![]() Lasting a relatively long 130 minutes, the film sees Kusturica reign in his ego and create a tightly controlled film which is not going to upset anyone.” įor Igor Krstić, “the case of Yugoslavia raises the question of whether a society and its culture can become captured as an individual can by the burden of too much history”. This time, however, it is channelled more into the set design than into the narrative structure or the plot, both of which are highly traditional. He does not abandon his love of the absurd. Thus, “more than any other film made by Kusturica, this is a film out for laughs. With this film Kusturica tried to counteract the effect of the controversy provoked earlier on by Underground (1995). ![]() Kusturica’s 1998 film Black Cat, White Cat also deserves a mention within this category, as it incorporated no references whatsoever to the history of the country or to any of the secession wars. Before this, he had produced two stories exemplary of his usual characteristic humanism: Tango argentino (1992) and Someone’s Else’s America (1996). In spite of his strong political commitment, Paskaljevic did not feel ready to speak of the state of Serbian (and Yugoslav) society until 1998, when he delivered the brutally desperate Bure Baruta ( Powder Keg). In the meantime, others refused to face the reality of the war, like Goran Paskaljevic. Draskovic’s perspective was double, just like that of the ordinary people of Belgrade. This is a good example of the complexity of war movies at the time, certainly neither Manichean nor Serbian fascist propaganda. With Toma gone, the spectator witnesses this woman’s intense suffering, when she is savagely and repeatedly raped by Serbian mercenaries. Ironically, the film is told from the point of view of a Croatian, Ana (played by Mirjana Jokovic), who’s left alone in Vukovar when her husband Toma, a Serbian, is called to join the army and to attack his own home town. A Romeo and Juliet style love story set in the devastated city of Vukovar, the film was accused of being a piece of Serbian propaganda. The latter was probably the one that received the greatest international attention. The Croatian war was the subject of Dezerter ( The Deserter, Živojin Pavlović, 1992), Kaži zašto me ostavi ( Why Have You Left Me, Oleg Novković, 1993) and Vukovar – jedna priča ( Vukovar: The Way Home, Boro Drašković, 1994). But it was understandable, from today’s perspective. In Venice they said it was a Fascist film, a Serbian Fascist film. Some of the festivals refused to screen the film because of that. Some of the reviews were bad because of that. And it did hurt the film a lot, the lack of distance. Especially for Pretty village, Pretty Flame. Another known Belgrade director, Srdjan Dragojević, admitted that when he made Pretty Village, Pretty Flame and The Wounds in the 1990s, whilst he didn’t dispose of the historical distance that these films needed, the need to make them was always far more important : “I had the urge to make these films, so I never thought of historical distance. For him, historical hindsight carried political associations, and what truly interested him was the people and not the politics. Strongly influenced by the events of the decade, the films from this period (1991-2001) are perhaps the best testimony of those terrible years.ĭarko Bajic, author of both Crni bombarder (‘Black Bombarder’, 1992) and Balkanska pravila (‘Balkan Rules’, 1997), explained at the time of the filming of Rat uživo (‘War Live’, 2000), right after the 1999 NATO strikes in Belgrade, that he didn’t feel that hindsight was necessary in order to examine historic events, and that films must be made straight away. This article is intended to be an examination of the themes evoked by Yugoslav cinema of the 1990s. The post-Yugoslav transition in Serbia (in all aspects - political, social and cultural) lasted for longer than in other former Yugoslav republics and perhaps only came to an end when both Serbia and Montenegro declared their respective independencies. The ‘new Yugoslav’ cinema hesitated between a potential new Serbian (or Serbo-Montenegrean) identity and the old Yugoslav one. It was a decade marked by the rise of Serbian orthodox nationalism as well as by currents of Yugo-nostalgia, a decade of war, inflation, embargo and international isolation. Still officially Yugoslavia (or more accurately, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or FRY), the country’s film industry appeared to be the natural heir of the former Socialist Yugoslav cinema. While in the 1990s other former Yugoslav republics such as Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia were already building their new national cinematographic identities practically from scratch, things in Serbia and Montenegro were much more complex.
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