# Rare Films from Socialist Yugoslavia October 22, 2024 Damir Kapidžić Denisa Sarajlic Nace Zavrl Embed The curator of the series Nace Zavrl shares his inspiration for putting together the fifty-film retrospective. In fact, one of the original founders of the Harvard Film Archive was Yugoslavian, and Zavrl suspected there might be a treasure trove of socialist-era films in the catalog. He was right. Damir Kapidžić, political scientist at the University of Sarajevo, notes that an explosion of filmmaking occurred after Stalin and Tito split in their ideologies, and Yugoslavia needed to present itself as a third kind of system, neither socialist nor Western. Denisa Sarajlic, former Deputy Minister of Civil Affairs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has studied the power of narratives from the socialist period to the present. She tackles the plots of the movies under discussion and describes the portrayal of women and the social tensions related to Western influences, among other fascinating insights. --- ## Guests [Damir Kapidžić](https://damirkapidzic.com), 2023–2024 Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Scholars Program. Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Sarajevo. [Denisa Sarajlic](https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/people/denisa-sarajlic), Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program (spring 2025). [Director, SKRIPTA](https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisa-sarajlic-7905b7152/). [Nace Zavrl](https://afvs.fas.harvard.edu/people/nace-zavrl), PhD Candidate, Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University. ## Host [Jessica Barnard](https://wcfia.harvard.edu/people/jessica-barnard), Program Manager for the Weatherhead Research Clusters on Migration and on Global History. ## Producer/Director [Michelle Nicholasen](https://wcfia.harvard.edu/people/michelle-nicholasen), Editor and Content Producer, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. ## Related Links - [The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957–1988](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/the-yugoslav-junction-film-and-internationalism-in-the-sfry) - [Harvard Film Archive](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/) - [Nace Zavrl’s personal website](https://afvs.fas.harvard.edu/people/nace-zavrl) - [Damir Kapidžić’s personal website](https://damirkapidzic.com) - [*Illiberal Politics in Southeast Europe: How Ruling Elites Undermine Democracy*](https://www.routledge.com/Illiberal-Politics-in-Southeast-Europe-How-Ruling-Elites-Undermine-Democracy/Kapidzic-Stojarova/p/book/9781032076911), edited by Damir Kapidžić, Věra Stojarová (Routledge, 2022) - “[Inclusive topic selection: reflections on Mostar’s first citizens’ assembly](https://www.publicdeliberation.net/inclusive-topic-selection-reflections-on-mostars-first-citizens-assembly/)” by Damir Kapidžić and Yves Dejaeghere (*Deliberative Democracy Digest*, February 15, 2024) - “[After Yugoslavia](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2022/after-yugoslavia/after-yugoslavia-an-introduction/)” by Nace Zavrl (*Senses of Cinema*, October 2022) - “[The patchwork method: on David Redmon and Ashley Sabin](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2024.2353538)” by Nace Zavrl (*Visual Studies*, Volume 39, May 2024) - “[Megaphone, Molotov, Moviola: 1968 and Global Cinema / Celluloid Revolt](https://necsus-ejms.org/megaphone-molotov-moviola-1968-and-global-cinema-celluloid-revolt/)” by Nace Zavrl (*NECSUS*, June 14, 2020) - “[High art cinema: The artist’s feature film](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/miraj.7.1.52_1)” by Nace Zavrl (*Moving Image Review & Art Journal*, Volume 7, Issue 1, Apr 2018) - “[Counter-operation: Harun Farocki Against the Network](https://online.ucpress.edu/afterimage/article/45/1/7/20594/Counter-operation-Harun-Farocki-Against-the)” by Nace Zavrl (*Afterimage*, Volume 45, Issue 1, July/August 2017) ## Music “[Balkan Qoulou](https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Watcha_Clan/Live_at_WFMU_on_Transpacific_Sound_Paradise_1102009/Balkan_Qoulou/)” by [Watcha Clan](https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Watcha_Clan/contact). *Source: Free Music Archive (*[*CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US*](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/)*)* ## Transcript JESSICA BARNARD: Welcome to the Epicenter podcast from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I'm your host, Jessica Barnard. Today, we're departing from our usual discussions about complex global issues to talk about film, Yugoslavian film, to be exact. Next month, the Weatherhead Center is co-sponsoring, with the Harvard Film Archive, a unique series of long and short films from Yugoslavia. It's titled The Yugoslav Junction-- Film and Internationalism in the SFRY from 1957 to 1988. The series runs from November 9 to December 9. For this episode, we ask the curator of the series to pick out three films for our guests to discuss, to give us a taste of the variety of film making during the '60s, '70s, and '80s in what was then the socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It's OK if you're not familiar with Yugoslavian film, because we'll get you up to speed on the industry and the political and social landscape with help from our guests. The curator of the series, Nace Zavrl, is a doctoral candidate in the department of art, film, and visual studies at Harvard, working on nonfiction filmmaking, globalization, and historiography. He's written on film and experimental media for a variety of publications and works as an editor at the journal senses of cinema. Damir Kapidzic is associate professor of comparative politics at the faculty of political science, University of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Denisa Sarajlic is the director of Scripta, a woman-led business consultancy, and was the former deputy minister of civil affairs in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Denisa and Damir are joining us today from Sarajevo. They are both affiliates with the Weatherhead Scholars Program. Let's start with you, Nace. You're the curator of the series. What was the inspiration behind the Yugoslav junction? NACE Zavrl: So I've been here, I've been at Harvard for six, seven years now. But a few years ago was the first time that I really started to think about, well, there's this film archive that we have at this institution. And I know that it's extensive. I know that it contains something like 25,000 titles-- More, maybe. But I've never really seriously looked at what's inside. And then I did. And I opened the catalog. And it's a beautiful archive because most archives are quite secretive about what they contain. They don't share the titles. They're not terribly happy to. The Harvard Film Archive catalog is entirely public, so I spent a good amount of time looking through it, seeing what's inside. And to my amazement-- well, maybe Not To my amazement. I suspected that there might be a significant amount of really fascinating Yugoslav stuff in that. Because the first curator of the Harvard Film Archive, one of the founders of the archive, was a man named Vlada Petric. Yugoslav born, he came to Harvard in the mid 1970s, found the archive together with philosopher Stanley Cavell and filmmaker Robert Gardner. And so I suspect that largely due to his influence and due to the connections and the friendships and the colleagues that he invited to Harvard, there is a significant number of films from the region in this archive. So I really started to think about what kind of story of Yugoslav film could we tell from what's here. This internationalist angle that I'm taking here is only one of numerous possible stories that we could take through this enormous body of work. And so I started to look at what kind of narrative we could tell, what kind of narrative of Yugoslav film we could tell, and also what's missing from it. Even though this is an extensive archive, it doesn't contain many films by women. It tends towards films from certain republics, let's say. And so it became necessary to, of course, supplement the archive's holdings. The series, as it stands now, contains 50 titles, 30 of which are from the Harvard Film Archive, and the other 20 are borrowed as loans from other institutions. JESSICA BARNARD: Great. And our other guests are not as involved in the world of film. They're more from the world of political science. Denisa, can you tell us about your interest and connection to film? DENISA SARAJLIC: Yes, thank you. Film has a function. And Yugoslav film had a function. It had ideological function. And it had political function, as well. And that's the case with Bosnian film today, as well. I mean, it has a very strong function in creating a certain narrative and especially in the post-war Bosnia, creating the narrative of many victims of the war, fighting historical revisionism. So in my work, I was in government for a four years a while back. And one of the items in our portfolio was culture. So I've worked very closely with Bosnian filmmakers on creating a more favorable political legal framework for the film industry, accessing some EU funds. But also promoting Bosnian films abroad. And then for my PhD thesis, I wrote about discourses and narratives, political narratives. So actually had to go back to the Yugoslav film, because part of today's political narratives, you can't tell the story of today's political narratives without looking at socialism and narratives that socialist Yugoslavia was creating. And film was crucial in making these narratives, the massive-- reaching the masses. JESSICA BARNARD: Great. And Damir, you're an associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Sarajevo. So how does film connect with your research? DAMIR KAPIDZIC: Well, you mentioned comparative politics. I mean, film, as Denisa mentioned, is a reflection of the politics of its time. So even when watching films from different eras-- and Denisa mentioned contemporary Bosnian film and Nace talked about the film of socialist Yugoslavia. Comparing even those two against each other tells us a lot about how politics developed in these countries and how the different regimes used film and other forms of media just to promote what they want to achieve, how they want to be presented to the outside world. And it's also very, very specific moments in time that then tell us this more detailed story. So, for example, when it comes to Yugoslav film, I always like to emphasize that this sort of explosion that we then see also in this retrospective, it comes after the split between Stalin, who we all know of the Soviet Union, and Tito, the longtime ruler slash dictator of Yugoslavia. When the two of them split, all of a sudden it became important to position Yugoslavia as a developed and leading nation, also globally. And film was a medium to achieve this. JESSICA BARNARD: How can you prepare viewers for the films they're about to watch if they have no prior knowledge of Yugoslav film from this period? I wonder if we can start with a quote that I really like from your press release. It's from a 1965 Time magazine article that says, "some Western visitors have remarked that Yugoslavia is a Marxist country-- 50% Carl and 50% Groucho." How is this reflective of the films chosen for the festival? NACE Zavrl: Well, I mean, I love this quote. And I think it's important to mention that Time magazine meant it very negatively. So this is what they write. And then the next sentence is, with comic indecision, it's economic planners, Yugoslavia's economic planners, have bobbed between iron-handed Communist controls and fleeting flirtations with capitalism. The results have not been happy. So Time magazine, they think this is laughable. That's how they're using the Groucho, that kind of Yugoslavia is a parody of itself. I think that the results in the sphere of film, at least, have been very happy. I mean, it's exactly this kind of uncertain mix, this wavering between an open market and a more closed socialist economy, this kind of intermixing of different cultural influences, East, West, non-aligned, whatever. That's exactly what made film in Yugoslavia, in socialist Yugoslavia, so interesting. To me, Yugoslav film is really one of the only remaining blind spots on the world's first political map. What I'm trying to really emphasize with this series is that there is so much more, that there is a really uncharted map of what was happening in different periods of Yugoslavia. And this can be something like the amateur cinema clubs, kino klubovi, that existed throughout the country, which were kind of state supported institutions in which amateur filmmakers got equipment, got money to make stuff. But they could do whatever. They could make whatever they wished. And there's all kinds of experimental cinema. There's all kinds of cinema that we really haven't studied yet and we really have barely seen yet. And some of these films and the retrospective, they fit into that. So maybe that's what I would emphasize when trying to prepare viewers for this retrospective, to maybe do away with all ideas of what Yugoslavia might be. OK, socialism, we understand. It's not the Soviet Union. We understand. It's something in between. Cool. But it's also so much more. JESSICA BARNARD: Damir, can you describe the sociopolitical landscape? DAMIR KAPIDZIC: I think this is actually quite a good sort of way to phrase it. And I found a quote by, from a work by John Kenneth Galbraith, late Professor at Harvard. In his book, Journey from Poland to Yugoslavia, he wrote that Yugoslavs are committed to supplying consumer goods, including those that must be imported in the present, in line with Tito's pronouncement who said that those who want socialism should enjoy at least some of its fruits. He wrote that he enjoyed reveling in the luxury and life, the excellent food, wine, good services, but suspected that he would also be too much of a hedonist to make a good modern socialist. Equally true of the Yugoslavs. Basically, what he said is that Yugoslavia, this third way that it created, was capitalism with socialist mistakes, or rather, socialism with capitalist mistakes. And I think this fits kind of well in describing this in-between, where socialist Yugoslavia would fit, that it tries to create some of its own way of both dealing with the West and with socialism, but neither being fully committed to either of those. JESSICA BARNARD: So we are going to focus on three films to give us a sense of the great variety of the films in this festival. We're looking at Where to After the Rain from the 1960s, I Miss Sonja Henie from the 1970s, and The Way Steel was Tempered from the 1980s. So maybe we can speak a bit chronologically about how these films speak to the aesthetics and sensibilities of their decade and what kind of evolution they show in thinking. Damir, why don't you go first? DAMIR KAPIDZIC: OK, maybe I can start us off. The first film from the 1960s, Where to After the Rain, It comes at a time when Yugoslavia was developing very strongly in terms of industrialization. And the regime back then also wanted to showcase this. So we see a lot of roads, buildings, driving happening all at once, along with a more modernist flair of the protagonists in the film, trying to blend in between East and West, trying to position Yugoslavia as neither Soviet nor completely capitalist. So we see some contradictions there-- and I'm sure that Nace and Denisa will talk about this, as well. When they emphasize their devotion to socialist and working class ideals, while at the same time displaying signs of wealth and displaying this need for some kind of consumerism. But what I also want to emphasize is that this film, it also adopts a critique of various social issues at the same time, which is kind of untypical for films from what we call post Soviet countries or former Communist countries. It is told from the perspective of minority. It is told from the perspective of a governing class. The main protagonists are actually the socialist elite. And the film highlights, in such an exquisite way, their alienation from the rest of society. So this sort of draws back to Milovan Djilas sort of work on a new elite, on a communist elite that is removed from the rest of the population. And for such a film to be produced and also shown in a one party state is something that, in itself could almost be seen as an achievement. So I mean, this emphasis of class wealth somewhere where egalitarianism should be the norm, and also, for example, cars as a status symbol. They're driving around in Mercedes, which are produced in Germany, not in Yugoslav cars, not in Soviet cars, but the best of the best, so to say. And this contrasts with the regular population, which drive in more or less rundown Yugoslav or Soviet vehicles. All of these small little symbolisms, they perform like a narrative critique of the system as such, but from within. JESSICA BARNARD: Denisa. DENISA SARAJLIC: Going back to what I said before, the kind of social dimensions of this, the film is structured around several dichotomies. So there is a dichotomy between characters, but then within characters, as well. So we have an older generation, which has become quite typical of this, what was, at the time, becoming kind of a bureaucratic apparatus, like a bureaucratic elite, basically, which characterized the middle and late socialism in former Yugoslavia. The parents who are representing in this film, the elite, the older generation, they are very conformist. They are the way that they are, the clothes that they are wearing. They go glamping, but they remain in their fur coat and very tailored suits, while the younger generation, the daughter and her boyfriend, visually, they're very conformist. He's just graduated. He's got a new job. They're looking to get a brand new apartment. She's dressed very elegantly. She wears a golden bracelet, kind of a symbol of being part of this socialist elite. But at the same time, each one of them, in their own ways, is trying to break away from these norms. So the daughter is looking at a plane which flies above them the whole time as a kind of a symbol of freedom. And the only time she smiles in the movie is when she looks at this plane. So clearly, sort of seeking to go away, to break away from whatever is kind of there for her. And parents show their expectation of a marriage between them soon to be. And she knows this, so she's constantly looking at this plane as a way of trying to avoid her destiny in a way. And then the boyfriend is the one that most explicitly is challenging the socialist norms. He's talking about going to Paris, running away from the country. He's openly judging her parents for being elitist. He calls them snobs. And so he's really verbalizing all the discontent which people must have started to feel in the '60s with the elites, which were clearly benefiting from the system. She doesn't say-- the daughter doesn't say a lot about that. And she even questions his choices. She's really kind of trying to warn him that he is breaking away, that this is dangerous. She's, in a way, trying to be the voice of reason, saying, even if you go to the West, it's not ideal. So don't idealize all these things. And then through that, eventually, they kind of realize that they're not even meant to be for each other. I mean, they realize the differences between themselves, because each of them carries this conflict within them. But then it's very symbolic in the end. The plane that's flying above them crashes, and kind of crashes her dreams. And this is when she-- she was at the tipping point from telling her parents that she doesn't want to marry, just as her boyfriend questions his own values and realizes that he has to be realistic and he has to get married, accept the job, accept the situation. And then the plane crashes and she kind of accepts the marriage and sets a date. What's really characteristic of this film, it being a new film, is that it's trying to break away from this optimistic, patriotic dogma, which was characteristic of the state sponsored film in the '50s. So that's what kind of characterizes it as more pessimism. And then it's also more humane. Because in the '50s, there's a lot of focus-- about '50s, '60s, and '70s, but I mean, before the new film. There's a lot of focus on the collective, the collective values, the collective ideology thinking. And in this film, it's more humane. It's more about individual wishes and individual values, thoughts, young people using their own brain. And final word, it kind of shows a generation stuck between the socialist egalitarianism but then this also very elitist view of socialism, which was beginning to develop in the army in the '60s, and then even more so in the '70s. JESSICA BARNARD: Thanks, Denisa. That's a helpful recap of the plot. The next movie that we want to spotlight is really completely different, from 1972, I Miss Sonja Henie. It's a 15 minute short film. Nace, maybe you can tell us about some of the people making it and how it was set up. And maybe I'll just say that Sonja Henie was a Norwegian figure skater, Olympic medalist, and popular film star of the 1930s. NACE Zavrl: I wouldn't say directed. I would say orchestrated by the Slovenian Macedonian cineast, Karpo Godina, who, at the 1972 Film Festival in Belgrade, where many domestic and foreign filmmakers were in attendance, he organized every evening after the official events, after the screenings of the festival, he organized this group of seven, eight filmmakers to come to an apartment not too far from the festival center. And each of the filmmakers would be given a very simple set of rules. This is the room you have to film in. You have one-- you can't move the camera. You have one camera position. You can't zoom in. You can't tilt. You can't pan. And you only get one roll of film, so a few minutes. So all of these famous international directors, like Milos Forman, Buck Henry, Tinto Brass, Paul Morrissey, Frederick Wiseman, and then domestic local directors, Bogdan Tirnanic, Mladomir Djordjevic, Dusan Makavejev. They all made a very short film according to instructions. And the only rule, the only limit that they all had to obey, on top of the formal limits, is that each of these very short films had to contain the words "I miss Sonja Henie," not necessarily in English. And the film is both in English. It's in French. It's in Serbo-Croatian. It's an eclectic, chaotic mix. And this quote itself comes from a line from the Snoopy cartoons. And Sonja Henie is a Norwegian ice skater. So it's absurd in its setup. And it's absurdist in the way that it turned out. I mean, these individual segments really don't make any sense together. And that's the whole point. That's the whole beauty, I think. Some of these filmmakers years later were asked, do you remember making this film, this classic? Because it is a classic. And I think somebody, I think Frederick Wiseman, had no recollection that he ever even did this. So I think that also speaks to the environment in which it was made, late nights after festival screenings. Maybe they've had something to drink, whatever. This is a film that really embodies a kind of loose, experimental, and thoroughly international spirits that was permeating a certain strand of Yugoslav cinema at the time. JESSICA BARNARD: You mentioned that the title I Miss Sonja Henie, comes from Snoopy, from the American Peanuts cartoons. Do you have any sense of why they chose that phrase? Or maybe the whole point is it's completely meaningless. NACE Zavrl: I don't think it has a narrative purpose. I think it was just a phrase that was in circulation that Karpo Godina maybe Dušan Makavejev read somewhere when they were browsing through American magazines, and then taking that phrase out of context, ripping it out of context and implanting it into this entirely different context. I think that's as much as we should read into the significance of I Miss Sonja Henie. JESSICA BARNARD: Would anyone else like to comment on that movie or the short film? DENISA SARAJLIC: Yeah. Yes, as Nace said, I think the reason why it's kind of become a classic is because it's so typical of this breaking of the form, and the whole kind of mission of the new film was to be rebellious, to fight against these norms. And in this particular film, they do so through the form itself, through this chaotic experimental controversial form, if you want. So internationalization is, as I said, the message. And it's kind of a form of art here because they are trying to, at that time in many of the movies, especially in the next one we're going to talk about, it's about sexual liberation. And this movie, it has many elements of that. It's about nudity. And nudity and sexual liberation at the time were proof of that the films were westernized and they were internationalized, because this was the trend internationally. And if you look at some of the Makavejev's other famous films like The Wilhelm Reich (WR) with Milena Dravić, she said in this other movie, she says, between socialism and free love, there can be no conflict. And I think this movie does the same thing. It's saying this is about free love. This is about breaking away of all these chains. And we interpret that however you want. But there's nothing there doesn't need to be a conflict between socialism and free love. JESSICA BARNARD: Damir, would you like to add anything of your thoughts on this short film? DAMIR KAPIDZIC: Not really. JESSICA BARNARD: OK. Let's move on to the third movie that we're going to highlight, The Way Steel was Tempered. That film was made in 1988, just three years before the breakup of Yugoslavia. So this is a really pivotal time in history. Can we talk a little bit about this film and how it reflects the political situation in Yugoslavia and the feeling of the people at that time? DAMIR KAPIDZIC: So maybe I can introduce the context a little bit. I mean, this film comes at a time when Yugoslavia was already on its decline economically, politically. And it paints a much bleaker picture of everything that was going on in the country. Also, the perspective from which it was told is different. It's told from the perspective of the working class or lower management trying to get by and survive in this sort of sense of a downward spiral of politics and mismanagement, essentially. So what we see here is the everyday man trying to get by in a broken system. And everything that was idealized, such as in the first movie from the 1960s, that's gone. We see here the sort of aftermath of industrialization, where the large part of the film was shot in a steel factory. That hasn't essentially changed much since the 1950s-- no safety equipment, no introduction of new techniques. There's always an imminency of danger both in the workplace, and in also in how the characters behave. And this imminence of danger, this sensing that something bad is going to happen. I mean, in the breakup of Yugoslavia, in the Yugoslav wars from 1992 to 1995, that happened. So in a way, the film already reflected an atmosphere within the country that was kind of sensing that it's not that going to be that easy. NACE Zavrl: Yeah, maybe I can also add that Zelimir Zilnik, the director of this film, he made quite a few films throughout the '80s and then into the '90s that, I mean, prophetic is a kind of overused and not very precise term. But he was able to diagnose the downfall of Yugoslavia and the political reasons for that before it even happened. I mean, this is a film that is littered with opportunism, kind of corruption, this kind of private public profiteering, various kinds of illicit, semi illicit business. There's this great line in the film, danas je granica izmedju rada i mučke skoro nevidljiva. "Today the line between fair and unfair work--" is how it's translated in the film, "is almost invisible." So there's this kind of relativism and this kind of nihilism, almost, that in the atmosphere that the film paints, that it really doesn't matter if you're doing legal or illegal work or whatever. It's just about surviving and making money. And then there's also this component of let's say, populism or a kind of mythological narrative of salvation in which there is this promise of new Japanese technology coming into the factory that will save the day. And the boss of the factory comes on this. He speaks from a megaphone on top of a car, promising just hang on and hang on, and that the Japanese technology is almost here. And then we will all be in heaven. So it's, again, this kind of populist mythologizing that we will hear a lot more of, I mean, in the '80s already, and then throughout the '90s. JESSICA BARNARD: Denisa. DENISA SARAJLIC: My favorite quote from this film is that "all nice people are in jail. The wrong ones are free. The wrong ones are out." And that really sums up the portrayal of the elite at the time, which is portrayed as not just as corrupt. The factory, the boss of the factory, he takes workers so that they can go and build his own cabin somewhere in nature. And this was very typical. And there were many scandals in the '80s with these kinds of misuse of office and funds. But this is 1988. Kind of the end is near. You can feel it in the air. The workers are no longer afraid to challenge the boss, to challenge this elite. Nobody respects his boss. His wife doesn't respect him. She kind of talks behind his back. She has a lover in Istanbul. She goes and sees him and he buys her expensive presents. Workers don't respect him. He's kind of a middle manager. He doesn't respect-- nobody respects him. But he's still out there kind of thinking that he's really holding everything together. Whereas, in fact, you can see that the whole thing is falling apart. Have a lot to say about this film, but we don't have time. But what I really, really want to comment on is the portrayal of women in this film, which is very typical of the '80s, not even so much the '60s, when objectively women were still in a kind of subordinate position. By the late '80s, women in Yugoslavia were working. They were doctors. They were lawyers. They were constitutional court judges. They were in different political functions. And yet, in movies, they are still portrayed as sort of submissive. There's, at the beginning of the film, the worker, the steel worker, he comes home and he complains because his soup is cold. And he throws the soup. It's all very kind of aggressive. What we also saw in the '80s. And this was slightly kind of the Western influences, as well as this macho culture, being developed in a whole new way from the traditional patriarchal roles of men in the Balkans or in former Yugoslavia. So he is being portrayed as a macho in the sense that he's an adulterer. He goes out. He engages sexually with underage girls. There's three, like you see they're in school. And this is OK. Nobody's questioning this. It's meant to be accepted. And then when they comment on him cheating on his wife and not committing to his wife, he doesn't want children. It's the woman who gets blamed. So it's these young schoolgirls who are portrayed as being promiscuous. They are the ones who are kind of after him all the time. So it's not his fault that he eventually gives in. And then generally, so in this movie there are, I think, four main female characters. And one is sort of submissive. And the three are promiscuous. And this is kind of the only way that women were shown in the film. JESSICA BARNARD: Thank you. That's an important perspective on that movie. Now, do you all have any final words for people who might be coming out to see the films, what they should consider? DAMIR KAPIDZIC: I mean, there's two things that you would consider watching these movies. If you just managed to catch one of them, maybe ask yourself how much of what you see is familiar versus how much is foreign in terms of goods, norms, values. Because this would allow you to see where Yugoslavia belonged in the middle between socialism versus capitalism. If you do watch a lot of them or several of them, then pay attention to how they progress sort of over the decades, especially from a sort of international perspective, from this idealized progressive internationalism in the early movies in the '60s towards a more institutionalized, hypocritical view of both domestic, but then also international, politics in the later films, towards the late 1980s. And this also can be sort of reflective of global politics throughout this period, both economically and also politically. So there's always a way to tie this movie making into something that's actually-- that was happening globally back then at that time. JESSICA BARNARD: Denisa. DENISA SARAJLIC: What's important about in terms of why we should look. So our films that have a function of agency. They give voice to many different people, individuals, groups, if you want, minorities, et cetera. And the Yugoslav film did give voice to many of those. So it's important that we look at it now because even I grew up in socialist Yugoslavia. I was a teenager when Yugoslavia started to fall apart. I was taught Marxism in school. So I think I'm the last generation. So even for me, who has some memory of even the good things about Yugoslavia, it's good to see these movies and to go back in history and to understand everything else, which, as Nace said, is not so visible. So thank you for picking those films. JESSICA BARNARD: Nace. NACE Zavrl: Some of these films have been shown widely. They're familiar to audiences in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Others are really, really esoteric and really rare to watch. So if I were to promote specific events within the retrospective, I would say on November 22, which is a Friday, the two films that we called analytic cinema, one is by Dušan Makavejev, the other is by Vlada Petrić. I really don't think those films have been shown in the last 20 years anywhere. I mean, maybe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong. But I won't go into terrible detail about them because they're really fascinating films. A lot of these films are difficult to see, and really, the copies that the Harvard Film Archive holds are kind of amazing, precisely because they haven't been shown. I mean, the animation, the Zagreb School of Animation, those are all copies from the Harvard Film Archive. And it looks amazing because it hasn't been spooled through a projector in a very long time. We have a very eclectic selection. And we have short films preceding the feature films. So it's a one of a kind opportunity to get to see things that-- yeah, you just can't get access to. I mean, this is really rare stuff. JESSICA BARNARD: Rare stuff, indeed. And a great opportunity to see these films on a large screen. Well, thank you all so much. It sounds like it's going to be a really fascinating and fun film festival. And we appreciate all your different perspectives on these films and how they reflect Yugoslavia as an international film mecca. Once again, the Yugoslav Junction Film Series runs from November 9 to December 9 at the Harvard Film Archive. And you'll find a link to the films and special events around the series on the epicenter podcast web page. Thanks for listening. I'm Jessica Barnard, signing off from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. You can support these insightful conversations by following the epicenter podcast on your favorite listening platform. See also:- [ Europe ](/region/europe) - [ Podcast ](/media-type/podcast) - [ October 2024 ](/month/october-2024) - [ Films ](/topics/films) - [ Socialism ](/topics/socialism) - [ Yugoslavia ](/topics/yugoslavia) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)