Heroes from the Past and Harbingers of the Future: Yugoslav History Politics in and through Amateur Film Practices

Abstract

In socialist systems like the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia, amateur ciné clubs were institutionalized after the Second World War as a means of technical education for the people which was crucial for the creation of the new socialist (hu)man. At the same time, amateur film was a useful political tool to document social developments, specific events, and educative contents, which made it a useful instrument for Yugoslav history politics and a collective memory of the National Liberation War which was as important as the belief in progress. In this article, I examine organized amateur film practices at the intersection of political ideologies of past and future and amateur films as partakers in the process of doing collective memory. To this end, I illustrate the institutional overlapping of amateurism and history politics, and subsequently investigate the filmic strategies with which amateur filmmakers tackled history politics, placed them in the present and shared a vision of the future through the embodiment of the past. My analysis is based on amateur films that were produced in Yugoslav ciné clubs between the 1960s and 1970s with a specific focus on their intermediality.