remnants of the black wave
Posted by popkitchen | Filed under films, popcult
Many people whom I meet this year were aware that I come from a post-Communist country, but were surprised to find out that the country in which I was born (with which most are familiar, not the results of the post-war division) had a socialistic organization of society, but was never a part of an Iron Curtain. Perhaps the paradox of the liberality of that regime, which was open to the West, but not democratic can be found in movement in film that took place in 1960’s under the title „black wave“.
Film makers of Yugoslav black wave were inspired by neo-realism and French nouvelle vague. Ideologically 
they were lefists, but disappointed with the bureaucratic regime, which promised freedom and prosperity to the working class, but by the end of sixties it grew to be a huge party-serving nomenclature. Very much influenced by the student protests of 1968 (both in Paris and in Belgrade), black wave film makers made films, which posed questions and exposed the cracks of what was considered to a functioning welfare system. Interestingly enough in such a setting, films could be only financed by the state, which all of them were, but later they would be shunned aside by subtle mechanisms of censorship. One director was sentenced to prison, while others were discouraged from making films by the party committees, production companies or “well-meaning” individuals. Many of these films were shown on international festivals, where they received critical acclaim (WR: Mysteries of Organism by Dusan Makavejev, I Even Met Happy Gypsies and The Master and Margaret by Aleksandar Petrovic).
Želimir Žilnik, who presented his documentary short films this week on UCL on the occasion of the Festival 
of Moving Image, was a prominent member of the movement. After making his feature Early Works, for which he received a Golden Bear on 1969 Berlin Film Festival, Žilnik
focused on making of documentary films dealing with undercurrent of socialist society – homeless, unemployed, children prostitution. Faced with continual pressures (he himself claims that there were no outright bans), Žilnik spent much of the seventies in Germany, continuing to make films about outcasts such as growing population of immigrants (guest workers).
A true independent film-maker, Žilnik today deals with issues such as migration in European Union (Fortress Europe), deported Gypsies (Kenedi Returns Home) or privatization gone awry, which is the topic of the film he is working on, which takes place in a town in Northern Serbia, where workers are fighting to take control of the company, whose new owner bought it and wants to shut down the production.
Tags: films, london, yugoslav black wave cinema
November 30th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Nice post u have here
Added to my RSS reader
December 1st, 2008 at 1:39 am
[...] writes about the Yugoslav “black wave” film of the 1960s. Posted by Veronica Khokhlova [...]
December 8th, 2008 at 12:02 am
[...] has an excellent short introduction to the Yugoslav “Black Wave” cinema movement - http://www.popkitchen.com/?p=23 [...]
March 28th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Спасибо наконец то нашла то что хотела прочитать тут. Кстати у меня есть рисунки на эту тему. Куда можно скинуть? Ещё раз спасибо огромнейшее !
May 13th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
[...] popular culture – both in terms of mass taste, as well as fringe stuff – I wrote already about black wave cinema of the late sixties/early seventies, also new wave music from the 80’s needs to be mentioned, as [...]
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 pm
#1 article