopolitical order, in as far as the Partisan struggle reminds us that no reconciliation can be achieved in a world where social, economical and political divisions still mark and define our own existences. Therefore, the answer to the question is simple: TRIESTE IS OURS! is both – conservative and at the same time subversive, ambivalent to the very end, as a piece of art that tries to mimic reality should be, for reality itself is not made of a synthesis of reconciliation, but rather of genuine paradoxes and intense conflicts.

B IBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict: Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London/New York: Verso 2006. Comolli, Jean-Lous/Narboni, Jean: “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”, in: Joanne Hollows/Peter Hutchings/Mark Jancovich (eds.), The film studies reader, London: Arnold Publishers Ltd. 2000. Furlan, Silvo: “Kratka predstavitev slovenskega celovečernega filma”, in: Silvo Furlan/Boris Kavčič/Lilijana Nedič/Zdenko Vrdlovec (eds.), Filmografija slovenskih celovečernih filmov 1931-1933, Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej 1994: 7–15.

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Jakiša, Miranda: “Down to Earth Partisans: Fashioning of YU-Space in Partisan Film”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 54–61. Lacan, Jacques: Le séminaire livre XXIII: Le sinthome. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2005. Munitić, Ranko: Živjet će ovaj narod. Jugoslavenski film o revoluciji, Zagreb: RK SOH 1974. Stanković, Peter: “Je mogoče o jugoslovanskem partizanskem filmu govoriti kot o žanru?”, in: Kino! 10 (2010): 22–53. Stanković, Peter: Rdeči trakovi: reprezentacija v slovenskem partizanskem filmu, Ljubljana: Založba FDV 2005. Udovič, Dušan: “Hajka na film, ki ga še niso videli” (uvodnik=editoriral), in: Primorski dnevnik, 6 November 2009. Velikonja, Mitja: “Titouage: nostalgia for Tito in post-socialist Slovenia”, in: Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen in Slowenien 41 (2009): 159–169. Wachtel, Andrew B.: Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford: University Press 1998. Wright, Will: “The Structure of Myth & The Structure of Western Film”, in: John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1994: 117–132.

F ILMOGRAPHY DOBRI STARI PIANINO/THE GOOD OLD PIANINO (YUG 1959, D: France Kosmač) NA SVOJI ZEMLJI/ON THEIR OWN GROUND (YUG 1948, D: France Štiglic) TRI/THREE (YUG 1965, D: Aleksandar Petrović) TRST/TRIESTE (YUG 1951, D: France Štiglic) TRST JE NAŠ/TRIESTE IS OURS! (SI 2009, D: Žiga Virc) VALTER BRANI SARAJEVO/WALTER DEFENDS SARAJEVO (YUG 1972, D: Hajrudin Krvavac)

The Partisan as an Artist, the Artist as a Partisan? On the Relationship between Artistic Autonomy and Workers’ Self Management Z ORAN T ERZIĆ Were it not for the wind, spiders would spin a web across the skies. SURREALIST ALMANAC, BELGRADE 19301

Where are ideas of political and artistic autonomy related? The Yugoslav Partisan movement included some of the most respected artists and writers, many of whom had belonged to the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s, and it produced thousands of folk poems and songs that still serve as a reference for literary works and have been present in popular culture until today. More than just analyzing Partisan inspired art, I am interested in the comparison of the artistic avant-garde and Partisans as historical subjects, that is, as agents of political change.

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Nemoguce–L'impossible, Surrealist Almanac (Proverb), Belgrade 1930. Quoted from: http://www.serbiansurrealism.com/arteng2.htm, last access: 22 April 2013.

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The main aim of the WWII Partisan movement was to defeat the fascist occupation. Military struggle and socio-political revolution were considered two aspects of one and the same historical process.2 Similarly, the objective of 20th century artistic avant-garde was to not only make art, but to put forward autonomous art practice as a revolutionary practice – from Futurists to Supremacists, from Bauhaus to Surrealists. As Trotsky and Breton put it in their manifesto Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendent (1938): “True art, which […] insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind, […] is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.”3

This was written at a time when some Belgrade based surrealists had been rounded up and imprisoned for sympathizing with the communists, and literary and artistic magazines (such as Surrealism Here and Now) were published semi-legally in the then kingdom of Yugoslavia.4 Hence, above manifesto was not only a theoretical exposition of concepts but it was also a reaction to the fact that artistic involvement already had created political consequences or, if you will, trouble.5 Yet, artistic struggle does not affect

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In other words, the synchronicity of politics and warfare was operational, and not a mere coincidence. This assertion is not as self-evident as it may seem if you take into account the feud between anarcho-syndicalist groups and the Communist party during the civil war in Spain, where the question of the revolution was a contested issue: to the anarchists, the war effort already constituted a revolutionary act, while for the Spanish communist party revolution was to take hold after a victorious war. Breton, André/Trotsky, Leon: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art. 1938, http:// www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism1.htm, last access: 22 April 2013. One of them, Aleksandar Vučo (1897-1985), was to become the first president of the committee for cinematography of Yugoslavia after the war. Deretić, Jovan: Kratka istorija srpske književnosti, http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/ jderetic_knjiz/jderetic-knjiz_10.html#_Toc412464113 ; last acces 22 April 2013. Avant-gardists understood their art practice as a means for changing society, and considered it to be comparable to any other revolutionary practice. The core gesture of the avant-garde was its striving for artistic autonomy, for political impact, and for pictorial abstraction, or, as Kasimir Malevic put it in 1920: “Representational art must be destroyed like the imperialist idea.” Harrison,

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society as directly as a popular uprising. Among other aspects, the artistic disruption of bourgeois life is achieved by a subversive simulation or “usurpation of established media boundaries.”6 By revolting against established cultural codes the avant-garde challenges the relationship to what Jacques Rancière calls an “aesthetic regime.”7 This type of political involvement can be understood as a struggle over who and what can be seen, heard, and agreed upon. In other words, “[p]olitics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage”.8 This conflict determines the relationship between the order of perceptions and the order of bodies that make up society while “political subjectification is the product of these multiple fracture lines.”9 Consequently, it is not Modernist abstraction or autonomy as such that matter – every ornament is abstract, and every hobbyist is autonomous – rather, it is the revolutionary disruption and/or the struggle for this common stage that matters: The avant-gardist dismisses the representation of a second order to which Plato once confined him: a painter, according to Plato, depicts a chair rendered from a real chair that has been modeled after the idea of a chair, its ‘real’ being. The avant-gardist reverses this paradigm and claims a new type of access to the reality of being. The artist's chair is the real chair, and the Platonic idea of it is an ontological footnote at best.10 This asserts in principle what a 1930s Belgrade Surrealist magazine refers

Charles/Wood, Paul (eds): Kunsttheorie im 20. Jahrhundert [2 volumes] Hamburg: Hatje Cantz 2003: 340. Transl. by the author. 6 Đurić, D., Šuvaković, M.: Impossible histories: Historical avant-gardes, neoavant-gardes, and post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2003: 76 resp. 137. 7 Rancière, Jacques: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum 2006. 8 Rancière, Jacques: Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999: 26-27. 9 J. Rancière: Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 37. 10 As an example, George Braque’s Cubist painting of a violin is not meant to be a depiction of how a violin looks like (the appearance of its shape rendered on a two-dimensional surface), but it is a painting of what a violin is. The simultaneity of divergent perspectives of the violin, typical for the Cubist method, relates to the concrete presence of the object and not to its face-value appearance. This ‘realism’ may look naturalistic or abstract. Your guiding principle, however, is always abstract in the sense that it abstracts from common modes of representation.

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to in its title: Naša Stvarnost (Our Reality). It molds both the Surrealists’ new reality and a common notion of reality together. Artistic abstraction or a Surrealist daydream is as real as a factory or a bullet, but its reality is of another kind, it is new, and you enter it through the back door. The revolutionary mode thus is ‘neo-realistic’ in the sense that it addresses concrete being at its root level and relates this being to the ever new presence of the art work or the revolutionary act itself. A painting, a novel, a film etc. in this sense are not only media but also subjects of their revolutionary cause. Their realism (whether abstract or figurative) could be called performative realism. Consequently, avant-garde art is not considered a means for representing revolutionary practice (as previous and later generations of artists may have understood it), but a means of revolution itself. We can hold here against Karl Marx that the aesthetic regime of interpreting the world accentuates and anticipates the regime of changing the world. Indeed, we can argue that Marx’ very own claim that ‘workers do not have a homeland’ is an analogy to Modernist abstraction. The avantgarde emphasizes that not only subjects (Rimbaud’s formula “Je est un autre”) but also objects do not have their fixed mode of representation, a ‘homeland’. If you liberate yourself from this mode, you will be able to abandon its uni-form of representation. This act of liberation is an aspect of what Alain Badiou has called a truth event, i.e. a genuine political act that creates a “rupture” in the normal order of things.11 One of the memorable film scenes in the history of Partisan Film from SLAVICA (1947) perfectly thematizes this rupture. The Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia has caused a call to arms in a small Dalmatian town, and a couple is facing dramatic consequences. In this particular scene, Slavica and her beloved Marin are facing each other, dressed in traditional folklore gowns. In the next cut, the couple is shown from the same camera angle and with identical body position, but now dressed in Partisan outfit. This simple cut symbolizes the ‘instant’ change from cultural to political subjectivity, from folkloristic to revolutionary uniform, from farmers/workers to Proletariat. The entire sequence epitomizes an existential decision that not only changes biographies but also the course of history. Life will never be the same.

11 Badiou, A./Macey, D./Corcoran, S.: The communist hypothesis. London: Verso 2010: 242.

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Ill. 1: An incident of truth – SLAVICA (1947)

K UNSTPROLETARIAT The symbolic activism of the avant-garde parallels the idea of the proletariat – the proletariat being for the working class what the avant-gardist is for the academic artist: the negation of art as such and, respectively, of class as such. Representational art can never be the same after it has been ‘refuted’, and similarly, the proletariat is not a representation of the working class – rather its abstraction.12 So, firstly, there is an idea to negate the existing order, either by developing class consciousness or form-consciousness, and secondly, there is an idea to define a new order. As Majakovski exclaims in 1914: “Everybody is a Futurist now. The nation is a Futurist.”13 However, did Majakovski’s “Communist Futurism” live up to his promise? In the course of the 20th century, many Modernists, who have fought as much for abstraction as for revolution, suddenly faced a dilemma: once their campaign had achieved its political goal, its original artistic means 12 We need to recall here that Marx conceived of the proletariat in relation to the specific situation in Germany. While he acknowledged that it was possible in France to have partial emancipation, he concluded that this was impossible in Germany. Consequently, the only option would be a total upheaval of the existing conditions – and the social force of this upheaval was what he called “Proletariat” (Marx, Karl/Engels, Friedrich: Werke, Vol. 1. Berlin/DDR: (Karl) Dietz Verlag 1976: 390-391). The working class cannot challenge the totality of society, the totality of the social game, the language game, the image game – it remains part of the game (or ‘struggle’). An avant-gardist, thus, is not a particularist – a worker or an artist –, but also an artifex laborans and/or an animal doctus. 13 Becker, Sabina et al.: Literarische Moderne. Begriff und Phänomen, Berlin 2006: 289.

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appeared to have lost their function. In 1932, Malevič proclaims, for example, that “now, in the course of socialistic construction, in which all artists have to participate, art needs to step back and become figurative.”14 Once the aesthetic goal was reached, it seemed, art could ‘step back’ politically. Curiously, in Marxism, there exists a similar idea of the withering away of the state: the state is a preliminary form of political organization that is to be replaced by an administrative form of self-government once the revolutionary process has taken hold. However, while one could perhaps argue that art has become ‘administrative’ in the Soviet Union with the inauguration of so called ‘Socialist realism’ – which was not a realism at all, quite the contrary: a political naturalism or symbolism at best –, the same could not be claimed about the Soviet state apparatus in regard to the political class.15 Hence, one could argue that the artistic avant-garde has more or less failed its promise, because political and historical circumstances did not accord to artistic concept, but rather imposed their own hegemonic rule, turning revolutionary art into art about revolution. From this perspective, one could argue that avant-garde art has not been an autonomous political force and artists simply have become ‘useful idiots’ that have provided free service to political actors who then went on to install traditional mechanisms of power – the opposite of what the emancipatory Kunstproletariat had strived for. Is this too strong of a claim? Details matter. In the following, I shall discuss the relationship of revolutionary form and content by focussing on production modes, representation, and subjectivity by discussing a post-war partisan film. The over-all discussion addresses the question, what emancipatory action means and how it represents itself or where it emerges.16 14 C. Harrison/P. Wood (eds.): Kunsttheorie im 20. Jahrhundert, 618. 15 The administrator class that, according to Marx, had to take control over state functions after the revolutionary struggle, consisted of the Moscow party elite. It is true that in the 1980’s well over 80% of Politburo members had been engineers – people skilled in technical matters and administrative tasks, but one could rightly argue that they ran the party apparatus in parallel to the state apparatus, there was no withdrawal of the political elite from state functions. 16 Beyond the withering away of the state and/or art I call this emergence performative realism and try to separate it from socialist realism or socialist aestheticism. The official stylistic term for the immediate post-war period of Yugoslav cinema appears to be nationalist realism (e.g. Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002.), which seems off-track, since there was no Yugoslav ‘nation’ or

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REALISM

The founding of post-war Yugoslavia was confronted by the task to steer the revolutionary force into building a new society, mainly after Soviet modeling. But how was it concretely to be performed? There are many analytical levels to approach this question, but perhaps a filmic example will shed a light on it. ŽIVOT JE NAŠ. LJUDI SA PRUGE/LIFE IS OURS: PEOPLE FROM THE TRACKS, directed by Gustav Gavrin in 1948, is one of the first Yugoslav post-war films. This production is remarkable because it is the first feature film to not focus on the military effort, but on the civic reconstruction after the war. Most Yugoslav films around this time had been modeled after SLAVICA (1947, D: Vjekoslav Afrić) and dealt with heroic war events. Not so with LIFE IS OURS. I would still call it a Partisan film, not primarily because most of the actors and the film crew have fought as Partisans during the war, but because the film shows a collective struggle – only that it is not the Fascists that need to be fought against, but a range of other enemies: nature, social ignorance, petty-bourgeois attitudes, egoism, illiteracy, ethnic competition, national chauvinism, adverse circumstances etc. The only way to fight these enemies, we are told throughout the film, is to act as a collective and overcome personal or particularist interests. The film is set in the postwar period and focuses on the attempts to build Yugoslavia’s transportation infrastructure. Here, youth brigades who work in the hinterland of Bosnia, where mountains made it necessary to dig a large number of tunnels. LIFE IS OURS focusses on a young worker, Milan, who leaves his home to join the youth brigades. Yet, not everybody is convinced of this effort, the skeptical population needs some persuasion to recognize that all Yugoslavs can work together to build the future of the country. The filmic narration emphasizes the cooperation between young Albanians, Croats, Serbs etc. But also the film production itself is like an argument for the film’s agenda: the cast is mainly Croatian while the film has been produced in Belgrade’s Avala film studios, exemplifying SerboCroat cooperation, a blueprint for many Yugoslav productions to come. The individuals in LIFE IS OURS have specific ethnic backgrounds, yet the revolutionary struggle has changed or is about to change the attitude in ‘nationalism’ to begin with. Perhaps anti-nationalist realism would be appropriate.

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regard to ethnicity: the young workers become more and more conscious of their historical responsibility, thus, every time a conflict occurs among the brigadiers, the voice of universal reason steps in. A rational argument leads to appeasement. Not only a Lacanian psychoanalyst would intervene at this point and insist that the human psyche is a more complex matter. The film’s task was obviously to depict these average youth workers as prototypic and educational role models that are to make the audience identify with them. Accordingly, the film repeatedly emphasizes that the youth brigades must work hard in order to prove that they are worthy of the example set by Tito. Socialist competition is emphasized, and the youth workers are motivated to work as efficiently as possible. For example, in a particular scene the names of the best and the worst performing brigadiers (“najbolji, najgori”) are publicly displayed on a board in order to motivate the others – in stark contrast to today’s capitalist competition, where only the best is regularly displayed and losers supposedly do not exist: think of today’s department stores that display the ‘(best) employee of the week’, never mentioning the ‘worst employee of the week’. In this particular instance of socialist competition, however, the ‘worst’ is part of the universalist game, you are not cynically excluded, ignored, or dismissed, but remain part of society unless you sabotage the socialist effort in toto (Fascists are by definition not part of the universal game).

Ill. 2: LIFE IS OURS (1948) – Left: Train tracks become a symbol for Yugoslav unity. Right: The names of the best and the worst brigadiers are displayed in order to motivate the others. Although engineers, political commissars and other technocrat elites supervise the work on the project, we have elements of self-management, e.g.

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when a brigadier in a joint effort with his colleagues improvises a tool to drill more effectively in the tunnel. There are elements of the Soviet shock worker model, elements of a Yugoslav self-management approach, and internationalism is emphasized repeatedly: we see Africans, Arabs, and other individuals from developing (and primarily non-aligned movement) countries visiting the building site in order to exchange expertise. Why does the film emphasize train tracks? Aside from infrastructural needs, a vital network of train connections is a symbol for Yugoslav unity (decades later, the highway Zagreb – Beograd was to fulfill the same function). In a nutshell, LIFE IS OURS aspires to what the first president of the committee for cinematography of Yugoslavia, a Surrealist writer in his own right and proponent of the Yugoslav avant-garde after WWI, Aleksandar Vučo, has considered as the primary objective of film making: the attachment to the goals of the broad popular masses. In other words: art, film, literature etc. are to be objective in “uniting truth with artistic strength.”17 As was indicated above, performative realism ‘mobilizes’ rather than represents society. This implies that the modes of production are as vital to the meaning of the work as its contents or its truth. Despite its formulaic and educational nature LIFE IS OURS therefore has a certain genuineness in that the makers of the film are as much determined as the characters in the story. Determined in two ways: determined to produce something popular in the above sense, and determined by circumstances of production. It is an instance where the producers, the actors, the depicted subject, and the audience share one and the same place of historical reality. Art and non-art share the same space. Is it propaganda? A cursory glance could indeed induce one to regard Soviet-modeled film-making and prop art as efforts to educate/influence the audience and establish symbols of unity. As Goulding writes “such films are replete with coarse propagandizing, ideological posturing, and sloganeering set in the context of socially important but banal content” and they “involve a mechanical analysis of reality [...] and deny any connection with worldwide artistic traditions.”18 Goulding makes an effort here to ban this kind of film-making from the regime of ‘art’, thus lining up for the usual ‘totalitarian’ cliché. But do not his words describe some basic aspirations of 17 D. J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 8. 18 D. J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 7-8. Read without context, this characterization applies to almost any Hollywood production today.

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the avant-garde, too (break with artistic traditions, ideological posturing etc.)? And furthermore, what is this kind of ‘mechanical’ propaganda supposed to mean in cases where the propagandist, the propagated, and the target of propaganda share the same sociopolitical circumstances? In the case of this film, the means of production impact the texture of this very production. In 1948, Yugoslav film production was at its very beginnings, most of the staff and leadership consisted of former Partisan fighters, equipment and expertise were lacking. So, although the film was an officially contracted project, it was improvised cinema for an improvised state, or, if you will, propaganda by the masses for the masses, and thus a genuine revolutionary project that mirrored the enthusiasm of film making with the “enthusiastic, or at least, tolerant, spirit with which they were received by Yugoslav viewing publics.”19 Yes, the film tells you what to do, it is manipulative and rather unsophisticated in its approach, but it is also the very object of its manipulation: One way to contribute to the reconstruction of society is not only to show how it is done but also to produce a film, this film, as if the producers were saying: ‘We are making films, while the other guys are digging tunnels’. The opening credits tell us accordingly that “the film was filmed on the tracks with the assistance of the management of the construction administration, the main staff of the youth brigades, and the sacrificing participation of the I. and II. Miner‘s Brigade from Vranduk and all other brigades on the tracks.”20 In short: the way the film was made accords to the way the tunnels were dug. If we were to start from here and discuss the development of Partisan films in general, we could point, on the one hand, to the artistic sophistication of some of the later films, a general tendency in post 1948 Yugoslavia’s cultural production that has been named “socialist aestheticism”.21 On the other hand, we could point out what one of the proponents of New Film, Živojin Pavlović, has claimed about some of the later productions: “In Yugoslav cinema, various forms of un-truth replace each other [...]. Instead of art about revolution, we have revolutionary kitsch.”22 19 D. J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 16. 20 Translation quoted from: Nielsen, Christian Axboe: “Život je naš (1948)”, 25 September 2010, http://jugokino.blogspot.de/2010/09/zivot-je-nas-1948.html, last access: 22 April 2013. 21 D. Đurić/ M. Šuvaković: Impossible histories, 10. 22 Levi, Pavle: Disintegration in frames: Aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007: 16.

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However, where, instead of “art about revolution”, is revolutionary art? My main point of reference is the above mentioned interdependence of the depicted, the depicter, and the circumstances of production, which in the above case is the political reality of all participants. Some of the later Partisan films may be more refined and artistic (e.g. Bauer’s refined and sometimes ambiguous character development). However, one could also argue that artistry has never stepped back in the case of LIFE IS OURS. On the contrary, one could argue that the honest and collective effort to create a film – no matter how good or bad it is from a today’s academic point of view or from the point of view of the decentralized and liberalized cultural scene of the 1960s – may turn out to be the actual ‘art’. Instead of cinéma vérité we have réalisation vérité. Vjekoslav Afrić, the director of SLAVICA, remarked in that regard that in these first post-war years “we were not romantic so much as naïve.”23 Hence, my argument does not focus on ‘film expertise’ or the ‘aestheticist’ reasoning of the post-Stalinist decentralization and liberalization or – as Goulding puts it in Liberated Cinema – “a higher plane of technical and artistic expression.”24 Rather, it focuses on the depth of the socio-political involvement of a production. It is not the elaborated skill that is relevant for the understanding of what is partisan in Partisan films, I would suggest, but the genuine implication of a production with the mode of production. This is an aspect that has more or less defined the activities of later neo-avant-garde and realist film making of the 1960s and 1970s. When, for example, Želimir Žilnik in CRNI FILM (1971) invites six homeless men to stay in his apartment – much to the surprise of his wife –, we sense that film-making is invested in the work as much as the subject/object of its filming.25 There simply and almost literally remains no room for anything else than immediate political involvement. Žilnik was not only exemplifying the work that the Socialist state has failed to accomplish at that time, but he also questioned the promises of artistic intervention, if it is released into the realm of ‘culture’.26 The ‘Black Wave’, ‘docu23 Horton, Andrew: “The Rise and Fall of the Partisan Film: Cinematic Perceptions of a National Identity”, in: Film Criticism 12.2 (1987): 20. 24 D. J. Goulding: Liberated Cinema, 16. 25 http://Žilnikzelimir.net/sr/crni-film 26 Buden, Boris: “Shoot It Black! An Introduction to Želimir Žilnik.” [Manuscript by the author] Published in: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 25 (2010): 38-47.

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drama’ labeling, or the Yugoslav context notwithstanding, throughout the last decades, there were many analogue examples of this kind of artistic involvement.27 I would argue that this aspect defines both the nexus and the conflict between artistic concepts and revolutionary politics until today. Art practice is defined by the interdependency of the circumstances of production with the means of production. The artist is part of his/her work, he/she is invested in it and in nothing else, the production is self-managed, thus creating a role model for emancipatory action. Malevič’s deviation from this principle by suggesting that the socio-historical role of art has changed and therefore its mode of representation has to adjust to new circumstances misses not only the artistic but also the political point. He must have assumed that by channeling the ‘proletarian’ force of art into orderly state institutions a socialist society will be established in a kind of post-utopian mode of realism. If this indeed was his assumption, it turned out to be wrong.

T HE

AVANT - GARDE SOCIETY

The question of genuine populism, of objective art etc., has been concerning art production all along the 20th century. Some post WWII attempts centered around artist collectives and activist groups that tried to further the momentum of a political struggle in various political surroundings. Postmodern irony notwithstanding, many artistic groupings adopted the rhetoric, the organization, the aesthetics, and the strategies of political movements. The praxis of self-management and its combination with the idea of a socialist society accompanied many activities or concepts both in Eastern and Western art production. Just to mention the 1960s Art Worker’s Coalition in the U.S., or more recently, collectives like ®™ark that define themselves as corporations with the objective to sabotage the corporatist system.28 Carl Schmitt’s notion of Partisans as ‘telluric’ actors, who are 27 Raunig, Gerald: Art and revolution: Transversal activism in the long twentieth century, Los Angeles: Semiotexte 2007; Klanten, R. et al.: Art & agenda: Political art and activism, Berlin: Gestalten 2011; Jelinek, Alana: This is not art, London et al.: I B Tauris & Co Ltd 2013. 28 ®™ark is [...] a corporation [...], but unlike other corporations, its ‘bottom line’ is to improve culture, rather than its own pocketbook. [...] Just as ordinary corporations are solely and entirely machines to increase their shareholders’ wealth

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defensive in nature and restrained to a specific territory, have changed with the internationalization of various resistance movements since the end of WWII and the proliferation of ideas via the world wide web (as it was perhaps envisioned in the little surrealist poem posted at the beginning of this text). If you will, many of these artistic strategies resemble Partisan efforts, although nowadays, due to a general fragmentation of public space, artistic eruptions are usually confined to the cultural realm and/or are marginalized as idiosyncratic efforts that are either ignored or merely celebrated in elitist circles, backed by substantial sponsorship. However, if we look at all of these activities as a whole, from the perspective of performative realism, we will notice that the artistic struggle for a ‘common stage’ has never stopped and that ever new efforts provide ever new signifiers for emancipatory involvement. A recent example that perhaps intriguingly links both a past and perhaps a future interpretation of the partisan is Marina Abramović’s performance The Hero from 2001. Mourning her father’s death, a celebrated WWII Partisan fighter, Abramović sat on a white horse, holding a white flag, while Partisan songs sounded from nearby speakers, as if she was to remind us of the fragment from KONJUH PLANINOM/A SONG FOR THE DEAD MINER (YUG 1966, D: Fadil Hadžić): “...the wind is humming The leaves sing mourning songs. And on top of the mountain, a flag is waving in the wind... ”29

[...] so ®™ark is a machine to improve its shareholders’ culture and life [...].®™ark supports the sabotage (informative alteration) of corporate products, from dolls and children's learning tools to electronic action games, by channelling funds from investors to workers for specific projects grouped into ‘mutual funds’.” ®™ark (ed.): Frequently Asked Questions, http://rtmark.com/faq.html, last access: 22 April 2013. 29 Translated and quoted from: Popović, Miloš: “Konjuh planinom”, http://www. vuksfrj.se/kultura/knjizevnost/nob/konjuh.html, last access: 22. April 2013.

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Ill. 3: From black square to white horse – Marina Abramović, The Hero (2001). We can imagine that the artist has abducted this flag, detaching it from a specific territory, and, instead of displaying a nostalgic commemoration of past struggles – art about revolution –, Abramović displays a positive and seemingly open future with a flag that is yet to be specified (it is not a peace flag, and there is no red star). Here again, personal ‘investment’ determines the ethos of the work. It is as if the artist was saying: life is ours, and it is up to us to find new delineations for our political and perhaps artistic struggle – the beginning of history in its non-alienated form. Perhaps any form of intervention has to start with this thought that human history has not yet begun, that any arbitrary act can become a truth event and change the course of time. This also may be the most comforting thought every time someone near to us passes away, like in the above case. One dies, and the other one is in charge now to make it better (not to fail better, as Beckett apologetics may stress). Every death opens a gate to a new attempt, a new life. And this is the reason why we must invest ourselves in the shaping of this future, slowly adding our traces – or, if you prefer the metaphor of train tracks and tunnels – to this empty flag. The avant-garde, whether political or artistic, whether past or present, whether ‘avant-garde’ or not, should dismantle and destroy the barbaric forms of pre-history, and it should do this constantly, beginning in the here and now.

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B IBLIOGRAPHY Abramović, Marina: The Hero, 2001 (courtesy of the artist). Badiou, A./Macey, D./Corcoran, S.: The communist hypothesis, London: Verso 2010. Becker, Sabina et al.: Literarische Moderne. Begriff und Phänomen, Berlin 2006. Breton, André/Trotsky, Leon: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art. 1938, http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism1.htm, last access: 22 April 2013. Buden, Boris: “Shoot It Black! An Introduction to Želimir Žilnik.” [Manuscript by the author] Published in: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 25 (2010): 38-47. Deretić, Jovan: Kratka istorija srpske književnosti, http://www.rastko.rs/ knjizevnost/jderetic_knjiz/jderetic-knjiz_10.html#_Toc412464113, last access: 22 April 2013. Đurić, D./Šuvaković, M.: Impossible histories: Historical avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, and post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2006. Đurić, D./Šuvaković, M.: Impossible histories: Historical avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, and post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2003. Goulding, Daniel J.: Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002. Harrison, Charles/Wood, Paul (eds.): Kunsttheorie im 20.Jahrhundert [2 volumes], Hamburg: Hatje Cantz 2003. Horton, Andrew: “The Rise and Fall of the Partisan Film: Cinematic Perceptions of a National Identity”, in: Film Criticism 12.2 (1987): 18-27. Jelinek, Alana: This is not art, London et al.: I B Tauris & Co Ltd 2013. Klanten, R. et al.: Art & agenda: Political art and activism, Berlin: Gestalten 2011. Levi, Pavle: Disintegration in frames: Aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema, Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press 2007. Marx, Karl/Engels, Friedrich: Werke, Vol. 1. Berlin/DDR: (Karl) Dietz Verlag 1976.

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Nemoguce–L'impossible, Surrealist Almanac (Proverb), Belgrade 1930. Quoted from: http://www.serbiansurrealism.com/arteng2.htm, last access: 22 April 2013. Nielsen, Christian Axboe: “Život je naš (1948)”, 25 September 2010, http:// jugokino.blogspot.de/2010/09/zivot-je-nas-1948.html, last access: 22 April 2013. Popović, Miloš: “Konjuh planinom”, http://www.vuksfrj.se/kultura/knjizev nost/nob/konjuh.html, last access: 22 April 2013. Rancière, Jacques: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum 2006. Rancière, Jacques: Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999. Raunig, Gerald: Art and revolution: Transversal activism in the long twentieth century, Los Angeles: Semiotexte 2007.

F ILMOGRAPHY CRNI FILM (YUG 1971, D: Želimir Žilnik) KONJUH PLANINOM/A SONG FOR THE DEAD MINER (YUG 1966, D: Fadil Hadžić) SLAVICA (YUG 1947, D: Vjekoslav Afrić) ŽIVOT JE NAŠ. LJUDI SA PRUGE/LIFE IS OURS: PEOPLE FROM THE TRACKS (YUG 1948, D: Gustav Gavrin)

Authors

Colombi, Matteo, research fellow at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe. His main research interests are Czech and Slovene literature, German literature from Prague and Italian literature from Trieste, literature and ethnicity, literature and film, crime literature. Recent publications: Stadt – Mord – Ordnung. Urbane Topographien des Verbrechens in der Kriminalliteratur aus Ost- und Mitteleuropa (2012), Vom klassischen zum plastischen Karst. In: Raßloff, Ute (ed.). Wellen– schläge. Kulturelle Interferenzen im östlichen Mitteleuropa des langen 20. Jahrhunderts (2013). Gilić, Nikica, associate professor, chair of film studies, department of comparative literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is the coordinator of the doctoral programme in literature, performance studies, film and culture at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Studies. His main interests are the history of Croatian and regional cinema, postmodern cinema, genre film and the theory of genre cinema. His recent publications include Introduction to the History of Croatian film (2010) and 60 years of Pula Film Festival and Croatian Film (2013, ed. co-edited). Jakiša, Miranda, professor of South and East Slavic literatures at Humboldt University Berlin. Her main research interests are literature, film and cultural studies, performance studies. Recent publications: Yugoslavia – Lebanon. Negotiations of Belonging in the Arts of Fragmented Cultures (2012), Remembering War and Peace in Southeast Europe in the 20th Century (2014, co-edited).

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Jovanović, Nebojša, PhD candidate of gender studies at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His main research interests are representations of gender and sexuality in Yugoslav cinema as the part and parcel of the cultural revolution in socialist Yugoslavia. His articles have been published in several film journals including: Studies in Eastern European Cinema, KinoKultura and Hrvatski filmski ljetopis. Kirn, Gal, postdoctoral fellow of the Humboldt Foundation at the Slavic Institute of Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. He holds a PhD in political philosophy (University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia). His main research interests are: ideology critique, history of Yugoslavia and socialism, film and art theory, memory studies, crisis, contemporary political theory. Recent publications: Encountering Althusser (2012, coedited), Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and Its Transgressive Moments (2012, co-edited) and Postfordism and its discontents (2010). Kolanović, Maša, assistant professor of contemporary Croatian Literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her main interests are popular literature and culture during Yugoslav socialism and postsocialism. Recent publications: Comparative Postsocialism: Slavic Experiences (2013), Underground Barbie (2012), Worker! Rebel? Consumer... Popular Culture and Croatian Novel from Socialism till Transition (2011). Komel, Mirt, teacher assistant of philosophy and researcher of cultural studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Main research interests include theoretical psychoanalyses, film studies, cultural studies of videogames, orientalism and balkanism. Recent publications: Discourse and Violence (2012), Twin Peaks and Postmodernism (2012). Komelj, Miklavž, poet and art historian from the Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research interests are contemporary philosophy, avant-garde and partisan art history, poetics and literature, nature in Renaissance and translation. He received the Prešeren’s Foundation Award for his work Nenaslovljiva Imena (Unaddressed Names). Recent publications: Necessity of Poetry (2011), How to think Partisan Art? (2009).

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Petrović, Tanja, senior research associate at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research interests lie at the interface of linguistic, social, and cultural phenomena in the societies of the former Yugoslavia. Recent publications: Politics of Representation in Southeastern Europe at the Turn of the Century (2011), Yurope: Yugoslav Legacy and the Politics of the Future in Post-Yugoslav Societies (2012). Stanković, Peter, associate professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He specializes in the field of cultural studies, film studies, popular music and identity politics. His recent publications include a book on Slovenian partisan films, an article on Slovenian cultural studies and several articles about mechanisms of symbolic exclusion of immigrants from the other former Yugoslav republics in Slovenia. Terzić, Zoran, studied Fine Arts in New York with Jessica Stockholder, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Will Insley and non-normative Aesthetics in Wuppertal with Bazon Brock and Heiner Mühlmann, where he received his PhD in 2006. All of his research centers on the interplay of aesthetics and politics. He lectured or conducted research in Vienna (IFK), London, Ghent, New York, San Francisco, Rotterdam (BAK), Amsterdam (Ellen de Bruijne Gallery), Zagreb (Goethe Institut), Ljubljana, Leipzig, Sarajevo, Belgrad (SOG), Berlin (ZfL) et al. His last monograph The Art of Nationalism (2007) dealt with the cultural semiotics of war. Velisavljević, Ivan, research assistant at the department of literature and communication at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University Belgrade, Serbia. His main research interests are disability studies, the relationship between film and literature, problems of adaptation and storytelling, the history of Yugoslav cinema. Recent publications: New Frames: Neglected History of Serbian Cinema (2008, co-edited), Unusual Bodies: Cripples, Freaks, Cyborgs (2012). Vervaet, Stijn, postdoctoral research fellow of the Flemish Research Council (FWO-Vlaanderen) affiliated with the Centre for Literature and Trauma at Ghent University, Belgium. His main research interests lie in contemporary literature in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, cultural memory

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studies, Holocaust studies and cultural history of the South Slavs in the 19th and 20th century. Recent publication: Centar i periferija u Austro-Ugarskoj. Dinamika izgradnje nacionalnih identiteta u Bosni i Hercegovini od 1878. do 1918. godine na primjeru književnih tekstova (2013). Vittorelli, Natascha, research assistent at the Departement of Contemporary History at Vienna University. Her main research interests are Yugoslavia’s politics of the past, History and historiography of women’s movements, Feminist Historical Studies, Zadruga (type of rural family community among South Slavs), Imaginary maps and (South) East European conurbation concepts. Latest publication: “Kriegerin und Krankenschwester. Mehr oder weniger spektakuläre Inszenierungen der Partisanin im sozialistischen Jugoslawien”, in: L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, 23 (2012) 1, 73–90. Wurm, Barbara, research assistant of Slavic studies at HumboldtUniversity, Berlin. Her main research interests are literary, film and media theory, non-fiction film, and the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Occasionally she works as freelance programmer (Dok Leipzig, goEast, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Zeughauskino) and film critic (senses of cinema, Sight & Sound, Ray, taz, Kolik, Filmdienst, EPD film). Recent publications (as co-editor): Digital Formalism. Die kalkulierten Bilder des Dziga Vertov (3/2009), Kino! No. 10: Partizanski Film (2010). Zimmermann, Tanja, junior professor of Slavic Literatures and General Literature at the University of Konstanz. Habilitation also in Art History. Main fields of interests: media policy, memory cultures, literature, art and media in 19th and 20th century in Eastern Europe. Recent publications: Balkan Memories. Media Constructions of National and Transnational History (2012), Der Balkan zwischen Ost und West. Mediale Bilder und kulturpolitische Prägungen (2013), Brüderlichkeit und Bruderzwist. Me diale Inszenierungen des Aufbaus und des Niedergangs der multinationalen Staaten in Ost- und Südosteuropa (2014).