Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (Film-Essay)

Our research has involved collecting and analyzing film and video footage from the socialist period in Yugoslavia pertaining to the more specific question: What constitutes the public sphere in a communist state?
Our focus has been on mass public performances; both state-sponsored performances in socialist Yugoslavia (like youth work actions, May Day parades, Youth Day celebrations, etc.) and counter-demonstrations in the period after the breakup of SFRYugoslavia (student protests and civic demonstrations in the 90s, the 5th October Overthrow, etc.).
We have been looking at public space and public sphere in the context of liberal socialism, and have inferred that it consisted of three elements in a constantly renegotiated relationship. Those three elements are:

THE PEOPLE – IDEOLOGY – THE STATE

While viewing archival footage, we detected several crucial historical moments during which the configuration of these three elements—the people, ideology and the state—changed.

Some of the mechanisms we recognized through close reading of the materials are:

‒ THE PEOPLE, POWERED BY IDEOLOGY, BUILD THE STATE
IDEOLOGY = PEOPLE (BELIEF)
Example: early youth work actions

‒ THE STATE PRESENTS THE PEOPLE TO THE PEOPLE AND THEREBY IDENTIFIES THE PEOPLE WITH THE STATE AND THE STATE WITH IDEOLOGY
IDEOLOGY = STATE = PEOPLE
Example: May Day parades, Youth Baton Relay

‒ THE STATE AND THE PEOPLE DIVERGE, AND IDEOLOGY IS CONTESTED BECAUSE NOBODY BELIEVES IN IT ANYMORE
IDEOLOGY? THE STATE? THE PEOPLE?
Example: Youth Day "slet"‒performances in the late 80s

‒ THE PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH THE STATE AND CALL FOR A NEW IDEOLOGY (NATIONALISM)
STATE ≠ PEOPLE (> IDEOLOGY)
Example: Slobodan Milošević’s speeches in the late 80s (e.g. "Gazimestan speech")

‒ PUBLIC SPACE IS OPEN TO A NEW IDEOLOGY.
THE PEOPLE RISE UP AGAINST THE STATE – THERE IS NO COMMON IDEOLOGICAL GROUND FOR THE UPRISING, AS THE PEOPLE STAND FOR DEMOCRACY AND/OR NATIONALISM
THE PEOPLE - (NO STATE) - IDEOLOGY?
Example: student/civic demonstrations in 1996/97, Belgrade

‒ THE PEOPLE DESTROY THE STATE, UNAWARE THAT THERE ARE AGENTS OF A NEW IDEOLOGY LURKING BEHIND IT (NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM)
(NO IDEOLOGY) - THE PEOPLE > THE STATE
Example: 5th October Overthrow (of Milošević’s regime)

In the film we will focus on the late 80s Youth Day celebrations and "slet"–performances that were broadcast throughout the Yugoslav republics, and which, in their content and form, to our surprise, explicitly signal and show the ideological shift from collectivism toward individualism and other tendencies that led to the dissolution of SFRYugoslavia. We will describe, contextualize and comment what is happening in the different layers of the broadcast’s production (event choreography, song lyrics, slogans projected in the stadium, TV commentary). In this film-essay, we would like to show the wider relations between the role of ideology, belief, and social choreography by analyzing this almost forgotten footage of public showings of social organization and how it changed over time. We will explore the genesis of ideas from Richard Sennett’s thesis, which posited that, when ideology becomes a belief, it has the power to stir up the people and motivate their social behavior, to Renata Salecl’s thesis that, at some point the people of communist Yugoslavia had ceased to believe in anything but belief itself–they no longer believed in communist ideology but believed others did.
The video footage that will be used for the film has been collected from the media archives of the former Yugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro). It includes material from state television, film news archives, private collections, and so on. Except for the live event that took place at a sports stadium in the SFRY capital of Belgrade, Youth Day celebrations were broadcast throughout the country. What we would like to investigate further is how local differences in media coverage of the same event may include details foreshadowing the civil wars to come. We are wondering if the meta-layers of the event were the same (e.g. TV announcers’ commentaries), or if they were specifically designed to support or prevent the upcoming wars and the dissolution of Yugoslavia.    

The film-essay form we are adopting is challenging but well-adapted to this kind of research-based film. Combining a fiction and documentary approach is necessary if one is to tell the story of the collective body of Yugoslavia through its public performances, and the way they negotiated relations between the people, communist ideology and the socialist state from its founding to its disintegration.


Director: Marta Popivoda
Screenplay: Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović
Theoretical support: Bojana Cvejić, Ana Vujanović
Editing: Nataša Damjanović