After the sporadic film productions between the two World Wars on the territories belonging to Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1991, centralised production characterised the period until 1965, when the economic reform de-centralised film production and moved it to the republic level. This reform coincides with the emergence of 'black film', a phrase more adequately applied to a series of film scandals occurring on the axis of film – state apparatus, than truly permanently forbidden works. 1967 can be called the triumph of Yugoslav film, marking the beginning of 'Yugoslav national film school', but also the introduction of structuralist approach in film criticism, which replaced a more impressionist trend theretofore. Many film-makers and critics, however, agree that the period 1960-1969 represents a turning point in Yugoslav film history, marking the emergence of new film⁵. Most of these critics also agree that "the heretofore stable patriarchal world begins to disintegrate with new film⁶".

The new wave of Yugoslav films became, therefore, synonymous with modernity, more in an aesthetic than historical sense given to this phrase in Yugoslav film circles. However, in spite of this (partial) visual subversion, it represented a supplement to the mainstream national cinematic discourse, rather than an example of counter-cinema. Whereas in France, the emergence of nouvelle vague was preceded by a new generation of public discourse, inclusive of women⁷, such was not the case in Yugoslavia. The new film generation was a complete male phenomenon, with the exception of Soja Jovanović⁸. Female idols, both as film authors or as fictional characters, therefore, did not seem to exist or were rare, in comparison to great numbers of male heroes, both on the screen and behind the cameras.

Yugoslav auteur film approaches socio-national themes in a highly gendered mode, contrary to earlier propagandist films which systematically effaced gender for the sake of class (communist, patriarchal) struggle. If Yugoslav women are not presented as a new personification of the 'eternal feminine' or fetishized femmes fatales for the masculine hero, they frequently convey the alienation of mass culture, are members of a higher class reflecting the film-maker's obsession with a high-class woman (e.g. Morning, Sand Castle, Rondo, R. Grlic's and L. Zafranovic's films etc.); come from a foreign, preferably Western country, representing the desired other and imaginary route of escape (S. Karanovic's, M. Radivojevic's, and later Z. Nikolic's films); or come from low, marginal social layers (Z. Pavlovic's and most so-called black wave works, but also G. Paskaljevic's, G. Markovic's films etc.). The female character is re-located to the traditional place destined for women not as the subject of narrative or discourse, but as the object of love and/or hatred by a masculine subject. Women are symbolic victims of misogyny or are literally imprisoned and physically confined.

The female body is infantilised, humilated, raped, beaten and dead, or maternalised. The rare free femininity is usually punished by a collective male institutional order of patriarchal forces. Woman is, further, portrayed similarly to a by-stander, an accidental prop on man's path to (no) self-awakening or its side-effect, as in so-called intimate film. The tragic destiny of an autonomous hero in such film is the result of a love relationship with a woman, who attracts his attention in the typically expressed heterosexual desire.

In sum, women are portrayed as derogatory, greedy consumerists, or sick, physically disabled human beings, marginalised, frightening or threatening, infantilised and gender-neutralised in the name of the collective socialist purpose, semi-emancipated seductresses or emotional wrecks.

After the peak in this consumerist discourse around the world in the 1950's, coupled with the climactic backlash against women and feminism in reality and fiction, both literary and cinematic, a reaction against such consumerism and comfort in material things occurred in all art forms (literature first, film later) around the world (Latin American cinema, for instance), with the most expressive and even violent reactions where the consumerism and class differentiation were most pronounced – in the Western countries. In Yugoslavia, this reaction needed not be as violent and as massive as in the West, but literary and film works abound in examples of thematic explorations of alienating consumerist culture, existential nausea, emotional discomfort etc. With the use of melodramatic excess as a means to develop the idea of a suffering hero, even Yugoslav black film is comparable to USA film noir. But, by contrast to film noir, this male suffering is related to social rather than only ontological conditions. It could be argued that the black wave film generation reacted against this new consumerism, wishing to depict the other, darker, side of the communist Yugoslav society.



Thinking that in their liberation from the daddy's cinema they are innovative in the sphere of sexual relations, these new film authors not only ignored these relations but also presented their stories in a classical mode, told in a narrative reminiscent of the literary tradition of the 19th century novel. Thus, this new generation of filmmakers, carried away by libertine enthusiasm of the 1960's, "begin 'writing' in the first person singular, in an attempt to give an unprecedented account of the most intimate experience and every-day 'modern' life"⁹. The new door just opened in Europe for freedom of cinematic expression and stylistic revolution, therefore, applied only to male authors, to male subjectivity – to male gender, in singular person. Yugoslav film criticism also situated itself in the tradition of 19th century romanticism, or post-war propagandist enthusiasm. None of these texts approach the subject of representational relations of gender/power/nation, which constitutes a rather dominating aspect in Yugoslav film.