ABSTRACT
Before I start with the description of films that make use of the “archaic”, a very brief introduction into Yugoslavia’s cultural and film history is needed. Yugoslavia was a rare example of a European country that liberated its territories by its own forces during the People’s Liberation Struggle (narodnooslobodilačka borba) in World War Two. Consequently, the Soviet influence in Yugoslavia was not felt as strongly as in those countries that were liberated by the Red Army. Nevertheless, right after the war’s end, Yugoslav cultural politics did rely on a Soviet cultural model. This holds true for its cinema as well: the first feature film that was made in Yugoslavia after 1945 bore the title In the Mountains of Yugoslavia (V gorakh Yugoslavii, 1946) and was directed by the Soviet director Abram Room. The making of this film served as a training ground for Yugoslav filmmakers. Room was assisted by Vjekoslav Afrić, who would direct the first Yugoslav feature film Slavica (1947) one year later. Nevertheless, Room’s feature also produced a certain malaise, if not discontent with the Yugoslav leadership and audiences. Nikica Gilić suggests that the earliest Yugoslav partisan films wanted to contest the way local partisans were depicted in Room’s In the Mountains of Yugoslavia (2011, 40), and Tanja Zimmermann offers some reasons for this dissatisfaction: in Room’s movie, Yugoslav fighters were depicted not only as heavily reliant on a “well-disciplined Red Army with planes, tanks, and cannons”, they were also represented as “simple, strong, and impulsive peasants, dressed in folk costumes and sheep skins.” (2014, 165)
