Film In The 1980s

Film can influence public opinion, shape the popular imagination, and reach great numbers of people in a short period of time.

Film was originally used to help the foundation of the Yugoslav ideology and identity after the split with Stalin. Over time this role has reversed, first with the appearance of the Black Wave and then with the New Yugoslav Film, that seeks to question the foundation of the Yugoslav identity and ideology.

These filmmakers use historical events to challenge the present. Even though they do this, they are not trying to represent historical sources themselves. Nevertheless, they do have an opportunity to provoke social change through their work .

This thesis observes re-examination of the past in Yugoslavia through the

The tendencies in Yugoslav film in the 1980s are the answer to its political and social problems.

When trying to analyze where Yugoslav film fits into the official Yugoslav ideology and in what way it criticizes this ideology, one can naturally start from the Yugoslav Black Wave and argue that this is the period of Yugoslav cinema where the system was criticized most heavily. However, the Black Wave was not criticizing the ideology itself, but the way it was applied. Yugoslav Black Wave was close to the ideas of Praxis. “Some of these filmmakers were committed socialists whose work was designed to not only exercise the postulates of the ideology that they had studied and practiced but also to play its part in realizing the ‘socialist paradise’ that Tito was intent on creating—though perhaps their vision of that paradise and how to realize it differed from the official

(…) Those who diverged from this official outlook and promulgated other ideologies (particularly Soviet ones after the Tito/Stalin split of 1948) were marginalized and sometimes imprisoned.

It is interesting to notice that the filmmaker that were active in the 1980s and were making these films as a commentary on the post WWII events, were the first generation that didn’t experience these events first handedly. They are the first ones who use history and memory to comment on these events that their parents were most likely experiencing. For instance, the story of When Father Was Away on Business is in a way the story of young Abdulah Sidran, whose father was doing time at Goli otok and we got to tell his story through fiction.

How the questions of the split with Stalin and the formal exclusion of Yugoslavia from Cominform, together with its political and social consequences, were treated in the film productions of the 1980s, “while the official national historiography was mostly silent about