The Archaic in the Yugoslav Cinema of the 1960s: Modernity’s Discontents in a Post-Revolutionary Film Industry (Eastern European Screen Cultures)

This book investigates the “Golden Age” of Yugoslav cinema and sheds light on it from a fresh perspective.By examining various tropes and discourses of the “archaic” that shaped not only the flourishing Yugoslav cinematic modernism of the 1960s but also a broader Yugoslav cultural politics, the book reveals a nuanced panorama of cultural negotiations. The “archaic” - that which is at odds with modernity - is a peculiar crossroads where Marxism intersects with Balkanism, while both are circumscribed by a general distrust towards representation.The analysis thus opens new perspectives on a politics of aesthetics that shaped some of the most successful Yugoslav films of all time.Furthermore, its findings will be relevant to any context in which a political as well as artistic movement seeks to present itself as avant-garde but is confronted with a discourse assigning it time-lag. Addressing an academic audience of scholars and postgraduate students interested in Balkan and East European a