On 3 August 1969, an eight-page article entitled ‘Black Wave in Our Cinema’ appeared in the newspaper Borba – the official organ of the Yugoslav Communist Party.Footnote 1 The article was written by the president of the Commission for Ideological Action, Vladimir Jovičić, who introduced the term ‘black wave’ (crni talas) as a pejorative label.Footnote 2 This criticism was part of a more systematic attack ordered by President Tito in September 1969, in the aftermath of the Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the June 1968 student protests in Yugoslavia, which ushered in a period of increasing ideological stringency and the culling of liberal politicians, intellectuals, and artists in the early 1970s,Footnote 3 correspondingly reflected in the dismantling of Yugoslav black wave between 1968 and 1972. Jovičić argued that the filmmakers in question depicted Yugoslav society in an overly negative light, presenting a systematic distortion of reality, with ‘improper’ images of violence, moral degeneracy, misery, lasciviousness, and triviality.
Black wave was part of a Yugoslav new wave cinema, known as novi film (new film), that flourished in the 1960s.Footnote 4 Following a split between Tito and Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavs embarked on an independent path towards socialist self-management (samoupravljanje), which prompted a re-examination of socialist realism in the 1950s, and a tangible aesthetic shift with novi film in the 1960s. Inspired by French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, and other new waves in European cinema (especially Czechoslovakian and Polish), these filmmakers rejected the norms and ideals of the official communist culture, and openly exposed the dark sides of the purported socialist utopia – its hidden capitalist side that emerged with the implementation of market principles, as well as unemployment, poverty, and crime.Footnote 5 If novi film was a modernist and non-conformist style of filmmaking that featured cynical and fatalistic reflections on life, then black wave refers to its most transgressive phase, in which the symbols and slogans of the Yugoslav state were subjected to a ruthless critique.
Despite a recent surge in scholarship on East European cinema,Footnote 6 a persistent lack of attention to music in these films implies that music was less important than other forms of cultural production in constructing and legitimizing the socialist experience. This attitude is further reflected in the minimal focus on music in scholarship on both novi film and Yugoslav mainstream cinema, also called ‘red cinema’ or red wave (discussed below).Footnote 7 By contrast, I argue that music was central in the shift from the aesthetic innovation of early novi film to the more politically engaged countercinematic practice of black wave, which I explore in three groundbreaking films: Želimir Žilnik's Rani radovi (Early Works, 1969), Dušan Makavejev's WR: Misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, 1971), and Lazar Stojanović’s Plastični isus (Plastic Jesus, 1971). Through a specific focus on the use of Partisan songs in these films, I examine how key political moments are encoded with new levels of meaning, often through parody, irony, and satire, and how contextual and intertextual modes of listening are critical for these films, rendering pre-composed music as a powerful medium for social and political critique.
Red Wave and the partisan soundtrack
The establishment of a post-war Yugoslav national cinema initially followed the Soviet model, with centralized organization under party control, which championed film as the greatest medium for propagandist purposes. Early dictates derided Western cinema as vulgar entertainment and bourgeois decadence alien to socialist principles, but the Tito–Stalin split prompted a swift turn from the Soviets to greater rapprochement with the West, signalled by a number of developments in the 1950s. Following its expulsion from the Cominform, Yugoslavia developed its own model of socialism based on workers’ self-management, decentralization, social ownership, and increasing market mechanisms. Several laws codified an ideological reinterpretation of Marxist–Leninist thought by Tito and his inner circle, who criticized the Soviet dictatorship and its centralized and bureaucratized state apparatus. They argued that the Russian Revolution was incomplete, but could be saved from Soviet deformation by fulfilling the Marxist programme of ‘withering the state away’, to be replaced by social self-management. Workers were eventually organized into workers’ councils and became trustees of ‘socially owned property’, given to them in the form of buildings, resources and means of production. As part of decentralization efforts, new law also introduced the concept of a socialist market economy, and in 1952 the Communist Party was renamed the League of Yugoslav Communists (LYC) in an attempt to redefine the party's role as a ‘social animator’ that would function through persuasion rather than autocratic power.
In terms of the film industry, decentralization introduced workers’ self-management and new economic incentives intended to free the industry from excessive bureaucracy.Footnote 8 State subsidies were abolished in favour of a system of taxes and self-financing (samofinansiranje), which spurred economic growth through international co-production initiatives in the late 1950s. All this led to increased film production, a more sophisticated network for film distribution, a steady rise in professionalism and livelier film criticism, which ironically lay the foundations for 1960s novi film. Film consumption also reversed from a predominantly USSR-fed market to one dominated by American and Western European films.
Just as the West had been derided in 1945 for light entertainment and formalist abstraction, the Soviets were now attacked for their ‘nationalist chauvinism’ and ‘deformation of true socialism’ (Marxism–Leninism).Footnote 9 In an effort to distinguish a Yugoslav ‘national realism’ from Soviet socialist realism, there was a new thematic focus on Yugoslav Partisans as the real tour de force during the Second World War, and not merely a subforce of the Soviet leadership under the Red Army. This reorientation was germane to the genre of partizanski (Partisan) or ratni (war) film, which emerged in the late 1940s and was rejuvenated in the 1960s, and which celebrated the Partisan resistance (known as narodnooslobodilačka borba or NOB) and Yugoslav post-war reconstruction. Designed as conduits of state propaganda, these films narrated the Partisan struggles and ultimate victory over the enemy (usually the Germans or local collaborators); they had obligatory optimistic endings and followed the rules of classical cinema, with clear communication and a seamless style; they perfected a romanticized picture of the Partisan hero as courageous, altruistic and above all a committed communist. They also endorsed the founding myths of socialist Yugoslavia – the cult of Tito and ‘brotherhood and unity’ (bratstvo i jedinstvo) – which procured generous state support for the genre in the 1960s and 1970s.
The initial Partisan films in the late 1940s closely resembled Soviet models,Footnote 10 but following the split with the Soviets, socialist realism gave way to new styles of realism by the mid-1950s. These included re-examinations of the war experience and its aftermath, with more intricate portrayals of the war years, greater psychological introspection, modernist styles such as Italian neorealism, and a range of new genres (animation, documentaries, shorts, sophisticated amateur films) whose modernist experiments anticipated novi film tendencies.Footnote 11 Film production consequently splintered in the 1960s into revived Partisan epics modelled on Hollywood blockbusters, dubbed the ‘red wave’, and auteur novi film. Red wave was soon established as the dominant mainstream (in terms of both output and financial backing), characterized by iconic films, such as Kozara (1962) and Bitka na Neretvi (Battle on the River Neretva, 1969), both directed by the celebrated Veljko Bulajić, and Desant na drvar (Raid on Drvar, 1963) and Sutjeska (1973) among others. Directors of these films (Bulajić, Fadil Hadžić, and France Štiglic) occupied an undisputed position of privilege, enjoying considerable financial resources that enabled them to make the most financially ambitious films in the 1960s and 1970s. Their films also had a special status at the Pula Film Festival, the most important national forum for the review of Yugoslav cinematography founded in 1956 under Tito's patronage. The festival comprised a jury of prominent film critics, directors, and actors who adjudicated the ‘Golden Arena’ awards, although in reality it was also a mouthpiece for party ideology, given that major Partisan films were not subject to the usual selection criteria but were given special screenings and an exclusive status.Footnote 12 This kind of favouritism fuelled novi film’s rejection of Partisan film and the black wave's overt critique of the party elites, as explored below.
In terms of music, the break with the Soviets effected little immediate aesthetic change, and socialist realism remained a part of the official discourse on music well into the 1950s.Footnote 13 Although early critics, under the party's influence, were determined in their repression of modernism and bourgeois decadence, they were less forthcoming with guidelines for the successful rendering of national realism, one that went beyond Soviet models at either the level of discourse or compositional practice.Footnote 14 As a result, many composers defaulted to neo-romantic styles with a playful and unpretentious ‘folk atmosphere’, an idiom that also characterized the early Partisan films, whose epic proportions and sentimental tone were reinforced by lush neo-romantic orchestral scores. Partisan films also used pre-existing Partisan, war and folk songs, which served as a witness to a specific historical time, and also as an ideological tool to transmit political messages and preserve the NOB legacy.Footnote 15 Moreover, the use of choral music written by leading NOB veterans, such as Oskar Danon, Nikola Hercigonja, and Bojan Adamič, helped create a more historically authentic soundscape, as many songs were penned during the war.Footnote 16 In line with propaganda aims, these songs promoted defiance, heroism, unity, sacrifice, optimism, and victory, and excluded the darker aspects of war, showing primarily an ‘idealised collective’ equally made up of men and women.
The combination of lush neo-romantic scores and Partisan songs forged an early dual convention. For example, in Živjeće ovaj narod (This Folk Will Live, 1947), the film embeds Fran Lhotka's score with canonic numbers from Oskar Danon's collection Pjesme borbe i pobjede (Songs of Struggle and Victory, 1943–48): against a slow-moving tableau of Partisan units traversing the Kozara mountain, we hear the song ‘Ide Mladen vodi partizane’ (‘Mladen Leads the Partisans’), praising the legendary hero Mladen Stojanović who organized the Kozara uprising; after a political rally in which Tito celebrates victory, the scene shifts to a tableau of men and women winding across the snow, hands intertwined, performing and singing the celebrated ‘Oj Kozaro’ round dance, which became an immediate symbol of Partisan defiance and unity (discussed later on); as a grandfather enthusiastically sets off on a journey to meet Tito, the non-diegetic mixed chorus sings ‘Ide Tito preko Romanije’ (‘Tito is Crossing the Romanija Mountain’). This scene creates a symbolic intertextual moment that maps one of Tito's mythical NOB missions with the grandfather's own journey, whilst the grandfather uses the same song to galvanize the younger male and female groups (represented by the chorus), suggesting their symbolic participation in the ensuing socialist revolution. The message is clear: despite the struggles and sacrifices, the NOB has ended with a victory in which all generations pledge their unwavering commitment to Tito, and to the project of post-war socialist rebuilding. In short, these early Partisan films established a set of conventions, a sonic thumbprint for partizanski film, that was both popularized by the consequent ‘red wave’ epics and directly parodied by novi film directors.
The socialist sixties
If the 1950s was the decade of disentanglement from the Eastern Bloc and of laying the foundations for Yugoslav self-management, then the 1960s represented the height of modernist developments and the peak of the liberal ascendancy, often regarded as the most creative and innovative period in Yugoslavia. Alongside experiments with new forms of self-management, there was a blossoming of auteur cinema and contemporary music (as reflected in the founding of the Zagreb Biennale in 1961),Footnote 17 and a new atmosphere of open debate and discussion promoted by the influential work of the Yugoslav Praxis philosophers, who published their journal Praxis (1963–74) and brought together renowned thinkers at their international Korčula Summer School, including Lukács, Bloch, Marcuse, Fromm, Habermas, and Lefebvre.Footnote 18 In this climate, pioneering filmmakers, critics, and theorists rallied loosely under the banner of novi film. They were connected through the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio, and Television (as either students or professors), which became a breeding ground for the first generation of leading filmmakers, including Aleksandar Petrović, Živojin Pavlović, and Dušan Makavejev. Initially cine-enthusiasts, they had their cinematic coming of age in the 1950s, around the Yugoslav Kinoteka (Cinematheque), which influenced their affinity for new European cinema. They shared a formative grounding in critical writing on cinema, which informed their preoccupation with the politics and ethics of film viewership and auterism. Although many of these figures were initially connected to the Yugoslav national film school, they had no specific programme or coherent aesthetic, as noted by the director Želimir Žilnik: ‘When you watch the films that are now labelled as black wave, it becomes clear that each of us had different ideas about what it means “to put a film together”. One could expect the same style, the same type of film tools, but they are all completely different.’Footnote 19
On the other hand, they all sought greater individual artistic expression and to free film from dogmatism and bureaucratic control; to promote stylistic experimentation in cinematic form and language, and create open metaphors about contemporary human and social conditions; and to express contemporary themes, including a critique of the darker side of social and political existence. They favoured humanistic democratic socialism and aligned themselves with Marx's notion of praxis over ideological conformity. But above all they confronted collective myths about the NOB and its aftermath, and the purported socialist utopia in Yugoslavia. It was their shared objection to Partisan film, however, that united them within the counterculture of novi film’s black wave. Petrović rejected the ‘romantic folklore’ of Partisan film, relinquishing aesthetic conformity in favour of experimentation; Pavlović attacked the Yugoslav dominant cinema as ‘falsified’ history and objected to what he termed the ‘primitive directing’ of Partisan filmmakers such as Bulajić, claiming that ‘In place of art about the revolution, we are given revolutionary kitsch’;Footnote 20 Makavejev condemned the so-called committee thinking of the Borba newspaper's film critics and their brand of collective ideological film critique, and questioned the intent, focus, and ethics of Partisan film. As a result they set out to destroy these ‘cinematic lies’ with the ungraceful documentation of real life.
In musical terms, there is no shared aesthetic or style that represents novi film, which ranged from dodecaphonic scores commissioned from contemporary composers (e.g., Čovek iz hrastove šume [A Man from the Oak Forest], scored by Zoran Hristić) to a variety of approaches to pre-existing music, including jazz, classical, popular, rock, folk, and Roma (as in films by Petrović and Pavlović), to the ironic use of Partisan songs – as explored in my three case studies below. In line with an auteur approach to all aspects of filmmaking, certain directors chose all their music themselves, in order to maintain complete authorial control (notably Petrović), but probably also because they had significantly smaller budgets compared to established red wave filmmakers.Footnote 21 Indeed, the dichotomy between Partisan cinema and novi film, as the two dominant styles in the 1960s, sharpened as the decade progressed, and novi film became more polemical, oppositional, and critical. This politically radical corpus of films in the late 1960s, pejoratively dubbed black wave, is the focus of my three case studies, and in particular their use of Partisan songs, which add layers of meaning through the parody and subversion of red wave cinema, in Linda Hutcheon's sense of parody as the inversion and authorized transgression of a model through ‘repetition with critical distance’.Footnote 22
Rani radovi (Early Works, 1969)
As Pavle Levi observes, Želimir Žilnik's debut feature film Rani radovi (Early Works) is ‘distinguished as the work of New Yugoslav Cinema most explicitly concerned with diagnosing the ideological limits and deviations of the 1960s political radicalism, while at the same time acknowledging its own indebtedness to it’.Footnote 23 Titled literally after Marx's early writings, Rani radovi looms large over the Yugoslav black wave, mainly because of the controversy that surrounded the film (discussed below), and the subsequent counter-offensive that ultimately dismantled novi film in the early 1970s.Footnote 24 The film concerns four young revolutionaries (a girl and three men), who, inspired by Marx, set out to awaken their countrymen from the slumber that the state has imposed on them, hoping to turn them into critical citizens. Rani radovi was inspired by the Belgrade student protests of June 1968, where students demanded a ‘more humane socialism’ and critiqued the country's ‘red bourgeoisie’ who came to hold a monopoly over the state and society.Footnote 25 The film does not reject socialism tout court but rather calls for its improvement, even though Žilnik's revolutionaries struggle to be heard in an indifferent society that continues to suppress their voices. The romantic revolutionary zeal of the main character, the beautiful girl Jugoslava – a proxy for Yugoslavia itself – is betrayed by her male companions, who come to stand for conformism.
The film reflects Žilnik's style of ‘docu-drama’, marked by specific modes of production and direct political engagement. He draws heavily on a documentary aesthetic, using handheld camerawork, natural lighting, real locations, and non-professional actors, and continually slips between documentary and fictional styles, evocative of cinema-vérité and direct cinema. This is reinforced by elliptical editing, with harsh transitions between the scenes, frequent jump-cuts, and montage. In addition, there is no traditional plot or narrative: the scenario combines sparse dialogues, early writings by Marx (and Engels), often read by the protagonists, and inter-titles that comment on the dramaturgy and structure of the film in a polemical manner – Žilnik's debt to Brecht and Godard.
Whilst the film has generated a considerable body of research and interest, there have been no studies on how music contributes to its construction of meaning. Rather, music is either mentioned in passingFootnote 26 or described in general terms, as ‘traditional (socialist) music’ or ‘classical revolutionary songs’.Footnote 27 Closer intertexual analysis, however, reveals how music shapes the film's discursive strategies and communicative potential. I argue that the use of music in Rani radovi, specifically partizanske (Partisan) and revolucionarne (revolutionary) songs, requires a certain cultural knowledge on the part of the listener – an approach that I term ‘intertextual listening’ – as the film often traffics the accumulated cultural baggage that surrounds a specific musical legacy, commonly overlooked by scholars and commentators alike. This sonic turn in Yugoslav film studies also helps us to recognize acoustic culture as formative of socialist experience in the late 1960s.
Žilnik uses music sparingly, limiting it to six main moments, which points to the importance of those scenes. Over the opening credits, we hear the song ‘Budi se istok i zapad’ (‘The East and the West Awaken’), which establishes an immediate link to Partisan heritage and to red cinema, whilst the fragmented credits in the visuals suggest a more polemical and oppositional relationship to that legacy. At the outset, Žilnik sets up a mismatch between sound and vision, a metaphor for the need to reconcile the socialist present with its partisan legacy. The original song, on which this version is based, is the Russian revolutionary march ‘Smelo tovarishchi, v nogu’ (‘Boldly Comrades, Let's March’), written in the late nineteenth century by Leonid Radin, and popularized during the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions. The song also became a hymn of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and a symbol of the worker movement in the GDR, with Hermann Scherchen's German version ‘Brothers, to the Sun, to Freedom!’ (‘Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit’).Footnote 28 In Rani radovi, the song sets up a similar atmosphere of revolutionary optimism that foreshadows the protagonists, reinforced by the lyrics and the upbeat rendition of the unison chorus, as well as the homophonic rhythmic drive of the accordion accompaniment. In addition, the song's theme of ‘awakening’ foregrounds the central theme of the film – the protagonists’ desire and struggle to awaken the citizens. The song also reappears later in the film, as Jugoslava's vocalized rendition in a communal shower scene, which critically alludes to her personal awakening regarding the workers’ indifference and the literal and metaphorical impotence of her male compatriots.
The first part of the film charts the central characters’ revolutionary zeal and their direct action. In an early scene we see one of the protagonists preparing Molotov cocktails, which feature prominently throughout the film both in association with their radical political activity and as a marker of Žilnik's third cinema-inspired guerilla filmmaking. In this scene, one of the protagonists declares ‘Our international debt is to sing “The Internationale”’as they vocalize the song. This song clearly links the group to the long-standing legacy of communist and socialist movements, and also to their contemporary revolutionaries in 1968, and in particular the French students who used ‘The Internationale’ in May 1968 to express their opposition and to traverse social division between students and workers.Footnote 29
The second part of the film introduces the idea of the struggle in starting and maintaining a revolution. The use of a Citroën C2 as a symbol of the revolution is striking in this regard: the car struggles to start, gets stuck in the mud, is often pushed by the protagonists or floats on a raft that they row. In the scene with the floating raft, music is critical for both the direct representation and parody of Partisan film, but also a critique of the mythologizing of the NOB and the Communist Party. The scene suspends the gritty realism of Žilnik's documentary style, instead impersonating the seamless epic style of Partisan filmmaking. One of the protagonists remarks: ‘I feel guilty for driving the car – the people should go on foot’, and then walks off across a muddy spit in the lake, thereby making reference to the long lines of marching soldiers commonly depicted in Partisan films. Žilnik's sentimental evocation of those marches, implied by the visuals (the sunset, shimmering water, a low mist), is contradicted by the soundscape. As the protagonist walks, we hear the amplified sound of his footsteps squelching through wet mud, which suggests a more realistic depiction of Second World War trudges. Žilnik then gradually introduces the soft orchestral opening of the song ‘Kompartijo, mirisavo cvijeće’ (‘Communist Party, You Fragrant Flower’), a saccharine paean to the Communist Party, which has a formal grandiosity and romanticism associated with red cinema. Žilnik, however, draws the viewer's attention to the camouflaging effect of music in red cinema by allowing the orchestra to gradually swell and drown out the trudging sound of footsteps. This approach to music is part of Žilnik's ‘deconstructive’ method evident in his use of intertitles, which reveal the process of filmmaking and fracture the seamless foundations of classical cinema.
Against the orchestra, the floating raft enters the frame and one of the protagonists shouts ‘Down with the romantics!’ The walking protagonist, however, seems immune to the interpolation, as he continues walking, his resolve suggested by the chorus:
The visuals again hint that there is an easier means of transport – the raft, the car, and even a passing speedboat – but the walking protagonist continues on his path, implying a blind devotion to the party and its legacy, further reinforced by the fawning lyrics and softly buoyant voices in major thirds:
The film's third section involves the protagonists’ direct action to awaken the working classes. Their first attempt is to wake up the villagers, for instance when Jugoslava gives a lecture on contraception to a group of village women, although the scene ends with the protagonists beaten up and expelled from the village. Their second attempt takes place in a cement factory: they join the workers in an attempt to make them aware of their poor working conditions, but the workers ultimately remain indifferent to their pleas. In one scene, the Red Army song ‘Po dolinam i po vzgriam’ (‘Across the Hills and the Valleys’) is heard as the revolutionaries throw a Molotov cocktail at a Fiat 500 with a white line across its roof – a direct reference to the white lines on the Soviet tanks that entered Prague in 1968. During the Second World War, the song was famously adapted into the Serbo-Croat version ‘Po šumama i gorama’ (‘Along the Forests and the Valleys’), which celebrates the pride and fighting spirit of the Yugoslav Partisans. By reverting to the Russian original – with the more charged imagery of ‘red wounds’ and ‘intrepid squadrons’ – combined with the protagonists’ insurgent gesture of throwing the Molotov cocktail at the car, the scene establishes Žilnik's critique of the ruthless invasion of Prague, which reflected Yugoslavia's official position and Tito's support for Dubček.
The film ends with the symbolic murder of Jugoslava, underscored by the last inter-title: ‘Makers of half-revolutions dig their own graves.’ In the last scene, male protagonists bring Jugoslava to an open field and push her around; she chides them for not finishing what they had started, and one of them pulls out a gun and shoots her. They cover her body with the proletarian flag and incinerate her corpse with a final Molotov cocktail. As Jugoslava is covered by the flag, we hear a solemn a capella version of the ‘Funeral March for the Proletarians’ (‘Posmrtni marš proletera’) – is an adaption of the nineteenth-century Russian song ‘Vy zhertvoy pali (pokhoronnyy marsh)’ (‘You Fell Victims (Funeral March)’), which gained popularity during the 1917 February Revolution. The Yugoslav version became popular for the commemoration of fallen heroes, often performed at national state celebrations and funerals, and the verses were also found engraved on soldiers’ tombs. In the film, the two slow reverential verses are heard as the smoke rises above Jugoslava's body:
From the perspective of the male protagonists, the elimination of Jugoslava acts as a purification rite. By the end of the film, they had been apprehended by the authorities, who cut their hair, symbolically bringing their rebellious streak under the conformist fold. Jugoslava remains the only witness of their impotence – both revolutionary and sexual – and by incinerating her body covered by the proletarian flag, they destroy all evidence of their inefficacy and the intended revolution. The epilogue message on the screen reads ‘They destroyed the seed of anarchy, and they are returning to the right path’, implying that the male protagonists will return to society unchanged, but their future looks bleak as they walk off towards barren trees in the distance, amid the smoke and ashes of Jugoslava's discarded body.
From the perspective of Jugoslava, her death can be read as the very death of progressive and liberal Yugoslavia of the 1960s, epitomized by the 1968 zeitgeist. Moreover, throughout the film Jugoslava had struggled against patriarchal repression and male aggression, and her death therefore suggests a critique of the position of women in socialist Yugoslavia: although she had conjured up notions of modern-day feminism, through her village lectures on contraception and her free attitude to sex, her brutal misogynist execution comments on the failed promise of the emancipation of female proletarians.Footnote 30 Žilnik's use of music, however, offers other perspectives. On the one hand, the seriousness of the music is called into question by the film's ultimate message that the revolution has been abandoned, with the implication that Jugoslava's efforts and sacrifice were in vain. On the other hand, Žilnik's choice of the solemn and ceremonial ‘Funeral March’ is consistent with the celebration of fallen Partisan heroes, and embeds Jugoslava within the symbolic narratives of the fallen proletarian victims. Although the male protagonists dispose of her body in an undignified manner, Žilnik's use of the ‘Funeral March’ ultimately pays her the respect she deserves – a noble funeral of sorts, which is also an allegoric gesture to the June 1968 student protestors who inspired the film, thus highlighting the soundtrack's affective and ritual role.Footnote 31
WR: Misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, 1971)
Similar to Rani radovi, Dušan Makavejev's internationally acclaimed WR: Misterije organizma explores political power and world revolution (the ‘WR’ in the title), but through metaphors of eroticism and sexual liberation. The film comprises two main intersecting themes: a documentary film about the Austrian Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (also ‘WR’), who developed controversial theories regarding sexual energy and therapeutic techniques, for which he was persecuted by communists in pre-war Germany and in McCarthy's America; and a fictional story about a liberated Yugoslav woman Milena, a progressive communist who tries to spread the gospel of Reichian sexual freedom to Yugoslav workers and a handsome Russian ice-skater Vladimir Ilych (aka Lenin), who loses self-control and decapitates her after they have sexual intercourse. Reich proposed the idea that a mysterious universal ‘orgone’ energy is released through sexual union, which, if suppressed, causes neurosis. Makavejev framed Reichian thought into a relationship between sex and politics, asking: ‘How do we build a society that can channel vibrations of individuals or groups into meaningful social action so that repressed energies do not accumulate in a big pocket of totalitarian destruction?’Footnote 32
Makavejev employs a montage method to create a multilevelled audiovisual collage, with continually juxtaposed, intercut, and cross-referenced threads which include: documentary material about Reich, incorporating family home movies and footage shot by Makavejev in the US, of Reich's museum and the prison where he died, and interviews with Reich's children and several contemporary Reichian psychotherapists; footage of late 1960s American counterculture, which depicts radical political, artistic, and sexual practices, including beatnik and hippie anti-war activities symbolized by Tuli Kupferberg of the band The Fugs, whose ironic protest song ‘Kill for Peace’ features prominently as Tuli stalks wealthy New Yorkers dressed as a guerilla revolutionary; various forms of sex-art (‘masturbatory paintings’ by Betty Dodson, sculpted penises by Nancy Godfrey, interviews with the editorial team at the pornographic magazine Screw); footage of transsexual Jackie Curtis, famous by association with Andy Warhol's Women in Revolt and Flesh; the fictional story in Yugoslavia, which focuses on Milena's sexual preaching about the liberating power of orgasm and her attempt to liberate the Russian skater Ilych; excerpts from Mikhail Chiaureli's socialist-realist ode to Stalin, the 1947 film The Vow; scenes from a Nazi propaganda film about mental institutions and the benefits of euthanasia; and footage of political rallies in Mao's China.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union are critiqued for misdirecting sexuality into power politics and militarism. The United States is criticized for McCarthy-era political repression, militarism in Vietnam and suppression of intellectual unorthodoxy (exemplified by Reich); Soviet repression is symbolized by the repressive Stalinist–Leninist orthodoxy, embodied in the politically conditioned figure of Ilych.Footnote 33 In the film, Yugoslavia represents a ‘third way’, espousing a humanist self-managed socialism, and Milena's self-appointed task is to enliven self-management by preaching the doctrine of liberation through orgasm.Footnote 34 The revered icons of socialist Yugoslavia, however, are also subject to cine-critique, as symbols of institutionalized ideology with oppressive and dogmatic methods (namely the Partisan mythology and the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA)).Footnote 35 For example, Makavejev uses the JNA soldier Ljuba (‘Ljuba the cock’) to satirize the revered NOB legacy by pairing it with Ljuba's relentless sexual escapades with Milena's housemate Jagoda; Milena lectures the workers that there cannot be conflict between socialism and physical love, ending with a humorous yet blasphemous scene (from the perspective of the Titoist regime) that reworks a Partisan round dance into an ‘ode to fucking’ (discussed shortly). Makavejev ultimately assumes a satirical attitude towards all forms of dogmatism, although there is clear sympathy for the Yugoslav autonomous path to socialism (Ilych, for example, comments ‘Well, I've been to the East and I've been to the West, but it was never like this. Wonderful!’). Makavejev explained his position on self-management as ‘more a question of an auto-ironic commentary in relation to my own romantic illusions . . . If I placed a number of “Reichian” propositions in the mouth of Yugoslav characters it is because I think there was with us a real attempt to concretize certain ideas that were going along the road to overall democracy and liberty.’Footnote 36
Structurally, music is a part of Makavejev's montage and juxtaposition of diverse material, which creates a complex network of associations that are jarring, ambiguous, and incisive. Makavejev (via his wife Bojana, who was the music editor for the film) employs a range of pre-composed music and soundtracks, from Coppertone and Coca-Cola radio advertisements to Soviet and Yugoslav communist hymns, various folk and gypsy songs, Smetana's symphonic poem ‘The Moldau’ (‘Vltava’), the German love song ‘Lili Marlene’ and American beatnik-rock poetry. In comparison to Rani radovi, more scholars on WR: Misterije organizma have identified the range of musical sources and acknowledged the role of music in producing the film's multidimensional associations,Footnote 37 but their observations remain limited to identifying sources rather than analysing how music functions within Makavejev's formal and technical vocabulary, how it challenges the status of what we see, and what additional layers of meaning it brings to the film.
From the perspective of the Partisan musical legacy, there are three key scenes where music creates an important intertexual commentary on networks of possible associations, both within the film and more broadly. These include the use of the communist song ‘Kompartijo, mirisavo cvijeće’ (‘Communist Party, You Fragrant Flower’, discussed in Rani radovi) for two scenes that frame the film – the opening documentary on Reich and the last scene when Milena and Ilych finally make love – and the reworked version of the Partisan round dance ‘Oj Kozaro’ for Milena's balcony speech. In the first scene, ‘Kompartijo’ is juxtaposed with the kaleidoscopic view of a couple making love, intercut with Milena's documentary voice about Reich and the therapeutic benefits of orgasm.Footnote 38 Structurally, this juxtaposition combines contrasting ideas into a new collage, in which the disjunction between the communist hymn and the sexually liberated duo can be read as both complementary and oppositional. The song is associated with complete devotion to and mass celebration of the party as the saviour of the people. By combining a revered symbol of the party with humorous visuals of intercourse, and Milena's impassioned advocacy of orgasm, the scene offers a satirical exposé of what is potentially lacking in the party and its ideology. On the other hand, the identification of the celebratory and euphoric act of love-making with party devotion also creates a complementary relationship between the visuals and the soft, lyrical song: as we listen to Milena's pro-orgasm voice-over, the orchestral accompaniment swells and the song culminates with the line ‘the entire people follow you’, implying that sexual revolution and party ideology can be brought together in a productive way. This reflects both Milena's convictions and Makavejev's views expressed in 1973, recalling his excitement about the party's new programme announced in 1958:
I was really enthusiastic about finding a political party that was ready to speak about love and sympathy in its program. It [the party's new programme] was a simple statement saying that if you want people to organise and improve their own lives, you must build sympathy between them. And I do believe that a society that wants to build itself not on a Western model and not on an Eastern model, not as a private enterprise society and not as state capitalism, but some kind of functioning, self-regulating, self-managing system, this society must in large measure have human values like humor, love, joy and play.Footnote 39
In Reichian terms, however, sexual liberation (symbolized by the couple) was critical for controlling repressive power (the party), and the opening scene foregrounds this theme of political power through sexual power. The scene also cross-references the celebration of the cult of personality (evoked by Stalin, Mao, and Hitler throughout the film) and the magnetic virility associated with those personalities. Makavejev achieves this by highlighting the sexual energy that draws in and hypnotizes the masses (as suggested in a scene with a photograph of Hitler surrounded by adoring women, and footage with Stalin and Mao addressing the party faithful), but also the repressed orgiastic energy associated with fascism, totalitarianism, and a devotion to party dogmatism (captured in the figure of Ilych). Moreover, despite the many scenes of lovemaking, there is no orgasm (even though Milena continually calls for one), except for the final scene in which Milena's ‘orgasmic shriek’ signals her murder.
By his own admission, using lines ascribed to Lenin by Maxim Gorky, music has a mollifying but disturbing effect on Ilych,Footnote 40 and the ‘Kompartijo’ song can be read as having a dual function: it assists Milena in breaking down Ilych's repressed devotion to the party and simultaneously represents that captivated state. As in the opening scene, the song also suggests the euphoria of coming together in the act of love making, although here as a Liebestod. The song is furthermore a symbolic denominator through which ideological conflicts are played out, where Milena acts as a reformer who disarms Ilych's Soviet dogmatism, although the line ‘the revered hand of the Party’ foreshadows her fatal blow by Ilych. As in Rani radovi the woman is sacrificed for man's purification: Milena is equivalent to Jugoslava – committed to the cause, seeking to introduce progressive revolutionary force within Yugoslav self-managed socialism, but ultimately a victim of cowardly, male conformism. Both films silence strong women and critique society for upholding the authority and actions of men. Of course, the murder of the independent and ‘pure minded’ woman is a cliché of opera and theatre that has been much critiqued,Footnote 41 and given the overtly sexualized nature of women portrayed in these films, the filmmakers themselves cannot be absolved of complicity in this familiar gendered narrative. Consequently, at a certain level these films both reinforce, as well as critique, the wider social fear of strong women, whilst also indulging in stereotypes of women as sexually dangerous – themes in Reich's own theories that have been subject to feminist critique.Footnote 42 Crucially, music in these films connects to these problematic aspects, by participating both in the portrayal of strong women as sexually alluring and dangerous but also in their silencing.
Makavejev, however, lightens the tragedy of Milena's death with a surrealist and comic twist, by allowing Milena's severed head to speak from an autopsy table. Furthermore, despite her recognition that Ilych is a ‘genuine red fascist’ who murders her, she remains beguiled by him and their temporary union:
Cosmic rays streamed through our coupled bodies. We pulsated to the vibrations of the universe. But he couldn't bear it. He had to go one step further, and . . . Vladimir is a man of noble impetuousness, a man of great ambition and immense energy. He is romantic, ascetic, a genuine red fascist. Comrades, even now I'm not ashamed of my communist past.
The third example, which uses the ‘Kozara’ round dance, occurs during a seminal scene in which Milena, dressed in sexy revolutionary attire (mini nighty, knee-high boots, Ljuba's military jacket and a perched cap with a red star – a visual symbol of the swinging sixties), preaches from the inner courtyard balcony to her neighbours and a group of workers about the necessity of sexual release. As Milena's speech gathers momentum, her power of persuasion is bolstered by the mise en scène: she delivers her speech from the third floor, with camera angles framing her from below; as her rhetoric becomes more fiery, the crowd grows on all levels, gazing at her and cheering her on. This empowers Milena, adding visual potency to her rhetoric, reinforced by marching band music that lends her impromptu neighbourhood talk the air of a stately address, emphasizing the role of music as a framing device. She is also framed in a close-up, delivering her speech directly to camera, linking her to some of the charismatic political leaders depicted in the film.
As she galvanizes her neighbours, they intertwine hands and burst into the re-worked ‘Oj Kozaro’ round dance. Originally a folk dance from the Kozara mountain region in western Bosnia and Herzegovina (orig. ‘Kozaračko kolo’), ‘Kozara Round Dance’ inspired a Partisan version during the Second World War entitled ‘Oj Kozaro’, with new lyrics that captured the growing support for the Partisan and communist cause. ‘Oj Kozaro’ became a symbol of Partisan defiance and unity and was popularized by the red cinema (discussed earlier and famously used in Bulajić’s canonic film Kozara). Makavejev's intertexutal reference to red cinema once again has blasphemous connotations, with a humorous reworking of Partisan celebration into an ode to love and sex, captured by the new lyrics:
The spontaneous eruption into this song truncates Milena's rhetoric of sexual release, but also functions as a form of release itself, where the very notion of breaking into song as pleasure – the idea of sound as jouissance – is central to the film's (and Milena's) aesthetics and politics. Her power of persuasion is confirmed, as she has sparked her audience into a course of action.Footnote 43 When the neighbours interlock hands and begin dancing, Milena forms the final link in the human chain as she reaches out and grasps the hand of the cameraman, thus absorbing the viewer – a common feature of novi film directors, who aimed their polemics and engagement directly at the viewer.
This scene is part of a larger audiovisual montage that demonstrates Makavejev's method of setting-up an emotional charge in one scene, then using a well-timed L cut to carry a particular emotion into the following sequence, to which the spectator might respond differently.Footnote 44 In this instance, he sets up a progression from the satirical yet rousing balcony scene to something more dark and sinister. From the round dance on the balcony the film cuts to a documentary scene in Peking's Red Square, using the same camera angle, where Chairman Mao and party officials walk in the same direction as the neighbours dancing, also elevated on a balcony. On the surface, this cut comprises a disjunction in space and time (Mao's China and fictional Yugoslavia in 1971), and, at first, ‘Oj Kozaro’ has limited connective potential. However, when the workers are finally aroused by Milena's speech and start singing and dancing, Makavejev uses the song and the euphoric cheering crowd at the Peking square as the culmination of Milena's love speech, a magnification of ‘glorious’ and ‘beautiful social action’.Footnote 45 Makavejev then cuts from Mao's square to a clip from the film The Vow, with Stalin's speech about the glory of his new society, sonically juxtaposed with the German love song ‘Lili Marlene’. In Yugoslavia, this song (in the original 1939 version sung by Lale Andersen) was identified with the German occupation of Belgrade during the Second World War, when it was regularly played from the German-controlled Radio Belgrade.Footnote 46 The song is used by Makavejev to accompany disturbing scenes of euthanasia from a Nazi propaganda movie, intercut with Stalin's speech – a technique known as ‘Serbian cutting’ or splicing – whose incongruous pairing of gruesome footage and love song has become a recognized tool in cinematic grammar.Footnote 47 This makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing and invites the viewer to contemplate the soporific effects of music – the seemingly innocuous, catchy qualities of ‘Lili Marlene’, which acts as a distraction from atrocities committed in the name of love and commitment towards society. On the other hand, the soundtrack's association with the Nazi destruction and occupation of Belgrade creates foreboding associations with the visuals, the flags that symbolize the fall of various cities to the Red Army in The Vow. For Makavejev, Stalin represents ‘a terrifying possibility, a frozen and ritualistic situation’, and he stands for the ‘freezing quality’ of arousal and joy.Footnote 48 The entire audiovisual montage ultimately forewarns how easily passions can be stirred, and that what starts as a revolutionary spark (with Milena) can quickly grow into a revolutionary inferno (Mao) with misguided principles (Stalin).
The sublimation of sexual release and military power also cross-references the most important structuring principle of the film: the interplay of arousal and its freezing. For example, Makavejev contrasts the elated Chinese masses with Stalin's stiff posture in front of his obedient crowd. In another elaborate montage sequence, Stalin's authoritarian figure is juxtaposed with a plaster cast of an erect penis, Stalin proclaiming that the first stage of communism has been successfully completed, patients in a mental asylum from the Nazi propaganda film, and Kupferberg from The Fugs simulating masturbation on a rifle. This montage comprises an equally heteroglossic audio collage, including Smetana's ‘The Moldau’, a Russian communist hymn, a cheerful Yugoslav folk song and The Fug's ‘Kill for Peace’, which simultaneously evoke but also question the implications of political mass arousal and its phallic fetishism, submission to authority, and sexual sublimation through militarism and political violence.Footnote 49 For Makavejev, montage destabilizes the singularity and certainty of textual meanings, and instead invites a number of possible responses. Paraphrasing Makavejev, Levi writes: ‘Face-to-face with Makavejev's film collages, every viewer is supposed to actively supply his or her own political and cultural predispositions . . . The process of deciphering the ideological, social and ethical implications of all the juxtapositions, possible associations, and contradictions established between the films’ disparate images and sound tracks may be described as productive, precisely insofar as it manages to involve the viewer . . . [in] a “debate.”’Footnote 50
Plastični isus (Plastic Jesus, 1971)
If Makavejev's and Žilnik's films are puzzles to be deciphered through the active engagement of the viewer, Lazar Stojanović’s Plastični isus is more about directly exposing and debunking oppressive political systems. In many ways, the film represents an intensification of both Žilnik's and Makavejev's ideas, but from an anarchist perspective of political radicalism, hippie and sexual revolution, youthful disobedience, and the ‘anything goes’ approach of a film student. This is perhaps the reason why it audaciously attacks Tito, which proved a transgressive step too far. Plastični isus is often seen as the main culprit in dismantling Yugoslav black wave, bringing Yugoslav experimental cinematography to an end, although astonishingly the work was Stojanović’s finals undergraduate project. According to Stojanović, the film was an unfortunate ‘victim of the calendar’ that was conveniently used as a proof of ‘antisocialist cultural politics’ during the mass culling of liberals in the early 1970s, which led to Stojanović’s imprisonment for three years.Footnote 51
The film has no traditional plot. Its episodic narrative follows the life of Tomislav (Tom) Gotovac, an outsider from Zagreb, who tries to survive on the fringes of Belgrade as an independent filmmaker. Overseen by omnipresent images of Tito, he has no permanent residence and floats between various women who support him. A maverick at the bottom of the social ladder, he does not conform to any conventional social order: when he is arrested and asked what he does, he replies he is a ‘film worker’ (an official category introduced with self-management), which the interrogator superciliously proclaims as ‘unemployed’. His social alienation is amplified in the final scene in which he sees a passing train – a reference to time passing and to the fact that he is not part of the Yugoslav revolutionary locomotive – after which he is shot by his girlfriend, who witnesses his infidelity. This fatalistic end places Tom alongside other marginal characters in Yugoslav black wave cinema who cannot find their place in society and receive an untimely death.
The film deals with the question of individual freedom, as well as many taboo topics from the Yugoslav past (namely the ethnic conflicts between Serbs and Croats during the Second World War), and the cult of Tito. As with Makavejev's films, Plastični isus juxtaposes Tom's life with archival documentaries about the Second World War, creating a collage of segments from Tom's life in colour (each filmed with a different exposure or in a different colour), and extensive black-and-white documentary footage, primarily from the Second World War, which creates a larger sociopolitical context for the film's central narrative – Stojanović’s critique of ideology. Through montage and Serbian cutting, Stojanović equates different political structures and ideologies. He compares communism with Nazism, Tito with Hitler, and suggests that multinational socialist Yugoslavia is rooted in ethnonationalist hatreds and intolerance. The archival material includes footage of Tito, Hitler, Stalin, communist-led Partisans, the German army, Hitler Youth, and Serbian and Croatian nationalist groups – Chetniks (četnici) and Ustashas (ustaše) – who collaborated with the occupiers during the Second World War and who were responsible for harrowing atrocities committed during the war. Unsurprisingly, Stojanović’s equation of socialism with Nazism, and ultra-nationalists with Yugoslav communists, as well as his inference that Yugoslav ethnic tensions were still present and would lead to bloodshed, proved too transgressive for the regime which insisted on a united multicultural socialist front.
In terms of music, Plastični isus is saturated with a wide range of songs and singing. These include recurring military march songs, ‘Lili Marlene’, a song about Hitler Youth, the socialist worker's hymn ‘Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit’ (discussed earlier in relation to Rani radovi), American folk songs (including the satirical ‘Plastic Jesus’ (1957) by Ed Rush and George Cromarty, which satirizes the coupling of religious fanaticism and capitalism), Soviet patriotic and propaganda songs, and a range of music linked to Yugoslavia, from folk songs and round dances to Partisan anthems, as well as taboo songs linked to Chetniks and Ustashas. Greg De Cuir rightly observes that singing and the use of songs become a vital structuring device in the film, but he fails to examine how this is done or consider what new meanings it creates.Footnote 52
Throughout the film, songs and singing enact opposition, an approach that is particularly striking in the film's seminal scene in which Tito appears the only time in person, in the form of a televised speech addressing student protestors in June 1968. Following Tom's arrest for running naked through the streets of Belgrade (an intertextual reference to the actor's work as a conceptual artist), Tito appears in his famous televised speech, in which he sides with the students and admits they were only asking for the self-managed system to engage in self-criticism, something that he himself had advocated. The scene is a parody of Tito-as-icon, executed through a collage intervention. Using archival footage that shows Tito's preparation for the speech, Stojanović strips the leader of his usual aura of greatness and demystifies his personality cult by exposing the icon as mere mortal – an image that was carefully withheld from the Yugoslav public. Tito appears hesitant and unsure as he shuffles his papers, consults with somebody off camera, and steels himself to perform the role of leader.
Tito's uncertainty is further amplified by an accompanying song based on a popular patriotic verse ‘Druže Tito, ljubičice bijela’ (‘Comrade Tito, Our Fair Violet’), and Stojanović’s choice of music is important in two ways. The original song concerns youth devotion to Tito and was a staple piece sung at important public gatherings, which were meticulously organized and rehearsed spectacles.Footnote 53 What we hear, however, is an amateur or semi-professional performance of a kind performed in schools or local cultural-artistic societies (kulturno-umjetničko društvo (sing.) or KUD). After 1945, the Yugoslav state invested considerable resources in developing a national network of KUD cultural institutions, and Tito himself argued that preserving folk heritage through such activities was crucial to the development of Yugoslav society.Footnote 54 Folk music ensembles served as melting pots that symbolically united people with different ethnic and religious backgrounds through song and dance, fostering a pan-Yugoslav identity. The ensembles typically concluded performances with a potpourri of ‘Songs and Dances from Yugoslavia’ – fragments of folk dances symbolizing distinctive traditions of the Yugoslav constituent nationalities and ethnic groups.
In addition, the recording quality of the song that Stojanović chooses is poor and unbalanced, and foregrounds the timpani and cymbals rather than the voices, which are further muffled by talking and occasional whistling. Although the crucial lines from the original are audible – ‘Comrade Tito, [our] fair violet . . . / all youth loves you’ – the performance style evokes a market fair rather than an official ceremony, and suggests a disorganized and disintegrating union. It also reflects a popular didactic method that helps children learn songs by repeating lines of text recited by an adult, which although a common method in kolo performances, in this scene evokes the implicit indoctrination of youth within the communist structure, from early Pioneer induction to later participation in the Alliance of Communist Youth. This also cross-references other scenes in which a young girl is engrossed in singing patriotic and revolutionary songs, in one instance oblivious to sexual images Tom is projecting onto a screen beside her.
As the song modulates for the second verse, the film intertextually embeds a scene from a seemingly disconnected period drama with subtitles that at first appear ambiguous – ‘Is that your last word? It was not easy for him to admit his defeat!’ – but which again appear to comment critically on Tito's speech. Tito's support for 1968 protestors in his speech proved to be only a front, and the overall montage reflects a discord between Tito and his united youth.Footnote 55 This disconnect is further suggested by the scene preceding Tito's speech, in which Tom sleeps rough with two drunks, having been thrown out by his girlfriend. Tom, as one of Tito's youths, becomes a social outcast, who falls outside the idealized youth structures of socialist Yugoslavia, a status that is amplified in this scene: Tom has passed out and one of the drunks removes his trousers, whilst the other strips naked singing ‘my son, watch out for gonorrhoea’; as he descends over Tom he comments ‘now it will be warmer’, suggesting that Tom gets raped. The juxtaposition of these scenes foregrounds the breaking of a contract between Tito and the youth, a governing myth of socialist Yugoslavia, which also announces the subsequent downfall of liberals and experimental filmmakers.
Conclusion
Why were Plastični isus and other black wave films considered profoundly dangerous? The answer lies in the wider political context. In addition to open attacks on Yugoslavia's red bourgeoisie and Tito, Plastični isus foregrounded the taboo question of nationalism – a perilous topic in 1971. The student demonstrations that took place in 1968 across the country marked a peak in the liberal atmosphere, generated by increased democratization of the regional communist leaderships (especially in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia). However, in Croatia, the reformist programme became involved with the populist-nationalist movement Maspok (Croatian Spring; lit. ‘mass movement’), with threatening separatist tendencies, and in Serbia, the liberals were attacked for endorsing a critique of state-centralism and economic liberalism. Although Tito's leadership was initially tolerant of liberals, Maspok in particular gathered a worrying momentum, and the party decided to take action in 1971, first with the culling of Croatian reformists, then by a crackdown on Serbian liberals in 1972, both marked by institutional purges and arrests. In Belgrade, dozens of student leaders, writers, and intellectuals were arrested, including Stojanović, whose Plastični isus was used as ‘concrete proof that the subversive tendencies and the danger of “counterrevolution” . . . were, indeed, very real’.Footnote 56 By 1974, Stojanović was in jail, the leading filmmakers lost their jobs (many from the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio, and Television) and moved abroad, and the critical work of the Praxis philosophers and their journal was brought to an end. Political bans, police raids, and arrests produced a new climate that reasserted centralized control by Tito and the Communist Party. With Tito's death in 1980, ethnic nationalism escalated once again, this time on all sides, leading to the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
From the perspective of music, however, the narrative of the liberal 1960s and totalitarian 1970s promoted in film scholarship proved more complex. In comparison to cinema and other intellectual activities, music got off lightly. In a society where the political elites were primarily concerned with clear political and ideological messages, music was not perceived as dangerous as the other arts – a point illustrated by the success of the Zagreb Biennale festival of contemporary music, and the fact that many music artists and workers involved in novi film continued their careers in the 1970s. Although popular music became more regulated, especially with the establishment of the first official censorship body Komisija za šund (lit. the Commission for Kitsch), in reality this was more a taxation body driven by economic imperatives than a censorship body, in which a few privileged individuals exercised their subjective and often arbitrary judgements rather than a strict party-line programme.Footnote 57
Many musicians also continued the black wave legacy of political engagement and musical experimentalism. One such example is the progressive rock band Korni grupa, who proceeded with a successful career in the 1970s, despite their involvement with black wave. Korni grupa, and specifically their leader-songwriter Kornelije Kovač, produced music for one of the last withdrawn black wave films, My Family's Role in the World Revolution (Uloga moje porodice u svjetskoj revoluciji, 1971). The music was largely derived from Korni grupa's concept album Poema 1941., based on the poetry of the Partisan veteran Branko Čopić.Footnote 58 The film, with its overtly satirical take on Partisans and their treatment of the pre-war bourgeoisie in the immediate post-war years, was withdrawn, but Korni grupa continued their career uninterrupted, enjoying some of the highest profile performances and professional benefits in socialist Yugoslavia. More broadly, in comparison to filmmakers, the Yugoslav state was more tolerant of musicians who challenged the official narrative, from Ivica Percl's early protest songs to politically engaged rock bands in the 1970s, such as Buldožer, who made politicized messages through irony and zany humour, or Atomsko sklonište, who imbued their songs with poignant social criticism.Footnote 59 The fact that their albums were released by state labels in the 1970s highlights the complexities and paradoxes of the Yugoslav brand of soft socialism, and the way that it was played out in the cultural arena.Footnote 60
The complexities of this cultural playing field and the paradoxes of Yugoslav soft socialism were also clearly manifested in the international reception of black wave films and the process of their censorship at home. In 1969, Žilnik was invited to enter Rani radovi at the Berlin Film Festival, which had a special programme devoted to Yugoslav cinematography that year. The film soon became the subject of an intense court case in Yugoslavia, in which it was attacked for causing considerable ‘damage to social and political morals’.Footnote 61 Žilnik, who trained as a lawyer, managed to defend his film by linking its critical attitude to related debates within the party itself, and in other public forums. The court's final judgement concluded that ‘our self-managed socialist society had adequately affirmed itself, that one film cannot bring into question neither our intra-national relations, nor agrarian politics, nor our attitude towards the events in Czechoslovakia and the role of the League of Communists in [our] society’ adding that ‘The circumstances in which such films are made and screened are a reflection of the strength of our society’.Footnote 62 Žilnik took his ‘freed’ film to Berlin, where he won a Golden Bear, alongside a host of national awards, including the special prize for directing at the Pula Film Festival, and the film was consequently sold to distributors in forty-eight countries. There was great acclaim amongst international critics, many of whom reflected the view of the district judge, but the Yugoslav reception was comparatively negative: it dubbed the Golden Bear a premeditated attack on Yugoslavia and all its values, including the party, the workers and the NOB. The film's domestic release was modest, mired by the pre-release censorship battle, which effectively ended Žilnik's career in Yugoslavia and signalled the repression of novi film, intensified by the contention surrounding WR: Misterije organizma and Plastični isus.
The controversy over WR: Misterije organizma began with a heated debate at a special screening arranged in 1971 in Novi Sad (the home of the film's national producer/distributor Neoplanta), which was attacked by an organized opposition of many angry Partisan veterans. Although Makavejev and the representatives of Neoplanta initially managed to defend the film and clear it for domestic release, this decision was soon reversed, which effectively prevented domestic distribution until 1987. The film was never formally banned, but it sat on a shelf for sixteen years as ‘unfinished’, and was removed from the register of officially produced films. Simultaneously, however, it was shown at several international festivals, won several festival prizes in Cannes, Belgium, and Chicago, and elicited widespread international discussion.Footnote 63 In other words, the film generated considerable discourse abroad, on Makavejev, Yugoslav cinematography, and Yugoslavia's progressive self-management, ironically bolstering the international image of a Yugoslav soft socialism, despite the totalitarian regression at home.Footnote 64
The worst fate befell Stojanović and his Plastični isus. His provocative links between Nazis and Yugoslav Partisans, Tito and Hitler, and in particular the use of a home recording with prominent party officials, all proved too transgressive. Stojanović was charged with producing a ‘hostile propaganda’ film aimed at overthrowing the socialist regime, and was sentenced to three years in prison. The film was confiscated as an ‘instrument of crime’ and stored in police vaults until the 1990s. The irony is that the experimental filmmakers, Praxis thinkers, and many progressive musicians who worked on film or were active around the Zagreb Biennale, essentially created a vision of a progressive, democratic, and human socialism for the international gaze, something they desperately yet unsuccessfully tried to effect at home – a reformed Yugoslav socialism, not an abandonment of it.
In assessing the impact of music in black wave cinema discussed in my three chosen films, it is undeniable that ideals of reform socialism found musical expression in novi film, and that the legacy of Partisan songs was critical for the politically engaged countercinematic practice developed in these films. Through my method of ‘intertextual listening’, I have demonstrated the importance of contextual knowledge of music in interpreting the cultural and political baggage that is often trafficked into movies. The sonic turn that I have proposed within black wave cinema and novi film not only confirms how music shapes the discursive strategies and communicative potential of the films discussed, but also highlights the vital role of music in constructing multiple experiences of Yugoslav socialism more broadly.
