Besmrtna mladost (1948)

"Besmrtna mladost" (Immortal Youth) was released by Avala in May 1948.  Like "Slavica," it is a partisan film, and as the title suggests it is again about youthful resistance to the occupation, but in this case the initial setting is urban Belgrade.  Irena Kolesar stars in this film as a member of a group of young people trying to gather weapons to assist the Partisans.

"Besmrtna mladost" was written and directed by Vojislav Nanović (1922-1983), who went on to direct many other films.  This first effort was of uneven quality and cannot quite match "Slavica" in terms of quality.  The choice of a female narrator who explains the goings on in the film to the viewer seems heavy-handed and tends to distract from the (melo)drama.  Those seeking a compelling Partisan drama set in Belgrade are better off vieiwng "Veliki i mali" (1956), which spins a good suspense.

"Besmrtna mladost" is widely available online, and was also issued on DVD in Serbia in 2008.

Živjeće ovaj narod (1947)

"Živjeće ovaj narod" (This People Will Live) is the first film produced by Jadran film studios in Zagreb.  Like "Slavica," it is a partisan film.  It is worth noting that whereas "Slavica" was made by the Belgrade studio Avala with a Croat director, "Živjeće ovaj narod" was made for the Zagreb studio Jadran with a Serb director.

"Živjeće ovaj narod" is set in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Second World War and deals with the love affair of a Croat and a Serb who join together to fight the occupying German forces.  Obviously this combination of romance and partisan themes mirrors "Slavica."

The screenplay for the film was written by Branko Ćopić (1915-1984), a Bosnian Serb Partisan veteran who a decade later wrote one of the most beloved children's books in Yugoslavia, Ježeva kuća (The Hedgehog's House).  Ćopić committed suicide in 1984.

I would love to tell you more about this film, but I have to date been unable to find a copy of it anywhere, though it allegedly exists on VHS and DVD.  If anyone knows where to find it, please let me know!

Slavica (1947)

Alright, this is the real kick-off.  The first feature film made in Yugoslavia after the Second World War was “Slavica,” and hence it is the first film that I want to introduce on this blog.  Before I go any further, please note that the description below gives away the ending of the film.

"Slavica" was produced by Avala film studies in Belgrade and was directed by Vjekoslav Afrić (1906-1980).  It is a black-and-white film and lasts 95 minutes.  Quite fittingly, the first film produced in socialist Yugoslavia was a feature film about the Yugoslav Communist Partisans, a genre that would come to include dozens of films.  Like many Yugoslav directors and actors in feature films produced after the Second World War, Afrić had himself joined the Partisans (though not after appearing on stage in the Croatian National Theatre at a time when it was under fascist control).   

Afrić, who also wrote the screenplay, hailed from Hvar, and so it was no surprise that "Slavica" was set in Dalmatia.  Given the devastated Yugoslav economy after the war, this meant that Afrić had to make do with just one camera, and the actors did not receive salaries.  However, the opening credits tells us that he did receive the support of Yugoslav navy and army units based in Split.  The opening credits are a "who's who" of actors and film production personnel who figured in later Yugoslav films.

The film starts on the eve of the war in Dalmatia.  Following socialist realist doctrine, the film portrays a society divided between the oppressed and noble working people, on the one hand, and a manipulative bourgeoisie supported by the clergy, army and police, on the other hand.  The heroes of the story are Marin (Marijan Lovrić) and the eponymous Slavica (Irena Kolesar - a Partisan veteran).  Here they are:

There is a very simple romantic plot here, with Marin quickly christening his fishing boat "Slavica."

And here are the enemies of the people, plotting against them: 

Afrić is very fond of close-up shots of his actors, who often make wonderfully naive and declarative short speeches about the glorious future that awaits the people under communism.

Soon enough, we hear the sound of the occupying army's boots occupying Yugoslavia in 1941.  The enemies of the people of course rush to collaborate with the occupiers, while Slavica, Marin and their friends start to wonder how to resist the occupation.  A common early theme here is that the older generation is portrayed as being more cautious than the youth, with Slavica's parents trying to dissuade her from any hasty action against the occupiers.  Here we also see inklings of feminism, as Slavica has no problems envisaging a role for herself and other women in the struggle for liberation.

Stipe, the stuttering and buffoonish friend of Slavica and Marin quickly arrives with the wonderful news that the Soviet Union has entered the war against the Germans and the Italians, that the Partisans have started resistance, and that "the Red Army is with us."  (Needless to say, not a word is mentioned about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.)

The youthful resisters try to take their ship and flee to Partisan-controlled territory in order to assist in the anti-fascist liberation struggle, but they fail and are captured.  Later they are themselves liberated by the Partisans and flee to the mountains overlooking the Adriatic coast.  Here they receive a bit of political indoctrination and learn the famous Partisan slogan "Smrt fašizmu sloboda narodu! (Death to Fascism and Freedom to the People!).  They go on to participate in combat and liberate the country.  However, the story includes a tragic note, as Slavica is killed on the ship named after her.

"Slavica" is available on DVD from Delta Video.  It can also be streamed online at a number of sites, for example at Veoh.  I have not yet found a version with English subtitles.  The image quality on the DVD is really very good considering the conditions in which the film was originally made.

The film was a huge hit with the public.  Irena Kolesar went on to star in a number of films, but as this article details, she unfortunately died impoverished and neglected in Zagreb in 2002.

PS.  This film is not to be confused with “Slavica Lavica,” a low-budget porn film that tends to pop up when you google terms like “Slavica film.”

Jugokino - a note about the name

In naming this blog, I wanted to choose something as simple and generic as possible.  Once I decided on "Jugokino," I of course googled this word to make sure that it was not already "taken."  Well, it turns out that "jugokino" is the German term in the Swiss Army for a type of directional anti-personnel land mine.  "Jugokino" is the heavy version, and "Jugofernseher" is its lighter cousin, at least if Wiktionary is to be believed.  That having been said, I made up the "Jugokino" term and do not have any military or other associations in mind.

A bit of Yugoslav film scholarship

The point of this blog is to have fun and share information and trivia about Yugoslav feature films made since 1945.  In other words, despite my academic inclinations, this is not a blog designed for long-winded and sophisticated analysis of the films.

Nonetheless, I would be completely amiss if I did not mention two outstanding and also very entertaining scholarly books on Yugoslav film.  The first one is Daniel J. Goulding's Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945-2001, originally published in 1985, with a revised and expanded edition appearing in 2002.  The other one, quite different but every bit as enjoyable, is Pavle Levi's Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema.  I do not pretend to know even a fraction as much about Yugoslav cinema as Goulding and Levi do.  I mention their books because they manage to convey a great amount of useful information and analysis while never losing sight of the enjoyment of the films themselves.  In fact, it was Goulding's book that made me go back and watch "Slavica," the first Yugoslav film made after 1945, and hence the subject of the first film treated on this blog.

In Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (the former Serbo-Croatian), the book of record is in many respects Petar Volk's enormous Istorija jugoslovenskog filma (The History of Yugoslav Film) published in Belgrade in 1986.  It gives an excellent and very thorough overview of Yugoslav film history from the very beginning until the mid-1980s, and includes a great many posters and photo stills from Yugoslav feature films.

Celovečernji the kid

A little music is needed for a proper inauguration, and for a blog focused on Yugoslav feature films, I cannot think of a more appropriate song than Đorđe Balašević's "Celovečernji the Kid".

Proš'o sam divlji zapad širom pod nebeskim šeširom,
a to baš nije neki raj:
kaktusi, kojoti, oluje, pa nema vode i struje,
o, kakav zabit kraj...

Useful links

The first step when trying to assemble a list of Yugoslav feature films made after 1945 is to locate and cross-reference previously existing lists.  To date I have primarily used several online databases, and my experience is that neither of them is complete.

The first database is Film.hr, "hrvatski film online." As of today, it lists 512 films in the feature film category, though this includes films going back as far as 1917.  The "Croatian" label is not too strictly applied here for the post-1945 period.  There is another list of Croatian and Yugoslav films available at Filmski programi.

Although it is not a film database per se, the selection of Serbian and Yugoslav films available in the domaći filmovi category at SerbianForum is very extensive.  This is also a great place to find old Yugoslav film posters, and many of the older and newer films are available for download, or can even be streamed online.  There used to be a pinned post on the discussion forum that listed almost all the domaći filmovi available on the site, but this unfortunately disappeared recently.  You have to dig, but it is still relatively easy to find the old gems.

Incidentally, there are discussions online about whether the term "domaći film" refers to the film production of  only one's one former Yugoslav republic, e.g. Serbia or Croatia, or whether it is a broad term referring to any film produced in Yugoslavia prior to 1991, and in any former Yugoslav republic thereafter.  Most people seem to take a pretty relaxed attitude to this, and with co-productions across borders becoming more frequent, a narrow definition does not really seem to be make much sense.

The mother of all internet film databases is, of course, the one and only IMDB.   While it certainly is enormous, some glitches on the site have lately made it more difficult to navigate in search of Yugoslav films.  Like so many others before them, the people behind IMDB unfortunately seem to have a hard time dealing with the complexities of Yugoslavia's dissolution.  Only a few months ago, if you asked IMDB to sort all movies by country of origin and chose Yugoslavia, the result was a verrrrry long list.  Now you just get an error message.  Instead, you have to resort to sorting movies by language, a highly imperfect workaround given the linguistic labyrinth that has developed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.  The language for some movies is listed as "Serbo-Croatian," for others as "Serbian," or "Croatian," or "Bosnian."  And, of course, many of the films that include dialogue in any of these languages are not Yugoslav movies.  A case in point with which I am highly familiar is the Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn's violent gangster trilogy, "Pusher," "Pusher II" and (sigh!) "Pusher III." (The first one is great, the second one questionable, and the third one strictly for masochists.)  As if to emphasize the point, IMDB lists the language as Serbo-Croatian in the first two, but as Serbian in the third.

I would be very grateful indeed if someone could direct me to other online databases, particularly ones from the other former Yugoslav republics that mirror Film.hr.

What is Jugokino?

My name is Christian Axboe Nielsen, I am a Balkan historian, and I teach Southeast European Studies and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) - the language(s) formerly known as Serbo-Croatian - at Aarhus University in Denmark.  In my teaching and research, I focus predominantly on the former Yugoslavia.

This blog is about my mission to watch every feature film made in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, starting with "Slavica," the first film made in socialist Yugoslavia.  Quite simply, I want to combine my interests in movies and in the former Yugoslavia in order to share with readers of this blog the many fascinating and often forgotten gems of Yugoslav cinema.  Today, movie audiences around the world have heard about a select handful of famous former Yugoslav directors such as Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljević.  Few, however, have seen such stirring movies as "Ciganka" (1953) or light comedies such as "Lito Vilovito" (1964).

In my free time, I am a voracious watcher of movies and a particularly devoted fan of the magnificent Criterion Collection.  My long relationship with Criterion started in 2002 when my old college roommate gave me the Criterion edition of Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress." Ever since, I have been pursuing the Sisyphean task of collecting and watching as many of Criterion's movies as I can.  Every time I visit the US, I return home with a suitcase stuffed with Criterion goodies, and I scour sites on the internet in order to find out-of-print titles.  In my own way, I am as obsessed with Criterion as Matthew Dessem, the author of the delightful and completely unpretentious Criterion Contraption blog.

One of the things I like about Matthew Dessem's blog is that he states his aim clearly and simply at the outset: "I'm going to watch every last DVD in the Criterion Collection."  My mission statement explicitly paraphrases this.  I want to watch every single feature film made in Yugoslavia after the Second World War.  This blog is not primarily focused on contentious issues in Balkan history or politics.  Sooner or later a variety of such issues will inevitably pop up, but I am not intending to let this spoil what should just be a long and enjoyable journey through one of the most vibrant European film industries in the second half of the twentieth century.

Some quick parameters: this blog will only focus on feature films - called igrani or cjelovečernji/celovečernji igrani filmovi produced on the territory of Yugoslavia after 1945.  So there will be no documentary films or notes on short features - of which there were hundreds, if not thousands.  Although most of the films will be in Serbo-Croatian, I of course include films in Slovenian and Macedonian.

The internet has made it possible to find and watch many films which were unavailable for decades, and which were only rarely shown even in the former Yugoslavia.  I hope that this blog will become a place where aficionados of Yugoslav film can not only discuss these films and provide information, analysis and trivia about them, but also help each other locate long-lost films.

I hope for commentary from any and all who share my ecumenical interest in Yugoslav cinema.  I will be posting in both English and BCS, and comments in all languages are welcome.  So, as they said in the old days: "Nema odmora dok traje obnova!"