IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE: YUGOSLAV CINEMA AND THE FALL OF THE YUGOSLAV DREAM ZORAN MARIC A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO January 2017 © Zoran Maric, 2017 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation outlines the trajectory of Yugoslavia’s decline through an examination of select works of Yugoslav cinema from the late 1960s to the late 1980s which cogently commented on their sociopolitical context. It brings together various interpretive perspectives and utilizes film studies, cultural studies, political history, and postcolonial studies to discuss how the Yugoslav society and its political system are scrutinized through allegory, satire, and genre revisionism, for instance, and to elucidate what the films contribute to discourse on the origins of Yugoslavia’s violent breakup. Through a discussion of cinema, arguably the most politically subversive form of expression in the Yugoslav public sphere, this dissertation offers insight not only into why the country broke up but also, and perhaps more importantly, into what was lost when it broke up. Although it revolves around Yugoslavia’s failure, the dissertation validates the egalitarian, anti-imperialist Yugoslav idea and offers a take on the country’s demise that is free of Balkanist stereotypes and anti-communist paranoia common to most discussions of Yugoslavia’s end. It counters the view of Yugoslavia as a dictatorship which disintegrated when dormant ethnic antagonisms of its peoples were inexplicably reawakened, and ties the emergence of ethnic nationalism to Yugoslavia’s economic collapse of the 1970s and 1980s caused by the grasping reach of Western economic liberalism. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor, Scott Forsyth, and supervisory committee members, Seth Feldman and Heather MacRae, for their input and advice. I would also like to thank Kuowei Lee, the Graduate Program Assistant at York University’s Cinema and Media Studies, for his patience and help. Finally, a special thank you to my wife Aisha for her love and support. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iv Preface……………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Introduction: On the Margins of Europe at the Centre of the World: Yugoslavia and Its Cinema…………………………………………………………………………………………….8 Yugoslavia’s European Dream..……….…………………………………………………….24 Chapter One: Black Waves on Red Shores: New Yugoslav Cinema for a New Yugoslavia……41 Out of the New and Into the Black......….……………………………………………………41 The Many Shades of Black..….….…..………………………………………………………47 “Some Revolution You Are!”: Ambush and When I’m Dead and Gone….…..…………….54 Frontier Justice: If You Are Not With Us, Pretend…..…………………………………60 Reforms and Other Myths……..………...……………………………………………...65 No True Love..……………………………………...…………………………………..69 Marching in Different Directions: The Bad and the Ugly….…………………………..71 Yugoslav(i)a in Praxis: Early Works and WR: Mysteries of the Organism.….……………...78 “There Is No Going Back!”: (Re)starting a Revolution.....……………………………..81 The Body of Revolution….…....………………………………………………………..94 Conclusion…..……………………………………………………………………………...101 Chapter Two: The Road to Kinshasa: Working Class Heroes and Allegories of Decline……..108 Staying Afloat: Yugoslavia in the Global Economy….…………………………………....108 The Struggle Within: Cinema of Austerity….……………………………………………..114 The Disease of Greed: The Rat Saviour……………………………………………………120 The Disease of Fear: Backbone………………………………………………………….....126 The Quarantine: Variola Vera…….………………………………………………………..131 Dispossessed: In the Name of the People………………………………………………….136 The Fourth Shift: The Dream about a Rose………………………………………………..145 “If the Bosnians Didn’t Exist, We Would Have to Invent Them”: Rams and Mammoths...152 Conclusion….……………………………………………………………………………...161 Chapter Three: Endgame: Darkness Descends on “Brotherhood and Unity”………………….169 Withering Away at the Gates of Europe….………………………………………………..169 Predictions of Fire: Yugoslav Cinema after Tito………………………………………….179 Long-Distance Nationalists: Maternal Half-Brothers and Dangerous Trail……………...190 The Rules of the Game: “Those Who Arrived Last Must Leave”.....…………………204 Restorative Nostalgia: (Flash)back to the Way We Used to Be….…………………...209 Horrors Yet to Come: Finessing the Genre in Déjà vu……………………………………215 Conclusion….……………………………………………………………………………...233 Conclusion: Back to the Front………………………………………………………………….239 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………254 1 Preface My relationship to this project is a deeply personal one. In this preface, I briefly outline the journey that brought me to it in order to clarify the political and ideological sentiments that shape this project as well as the biases found within it. My analysis of Yugoslav cinema, which aims to offer insight into what Yugoslavia was and why it broke up, is filtered through my own sense of loss when the country dissolved. This loss is twofold: the loss of home and of the only stable cultural identity I ever knew enmeshed with the disappearance of a country and its ideological underpinnings. For me, Yugoslavia’s dissolution was not just a passing moment in the annals of European history. It was a defining moment that profoundly changed my life, and its intangible phantasmagoric effect on me is deeply integrated into my readings of the films. This dissertation, then, is not an exploration of a subject matter I selected simply because it intrigued me: I was compelled to tackle it in order to understand myself. In a very real sense, the project found me, not I it. It was, I am happy to say, a therapeutic pursuit in that it helped me regain my Yugoslav cultural identity. It provided me with a forum within which to begin to conceptualize, following more than two decades of internalizing outsiders’ perceptions of what Yugoslavia was and why it is no more, a validation of the Yugoslav idea as a politically progressive one (however flawed it may have been in practice). I did this by offering a take on the country’s demise that is free of Balkanist stereotypes and anti-communist paranoia, and by tying the country’s break up to the grasping reach of Western economic liberalism. I belong to the generation that grew up in the 1980s when Yugoslavia was becoming unrecognizable, and reached adulthood in the early 1990s when it descended into a civil war. The experience was not unlike the Freudian uncanny that Pavle of Backbone or Ivan of The Rat Saviour experience—society was being radically altered in some unsettling, but, for a young adult, difficult to define way. I was a passive observer, a subject of this process, quickly 2 becoming the Other in my own home. Despondent Milutin’s question in In the Name of the People, “Did not my house use to stand here?” perhaps best defines my personal link to this project since for me, too, it is symbolic of the strange sense of having been set adrift upon losing my home. Unlike Milutin’s, however, mine is not a futile question but one that locates the answer in concrete historical and political processes which can be defined. Owing to the temporal distance from the events which made me both homeless and stateless, I was able to take into consideration a plurality of views on the subject of what happened to Yugoslavia. Inquiries of this kind have typically been the domain of the social sciences. Though I draw on the assessments offered by political scientists, historians, sociologists, and economists, my own approach is firmly rooted in the humanities and therefore somewhat at odds with the methodology of the social sciences which relies on statistics about inflation, unemployment, or ethnic geography. It is perhaps precisely this disharmony that makes my dissertation a unique exploration of both Yugoslav cinema and Yugoslavia itself. This dissertation is far from dispassionate or neutral: it is a work structured by my pan- Slavic socialist worldview and a complete absence of cynicism towards ideas which border on utopian as they seek to offer ways to create egalitarian societies. During the research process, I dismissed outright the inherently neocolonial accounts written by outsiders with, as writer Rebecca West puts it, “a pet Balkan people,” that is, a history of maligning this or that former Yugoslav ethnic group while championing another, and I stayed away from anti-communist ones which tend to perceive Yugoslavia as an oppressive abomination (which was easy to do as the two typically intersect, anyway). Part of the driving force behind this project, and what perhaps makes it decidedly subjective rather than objective (if a claim to objectivity can be made at all), is my deep resentment of those forces which worked to undermine Yugoslavia—a tendency for 3 which I fail to locate a valid justification. I offer this qualification because my dissertation, in direct and indirect ways, deals with the subject of culpability for Yugoslavia’s dissolution. The aim was certainly not to distribute blame but the reader will find my views regarding the roles of domestic and foreign actors involved in Yugoslavia’s disintegration rather unambiguous. Yet, a kind of surreal dreamlike opaqueness inherent to traumatic experiences is a constitutive element