Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema

This bibliographical collection offers a selection of works that reflect both the major historical developments in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema, as well as some of the central themes that have dominated the robust body of scholarly work on this particular cinematic tradition. Yugoslav cinema was in its nascent form in the early parts of the 20th century (in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and received its most ambitious development during the socialist period after the end of World War II. Throughout the length of Yugoslavia’s existence, its film industry saw the development of several endemic cinematic styles and trends: from the World War II epics to Yugoslav New Film and its radical strain, the Black Wave, to a rich tradition of socially engaged documentary filmmaking, to Animated Film, to radical avant-garde and neo avant-garde cinema—as discussed in Levi 2012 and Daković 2003 (cited under Yugoslav Experimental and Avant-Garde Cinema)—to late socialism’s cinema, whose emphasis was on the personal as covertly political. Some of the Yugoslav era’s most notable and internationally recognized filmmakers include Dušan Makavejev, Živojin Pavlović, Puriša Đorđević, Aleksandar Petrović, Želimir Žilnik, Krsto Papić, and Emir Kusturica. The post-Yugoslav period saw the dispersal of the formerly transethnic film industry into smaller ethno-national cinemas whose gaze largely turned to the exploration of ethno-nationalism and war, as well as to the question of memory and identity in the aftermath of the devastating wars that precipitated the emergence of new nation-states in the wake of Yugoslavia’s demise. Some of the most notable post-Yugoslav filmmakers include Danis Tanović, Aida Begić, and Jasmila Žbanić (Bosnia-Herzegovina); Dalibor Matanić, Branko Schmidt, and Anton Arsen Ostojić (Croatia); Milcho Manchevski and Teona Strugar Mitevska (Macedonia); Srđan Dragojević (Serbia); Maja Weiss (Slovenia); and Isa Qosja and Arben Kastrati (Kosovo). While this article treats films made during the Yugoslav period as strictly Yugoslav rather than as belonging to separate ethno-national spaces that have emerged since the end of Yugoslavia, the latter sections examine some of the controversies over the ownership of Yugoslav cinema in light of the country’s breakup, as well as a recent scholarly emphasis on ethnocentric interpretations of post-Yugoslav filmmaking, often at the expense of a more trans-ethno-national view. For biographical sources that came out during Yugoslavia’s existence and that are written in the local language, this article uses the then-standard term Serbo-Croatian. For post-Yugoslav bibliographical sources in the same language, the bibliography uses the currently preferred term BCS (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian).