The Ninth Circle (1960).
As with much of communist Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia’s film industry exploded in quality and international reach across the 1960s. With generous state investment in film in an era of social liberalization, Yugoslav filmmakers of the 1960s—or certainly those who fell under the Black Wave banner—were, at their best, politically radical and timeless, creating films that captured a unique historical moment and yet—60 years on—have lost none of their anger and impetus. But as a recent retrospective of Yugoslav cinema programmed by Mina Radović at Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato shows, this radical Black Wave cinema did not emerge from nowhere, but rather had its roots in the earlier cinema of the postwar era. Earlier films, such as Zenica (1957) and The Ninth Circle (1960), looked forward to the radicalism of the forthcoming movement, while canonical Black Wave films such as Tri (1965) grew from the foundations that had been laid down previously. The Yugoslav Black Wave was part of a continuum rather than a break with the past, as is often assumed—a continuum elegantly expressed in the stylistic shifts apparent from Zenica to The Ninth Circle through to Tri.
This pre-Black Wave era did have its fair share of static socialist realism, but this was also a nascent film industry still finding its feet. As communist Yugoslavia, led by Josip Broz Tito, emerged victorious from WWII, the film industry began to receive investment from the state as part of the postwar rebuilding effort, recognizing, as Lenin did, the possibilities of film as a tool to shape society. But a conflict with Stalin led to Yugoslavia dropping out of the orbit of the Soviet Union in 1948, necessitating a different ideological construction of socialism. This socialism was one that was broadly a bit more liberal than its counterparts across the rest of Eastern Europe, albeit not without a strong authoritarian element—as evidenced by the fact that, after the liberalization of the ‘60s, the walls came crashing down in the early '70s, with filmmakers stopped from making films, exiled, or even imprisoned (in the case of Lazar Stojanović for his 1971 film Plastic Jesus).
Importantly, this different ideological construction of socialism helped birth a different cinema—one which took in the many fragments and innovations of world cinema across the postwar era and built something entirely new and distinctly Yugoslav. In part, the development of the Black Wave was helped by the structure of Yugoslav cinema, which was federalized along the lines of each constituent republic in the country—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, joined later by the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina—with each republic’s capital having a film production center. In essence, this meant that each republic developed a slightly different way of doing things—with a number of smaller film industries rather than a central production center—and this variety allowed for a greater richness, even from an early stage of development.
That early richness is exemplified by Zenica, directed by Jovan Živanović and Miloš Stefanović. Superficially, Zenica appears to be a prime example of standard-issue socialist realism, envisioning the civilizing effects of socialism and the coming of modernity. The titular city in Bosnia-Herzegovina was, prior to WWII, a small town with a majority Muslim population. In the years afterwards, the city was developed as an industrial center, necessitating a huge influx of workers and construction. The city doubled in size within ten years of WWII and continued to grow until the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The film captures the city at a crucial point in its postwar growth, as a multi-ethnic influx group of newcomers deal with cultural differences, workplace stresses, and growing pains.
An early scene illustrates this perfectly, as Divna (Gordana Miletić), the wife of steelworks technician Bora (Rade Marković), finally arrives in Zenica to join him. We’ve overheard already how workers in Zenica are struggling to find adequate places to stay, as newcomers outstrip the pace of construction. A shot of Divna’s horse carriage, surrounded by half-built apartment blocks being furiously assembled, cuts directly to old cobblestone streets and a dilapidated, Ottoman-era old town center. It’s the old and the new smashing into each other, with precious little knowledge of what’s to come.
Much of Zenica’s thematic richness comes from this intercutting of past and future—the looming steelworks set against the gentle lean of the mosque minaret, prying into the protagonists’ psychogeography. With Bora and Divna hailing from Belgrade, Zenica also plays on the rural-urban divide prevalent in Yugoslavia at the time, capturing how elitist urban attitudes led to prejudice in more rural areas (a divide further exacerbated in the wars of the ‘90s). The focus of the film’s story may be on the rocky relationship between Bora and Divna, which plays out as a rather overly neat melodrama—perhaps a concession to standard socialist realist modes—but the real magic is in the detail surrounding their relationship. Zenica’s recognition of how rapid urbanization could entirely replace long-standing traditions (liberalizing women’s rights in rural Bosnia, as a subplot depicts) while also displacing communities (with the old Zenica gradually disappearing under industrialization) points forward to the Black Wave and its willingness to grapple with multiple truths simultaneously.
In Tito’s Yugoslavia the founding myth of the state was predicated on the heroic victory against the Nazis and fascism, giving birth to a socialist country built on “bratstvo I jedinstvo” (Brotherhood and Unity), with the various ethnicities of Yugoslavia living together under one roof. In its most obvious cinematic guise, this led to the partisan war subgenre, a series of often big-budget films that depicted the struggle of Tito’s partisans against the Nazis in particularly valiant and grandiose ways. They frequently had a propagandistic purpose and many of these remain excellent action films, particularly The Battle of Neretva (1969, Veljko Bulajić), a three-hour epic whose multinational cast includes Yul Brynner, Franco Nero, Sergei Bondarchuk, and Orson Welles.
The flip side of the partisan war genre included films that told a more morose and less obviously heroic story of WWII. Once again, the Black Wave would become acclaimed precisely for such films, but these stories appeared in earlier eras too. Particularly traumatic was the genocide of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and dissident groups by the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state led by the Ustaša, a Croatian fascist movement. Unfortunately, since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, far-right nationalist forces on both the Croatian and Serbian sides have weaponized the existence of the Independent State of Croatia and the Ustaša, so that in the long run this era has become a site of contested history and genocide denial. Yugoslav cinema however broached the subject of Ustaša collaboration, criminality, and genocide multiple times: in Eduard Galić’s Black Birds (1967), Lordan Zafranović Occupation in 26 Pictures (1978), and perhaps most eloquently in Slovenian-born director France Štiglic’s The Ninth Circle, which was featured in the program in a beautiful restoration.
The film, produced by Zagreb-based Jadran Film, tells the story of Ruth (Dušica Žegarac) and Ivo (Boris Dvornik), two teenage sweethearts in Nazi-occupied and Ustaša-administered Zagreb. With the occupation placing the Jewish Ruth at risk, the parents of both families have the two marry to cover up Ruth’s identity. Initially, Ivo is frustrated and even resentful of the limitations on his freedom in a planned marriage, ignorant also of the anti-Semitism of the Ustaša. Gradually the two become closer, particularly as Ivo’s awareness of the situation grows. Inevitably, Ruth is caught and forcibly sent to the camps—and so Ivo begins his descent into the metaphorical ninth circle of hell to rescue her.
For the most part, the film is formally classical, making great use of Zagreb’s Austro-Hungarian architecture to evoke a city that is foreboding and imposingly noirish, building on the importance of location that was so critical to the Italian neorealists a decade before. Its final third, however, which takes place in the camps, takes an increasingly nightmarish and impressionistic tone. Fog drenches the bare, sickly trees; a horse’s reflection tramples through a muddy pool on the road; a single torchlight lights up a room of Ustaša soldiers drunkenly dancing with half-unconscious female camp inmates.
The film’s classicism creates a compelling contrast for its depiction of the camps, gradually tearing away at the conventional aesthetics due to the inherent tension between form and content: such aesthetic choices are, after all, no match for such horrendous trauma. It also makes clear the link between the suffering in the camps and the road a society travels to get there, keenly depicting the psychological effect on both the oppressed (whose time onscreen becomes increasingly claustrophobic and housebound throughout) and oppressors (who gradually loom larger and larger).
The Ninth Circle’s sense of formal invention sets it apart from its more heroic peers and its deromanticized vision of suffering is apparent in other early films of the era, particularly in Don’t Turn Around, My Son (Branko Bauer, 1956). But it would find full expression in the Black Wave, when a more socially liberal atmosphere and less strict censorship (helped in part by the forced removal of hardliner Vice President of Yugoslavia Aleksandar Ranković in 1966 from Tito’s inner circle) allowed more space for darker stories to proliferate.
Tri (1965).
The biggest difference in the Black Wave compared to earlier Yugoslav filmmakers was perhaps best summed up by Dušan Makavejev, one of its leading lights, as “viewing the world as it is, without literary and ideological intervention.” For all their excellence and harking forward to the future, films such as Zenica, The Ninth Circle, and Don’t Turn Around, My Son do retain the mark of films made in broad alignment with the dominant state ideology, telling stories that were otherwise unthreatening to the state, something that the Black Wave was able to temporarily break free from. Aleksandar Petrović’s Tri (Three) does precisely that, and is rightly one of the totemic pieces of Black Wave cinema.
Tri is a war film, telling three linked stories through the eyes of Miloš (Velimir ‘Bata’ Živojinović), placing him as witness, survivor, and participant to killing at the start, middle, and end of WWII. Each story sees Miloš unable to save somebody from death. The first story opens with a crowd of people at the onset of war waiting at a train station. The retreating monarchical Yugoslav army passes through, and later a stranger arrives. The locals and the military surmise him to a spy and he is shot, though Miloš protests. In the middle story, Miloš is on the run in the mountains as a Yugoslav partisan, hiding from Germans. He meets a fellow partisan and they attempt to escape, but his friend is found and shot. The final story sees Miloš as a partisan unit leader at the war’s end. A small group of prisoners are kept nearby, awaiting execution. He sees a woman and feels guilty about her death, but is told she is a Nazi collaborator. He tries but is unable to find a reason to save her from execution.
There is a complete lack of sentimentality to each segment. The partisan war effort is depicted not as a heroic, valiant victory, but a cold and ugly fact of life, a necessity of survival that drains the soul away. Petrović frequently locks onto close-ups of witnesses and passers-by, placing them as complicit in this chaos (throughout the first segment, there is a frequent cut to a woman sitting in a nearby first-floor window, silently watching events unfold from above). Most regularly, these close-ups focus on Bata Živojinović, and his impassive, exhausted gaze.
Živojinović would go on to become arguably the biggest star of Yugoslav cinema. Though he had a great range as an actor, his most well-known performances were in the heroic partisan films such as the aforementioned The Battle of Neretva, and smaller-scale films such as Walter Defends Sarajevo (1972, Hajrudin Krvavac). By the time of Tri’s release, his star was already in the ascendancy (he had already appeared in a few such films), but despite being a film about a partisan, one would be hard pressed to call Tri a partisan film—it is tough, hard-edged and ugly, the exact opposite of the heroism that the mega-budget films called for.
Aesthetically, it remains an incredible piece of work—the middle section is an all-time great action film on its own, with Petrović’s eye for poetic, lyrical movement at the forefront. Crucially, it is precisely its unwillingness to fall in line with a standardized narrative that gives the film its power, reflecting an experience of war that is likely more in line with many ordinary Yugoslavs, recalling these stories in a matter-of-fact manner. Živojinović’s star persona was that of an action everyman—here he is against type as just a helpless everyman.
That, of course, punctures holes in the state-led version of events, suggesting that there is no great exceptionalism to the founding myth of Yugoslavia. Later films such as Živojin Pavlović’s The Ambush (1969) would go even further, depicting an idealistic young communist arriving in a rural village towards the war’s end to help with the rebuilding effort. He becomes quickly disillusioned with the greed, elitism, and selfishness of his fellow party members. He is stopped outside of the village, suspected of being a spy, and killed. Taking plenty of aesthetic inspiration from Westerns (themselves a genre used to build myths about the American state), The Ambush is in direct conflict with the state-sanctioned mythos of a valiant, collective rebuilding effort. It’s a story that has more in common with what people might have spoken about in hushed tones at home or in the corner of a kafana, about how they remember what happened to so-and-so immediately after the war but never officially acknowledged in public.
Yugoslav cinema at its peak was potent when it came to pushing against official narratives. These films seem to push beyond that dominant ideology itself and into an unfettered world, piercing at its puppet strings. If most cinema is a prisoner of its own ideology, films like Tri, The Ambush, and Little Pioneers (a 1967 short by Želimir Žilnik, which also screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato) are like bombs thrown at the very structure of how we philosophically shape stories.
The communist Yugoslav state itself was continually engaged in a push-pull between liberal reformers and conservative hardliners, and eventually the latter won out. Black Wave films, including The Ambush, were rarely fully censored—they were just conveniently made “unavailable.” When Yugoslavia shifted back to a more hardline attitude towards filmmakers in 1972, the door on the movement was slammed shut, though its influence continued to proliferate in Yugoslav cinema, signposting in its undertow the way towards a cinema that rejects traditional boundaries and narratives.
The program at Il Cinema Ritrovato was appropriately titled “Tell the Truth!”, suggesting that a fresh look at this particular national cinema would help pinpoint a new vision of reality at that time, as defined by the Yugoslav cinema. By marking a start point well before the start of the Black Wave itself (commonly referred to as something of a watershed moment for Yugoslav cinema), the sense of transition and continuum is made clear: there is no Makavejev, Žilnik, or Petrović without Štiglic or Bauer before them. On closer inspection, films such as Zenica were indeed telling the truth, particularly given the limitations of their era. The anarchic visions that would come to define the Black Wave could not exist without the challenges their forebears faced, nor without the small army of film technicians and craftspeople that constitute a film industry, an industry that grew greatly in size and confidence in the decade beforehand—and an industry that produced many challenging and brilliant works long before its emergence on a world stage.