BELGRADE

  The Association of Writers of Serbia (Udruženje književnika Srbije), for example, is at 7 France Street near Republic Square. The association had an elected president and assorted secretaries responsible for different aspects of the organization. The premises were used for meetings and book promotions. The association distributed money in the form of prizes, funded delegations on official trips to meet writers overseas and held a large international conference every October. The managing board of the association also had access to social housing, and one of its functions concerned the distribution of apartments to writers who met the official criteria. These benefits were a strong incentive to membership. It still exists although there are now other bodies and the arts are more open to market mechanisms as in the West.

  Despite patronage, the Association of Writers became a platform for the intellectual opposition to many aspects of the system by the 1980s. Protest meetings were organized and a committee established to protect the rights of its members to free speech; it also often defended writers who were being hounded by the authorities in other republics. The infrastructure established by the regime as a method of quiet control became in communism’s last decade a source of opposition.

  CHALLENGING IDEOLOGY

  When the communists came to power, all areas of public life were subject to scrutiny by the party: not only political and security structures, but also all places where people might meet and exchange ideas. The circulation of anything of aesthetic significance came within this remit, and the wider the possible audience, the greater the care that had to be taken over its dissemination. The communists adopted the tenets of Socialist Realism from the Soviet Union, requiring that the arts play a part in the construction of socialist Yugoslavia and form its citizens into standard bearers for the future. The message of literature, painting and film was to be positive, showing that the ultimate success of the class struggle will wipe away the remnants of the past, that the socialist model of economic and political organization is superior to all others, and that in the Yugoslav context the victory of the Partisans in the Second World War was the first inevitable step in this direction. The emphasis in art was on reproducing this message, not in encouraging stylistic experiments and departures that would only confound what was to be a simple matter of communication. Yet the break with the Soviet Union in 1948 profoundly influenced this approach to cultural politics in Yugoslavia. Socialist Realism, along with other Soviet models, became discredited.

  There was no official announcement that the Communist Party’s cultural policy was about to change, but a series of events in the early 1950s heralded a new direction. The painter Petar Lubarda (1907–74) opened his first major exhibition in Belgrade in 1951, an occurrence accepted by many as a crossroads in the development of modern Serbian art. He introduced a bold way of using colour and abstract techniques, emphasizing the autonomous dynamism of painting to express multiple meanings directly or metaphorically. He was joined by others such as Bata Mihailović and Mića Popović who were interested in pushing at the boundaries of aesthetic interpretation and the possibilities of what painting can express.

  It was well known that President Tito himself did not care for abstract painting, but these artists broke through onto the international scene and took Serbian art beyond the borders of the country to exhibitions abroad. Their stance also forced the art establishment to revive the work of painters from before the Second World War whom the communists had regarded as decadent. The Museum of Modern Art in New Belgrade has a large collection of these modern masters. This change was happening not just in painting but in all branches of art, and especially in Belgrade. The communist hierarchy made the city the home of its most powerful institutions; it also became home to the newest artistic credos.

  One of the factors influencing the new directions in Yugoslav art was the re-opening of contact with cultural trends in Western Europe and North America. After 1951 Belgrade theatre blossomed in the more tolerant and artistically creative atmosphere ushered in when foreign plays were performed. Under the old cultural policy any kind of display of capitalist art was looked on with great suspicion by the authorities. But between 1951 and 1958 the Belgrade Drama Theatre (Beogradsko dramsko pozorište) staged plays by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman), Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) and other western playwrights. Styles of acting became more adventurous and opened up more expressive possibilities for the stage. The Yugoslav Drama Theatre, under its highly innovative artistic director Bojan Stupica (1910–70), toured abroad with great success, with a review in the Parisian Le Figaro praising the ensemble for its “spirit of unity, which acts with a high level of consciousness and emanates dignity”.

  The new direction was not all plain sailing and the authorities could react high-handedly if minded. The Belgrade Drama Theatre attempted to put on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955, but the production was banned. Yet once having tasted a more liberal approach in cultural policy, the artists themselves were not willing to succumb to each official backlash. The play was performed the following year in the newly established theatre, Atelje 212, its first performance in Eastern Europe. Atelje 212 went on to produce plays by Jean-Paul Sartre (Huis Clos), Eugene Ionescu (The Chairs), Harold Pinter (The Caretaker) and other examples of controversial modern drama. The manager of the theatre, Mira Trailović (1924–89), and its literary consultant, Jovan Ćirilov, founded the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) in 1967, which has operated every year since then in September. BITEF brings the best of international stage companies to the city, and provides a conduit for Belgrade groups to perform abroad. Many aesthetic barriers were overcome, which was not the case elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and the authorities were forced to reconcile themselves to a certain degree of artistic freedom, provided that political boundaries were not overstepped.

  FROM RED REELS TO BLACK WAVE

  Film, like other art forms, fell under the demands of Socialist Realism and the Soviet model. The Second World War had effectively destroyed what little existed in the way of studio facilities, technical equipment and personnel in Belgrade. Despite these obstacles, after the liberation of Belgrade the communists established a film section, which was to produce documentary films about the war and the first efforts to re-build the country. In 1945 a state film enterprise was founded, taking over control of the funding, production and distribution of film. Although facilities were sparse the Central Committee took the role of film very seriously, with the first studio Avala Film in operation on 15 July 1946. New facilities were concentrated in Belgrade as the federal capital and the urban centre with the greatest infrastructure. The party established a Film City (Filmski grad) on the outskirts of Belgrade at Košutnjak; the first professional school for acting and directing was also opened here, along with another institution for the training of technical staff, and a journal Film.

  The first movie from Avala Film was called Slavica, released in 1947. The action is set in Dalmatia, telling the story of a small resistance group struggling against the occupying forces and against traitors and collaborators. The nucleus of the plot revolving around a small band of heroic Partisans fighting a lonely local battle against much greater odds became staple cinematic fare in the first years of communist rule. Characters in these films were stereotypical depictions of brave guerrilla fighters with impeccable ideological credentials, in complete contrast to the rather vain and stupid Italians, brutal Germans with their military airs, and the domestic traitors, the Četniks and Ustaše, who were deceitful and cowardly by nature. Such films were important in creating a deliberate mythology of the Second World War, presenting a romantic and simplistic version of events as historical truth. They were epic narratives recounting a struggle between contesting forces and the difficult birth of a new country.

  The film industry in Belgrade during the 1950s continued to glorify the heroes of the war and post-war reconstruction but also introduced a note of greater dept
h. Heroes had some flaws, mistakes were made, but the same message ultimately stressed that what was done was necessary at the time. Greater diversity was introduced into the repertoire with light comedies and some careful attempts at portraying contemporary themes.

  The split with the Soviet Union ushered in many changes, including consequences for the organization of the film industry in Yugoslavia. One of the main thrusts of the reforms was to hand over a more meaningful role to republic governments. Each republic was duly handed its own studio system, technical facilities and personnel with institutional facilities at the federal level to allow collaboration. Central funding was removed in 1957 and replaced by a tax on tickets as a way of raising revenue to finance the film industry. Nevertheless, government subsidies were available for large, prestigious projects. Foreign films also began to find their way into Belgrade and Yugoslav cinemas as part of the policy to open the door to the West. The influence of Italian Neorealism particularly made itself felt in cinema. The presence of other aesthetic sensibilities and competition from abroad were a force for good in stimulating the cinematic infrastructure at home.

  Belgrade filmmakers began to take a more independent stance in the 1960s, which evolved into a trend known as the Black Wave (Crni talas). This radical group of directors had at its centre Aleksandar Petrović, Živojin Pavlović and Dušan Makavejev. They risked government displeasure by offering individual perspectives on social themes, the meaning of suffering in the war of national liberation and personal visions of uncertainty about the future. Their work is often pessimistic, filled with the realities of urban squalor, exposing the gulf between official aspirations and the lack of direction and drive of a new generation. Their world was one of ambiguity, filled with primitive and unknown appetites that can swallow beauty, innocence and intelligence.

  One of the first films in this wave was Pavlović’s When I’m Pale and Dead (Kad budem bled i mrtav, 1960). The story is set in the post-war period concerning a young man who is a drifter with no purpose in life. He tries his hand at singing, and finds that his poor voice is acceptable in small kafanas or army camps where the audience is not too discriminating. He goes to Belgrade to try his luck but faces two problems: his lack of real talent is recognized, and his choice of material—old-fashioned ballads—is at odds with the city’s demand for western pop music. He returns to the provinces and the corruption of communist officials who use their influence to satisfy their desires for money and women. Confronting one of these men, the disillusioned popular singer is shot and killed. He dies in a most undignified position, in an outdoor lavatory with his trousers round his ankles.

  In the end, the authorities decided that these directors’ work overstepped the political boundaries on which the party insisted. In their hands, contemporary life was a struggle for survival set against the backdrop of the new slums created by massive post-war movements of population. They focused attention on themes of social dislocation and individual alienation, which was seen as too critical of contemporary Yugoslav reality. So the Black Wave came to an end.

  LITERARY IMAGES OF BELGRADE

  The turning point for literary production after 1948 came in 1951 with the publication of Dobrica Ćosić’s novel Far Away Is the Sun (Daleko je sunce). The story follows a fairly standard Partisan narrative but with the additional themes of doubt and possible ideological miscalculation, which were not typical at the time. More generally, there are few examples from this period of the kind of Belgrade literature that had flourished before the Second World War. The authorities did not forbid such expression, but neither was it part of their agenda for cultural policy. The city was not a centre of Partisan activity during the war; it was occupied and then liberated only in the latter stages of the war. It was also a place with many physical reminders of the previous regime. The communist authorities were anxious to promote their arrival as year zero, and to suppress memory of what existed before them.

  Literary life in the 1950s was dominated by the polemics between the Modernists grouped around the journal Delo and the Realists around Savremenik. The differences between the two groups were founded in their attitudes to the role of the literary work. The Modernists emphasized the autonomy of the text and its potential meanings from direct social and political engagement. The Realists regarded literature as an expression of social forces that could not and should not be separated from that world as its raw material. In some senses, the latter were closer to official views on the responsibility of the artist to practise his or her art with an eye to the possible influence the text might have on the public imagination. Yet it would be too simplistic to see their differences just along these lines. By the end of the decade their polemical relationship was over, as literature followed the same kind of cosmopolitan and varied styles to be found in other creative spheres.

  The city became a literary topic during this period in the work of two authors who came from very different poetic backgrounds, Dragoslav Mihailović and Borislav Pekić. After the debates between the Modernists and Realists most writers wanted to take literature out of the public sphere and tended to produce work with little connection to contemporary life, especially with its more squalid aspects. Literary prose became more contemplative. Then, at the end of the 1960s, a new wave of authors, most probably under the influence of the Black Wave in film, saw literature and particularly the novel as a source for depicting the new urban reality. Mihailović was one of their number. He published his novel When Pumpkins Blossomed (Kad su cvetale tikve) in 1968. The narrator is a Yugoslav worker living in Sweden and recalling the events that forced him to leave Belgrade some twenty years earlier. He reveals how he lived in one of Belgrade’s poorer districts, and in the aimless poverty of the immediate post-war years took up boxing. While undergoing his compulsory army service he hears that his sister has died. She was raped and, as a result, committed suicide. Learning that the rapist was a member of a rival gang from another district, he resolves to take his revenge. Eventually catching up with his quarry, he beats him to death and, when he feels that he may be arrested for murder, flees the country.

  The novel was one of the first to make use of post-war Belgrade not just as a setting for action, but also as part of the structure of the novel and its fictional world. The places where events happen are real, and the grinding difficulties of the urban environment in this period are relevant to understanding motivation. Characters speak the authentic language of the Belgrade streets, and their mental and emotional horizons are bounded by that same geography. The action of the novel even includes an obvious allusion to the arrest and transportation of people from Belgrade to Goli Otok in the purges following 1948.

  Borislav Pekić published his novel The Houses of Belgrade (Hodačašće Arsenije Njegovana, 1970) two years later. The narrator and hero of the story is Arsenije Njegovan, who has not left his apartment since 1941. He was a landlord in Belgrade before the Second World War, the owner of numerous houses which he rented to tenants. The novel is set in 1968 when Arsenije decides to leave his flat for the first time in over 25 years. He resolves on a pilgrimage round his former properties, thinking that he is still their owner, unaware that the war and the subsequent arrival of a communist government have changed his city.

  Pekić’s urban landscape takes on a much greater symbolic presence than is the case in Mihailović’s novel. As he goes around recalling his Belgrade of 1941, Arsenije remembers the event that frightened him into his seclusion. Caught up in the demonstrations at the end of March against the pact that Prince Paul signed with Hitler, he was badly injured and has been unable to face the world since. Now, once more, he witnesses another demonstration on the streets of Belgrade, this time the student protests of 1968. He sees these events as symptoms of the collapse of order, the actions of the crowd contrasting with his houses, which represent examples of symmetry and beauty.

  Arsenije is obsessed by the houses which he once owned, giving them names and personalities. In his vision of the world,
all problems are eventually seen as issues of architectural or urban design. When watching the demonstrating students in early June 1968 he gets into conversation with some fellow-bystanders. They discuss the events unfolding in front of them, the behaviour of the mob and its destruction of property. They are aghast at the display of lawlessness, while Arsenije feels more for the hurt caused to dwellings than to people. The bystanders comment on the police response, while one of them calls the situation “a political error”. Arsenije offers an alternative explanation:

  “That’s a political error,” said the man behind us.

  “It’s an urbanist error, gentlemen!” I shouted. “C’est une faute urbanistique! The workers’ suburbs have been located in an encircling belt which grips the commercial heart of the city like a vise. This has concentrated the proletariat in breeding grounds of revolt and destruction. Why, gentlemen, didn’t they place those people in closed-off Soleri cones?”

  “What’s all that crap about?” said the colonel.

  “I’m speaking of Paolo Soleri, who designed a town like a beehive, or rather a conical anthill with internal passageways. All its exits can be easily controlled, and production carried on without any fear of revolutionary ideas or attitudes. In a word, a real town for workers.”

  It is difficult to imagine such sentiments finding their way into a published novel elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time.

  SYMBOLIC ENDINGS

  At the end of Tito’s final decade in Belgrade the city was again represented in fictional works, but this time with a potentially broader meaning in a short story by Danilo Kiš and a film by Slobodan Šijan. The film, Who’s That Singing over There (Ko to tamo peva), made in 1980, has been voted the most popular piece of cinema made in Serbia. It tells the story of a ramshackle bus with its strange conductor and driver, taking a group of passengers from a village somewhere in the Serbian countryside to Belgrade. The journey takes place in 1941, on the very eve of Germany’s attack on the city. The passengers represent people from all walks of life and all ages, as if a microcosm of the country itself. They include two gypsies, itinerant musicians, who introduce the film with a song. The journey extends into the night when the passengers come across the army making preparations for something, although the danger is not named. The atmosphere is generally light-hearted but as the bus approaches its destination the mood begins to change. One of the passengers is sure that his wallet has been stolen, and all eyes turn inevitably to the gypsies. Daylight is breaking, the bus is entering the outskirts of the city, and unwarranted violence is about to be inflicted on two innocent men. Then, without warning, the bus is hit by a bomb dropped by the Luftwaffe. It explodes and the bus is blown over, the sudden silence indicating that everyone is dead. But the two gypsies emerge as the only survivors, and the film closes as it opened with their song. It is a symbolic journey of a country heading toward a catastrophe of which it is completely unaware. Looking back on the film from a vantage point after the year 2000, it seems to suggest a much wider resonance than that of Belgrade facing the Second World War. It was made in the same year that Tito died, when another unseen hand began work at the long process of unravelling Yugoslavia.