Actualités

Ivana Miloš, Three Reeds (2022), monotype, gouache, collage, and nature print with reeds on paper.The line of dancing children on the shorewas life exploding from the drought.Among thin reeds and branches the human plantgrew in pure air.—“Cuttlefish Bones,” Eugenio MontaleSometimes, in order to understand the meaning of a plant in a film, it is necessary to look for the same plant in another film. The majestic reed beds that appear towards the tragic finale of a breathless chase sequence between Nazi soldiers and two partisans in the middle part of Aleksandar Petrović’s devastating anti-war parable Three (1965) seemed strangely familiar when I first saw the film. I also saw them in a beautiful document of a disappearing way of life, Obrad Gluščević’s Ljudi s Neretve (1966). Both films were shot around the same time, in the middle of the 1960s, in one of Yugoslavia’s most fertile regions,...

By Sam Weisberg - April 23, 2011

“Cinema Komunisto” is an exquisitely detailed, heartfelt look at the former Soviet Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s thriving yet little-known film industry, circa post-wwii to 1980. Josip Broz Tito, the celebrated war hero, Prime Minister and eventually president-for-life during this time period, was a lover of grand-scale Hollywood films, which began to be shown in Yugoslavia after the country’s break from Stalin’s Eastern Bloc, and in turn Soviet influence, in the late 1940s.

Armed with newfound independence and chutzpah, Tito—who screened at least one movie a day, privately, for the next thirty-two years of his life—decided to make Yugoslavia a cinematic empire. The state-financed Avala Film studios would go on to produce ‘partisan films,’ insanely self-aggrandizing war movies that depicted Yugoslavia as an unstoppable, Nazi and Soviet-defeating force. (“A lot of these movies were absolutely terrible,” the actor Bata Zivojinovic admits; “I...