The Crime that Changed Serbia

Since the mid-1990s, the analysis of the cinematic cityscape has been a rich, popular interdisciplinary topic with an increasing number of works dedicated to it. In a few essays, I have analysed the cinematic cityscape of Belgrade as the field of the construction of transcultural identity; ¹ through the innovated spectre of the genre texts; ² or by comparison between ex-Yugoslav metropolises. ³ Bearing in mind the notion of postcommunism in the title of this book, in this chapter I analyse the changing cinematic cityscape of New Belgrade as the site of the projection of the changes brought about by socialist/postsocialist transition. The era of transition embraces a complex socioeconomic dynamic, mapped through chains of transformation. The social system has changed from a socialist federal state to its decay, via the fractured Republic of Yugoslavia in the nationalist frenzy of the 1990s to the Republic of Serbia in the democratic transition; and the economy moved from the blooming consumerism of Tito’s socialism through the hyperinflation and collapse of 1993 to variable attempts at recovery after 2000. Images of New Belgrade in cinema that visibly rearticulate the series of conversions are confirmed as the point of intersection of aesthetics, history, ideology and cinema. Reading of the cinematic cityscape as decoding the traces of the socioeconomic dynamic is based upon the system of interdependence between space, and urban and social formation established by the theories of Henri Lefebvre. The French theoretician offers the theory of the construction of urban society as based broadly upon concepts of urbanism and architecture. He proves that society not only defines and structures economy and culture but also constructs physical space. The capitalist, or in this case democratic, society in transition not only defines and arranges working hours and salaries, and the way we dress and behave, but society and instances of power also construct parks, squares, markets and highways, i.e. they model physical space according to their own measure. The reading and decoding of the modelled space is rendered more relevant and important due to the indexical nature of film media. The cinema’s indexical dimension has an important role in the way a particular film engages with its contemporaneity, ⁴ the way it codes, constructs and represents it. The cinematic images of New Belgrade that will be analysed here are an index of the socialist/postsocialist transition and of the work of the state’s will and ideology.