By Franziska Schuster. One of the most expensive productions of Serbian film history was the 2009 war drama ST. GEORGE SHOOTS THE DRAGON, directed by Srđan Dragojević – a national epic about the trauma of the Serbian people during the First World War, narrated with the help of a rather obscure anecdote from the course of the war and a fictional three-way love affair in the style of a TV melodrama. This drama steeped in mud and pathos nonetheless was an immense flop in its home country finding only 150.000 viewers during its cinematic run. That might be because of the completely different kind of films with which the 47-year-old director once shot to fame in the 1990s: His taboo-breaking film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame started a national debate in 1996 about the depiction of war crimes on both the Serbian and the Bosnian side of the Balkan war; his next film THE WOUNDS two years later took aim at the sharp ethnic divides of the former Yugoslav society, in the same sarcastic kind of way as its predecessor.

The Black Wave

The pitch-black humour of Dragojević’s earlier films stood in a long Yugoslav tradition – especially Dušan Makavejev gained notoriety far beyond the Yugoslav borders during the 60s and 70s for his subversive studies of political and sexual suppression. He clashed just as regularly with the censorship office as did his colleague Želimir Žilnik, who in his many documentary and feature films has been laying his fingers into the wound of social grievances since the 1960s and is still doing so today. Makavejev and Žilnik formed a part of the movement spreading out of the student revolts of 1968 and the end of the Prague Spring, which came to be known under the label of The Black Wave. Until 1971 a couple of important movies were produced by this movement, each displaying a provocatively nihilistic-anarchic attitude. Aleksandar Petrović, whose drama I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) won the Palm D’Or in Cannes, was also one of the more renowned activists of the Black Wave.

The Prague Group

Since the middle of the 1980s the so-called Prague Group earned itself a similar kind of fame. Their members all had graduated from the Czech technical film academy FAMU. Srdjan Karanovic, Goran Marković, Goran Paskaljević and others were untied by their intentions to deal with current topics in a critical way, although in no way as radical as their predecessors. Goran Marković shows the contradictions the Yugoslav society had to endure after the Second World War from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy in his successful comedy Tito and me (1992). Srdjan Karanovic’s Virdzina (1991) takes a darker path: it’s the story of a girl which in the middle of the 19th century is masqueraded as a male son by its peasant family in order to save the honour of the clan.

During the course of the Balkan wars, the tonality of the Serbian movies got increasingly abrasive: Goran Paskaljevićs Powder Keg (1998) is a very angry account of the disintegrating civil society, in which one cruelty is followed by the next one. And even the most famous director of the Prague Group, Emir Kusturica (When Father Was Away on Business, 1985; black cat, white cat, 1998) directed an insane grotesqueness with Underground (1995), where degenerated characters doom each other because of their own egomania. The image of a self-righteous and power-mad male society is continued – albeit it with a more serious and melancholy tone – in recent productions like the thriller Klopka – the trap (2007) by Srdan Golubovic or the quiet drama Love and Other Crimes (2008) by Stefan Arsenijevic. And even Srđan Dragojević tries something different after his war epic: his next project revolves around the Serbian Gay Pride Parade, which was prohibited by violent excesses in Belgrade in 2001. The organizers had another try only as recently as 2009, which was however banned by the Serbian Ministry of the Interior due to massive threats of violence from radical right-wing organisations.

Links

• Film Center Serbia
• »Yugoslav film-makers« (Arte archive)
• Reviews of most of the mentioned films
• Website of Želimir Žilnik
• Documentary Film Initiative South East
• South East Europe Society
• Belgrade Pride

• SNARE DRUM (SRB 2008. Mihajlo Jevtic)