ABSTRACT
The analysis of revolutions in Macedonian Bloody Wedding and When You Hear the Bells demonstrated that the archaic can shape competing yet compatible representations of history. However, the archaic is in no way limited to historical representations. Not only can it serve as an interpretative model for the present, but also, it can introduce certain elements of the past into this present. This peculiar intertwining of things past and present will be scrutinized through an analysis of two seemingly very different films: the modernist classic Birch Tree (Breza, Ante Babaja, 1967) and a comedy almost in the style of trash film entitled Poor Mary (Sirota Marija, Dragoslav Lazić, 1968). A comparison between these two films will disclose the archaic as a “timeless” representational strategy while examining a dense net of intertextual relations that undermine the previously described “barricades” scheme of Yugoslav film history.
