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Towards a Theory of Political Art: Cultural Politics of Black Wave Film in Jugoslavia, 1963-1972Towards a Theory of Political Art Cultural Politics of Black Wave Film
in Yugoslavia, 1963-1972
511
Sezgin Boynik
Cultural policy of the film Black Wave in Yugoslavia, 1963-1972
Available for public inspection in the Alfa Hall of the University Agora building with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Jyväskylä
on December 13, 2014 at 12 pm.
Academic dissertation for public discussion, courtesy of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä,
in the Agora building, Alfa Halle, on December 13, 2014 at 12 noon.
UNIVERSIDADES JYVÄSKYLÄ
Cultural policy of the film Black Wave in Yugoslavia, 1963-1972
JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN EDUCATION, PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH511
Sezgin Boynik
Cultural policy of the film Black Wave in Yugoslavia, 1963-1972
UNIVERSIDADES JYVÄSKYLÄ
URN:ISBN:978-951-39-5980-7 ISBN 978-951-39-5980-7 (PDF)
Copyright © 2014, Universität Jyväskylä
Universidade de Jyväskylä Press, Jyväskylä 2014
ABSTRACT
Boynik, Sezgin Towards a Theory of Political Art: Cultural Politics of Black Wave Film in Yugoslavia, 1963-1972 Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2014, 87 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research ISSN 0075-4625; 511) ISBN 978-951-39-5979-1 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-5980-7 (PDF) The starting point of my Thesis is the forms of "Black Wave" films made in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s in relation to the political contradictions of socialist self-government. Instead of explaining film forms as representations of social and political dynamics; My aim is to propose a proprietary methodology and conceptual apparatus that allows social dynamics to be captured through their inscription in the art form. The new methodological reading that I propose is largely based on updating some theses proposed by the Russian formalists, Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser. By combining these different theoretical positions, I would like to propose a model that incorporates the contradictions in the study of political art without reducing formalism to mere representation. Largely based on the work of Dušan Makavejev, I have shown that the political engagement of avant-garde artists and filmmakers contributes to the richness of artistic forms. My goal is to find ways to uncover these contradictions. By carefully considering the notion of slogans and cultural politics in Makavejev's writings and artwork, I want to show that the conceptualization of political terms in artistic production has a distinctive character. Based on this observation, my aim is to propose a different reading of cultural policies and artistic practices in socialist Yugoslavia. Addressing theoretical and historical debates on the representation of politics, nationalism, stylistic change, realism and the relationship between philosophy and art, I showed the advances of the formalist approach in understanding the Black Wave, the Yugoslav Black Wave, and tried to distinguish from the formalist reading that I propose. At another level, in my text on “New Collectives” in Post-Yugoslavia, I apply this methodology to the contemporary art scene and point out some formal transformations that occurred in the discourse on art in the transition from socialist to neoliberal conditions. Keywords: political art, cultural policy, Black Wave Cinema, Yugoslavia, self-government, Louis Althusser, formalism, contradictions, ideology, realism, historicism.
Adresse des Autors Sezgin Boynik Sturenkatu 5a 32 Helsinki[Email protected]Supervisor Professor Anita KangasInstitute of Social Sciences and Philosophy University of JyväskyläProfessor Kia Lindroos Institute of Social Sciences and PhilosophyUniversity of Jyväskylä Proofreader Professor Anna Schober Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies Justus Liebig University KimmoLaine University Institute of Media Studies University of Turku OpponentProfessor Milena Dragi evi -Šeš Docentei of Dramatic ArtsBelgrade University of Arts
PREFACE
In the mid-1990s, when it would be time for me and many of my generation to become involved with the interesting experimental and avant-garde art productions of socialist Yugoslavia, that country was being ravaged by a bloody civil war. At that time it was impossible for me and many of my generation to address any question about Yugoslavia that did not have an answer already inscribed in history. The logic of this historical explanation was simple: everything from self-government to punk music, to name just two examples, of socialist Yugoslavia meant that civil war, neoliberal nationalist plunder, and the collapse of the country were inevitable. That was my understanding of Yugoslavia in the 90s, when I was dealing with the Situationist International, with Godard, with Michael Haneke, rock-in-opposition, free jazz and other things. The name Yugoslavia was nothing more than a suspicious construction based on certain mythologies, which soon proved to be wrong. In this falsehood there was no room for serious involvement.
For me, waking up from the historical dream of Yugoslavia was a painful and contradictory process, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin in the conservative discourse. This ideology has taken many different forms; but what seemed to be common to most of them was a truism in these plain and obvious statements. It was argued that multinational and autonomous Yugoslavia was at odds with the inherent nationalism and residual elements of feudalism. These contradictions, as the defenders of this logic tirelessly repeat, are the main reason why the country ceased to exist.
As I said, in the 1990s there was no escaping this logic, everything seemed to fit into what we were experiencing in our daily brutality. Official discourse in the 1990s always reminded us that this was a repeat of the 1930s or World War I or even earlier periods of Yugoslav history, when wars happened almost like natural disasters, as film director Emir Kusturica on the recent war in Bosnia.
What we begin to realize is that the logic of inevitability was not a product of the 1990s. It has always been there, from the dawn of the Second Yugoslavia, all the way back to 1945. This was particularly true when arguing that self-government was alien to the Yugoslav context, or that multinational coexistence was foreign to human nature in general. But we also begin to see that running parallel to this logic in Yugoslavia was another position, what might be called the internationalist, vanguard position (the core of anti-fascist partisans in World War II), which was the driving force behind the theory and practice of World War II. World self-management. I was interested in this position, especially how this avant-garde and internationalist position relates to art and culture.
My graduation thesis is the result of this commitment, which is not just the result of personal effort. It's been a long road of collective engagement in many different areas.
different intellectual and especially artistic platforms in post-Yugoslavian spaces (in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Skopje and Prishtina), is the result of many difficult debates (public and private, some still ongoing), heated discussions, more exciting Accidental discoveries (in archives, flea markets, in people's personal collections), exhibitions, exhibitions, editorial meetings, etc. Just thinking about how many people I can name who have contributed to all these discussions makes me excited and hopeful at the same time that we are not just a few isolated artists and researchers who don't want to believe the official historical hypothesis about the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia. But most of all, I am indebted to conversations and friendships with Slobodan Karamanic and others at Prelom Magazine, Gal Kirn, editors of Journal Kino! (Andrej Sprah, JurijMeden, Nil Baskar, Maja Krajnc), Branimir Stojanovic, Nebojsa Jovanovic, Vladan Jeremic and many others.
I should also mention how I started my dissertation at the University of Jyväskylä. I spent the winter of 2008-2009 in Belgrade, where I spent my free time, in fact I had nothing but free time at that time, in the archive of alternative films in the Culture Hall “Studentski Grad”, run by cinephile and filmmaker IvkoŠeši. After noticing that we have many common interests, he introduced me to his partner Milena Dragi evi -Šeši, whose book Art and Alternative I already knew. She recommended that I contact the Department of Cultural Policy at the University of Jyväskylä. That's how I met one of my supervisors, Anita Kangas, who understood and supported my research from the beginning. Co-advisor KiaLindroos, then from the Department of Political Science, took my research in a very different and productive direction. I am very grateful to both.
The reason why I was in Belgrade in the winter of 2008/2009 is another interesting fact. It was an artist residency by my partner Minna Henriksson, who originally lived in Helsinki and was working on an art project mapping the Belgrade art scene at the time. So the “artistic” side of my research on Onda Negra has been with me since the beginning of my research. Even during the most difficult period of my methods research and other academic work, my cinematic research was never separated from artistic practice. I met Dušan Makavejev, Zelimir Zilnik and Lazar Stojanovic at the galleries in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Prishtina, respectively; most of my BlackWave talks have been part of contemporary art exhibitions; Also during my PhD I was involved in the realization of two artistic projects with models of experimental cinema. My special thanks therefore go to Minna.
I am also grateful to Sovako and the University of Jyväskylä for financial support. Also, I want to thank all my loved ones; Roza, Engin, Elmas and Anush. I dedicate this work to the memory of my father. Helsinki, November 2014
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES TO PUBLISHED ARTICLES
Chapters appeared in the following publications: 1. “Between Necessity and Spontaneity: The Cultural Politics of Dušan
Makavejev” was released in theaters! Magazine of Cinema and Film Issues No. 15, 2011, pp. 87-108, Ljubljana. An earlier and shorter version appeared with the same title in the catalog Dušan Makavejev: Retrospectiva published on the occasion of his films at Cinemateca Ljubljana, 2011 Black Wave, AlfredoSuppia and Henrique Figueiredo (eds.), São Paulo: Cinusp PauloEmílio/Pró - Rectoria de Culture and University Extension-USP, pp.81-106. A version of the article was presented as "From Worker to Immigrant: Transformation of Political Subject in Makavejev's Films" at the Symposium of Black Wave in Yugoslavian Cinema at GoEast: Festival of Central and Eastern European Film in Wiesbaden in April 2013.
2. "Sobre Makavejev, On Ideology: The Concrete and the Abstract in Read-
ings of Dušan Makavejev Films” appeared in Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema, edited by Gal Kirn, Dubravka Sekulicand Ziga Testen, Jan Van Eyck Akademie, 2012, pp. 106-152, Maastricht. The unmodified online version appeared in the special issue on Makavejev in the e-journal Mediantrop: RegionalniCasopis za Medije i Kulturu, edited by Zorica Jevremovic-Munitic.http://www.mediantrop.rankomunitic.org/on-makavejev-on-ideology
3. “New Collectives: Artistic Networks and Cultural Policies in Post-Yugoslavia
Spaces” appeared in Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, edited by Slobodan Karamanic and Daniel Suber, Brill, 2012, pp. 81–105, Boston and Leiden. Part of the article was read at the conference Questioning Transitional Dynamics in Re-defining Cultural Identities in SEE, organized by the Peace Institute in Ljubljana in January 2011. , in CulturalIdentity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies, edited by Aldo Milohnic and Nevena Svob- Djokic, Institute of International Relations, pp. 141-147, Zagreb.
4. "The Art of Slogans (The Performative Part)" was published in TKH:
Journal for Performing Arts Theory, No. 19, pp. 132-141, Belgarde. The Serbian translation was published in the same issue of the magazine as "Umetnost Parola (Performativni Deo)".
5. “The Art of Slogans (The Constative Part)” was published in TKH:Journal for Performing Arts Theory, No. 20, pp. 82-95, Belgrade. The Serbian translation was published in the same issue of the magazine as "Umetnost Pa - Rola (Konstativni Deo)".
CONTENT
1. INTRODUCTION................................................ .. ................................................................ 11
2 RUSSIAN FORMALISM.................................................. . . .. ...................................14 2.1 Methodological means of Russian formalism... .. .. ......................... 15 2.2 Philosophical concepts of formalist theory ............... .. ... .................................................. 17
3 NON-SYNTHESIS ..................................................... .. ...................................................18
4 MATERIALS FROM MY RESEARCH AND PRESENTATION OF MY PUBLICATIONS........................................................ .. ......................................................... 22
5 EXCESS AND CONTRADICTIONS OF THE BLACK WAVE ............... 24 5.1 Introduction to the contradictions of the "Black Wave" ........ .......... ... 24 5.2 Theory of cinematographic excesses............... ........... .. ............. .........................27
6 REGISTRATION OF CONTRADICTIONS OF THE "ONDA BLACK" ...................................... 28 6.1 The contradictions of party politics or the ideological state
Device................................................. .................................................. .28 6.1.1 Linguistic theories on the formation of ideologies
Contradictions ..................................................................... ..........................29 6.1.2 Conceptual consequences of the formal study of black people
Cinema of Waves ..................................................... .. ................................32 6.1.3 Formal treatment of slogans in Dušan films
Makaveev .................................................................. . ......................................................36 6.2 Contradictions of nationalism .... .... . .................................................. ....38
6.2.1 Definition of the framework of national contradiction in the cultural policy of Yugoslavia............................ 38
6.2.2 Theoretical and formal discussions of the national contradiction in relation to cultural policies ......................44
6.3 Contradictions of self-management .................................................. .. .... 47 6.3.1 Theoretical and philosophical discussion
of self-government in Yugoslavia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 6.3.2 Yugoslav philosophy of practice and black wave cinema ...... 50 6.3.3 Unequal relationship between ideology and art: On use
by Beethoven in Makavejev's films ..... 55 6.3.4 Addendum to a theory of contradiction .....................57
7 YUGOSLAVIA AND CINEMA: TOWARDS A TEMPORARY UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONTRADICTIONS OF REALISM ................................... 63
7.1 Introduction to the theory of realism.................................................. . ........ 63 7.2 Realism and history in Yugoslav cinematographic discourse ........... 67
8 CONCLUSION: ART AND POLITICS BETWEEN CULTURE AND POLITICS ................................................... ................................................................... . .. ......................72
SUMMARY................................................. .................................................. .........79
LITERATURE................................................. .................................................. ......81
1. INTRODUCTION
In my research, I have grappled intensively with the question of how to conceptualize the relationship between art and politics. The starting point of my research on the relationship between art and politics was a theoretical examination of the formal challenges of cultural policy. More specifically, the starting point of my research was the conceptualization of cultural policy as a field determined by both politics and the arts. So my main question deals with the contradiction of cultural politics: how is it possible to understand the work of art of the political avant-garde positioned somewhere between the supposed practicality and the negation of utilitarianism? My position (in terms of materials, methodology and conceptualization that I use) is based on the assumption that by conceptualizing this contradiction we can understand the making of a work of art in all its complexity.
To conceptualize this contested field of political, artistic, and cultural studies, I have used a wide variety of empirical and theoretical sources and materials. In my articles published over three years, I have reflected on this difficult theoretical field of the relationship between art and politics from different perspectives. The common thread of these published articles are the Yugoslav black wave films and, in particular, the films of Dušan Makavejev. Due to my particular theme, certain issues such as conceptual periodization (temporality, historicization), national and economic contradiction, complex and unequal social and cultural relations, representation and the genealogy of forms formed an important part of my research. In this introduction, I would like to present the conceptual elements of my research more succinctly and try to configure these elements within a more rigorous methodological framework. It is particularly about the mythological orientation and its implementation in the material. But academic work aside, my study of the Black Wave and Yugoslav cultural politics can also be seen as a real debate about issues that have wider implications than just those affecting academic institutions. I could say that my work is in part the result of a theoretical and methodological intervention in existing discussions about dark wave studies. It was also my goal to build a conceptual scheme
12, which would turn the abstraction on the above issues into a concise theoretical work. In order to find the terms of my theoretical orientation in the following pages, I will condense the discussion on the relationship between art and politics, which forms the axis of my general conception and methodology.
To summarize the methodological and theoretical direction of my research, I will begin by highlighting some of the inherent contradictions and challenges that have shaped the way my work has taken shape. In other words, I could say that the complex structure of my methodology was created precisely by the theme of my research, which deals with the relationship between art and politics in the case of Yugoslav cinema. These methodological difficulties have been most evident in the aspect of data collection and discussion and in the general theoretical interpretation of these materials. But almost immediately, these complexities begin with the conceptualization itself, which I will discuss in detail in the following pages.
There are some questions that recur frequently when discussing the emergence of avant-garde art and cinema in the context of political conditions in Yugoslavia. My aim is not to avoid these questions and challenges, but to face them head-on. One of the most persistent challenges in this conceptualization is the issue of temporalization, or the retrospective interpretation of Yugoslav avant-garde art in the 1960s from a contemporary perspective. The main implication of this challenge concerns not only the historiography of artistic training, but also the general theoretical temporalization of the work of art itself. differ from political temporality? This issue is directly related to the very nature of the work of art. Understanding the contradictions of Yugoslav cultural policy from this perspective means elaborating the discussion at the higher theoretical level of artistic training itself. Therefore, my last methodological statement is based on updating the temporal aspect of the work of art. In short, the temporal complexities inherent in arts education are a crucial component of my theoretical and methodological approach. In the pages that follow, it becomes clear that the issue of actualization also has far-reaching effects on a general conceptualization of political art.
The second theoretical and methodological challenge in dealing with the Black Wave is the question of representation, or more precisely the representation of the Yugoslav uniqueness through the perspective of its intersection with the global conditions of cinematographic production. In order to understand the genesis of Yugoslav black wave films, I would like to avoid contextualizing Yugoslav cultural politics as a closed or autopoietic system that generates its own truth. Contrary to this type of mainstream discussion, I have placed Yugoslavian black wave cinema in a global context of international film studies. Through an extensive review of available written texts on Dušan Makavejev's films, I have shown that the Yugoslav filmmaker's inclusion in the internationally recognized system of film theory is generally reproductive.
13 leads to certain patterns of representation that persist in this inclusion process. Furthermore, I argue that by considering these standards it is possible to discuss the cultural policy of cinema from a more concrete and historical perspective.
Third, a more specific theoretical challenge of my research relates to the question of philosophical legitimacy, more specifically to the question of the relationship between artistic practices and progressive intellectual platforms active in Yugoslavia.
To deal with these theoretical challenges, my aim is to propose a methodology that reflects these heterogeneous and diverse conceptual elements as a result of the contradictory formations of the artwork. I will argue that the theory and methodology of Russian Formalism is the most appropriate approach to understanding the complexity and contradiction of artistic creation. In addition to offering a new understanding of the intelligibility of the work of art, Russian formalism also offers a scientific model for apprehending the inequality of artistic formation more interestingly and rigorously.
In the following pages, I will discuss which terms I refer to in Russian formalism and give a conceptual rationale for using this model in my methodology. I will also speculate along possible conceptual lines about how I might incorporate Walter Benjamin's temporal model into my general theoretical and methodological framework.
2 RUSSIAN FORMALISM
The main conceptual task of my research is to formalize the distinct and unique contingencies in arts and politics through their specific intelligibility. The Russian formalism of the 1920s and 1930s is not a monolithic intellectual position. Started as a search for the specificity of forms, regulations, laws and the historical development of art, it includes a variety of models, mainly from Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Yuriy Tinjanov, Boris Exhenbaum, V.N. Voloshinov, P.N. Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin. Next, some theoretical observations are presented as outlines for the use of formalism in the mystical exploration of Yugoslavian cinema.
Typically, most analyzes of political avant-garde artworks tend to describe the elements involved in the production of a given work in terms of extrinsic processes that bear some arbitrary relationship to the artwork itself. Roman Jakobson, one of the most important theorists of formalism, explained this with an apt metaphor that serves as the leitmotiv of my methodology: "The object of literary studies is not literature, but literacy, that is, what makes a given work a work of Literature. And yet, until now, scholars of literature often behaved like policemen, catching anyone and everyone in the house, as well as passers-by on the street, just to ensure the arrest of a particular person. Likewise, the literary historian used everything at their disposal: biographical evidence, psychology, politics and philosophy. Instead of literary studies, they created a conglomeration of indigenous disciplines” (Jakobson, 1997: 179) How to deal with the intelligibility of art without necessarily reversing the scope of the artwork to a mere reflection of social and political changes is a problem. Formalists have described Jakobson's 'literariness' in different ways. different but, in general, all refer to the emancipation of the 'traditional correlation of 'form-content' and the conception of form as a shell or external container into which a liquid (content) is poured” (Ejxenbaum, 2002: 12 ). What makes formalism real, distinct and compared to an advanced method
It differs from other approaches to literary and artistic studies in that it does not unfold the form of a work of art into explanations of ad hoc transformations induced by social content. According to this methodology, form is content. Taking into account that the work of art is not transcendental, separate or independent from social changes (institutions responsible for sustaining this art, major economic-political changes that affect these cultural institutions, the global conjuncture, economic contingencies, certain policies, etc.) formalism proposes to treat these determinants by their existence within the work of art.
2.1 Methodological means of Russian formalism
By showing how extrinsic determinants (such as historical, political and social factors) were transformed into an artistic form, the formalist methodology advanced some approaches that will be present in this part of the text. These tools or models (Jameson, 1972; Steiner, 1984) for exploring the correspondences and conflicts between socially extrinsic materials and intrinsic artistic forms are: devices (Shkovsky, 1990); Realism of Art (Jakobson, 2002); Evolution (Tynjanov, 2002; Tinjanov, 1998), dominant (Jakobson, 2002; Jakobson & Tynjanov, 2002), mechanism, organism, synecdoche, (Steiner, 1984; Striedter, 1989), literary fact (Tynjanov, 1998; Fore, 2006 ), automatism, alienation and heroism (Shklvosky, 1990). As formalism has several ways of dealing with the form of the artwork, it is difficult to reduce it to a typical artistic science or methodology. For this reason, some formalists have vehemently opposed the use of “method” as their approach, proposing instead a broader and more conceptual term than “formalist principles” (Ejxenbaum, 2002:4-5).
These principles were ultimately based on linguistic approaches to the analysis of artistic materials and forms. Although it began as a general search for artistic form, the formalists' usual research material was literature (poetry and prose). Consequently, most of his crucial works were based on the formal analysis of certain novels and poems; such as 'How Gogol's Overcoatis Made' (Ejxenbaum, 1964), 'The Making of Don Quixote' (Shkovsky, 1990), Xlebnikov and Majakovskyj (Jakobson, 1997), Trsitam Shandy (Shkovsky, 1990), etc. answer the decisive question about the "literariness" of the formalist principle: how is it possible to use language-based analyzes in film studies research? First, my two texts dealing with slogans (The Art of Slogans: Constative Part and The Art of Slogans: Performative Part) are directly related to the issue of linguistics related to a work by Dušan Makavejev. Following Makavejev's early writings on political language, particularly Onslogans (Makavejev, 1964), I have examined how Makavejev's early formal quest for "how political slogans can be written" also influenced the cinematic form of his later avant-garde films. in slogans suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:75-110) compared to political writings by Len-
16 in On Slogans (Lenin, 1967), I have tried to show how the intrinsic friction and contradiction between politics and art must be formally discovered, considering the nature of slogans. In addition, I used language materials such as slogans, which tested the methodology of proving that cinema's relationship with the socialist system of Yugoslavia was more complicated than some scholars of the subject suppose. Second, some of the most advanced film theories developed in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in France, used linguistic theses in their conceptualizations. In general, these linguistically influenced film theories were influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure's structural and binary theses on the strict distinction between diachronic and synchronic concepts of language (Metz, 1982; Heath, 1981). Formalist theories, critical of Saussure's reductionist separation of diachrony and synchrony, offered a more complex and process-based approach to the formation and transformation of linguistic systems (Steiner, 1984:217-225). This complex formal thesis about the relationship between diachrony and synchrony is also most useful for exploring the language of arts other than literature, such as cinema, in relation to history. Third, some applications of formalist method principles, such as dominance, hero and action, alienation, means, and synecdoche, would be very helpful in dealing with filmic language forms. For example, when dealing with the transformation of the political subject or hero in Dušan Makavejev's films from worker to immigrant, the use of Viktor Shklovsky's "theories of prose", which analyze the hero's relationship with the action of a work of art, would be very useful (Shklovsky, 1990). The medium of alienation is also directly related to the juxtaposition and shock form of Makavejev's cinematic form, heavily based on Eisenstein's theory and practice. Fourth, there is widespread academic use of formalist theories in film studies that deal with social issues. Particularly widespread since the 1980s is the approach that uses specific literary tools of Mikhail Bakhtin, such as chronotopia, carnivalesque and polyphony in film studies (Stam, 1992). , or studies that relate Makavejev's work to Bakhtin's writings (Horton, 1990). But the Formalists themselves used their methods to deal with the cinema. Shklovsky was among the most important Formalist scholars dealing with cinema; He has written extensively about the relationship between literature and film (Shklovsky, 2008; Shkovsky 1982), about Eisenstein (Shklovsky, 1975), and has also written literature and fiction using film equipment (Shklovsky, 2001). In 1927, during the most interesting period of Russian avant-garde filmmaking, the Formalists published a book Poetics of Cinema containing articles on "Cinema Style" (Ejxenbaum, 1982:5-31) and "Fundamentals of Cinema". (Tynjanov, 1982: 32-54). Finally, another interesting academic article sought the thesis that certain film directors used formalistic methods in the production of their works. According to this research, both the cinema of Eisenstein (V. V. Veselinov, 1971: 226-236; V. V. Veselinov, 1985: 221-235; Salvaggio, 1979: 289-297) and that of Dziga Vertov (Petric, 1987) had a complicated relationship - submission to formalist theories; both were influenced by these theories and criticized them as unsuitable for filmmaking.
17 2.2 Philosophical concepts of formalist theory
Conceptually, it is easy to find the historical links in the intellectual relationship between Walter Benjamin and the Formalists. Benjamin used the theories and works of Sergei Tretiakov in his text Author as Producer and Ejxenbaum in his Storyteller (Striedter, 1989:55-58), Brecht had a strong relationship with Shklovsky (Brewster, 1974). But it is more interesting to look at the conceptual connections between these two. A philosophical connection between Benjamin and the Formalists was his reference to Goethe's concept of 'morphology of forms' (Steiner, 1984), another strong conceptual connection is the rejection of historicism. Probably the most “formalist” idea in Benjamin's work, which is directly related to his theses on cinema and play, is the suggestion of a “second nature” or “second technique” as he develops it in his text The author as producer. By treating technology and technological culture as a "second nature" that develops independently of the "real" or "first nature", Benjamin further developed his "non-synthesis" model towards a possible formal analysis of art . (Leslie, 2000) What I consider the most valuable contribution in the encounter between formalist methodologies and Benjamin's model of "non-synthesis" is the possibility of the conceptual proposal of dealing with the intelligibility of art, in this case cinema, to further intensify more. If we have already established that Benjamin's cinematic reality ('Kinoland') exists conceptually independently, formalistic methods could be used to deal with the intelligibility of this particularity.
Regarding the work of the Formalists and their theoretical interventions in themes such as literary evolution, development and transformation of artistic styles, we can also include a temporal aspect in the current updating of Formalist theory, an important point for Benjamin. The temporal aspect of the formalist model is best seen in his critique of Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics. Instead of the synchronic structural approach, they preferred to work on the model that can be described as a dialectical relationship between diachrony and synchrony, or better, between history and structures (Striedter, 1989; Steiner, 1984; Jameson, 1972). Another important theme in this part of the text will be the relationship between Marxism and formalism. The extensive reference and use of formalist theories in the Marxist literary field as a possible model for analyzing avant-garde art has been discussed in many other academic works (Jameson, 1972; Bennett, 1979; Groys, 2011; Yurchak, 2005).
3 NO SYNTHESIS
As I have already mentioned, it is impossible to reduce the notion of temporality in avant-garde art and politics to a linear narrative of an easily applicable methodology. A more adequate way of using the concepts of temporalization is to update them as a kind of performative methodology. This allows me to freely orient my research in the field of politics and art and also gives me clues for updating historical sources to contemporary conditions. Since my dissertation is based on the assumption that the intelligibility (or conceptualization) of art and politics as historical categories in contingent forms allows for their distinct singular conceptualizations, the aspect of temporalization will primarily provide the creative and at the same time mostly rigorous direction of my search. One of the most important theoretical positions that openly deals with questions of the historical conceptualization of political contingencies is Walter Benjamin's model of "non-synthesis" or "dialectics of stagnation". This historical model of Benjamin, embodied in his posthumous text "Theses on the philosophy of history" (Benjamin, 1968/Iluminações), proposes a temporalization that would lead to a politicization of history, or to a model of historical survey that could be described as "historical materialism". [“The historical materialist cannot do without the idea of ​​a present that is not a transition, but in which time stops and has stopped” (Benjamin, 1968: 262, Thesis XVI)]. This concept of stagnation or non-reconciliation directly alludes to the historicist notion of continuum, which homogenizes social transformations as latent inscriptions of abstract thought. As such, the 'paralyzed dialectic' and 'non-synthesis' models are ultimately political, or as Rolf Tiedemann described the former, 'whereby politics must retain its 'priority over history'' (Tiedemann, 1988: 272-273); or on 'non-synthesis': "this notion as a further development of a 'kairological' approach to temporality that reveals historical contingency and the sudden emergence of known and unknown historical elements in a way that also characterizes the politics of historical interpretation" ​​(Lindroos, 2006:127-128).
To clarify the proposed model of formalization and temporalization that implies some political efficacy in my conceptualization, I need to
19 to point out briefly how I have used the term politics in my writings. The starting point of my discussions related to politics starts from the assumption that politics, like art, also has a specific and distinct intelligibility. Furthermore, I start from the assumption that this intelligibility in politics and art takes place through the formalization of this distinct intelligibility. I have discussed the formalization of political and artistic intelligibility, referring to the writings of Louis Althusser and other political philosophers who share this model of political formalization (such as Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Miko Lahtinen and others). This political form that emerges in my discussion is related to the conflictual and contradictory character of the formalization of the singular intelligibility of politics. I might call this a conflicting feature of politics. This property, of great importance in my discussion of the relationship between art and politics, led me to a second important property of politics; that is, to the temporalization of the political. It is possible to approach this field from two intellectual perspectives, one is a Benjaminian model of the temporalization of historical contingencies (as I have discussed with reference to Peter Osborne and Kia Lindroos), and the second is an analytical model of the formalization of contingencies. This thesis, which is also related to the Benjaminian concept, as well as to the radical randomness inherent in the Althusserian model, can be approached through the philosophical use of Machiavelli's Fortuna concept. From Althusser to Lefort and Paul Ricoeur, the contingency of politics, which is the condition of its temporalization, could be further formalized, as Kari Palonen did, through two opposing trends in the conceptualization of politics, namely, politicization and politicization. The proposed separation between politicization and politicking in general corresponds to politics as an activity and game in the first and, in contrast, to politics as a discipline, which corresponds to the second (Palonen, 2007).
I can therefore argue that the temporal and conflictual aspect of politics I am referring to is closer to the definition of politicization. From this, I can say that the general tendency of my published articles is to formalize the temporality and contradiction of works of art generated by various contingencies. Finally, my purpose is to discuss these contingencies in terms of policy.
The conceptual "[possibility] of something unexpected, contingency, conflict... : 89) that as a 'non-reconciling' understanding "that reveals elements of contingency, but is still embedded in history" (Lindroos, 1998: 93). in short, this is an irreconcilable conceptualization of history as political contingency. Drawing on Benjamin's early Romantic writings, the concept of 'non-synthesis' is an attempt to reflect on the past or 'connect the now and the then', which would avoid the unfolding of historicist writing; or more formally, it is an attempt to discuss history in terms of a 'discontinuous' conceptualization ('the history of the oppressed') as opposed to a 'continuous' conceptualization of history ('the continuum of oppression'). ').
20 power”) (Lindroos, 1998: 94). Since these elements only exist as concepts in political conceptualization (and even more so in artistic conceptualization), we must theoretically deploy such descriptions as “oppressed people” and “oppressive power” as concepts for our model. I believe that "non-synthesis" as a conceptual model also makes a valuable contribution to what is described in Louis Althusser's theory as the crucial distinction between the "object of knowledge" and the "real object" (Althusser & Balibar, 2009 : 44). By linking these two approaches, I tried to place the heterogeneity of uneven temporality in the field of structuralist discourse. In a way, this approach stems from my interest in formalizing the politicization of avant-garde art.
The non-synthesis model presents at least two methodological advantages by positioning the heterogeneity of temporalities in a structured and formalist way: first, it is directed against historicism, which assumes the teleological, deterministic mode of transformation; and second, it does not pose the issue of representation as a simplified and reductionist process. This historiography is more advanced than other methodologies that deal with the past, which generally focus on the official narrative of the historicist formation of political or artistic objects.
Second, the methodological advance of the “non-synthesis” model lies in the amount of resources it adds to scientific investigation: by conceptualizing different temporalities in the construction of the work of art, non-synthesis represents reality on many different and contradictory levels. . The crucial peculiarity of this methodology is that it erases automatism or spontaneity from the creation of the artwork and presents the artwork as a process of construction. According to Benjamin, “art becomes politicized through the process of 'construction'” (Lindroos, 1998:185). But two particular things must be added in Benjamin's conceptualization of art as construction: a) construction has no functionalist meaning; it has to do with destruction and antagonisms. “It is important for the materialist historian to distinguish very strictly between the construction of an ahistorical state of affairs and what is commonly called its 'reconstruction'. "Reconstruction" through empathy is one-sided. "Construction" presupposes "destruction". (Benjamin, 1988: 60, Konvolut N.; Osborne, 1995: 156); and b) construction is against spontaneity and automatism.
This brings us to the heart of the "non-synthesis" model applied to cinema: first, this model sees art as construction; and, second, separates cinematic reality from everyday reality, emphasizing the distinction of their parameters [“Benjamin does not express any aspect of value between the two, since both realities are equally real and important” (Lindroos, 1998:206) ]
Another important methodological aspect in the elaboration of the non-synthesis model is the conceptual possibilities that it can implement in the field of political philosophy. For me, “non-synthesis” is the conceptual possibility of evaluating the issues of Yugoslavia as issues of cinema. In this regard, one might assume that in dealing with a "second Yugoslavia" as Benjamin's "second nature" (as developed in 'Author as Producer'
21 will be dealt with in the next chapter) it can be said that the “Land of Cinema Yugoslavia” is a field of action of my conception.
The philosophical possibilities of the non-synthesis model to formalize contingencies are the following:
1. temporal: a mismatch of characteristic temporal elements in the
conceptualize the historical transformation of art; 2. spatially/or asimagistically/or syntactically: a non-reconciliation between
different domains of knowledge/perceptual constructions (ie, incompatibility between object of knowledge and real object);
3. how methodical; Non-conciliation between different concepts
of cognitive processes in politics and art.
4 MATERIALS FROM MY RESEARCH AND PRESENTATION OF MY PUBLISHED ARTICLES
As I explained earlier, my methodological and theoretical approach largely determined my approach to material selection. When discussing the Black Wave, I focused mainly on the writings of Dušan Makavejev. A special reason for this is Makavejev's own intellectual career. In addition to shooting avant-garde and experimental films from the mid-1950s, Makavejev worked in many different film styles, including documentaries, feature films, experimental and propaganda films. Even if I didn't think about the form of this heterogeneity, it somehow characterized my methodology, which also includes heterogeneous conceptual environments. Another aspect of Makavejev's intellectual and artistic background was his political activism. As I have tried to discuss in particular in my text on Makavejev's cultural politics and in my two-part essay The Art of Slogans, Makavejev's early involvement in youth work in the 1950s and later his involvement in various platforms of cultural policy had an incredible influence on his upbringing. I emphasized the role of this political and cultural activism as much as possible. The peculiarity of my research is that I drew heavily on this area of ​​Makavejev's background, which unfortunately has been silenced in many other studies. To demonstrate my thesis that Makavejev's intellectual formation was strongly influenced by the political-cultural discussions under socialism, and that this interest in the political-cultural discussions guided his artistic formation, I also examined the materials that are little mentioned in the discussions of Onda Negra. I followed the debates and discussions published in various Yugoslav sociological and cultural journals on the importance and role of New Cinema in the Yugoslav cultural field, in which Makavejev also participated.
Another reason I have been talking so much about Makavejev is that his book Kisses for a Comrade Slogan was one of the most concise elaborations on the issues of the relationship between art and politics. This book—actually a collection of his early writings—appeared just as Makavejev was starting to make his internationally acclaimed feature films.
23 heterogeneity of their intellectual formation. This forgotten 'source' in Makavejev's research was introduced into my research to provide an entirely new view of the formal aspects of avant-garde films dealing with political issues.
In my article On Makavejev, On Ideology, I focused on the reception of Makavejev's films in international film studies. Besides not considering any of Makavejev's writings from his formative years; Many of these receptions repeated certain patterns of film politics in relation to the Yugoslav context and Makavejevan. I have tried to deconstruct them by carefully considering these patterns and discussing them as reflecting two dominant ideological trends. The initial impetus for this comprehensive and critical analysis of Makavejev's existing writing material was to clarify certain issues related to Yugoslav cultural policy in vague and ambiguous ways, implying a practice of anti-totalitarianism or a dissident approach. In both cases they were not enough to explain the real structural factors of artistic formations. I have tried to show that the discourse of totalitarianism reduces discussions of the relationship between art and politics to binary simplifications that treat complexity in very vague terms. Seeing these complexities not as symptoms of a dissident artistic practice under conditions of totalitarianism, but as a constructive contradiction, I consciously analyzed these fissures, difficulties and conflicts. Simply put, in order to write my two-part essays The Art of Slogans and the Cultural Politics of Dušan Makavejev, which form a significant part of my thesis, I had to go through a complex and difficult process of clarifying the ambiguities and confusions surrounding the reception of Makavejev.
My text on the cultural politics of post-Yugoslav spaces is an attempt to update the methodology from a contemporary perspective. More directly, it is about understanding the legacy and legacy of self-government – ​​which was an experimental cultural policy that guaranteed the space for experimental artistic practices in Yugoslavia – from the perspective of current artistic practices. My thesis in this article is that, from the current point of view, we cannot speak of self-management if the economic and political conditions for its existence have disappeared. As I have tried to demonstrate through the theory and practice of contemporary art collectives, self-management can exist today under post-Yugoslav conditions only as a culturalization or psychologization of political art practices. The materials I have used in this text are directly related to discussions of the Black Wave. First, the conceptual tools or theory of dealing with artistic collectives largely relate to a post-Fordist approach that has a strong connection with the practice and theory of self-management. Second, most proponents of artistic collectives as a new form of politicization under post-Yugoslav conditions have largely focused on artistic and intellectual sources that are also important for the Black Wave, such as Conceptual Art, Fluxus, non-socialist sculpture. -figurative, anti-fascist art, etc. Por i In pursuing these similarities in their genesis, I have tried to show the differences in the formal constitution of the work of art and its resulting politicization.
5 EXCESS AND CONTRADICTIONS OF THE BLACK WAVE
5.1 Introduction to the contradictions of "Black Wave"
The object of my research is the Yugoslav Nouvelle Vague films of the 1960s. These artistic films, commonly referred to as “Black Wave” (CrniTalas) or “New Film” (Novi Film), have characteristics of formal innovation, non-narrative plots and non-diegetic, dissemination of politically and socially charged themes and alternative implementation, production and sales strategies.
If we look at the more recent writings on the "Black Wave", we realize that this description is not only an imprecise and ideologically oriented term used in historiographical, sociological and aesthetic studies, but also a term associated with confusion and fraught with misunderstanding. One of the main reasons for this confusion is that the term “black wave” was never used by filmmakers themselves to designate certain artistic films. Apart from vague references to the so-called “black” Polish documentaries of 1956-1958, there is no other connection between “Black Wave” and other cinemas that connect the blackness, opacity and negativity of Yugoslavian films with the blackness of films from other genres and regions or epochs.
The genealogy of the term “Black Wave” can be dated back to the late 1960s, 1969 to be precise, when Borba, the official newspaper of the Yugoslav Communist League published simultaneously in Belgrade and Zagreb, launched an attack on certain artistic films as politically and ideologically unreliable cultural productions This report titled 'BlackWave' in Our Film', written by Vladimir Jovi i Jovi i, is, to my knowledge, one of the first occasions on which the term was used1. This text is considered the cornerstone of the attack on New Yugoslav Cinema
1 There are other earlier reports of some Yugoslavian films being labeled as “black” films.
dating back to 1963. Some of these accounts have been discussed in recent studies of the Black Wave historiography (Jovanovic, 2011). But Jovicic's article is the first to use "black wave" to denote a specific movement in Yugoslav film production.
25 was called neo-Stalinist or neo-Shdanovist in Yugoslavia's cultural policy; and by many it is interpreted as a text commissioned by a party leader to resolve Yugoslavia's political contradictions through the instrumentalization of cultural and artistic fields (Ristic & Leposavic, 1998; Dragovic-Soso, 2002). Recent discussion of this text by Boris Buden has emphasized the fact that Jovi's attack on the "Black Wave" was in fact based on a politics of representation tightly regulated by the Yugoslav state apparatus, which saw this problem beyond the aesthetic realm and reaching political implications. and economic consequences. First, the attack criticized these films for negatively representing Yugoslavia, or more specifically, casting a negative light on its large economic, geographic, and touristic sides; and second, he also treated the question of representation on a more ontological or general level as a philosophy of 'blackness', 'dead end' and impossibility. But, as Buden rightly points out, what was really at issue here was that Jovi i had established the limits of representational practice in artistic politics in socialist Yugoslavia, a practice that the Black Wave did not carry out: the "official position of the party on culture problems draw theirs at the time.” Arguments of identification with a Western-Orientalist vision that imagined Yugoslavia as an exotic kingdom of authentic joie de vivre and natural vitality.” (Buden, 2010: 42) Thus, the true measure of what official Yugoslav cultural policy accepted as “Yugoslavism” was not “culture as a battleground” (Bourdieu, 1993; Balibar & Macherey, 1996), but a field of reconciliation in which culture would play a confirming role in the existing Yugoslav conditions prescribed by the policy of official representation. In this case, art in the service of politics would erase social conflicts, and contradictions (including class conflicts) were sustained by cultural politics as, to paraphrase Buden, “a symbolic position based on identity that commits society to culture” (Buden, 2010: 43). which Daniel Goulding called Jovi's attack a "neo-Zhdanovist" move (Goulding, 1985: 83).
If we look closely at Jovi i's text, we can see that in the text the connection between art and politics, the question of representation, the cultural politics of avant-garde cinema, functionalism and national identity in Yugoslav cinema are presented much more clearly. complicated terms than most critics of Jovi's attack are willing to acknowledge. What is most unusual about Jovi's attack is that he depicts the Black Wave's cultural policy as correlatively opposed to or on the other side of Zhdanovist socialist-realist conservative cultural policy. As he claims, the latter, which could be described as "more directly affirmative", is replaced by the position of the former "neo-Zhdanovism", which "lacks any kind of affirmative attitude". Black Wave's negativity is again an extremism of affirmative non-representation. This over-the-top non-representation is what Black Wave is all about; Because of this apparent form, Jovi i refers to the Black Wave as "anti-zhdanovistzhdanovism" (Jovi i, 1969:23). The conceptualization of Yugoslav cultural policy in terms of positively described negation or the impossibility of negation is
26 nothing unknown; Makavejev described it in terms of a hidden Stalinism in an anti-Stalinist Yugoslavia (Mortimer, op.cit., 2009:169), and Svetozar Stojanovic, a philosopher belonging to the Praxis group, retrospectively described the situation in Yugoslavia as “anti-Stalinism”. Stalinist”. .two
But rather than further formalize Black Wave contradictions over the issue of “non-representation”, Jovi ir symptomatically concludes his remark with the historicist assertion that Black Wave negativity is an artistic expression that is anachronistic or out of sync with the current state of novels; In general, according to Jovi-i, the Black Wave is not in harmony with Yugoslav “cultural-political-ideological” progress (Jovi-i, p. 7). This discordant situation of the Black Wave is explained by the
perceived imbalance between form and content; Even the Black Wave directors' claims that their films are direct reflections of "black" reality (a claim often repeated by Zivojin Pavlovic, Aleksandar Petrovic, Krsto Papic, Dušan Makavejev and other Black Wave directors) is true according to Jovi i an uncientific and naive proposal. Jovi i then contradicts himself by rejecting the idea of ​​an “unmediated reflection”, reminiscent of Karl Marx's thesis that the general development of society need not necessarily be aligned with the general development of the arts. In the sequel, Jovi i states that neither Black Wave nor any other film can represent reality "as it is" (Jovi i , p.7). In this conceptual confusion or 'ideological attack', black meant something more than a color of the cinematographic image (that is, the optical-technical arrangement of cinematographic or pro-cinematic material) or the representation of vérité; it had an excess of connotations linked directly or indirectly to extra-aesthetic projections on the work in question.
As Dušan Makavejev described in one of his interviews, this blackness had a fantasy of ideological excess that somehow transcended the “negativity” aspect in the avant-garde artistic position of the “Black Wave” filmmakers themselves. “That expression, the 'Black Wave', was invented by some people who were building their political careers at the time. ... In fact, their imagination was very wild, politically pornographic, and they took it much more natural than we do, in their own way naive and obsessed with the need to be purified by it. So our films were used as “black films” for a social exorcism, for a spiritual liberation of some people…
2 “But the greatest irony in the history of the YCP (Communist Party of Yugoslavia) is
was that its most Stalinist potential only manifested itself at the moment when it openly resisted Stalin. That is why, more than 40 years ago, I characterized Tito's initial 'no' to Stalin as a form of Stalinist anti-Stalinism” (Stojanovic, 2009: 390).
27 5.2 Theory of cinematographic excesses
What I mean is that this “excess” of Onda Negra opened the doors to many confused positions in the artistic cinema of Yugoslavia in the 1960s. in the constitution of social understanding, or philosophically as a kind of semiotic parasite.3 But “excess” as an explicit formalist term also became Describing marginalized and oppressed stories used in the construction of cinematic form. In film theory, excess is used as a kind of core component of film systems. As Stephan Heath put it very schematically and theoretically: "A cinematographic system, therefore, always means at least this: the 'system' of the film, in so far as the film is the organization of a homogeneity and the external material is inscribed in its operational organization as well as its contradictions." (Heath, 1975: 100). This “material inscribed as contradiction” was crucial for neoformalist film theorist Kristin Thompson to develop a theory of the dialectic between narrative and counter-narrative as the main dynamic of film formation. (Thompson, 1986:130-142). But beyond producing a cinematic narrative, I think the conceptualization of excess is very useful for developing a historiography that is more open to alternative counter-narratives of the marginalized or oppressed. This methodological approach, already visible in the allusion to the term itself, would also allow the use of historical contradictions, which are usually repressed as obstacles in the methodology and in the theory itself.
To navigate this contradictory or "noisy" field of the "black wave", I will work to build a kind of "cognitive mapping" that reveals certain fundamental theoretical and methodological trends in this area. My first step is to "map" some of the recent writings on the "black wave" and show that the theoretical, historiographical and methodological diversity on the subject stems from the constitutive contradictions in the conceptualization of the term; While I "map" these contradictory aspects into three different ideological and political fields that have certain peculiarities of what Yugoslavia meant (respectively in the field of ideological apparatuses, nationalism and self-governing socialism), I will also examine the formal and theoretical consequences of these demonstrating conceptualizations. As a countermethod to currently available readings that deal with the relationship between art and politics in the context of black wave films, I will offer a more complex and formal-materialist reading model that includes both contradiction and theoretical elaboration.
3 I will occasionally refer to the concept of noise in this text, always in relation to
Conflicts and contradictions that play a constitutive role in the construction of a work of art. Methodologically and theoretically, this approach can be traced back to the work of formalists and semioticians (Lotman, 1977; Eco, 1989) of epistemological philosophers (Serres, 1983: 48-63); and also in some references to ideological analyzes in Alhusser (Althusser, 2006:105-110)
6 WORK WITH THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE “BLACK WAVE”.
6.1 The contradictions of party politics or the ideological apparatus of the State
The main conceptual principle of this trend rests on the following assumption: that Yugoslav socialism represented an intrinsic and incurable set of ideological contradictions that shaped its political form to such an extent that the disappearance of the state apparatus was inevitable. The most important theorist of this thesis on the contradictory state of Yugoslavia is Dejan Jovic, who focused his research on the discrepancies of political discourse in state socialism and emphasized this tension with the greatest clarity. The Yugoslav worldview, according to Jovic, was a "no-win situation" of confused and antagonistic political categories in which the theory and practice of socialist self-government, principally supported by Josip Broz Tito and theorized by party official Edvard Kardelj, were at odds with each other. Jovic described the theory and practice of self-government as the pragmatic outcome of the irreconcilable social and political forces that made up Yugoslav reality. Ultimately, then, the theory and practice of self-government was not a genuine "third way" of socialism, but a calculated strategy to avert the catastrophe of inevitable collapse.
Formally, these political conflicts of the Second Yugoslavia (or Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1945-1991) were not only of an ethnic nature, as Jovic argues, but also of an "ideological nature" and had to do primarily with conflicts of understanding " administrative" ("statist") and "self-governed" ("non-statist") of the goals of socialism (Jovic, 2003:161). This conception of socialism had a strong impact on the representation of what is commonly understood by "Yugoslavism", that is, as an alternative socialist conceptualization of the state that regulates the ever-present ethnic and ideological antagonisms. According to Jovic, the consequences of these contradictions between two irreconcilable trends in Yugoslav ideology were painful: “The success of
29 Kardelj's anti-statist project weakened the state, leaving it vulnerable and unable to defend its unity. Yugoslavia was first weakened from within, by its own ideological concept of the “withering away state” (Jovic, 2003:158). Another consequence of this "no-win situation" was that the paradoxes of the "new Yugoslavia" should be comprehensive or, as Jovic describes it, a "polyvalent" formula, offered by many sides "something and nobody is everything" (Jovic, 2003: 160) . As a result, the meaning of socialist self-government became everything and nothing at the same time; it became a kind of language game, delaying the eruption of constant tensions. Jovic's main argument about self-government ideologies ("anti-state" ideologies) was that they underestimated the "real danger posed by the real world" and led to an "almost religious belief in the power of words", which ended up being governed by "resolutions " and propaganda” (Jovic, 2003: 181) created an unrealistic policy. Formally, this version of Yugoslavia was associated with paradoxes and contradictions that awaited the reconciliation of antagonistic ideological tendencies through the theory of self-government. But instead of a solution, as Jovica wants to demonstrate, the “non-statism” of self-government created deeper structural contradictions in which reality and fiction were blurred by synthetic linguistic constructions.
6.1.1 Linguistic theories on the emergence of ideological contradictions
There are several different theoretical approaches that deal with the ideological contradictions of art in post-revolutionary socialism. One of them is the speech act theory, which usually deals with the issue of ideological contradictions from the discursive point of view of language formation. These discussions mainly deal with the issue of political slogans in works of art and in everyday life produced in a revolutionary and post-revolutionary context. As discussed by Alexei Yurchak in the context of the post-Stalinist-Soviet ideological field, slogan building is one of the most important constitutive practices in the ideological and cultural vacuum of socialist countries. Yurchak's theory of the construction of political language in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist ideological state, involving a complex set of relations between performative and constative speech act positions, is a very useful approach. Referring to some poststructuralist theses about language in relation to Austin's general propositions of speech acts, he showed that the fundamental ingredient of the "performativity" of language in the realm of semantic "constancy" is the ability of the speech act to of having multiple, polyvalent, and transformable nature (Yurchak, 2005:20). Rather than proposing a kind of spontaneous anthropology of a pragmatic and highly ermeneutic nature, Yurchak approaches the arbitrariness of political discourse in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist ideological climate as a formal system of linguistic strategy in which the constant and the performative are interrelated to each other. such to the point that all meanings are transformed into a combination of "quotes": "[t]he narrative structure of the text has become circular, to the point where many speeches and stereotyped speeches can be read top to bottom and bottom to bottom. up with similar results" (Yurchak, 2005: 49-50).
30
The theses about the untenable contradictions of the Yugoslav State ideology and its relation to language phenomena were assumed by some cinema researchers as intellectual and sociological alibis to explain the strange and conflicting form and excesses of black wave films. One of them was Greg de Cuir, who in his articles and book developed the thesis that the inconsistency of the Yugoslav black wave film was the result of a rhetoric of antagonistic ideological positions as an extension of the state's ideological rhetoric. In order to formalize the (external) political contradictions of the black wave film, de Cuir proposed certain structures of speech acts, which he calls rhetorical: "the anoratory mode through which a polemical message is conveyed by the characters of the films" (de Cuir , 2012: 149). Typically, according to de Cuir, the most concrete and immediate symbol of rhetoric used by Black Wave filmmakers is "political speech" (ibid.). Consequently, a particular form of "political discourse" is constructed in BlackWave as a stance against the official or "socialist realist" art form by encapsulating "the subject and the spirit" what de Cuir describes as "methodical Marxism", a branch of Marxism , anti-traditional, oppositional ideas and criticisms opposed to the programmatic, optimistic and educational ideas of “Socialist Realism”. Applying these epistemological principles to Yugoslav cinema, de Cuir draws the following parallel: “The Yugoslav film industry was founded on Gorky's definition of socialist realism, which in turn conditioned the conservative aesthetics of classical Yugoslav cinema. Methodical Marxism and the black wave represent a progressive spirit and attitude” (de Cuir, 2012: 78). For de Cuir, this contradictory aspect of Yugoslav socialism is also intertwined with the general antagonisms and rhetoric of Marxist ideology. In this case, the Dark Wave contradictions were extended conceptually to a deeper level of philosophical discrepancy. The shortcomings of De Cuir's work, particularly his brand of 'methodical Marxism', have been critically appraised from historical and theoretical perspectives (Jovanovic, 2011:161–171; Mazierska, 2012:107–109).
Although this formalization of dark wave films through a kind of philosophical model seems to elaborate the prevailing position in the intellectual context of most positivist and historicist approaches; The true ideological form of the Black Wave appears to be far more complex than de Cuir acknowledges. This could be discussed using another example of applying Jovic's theses on the contradictory politics of Yugoslav film studies. The recent publication by Vlastimir Sudar, which deals with one of the protagonists of the Onda Negra cinema, Aleksandar Petrovic, makes extensive reference to Jovic and other Yugoslav historians such as John Lampe, through whom he describes the Yugoslav socialist ideology as a paradoxical state of impossibility and as represents an ideology abstracted from reality [“Tito released with one hand, but held back the process with the other” (Sudar, 2013:45).]. Following this line, Sudar proposes a historical-biographical analysis of Petrovic's development as emancipation from this paradoxical and abstract conception of the State. The evolutionary linearity of Petrovic's formal and cinematographic development is presented in his research as inversely proportional to the political and ideological history of Yugoslavia. Parallel-
Parallel to the deepening and complication of the ideological contradictions of Yugoslav self-government, Petrovic's cinema increasingly detached itself from these contradictions induced by self-government. As the author shows, the result is a stronger focus on the concrete elements of society and an emancipation from ideology and the abstraction of political discourse. Artistically, this reversal meant breaking with politics and culture and turning to the question of the eternal values ​​of nature. In Petrovic's case, this development can be represented by his use of gypsies (or, as Sudar calls them, the "gypsies") in his films. Like Sudarargues, Petrovic's interest in nature as an alternative to abstract politics was present in his earlier films; But while filming a short documentary Sabori/Assemblies in 1965, Petrovic discovered that the "'other side' or [rural, religious, superstitious] world that official politics at the time would have preferred not to exist" was more real than abstract calculations. of official party ideologies. This discovery, according to Sudar, becomes a key that unlocks his artistic development (Sudar, 2013: 94). This turn to concrete reality, characteristic of many Eastern European filmmakers as a sign of distancing from the tensions of abstract politics, morphed into a genuine cinematic style of dissidence. Petrovic Skupljaci's film Perje/I Even Met the Happy Gypsies, which won the Cannes Grand Prix in 1967, is the clearest example of this concreteness, or as Sudar describes it: "[The film presents] the Gypsy lifestyle as a culture specific that the communists did not want to understand... and do not allow the exercise of their specificity (their nomadic lifestyle)” (Sudar, 2013: 133).
On an artistic and stylistic level, Sudar interprets Petrovic's detachment from politics and his contradictions with nature and harmony as a detachment from formalism; or as “abandonment of the 'whim' of formal experimentation” (Sudar, 2013: 94). To contextualize this shift in deformalization, we can describe it as a shift from NewFilm to Black Wave4, schematically based on Sudar's historiography of Yugoslav art cinema. In the case of Petrovic, who wrote two books on the subject, the Black Wave represents precisely this way of abandoning the ideas of socialist progress imagined through deformalization (Petrovic, 1988). Sabori, in this case of the historicism portrayed by Sudar, is a transitional film; the moment of detachment from form that gives way to an unmediated truth. Methodologically, this leads to the claim that BlackWave films as the art of counterhistory were a condition for revealing the truth in Yugoslavia, which revealed the contradictions buried under the official palimpsest of confusion, lies, ideology and politics. Or, as Sudar describes it, a process of "decoding the political image of time and place that can be decoded by watching Petrovic's films". (Sudar, 2013: 6). That the purity of the Black Wave phenomenon lasts as an “anti-dogmatic” attitude is one of the most difficult questions in the historiography of Yugoslav artistic cinema
Distinction between Novo Filme and Onda Negra. Often compared to Black Wave, New Film is seen as a more formal approach to portraying modern urban life; in contrast to this black wave is called the cinema of truth, showing the remnants of urban socialist progress. (Hatherley, 2012:180-212; Goulding, 2002).
32 structured, according to Sudar Viewing, not only by the harmony of the story (fabula) of these films, but also by a plot device (sjuzet) aimed at a more effective integration between form and content.5
Describing Petrovic's previous political documentaries, in which he experimented with new cinematographic languages, Sudar says: "Petrovic's formal innovation was carefully integrated into the more traditional documentary form, making the film very dynamic and, at the same time, coherent in content. " (Sudar, 2013:59).
6.1.2 Conceptual Consequences of the Formal Study of Black WaveCinema
The conceptualization of “dissent” in these terms is not unknown in Yugoslavian and generally Eastern European socialist cinema studies and cultural politics. Yvette Biro's book on modern cinema, for example, is based on this dualism between an abstract idea and a concrete idea of ​​cinema phenomenology; which she discusses as a dichotomy between poetry and grammar. This feat, actually based on the theory of Russian formalism, is used in Biro's book as a kind of paradoxical deformalization of the artistic text; She recognizes that the artistic text is a fraction of external reality, but adds that concrete reality itself has artistic (poetic) qualities. The position of Biro's phenomenological formalism is complex in film theory because it uses formalist theories to propose a non-formal (non-formal) reading of cinematographic works. Considering that Biro's theories of phenomenology of cinematographic formalism had a great impact on the reception of Eastern European films and the conceptualization of political cinema in general, it is important to clarify this theoretical model and its ideological and political implications. The main theorist of Russian formalism, Roman Jakobson, from whom Biro derives his thesis on the 'poetry of grammar', had a strong philosophical relationship with Husserlian phenomenology (Holenstein, 1976). But the relationship between poetry and grammar was formalized in Jakobson along two opposite axes, as 'poetry of grammar' and 'grammar of poetry'. Biro, referring only to the first, delimits the scope of Jacobson's theory precisely where it is strongest or formalist. Because Jakobson's “Grammar of Poetry” is one of the most important logics of artistic creation; makes art and poetry possible
5 According to Russian formalists, the difference between story and plot is crucial
to underline the materialist analysis of the text. The term, originally proposed by Viktor Shklovsky, “plot formation changed the traditional notion of action as a series of motives, redirecting it from the origin of thematic concepts to the origin of compositional concepts” (Ejxenbaum, 2002:15-16) . Boris Ejxenbaum describes “action formation” as the most important medium of artistic work: “The concept of action (sjuzet) acquired a new meaning that did not correspond to that of story (fabula), and the action formation itself took its natural place in the field of art, formal Studies as a specific proponent of literary works” (Ejxenbaum, 2002: 16). Thus, in order to achieve a proper formalist approach to the text, we need to conceptualize action not as representations of events or “things of the story” (Shklovsky, 1990) that are just materials to fill the action, but as artistic laws that govern these materials. organize or assemble. Therefore, artistic approaches that focus on the question of fable or narrative lack essential means of artistic independence.
33 as a means of formalizing extrinsic materials. Philosophically, it is about structuring the comprehensibility of art through regulations whose effects do not necessarily limit artistic expression. With Jakobson we confront artistic prescriptions that allude to the Spinozist point of geometry; or, as Jakobson puts it: 'The obligatory character of grammatical processes and concepts compels the poet to consider them; either he strives for symmetry and clings to these simple, repeatable, translucent patterns based on the binary principle, or he can deal with them while yearning for “organic chaos”. I have repeatedly said that rhythmic technique is 'either grammatical or ungrammatical', but never ungrammatical” (Jakobson, 1987: 132).
Based on this, it can be said that Biro expects an “organic chaos” of artistic creation without grammar as a condition of artistic work. His thesis of cinema as a "new mythology" that derives its richness from a poetism of concreteness and unmediated reality is further explained by the sociological observation that in modern, institutionalized, ideologically overdetermined and patterned life, "events and people become increasingly increasingly formalized and more mechanical” (Biro, 1982: 67). In contrast to these limits of the mechanistic notion of abstraction, she proposes the ingenuity of the concrete as the “poetics of grammar” of everyday reality. level of reality at the moment in which it extracts all ideological meanings, more precisely, all the effects of the ideological apparatus of the State inscribed in the work of art. According to Biroh, this depoliticization of cinema has far-reaching philosophical consequences, which, following an aspect of the Jakobson's formalism, she describes as "negative meaning": "That missing layer [loss of deep human meaning, sic] is what Film can make visible l when he descends into the incomprehensible jungle of the world of objects and shows us what it really is: chaos, indifference and monotonous existence; it is an empty existence, so to speak, a non-existence” (Biro, 1982: 89). If we consider that Biro calls the means of this "negative sense" semiotic exaggeration, excess or simply alienation and alienation ("ostannenie") (Biro, 1982: 78) and that his thesis of "indifference" reminds us of the "Dispositivo Sem Trama" of Shkovsky' We must understand these concepts in their fully formalist aspect. Since later in Makavejev's work I will elaborate the conceptual meaning of the "Ostranie" device, it is important to situate this artistic device with another similar device, namely with Brecht's concept of "Verfremdung" (V-Effect). . The literature on the comparison, influence and relationship between Shkovsky's 'Ostannenie' and Brecht's 'Verhemdurnefekt' has been discussed on many occasions (Mitchell, 1974; Brewster, 1974; Striedter, 1989); The main theoretical principles of these discussions are twofold; one claimed that 'ostranism' and 'alienation' refer to the means of attraction and shock and consciously act in a purely perceptual mode of aesthetic experience; and another refers to them as a way of characterizing the heuristic process of ignoring the context of politicization in the arts Take a closer look at the writings of Darko Su-
34 vin, Yugoslavian practical philosopher and playwright, who discussed terms in direct relation to avant-garde art. As Suvin made clear, Brecht's V effect is not just about emphasizing the audience's position as a mass alienated from the artwork; but rather to point to the process of alienation that sustains the structure of the work of art itself. In other words, instead of understanding the V effect (alienation made perceptible) as a device that makes us aware that we are in front of a work of art, Suvin states that the real emancipatory potential of the Brecht-Shklovsky device resides in the power it makes the social, political and ideological construction of certain elements involved in the constitution of the work of art (Suvin, 1965: 579-580). But the use of the V-Effect solely as a means of experiencing the world, of having an immediate relationship with reality, is, according to Suvin, "a nihilistic alien word designed to influence a ritualistic and mythic approach rather than a cognitive one." (Suvin, 1984: 252). Formally, the horizon of all nihilistic alienation, according to Suvin, is "an exhilarating view of the discontinuous flow of things, combined with an awareness of the limits of philosophical humanism and the positive meaning of alienation." (Suvin, 1984:253). This methodological correction of two different uses of alienation, the nihilistic and the political, is important for two particular reasons related to my research into the formal and political reading of BlackWave films and Dušan Makavejev in particular. First, Suvin's intervention on 'nihilistic alienation' (which he still describes as 'religious, mystical and mythical') is aimed at the intellectual context of art theory, specifically by 'replacing historical values ​​with pseudo-biological values' (Suvin, 1984: 232). in the work of Lee Baxandall. As I discussed in my article On Makavejev, On Ideology, Baxandall's writings, particularly his text Towards an Eastern-European Cinemaxism, were instrumental in appropriating Makavejev's film form as something