ABSTRACT
The game of the archaic introduces several displacements into the history of Yugoslav cinema. A shift of perspective towards the archaic makes the “barricades” model of this history crumble; the apparently unbridgeable trench separating high modernist auteurs from their popular cultural surroundings becomes porous. On the one hand, authors quite often changed camps; Mića Popović, the notorious provocateur, directing a popular comedy is the best example of this process. On the other hand, tropes and milieus associated with the archaic and the notorious Black Wave were quite capable of acquiring high popularity, as Lazić’s The Musicians and Poor Mary demonstrate.
