• 1 Cf. Anthology Film Archives – Avant-garde Films by Polish Women Artists of the 1970s, 2021, online: (...)
• 2 Belc Petra, “Poetika jugoslavenskoga eksperimentalnoga filma 1960-ih i 1970-ih” [Poetics of Yugosla (...)
• 3 Cf. e.g. Belc Petra, “Home Movies and Cinematic Memories: Fixing the Gaze on Vukica Đilas and Tatja (...)
• 4 Modrić Jelena, “Radojka Tanhofer, Croatia’s Pioneering Film Editor,” Apparatus. Film, Media and Dig (...)
• 5 Cf. ibid.

1In recent years, amateur film and women’s experimental cinema have gained importance in film studies, bringing a new understanding of these cultural phenomena in Eastern European countries.1 This growing interest in overlooked histories of major cultural forces and actors, which helped to shape the East-European societies of the Cold War era, enhances our understanding of their complex dynamics. In my thesis on the Yugoslav Experimental Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s,2 I approached the phenomenon of experimental cinema in Yugoslavia from multiple angles: infrastructural, political, artistic, and theoretical, as well as practical, with a focus on the position of women in amateur/experimental filmmaking circles. Although women had an active presence in Yugoslav film history,3 their roles were generally consigned to less visible sectors of film production – script writing or script supervision, makeup and costume design, sound, and film editing. The connection between women and editing is particularly interesting, as it was initially female-dominated due to a perception of editing as “undemanding manual labour offered primarily to women.”4 While various professions in film are credited for creative authorship, only film directing is widely recognized as the primary authorial role.5 As a result, women found creative freedom in amateurism as a mode of production and experimentalism as a method of filming.

• 6 Belc, “Home Movies and Cinematic Memories”, op. cit., p. 156.
• 7 Due to limited resources (private funding) my research focused on works made in the realm of amateu (...)
• 8 Rabinovitz Lauren, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema (...)

2Official Yugoslav cinema history recognizes seven female directors of 15 feature films.6 The history of Yugoslav amateur and experimental cinema7 – still in its early phases – is more inclusive. During my research on women directors in Yugoslav experimental amateur cinema, I have identified more than seven names, suggesting the task is still ongoing. Most of these women produced their work outside of official film productions, often disconnected from professional artistic circles. Much as this might have been a blessing in terms of creative freedom, it is also a curse, making documenting and recounting their contributions in historical narratives challenging. Many of the amateur experimental films by Yugoslav women are lost, but the surviving works offer a glimpse into the rich worlds of their artistic and personal visions. For these women, cinema served as “a means of personal expression” marked by an unmistakable “artisanal mode of production.”8 This text serves a dual purpose: to spotlight films identified in my research, and to evaluate their “women’s” discourse against the emergence of the Yugoslav academic feminism.

• 9 De Beauvoir Simone, Le Deuxieme sexe, Paris, Gallimard, 1976 [1946], p. 20.
• 10 Rabinovitz Lauren, “The Future of Feminism and Film History,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, an (...)

3I began my research on Yugoslav women’s experimental cinema at the intersection of film and feminism by exploring the origins of women’s emancipation in early Second Yugoslavia and then continued with studying “lost and found scholarship.”10 This involved archival research and analysing works from the 1960s and 1970s by Belić, Đilas and Ivančić. Yet the question of their political and/or activist nature, specifically whether they can be characterized as feminist, remained unanswered.

• 11 In the 1960s, Yugoslav film theorist Dušan Stojanović listed Rok among films which, in his opinion, (...)

4To contextualize these films within the broader landscape of Yugoslav cinematic production, where they continue to occupy a marginal position, I strive to identify a suitable common thread that goes beyond their gender. These films differ from each other, and from the rest of Yugoslav cinema – sometimes acknowledged within their circles (like Divna Jovanović’s Rok)11 but more often existing on the margins of visibility. They are characterized by deviations from the alternative forms (Vujanović with Putovanje), insistence on the development of personal poetics in short, lyrical forms perceived as less relevant by the critics (Tatjana Ivančić), a self-chosen invisibility (Vukica Đilas), bold visual articulation of psychological portraiture (Erna Banovac), and direct focus on female sexuality (Dunja Ivanišević and Biljana Belić).

• 12 Delap Lucy, The Feminist Avant-garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century, Camb (...)
• 13 Ibid., p. 4.
• 14 Although Dunja Ivanišević’s Žemsko (1968) is often considered the earliest example of feminist film (...)

5Drawing inspiration from Lucy Delap’s ideas,12 I would align these filmmakers with the concept of avant-garde feminism. While Delap discusses women involved in feminist ideas in the early twentieth century, her description of characteristic features of this discourse, rather than a movement, could be applied to these filmmakers as well. “The idealisation of originality, rejection of forebears and sense of rupture with the past, the denial of ... eternal truths, anti-conventionality, artistic experimentalism and so on”13 are also some of the hallmarks of Yugoslav women experimentalists. Could I retrospectively inscribe feminist notions in these films?14

• 15 Lisinski Alemka, “Feministički film” [Feminist Cinema], online: https://filmska.lzmk.hr/natuknica.a (...)
• 16 Debate on feminist cinema, rich in history and theoretical concepts, has recently been succinctly s (...)
• 17 Cf. hooks Bell, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, London, Pluto Press, 2000.
• 18 Here once again I turn to Lucy Delap, who considers “feminism should remain understood as a term in (...)
• 19 Pejić Bojana, “Proletarians of All Countries, Who Washes Your Socks? Equality, Dominance and Diffe (...)

6Croatian second-wave feminist Alemka Lisinski defines feminist cinema as having “an oppositional social dimension, striving for a multilayered reading of woman’s societal position, and filmed almost always by women as an expression of their emancipatory and political aspirations.”15 But can we conceptualize “feminist cinema” as an empowering practice (in this case of filmmaking)16 aiming to correct social injustice,17 even if this feminist reconfiguration is limited to individual efforts?18 Art historian Bojana Pejić stated that in Yugoslavia “until the early 1990s, there were very few artists whose work was informed by feminist consciousness.”19 Although neither explicitly feminist nor made by feminists, the films discussed in this article can be seen as inadvertently feminist, marked in form and content by their creators’ unique position and experience, thus providing an emancipatory space for personal development.

• 20 Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge, op. cit., p. 48, 69.
• 21 Ibid., p. 99.
• 22 Ibid., p. 97.
• 23 Lóránd indeed mentions the emancipatory (liberated, dissensual) space of Yugoslav kinoklubs, but it (...)
• 24 Iveković Rada, “Ženska kreativnost i kreiranje žene” [Women’s Creativity and the Creation of Women] (...)
• 25 Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge, op. cit., p. 99. Lóránd mentions Student Cultural Centre in Belgrad (...)
• 26 In 1975, Yugoslav feminist artist Sanja Iveković created “Women in Yugoslav Art,” a diptych-collage (...)
• 27 Ibid., p. 94.

7As Zsófia Lóránd highlighted, feminism in Second Yugoslavia operated on different institutional levels with dissensual and unequal ideological terms. On one side, there was institutional state feminism emphasizing general human emancipation rather than the emancipation of women as a distinct gender.20 Lóránd considers this incorporation of women into the generally human a type of strategy used by the state as a way of “silenc[ing] women’s demands formulated through feminism.”21 At the opposite end from the institutional state feminism, a new Yugoslav feminism (neofeminizam) was gaining strength and visibility around the mid-1970s. New Yugoslav feminists were predominantly influenced by the French post-structuralist feminism (especially écriture féminine), the ideas of gynocriticism and women’s creativity, with many of them writing about women artists or making art themselves. With its ideas of “re-evaluation and re-publication of less appreciated and forgotten” authors,22 the concepts that the New Yugoslav feminists used could lend themselves perfectly to incorporating the films of Belić, Ivančić, Jovanović and others into the new thinking on women’s art in Yugoslavia. 23However, New Yugoslav feminists wrote about Milica Zorić and Jagoda Buić,24 screened films by authors such as Natalia LL or Ulrike Rosenbach,25 and stressed the fact that in Yugoslavia there are hardly any women artists at all.26 Looking back on their efforts, it seems that only already legitimized artists were legitimate artists in the New Feminist discourse. Even in their case, the “proper” women’s (feminist) artistic practice in Yugoslavia was underpinned by the institutions and the “academic-activist scene at the universities”27 and it might be said that their institutional position was a major cause of their blind spot.

• 28 Delap, The Feminist Avant-garde, op. cit., p. 6.
• 29 Lisinski, “Feministički film”, op. cit.

8“Women want as many different things as there are women,” Delap quoted suffragist Helena Swanwick in her study on twentieth century emerging feminism.28 In Yugoslav amateur experimental cinema, women never formed a feminist group or movement, and it might be that the names of these women, and the films they made – which I collected during my research – communicated only on the pages of my notebook. However, the films they made had something in common – they were clearly filmed “as an expression of their own emancipatory [...] strivings.”29

• 30 Butler Alison, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen, London, Wallflower Press, 2002, p. 17.
• 31 Lucy Fischer as quoted in Butler, ibid., p. 18.

9What experiences do these particular films convey? Can we discern in Yugoslavia a particular “aesthetics and politics of women’s experimental amateur cinema” that was not “rigorously exclusive on political grounds”30 yet was aligned with feminist ideas? What constitutes their accidental feminism? Instead of framing this solely within the traditional ideas of social, structural, and economic oppression, I suggest broadening the discussion to encompass “women’s experiences” in terms of aesthetic appreciation. This perspective considers the authors as moviegoers, art lovers, and literature readers... Could we interpret these films as articulations of their author’s ways of re-mediating these experiences, finally representing a “dissension from the mainstream culture”?31

10Divna Jovanović (1939-1991), author of one of the earliest amateur experimental films made by women in Yugoslavia (Rok, 1960) worked with the materiality of the film strip, often juxtaposing different symbolic motives with an inclination to the primitive and the nature (Rondo, 1963). In Rok, Jovanović scratches and paints over the celluloid (much like Storm de Hirsch in 1965 Peyote Queen), featuring motifs of hearts, flowers, a boat at sea, and simple sketches of a boy and a girl. She would again turn to men and women in Preobražaj (The Metamorphosis, 1973) exploring the transformative power of love using rotoscope animation. The motifs of gentle lovemaking, tall forest trees and a wedding culminate in a transformation of the red flag. In a repeating gesture the flag moves across the screen, carrying one big white heart instead of the communist symbols which the viewer habitually expects to see.

• 32 Jovanović Jovan, “Film kao mogućnost samosvesti – autorski opus Biljane Belić” [Film as a Possibi (...)
• 33 Ibid., p. 340.

11Biljana Belić (1947-1985) began making films in her early twenties, exploring interpersonal relationships, female sexuality and motherhood. “For her, film represented a possibility of raising self-awareness – that is, a way of acquiring a personal integrity,” wrote Jovan Jovanović in an article which today exists as a precious document detailing Belić’s work, since all but two of her films have been lost.32 In one of the remaining films, Penelope 77 (1977), co-authored with her partner Dragiša Krstić, Belić reconfigures the role of Penelope. Beyond being a mother and tradition keeper, Penelope (Belić) becomes a self-aware woman, faithfully rejecting suitors while satisfying her desire through masturbation as she awaits her Ulysses (Krstić). In Pieta (1970) Belić appears in a grainy, black and white depiction of tender lovemaking, ending with a classical pose of Pietà – portraying a woman as a mother holding in her lap a lover instead of the Christ/Son. Jovanović briefly mentions two films which explicitly express the pain and “anxiety of unrealized motherhood”33 – Želela bih sada da si tu [I Wish Now You Were Here, 1976] and Dete [A Child, 1976] – where Belić once again films herself, this time as a pensive young woman musing on her unborn child. Based on available documentation, Belić emerges as an (inadvertent) feminist avant-garde filmmaker, bravely and self-consciously translating inner emotions into cinematic material.

• 34 Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge, op. cit., p. 105.
• 35 Cixous Hélène, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Estelle Freedman (ed.), The Essential Feminist Reader, (...)
• 36 Ibid., p. 319.

14The works of New Yugoslav feminism were summarised by Lóránd as ranging “from the search for women in Yugoslav art and literary history to an investigation of the possibilities of women’s creativity”.34 This idea of a “search” prompts me to question why the realm of amateur cinema was excluded from that pursuit. The concepts employed by Yugoslav feminists could readily be applied to the work of Yugoslav female amateur filmmakers. Discussing the relationship between the body and writing, Hélène Cixous emphasizes the “production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity” intertwined with female desire for sexual pleasure.35 It is precisely the release of that Cixousian incredible and inexhaustible “women’s imaginary”36 that I see in the sequence of masturbation in Belić’s Penelope 77 – a film released only two years after the publication of The Laugh of the Medusa. The head of Medusa is what I recognize in the reclining woman figure in Dunja Ivanišević’s Žemsko (The Gal, 1968).

• 37 Iveković, “Ženska kreativnost,” op. cit., p. 142.
• 38 Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge, op. cit., p. 99.
• 39 Belc Krnjaić, Petra, “Some Remarks on the Position of Women in the History of Yugoslav Experimental (...)
• 40 Iveković, “Ženska kreativnost”, op. cit.

15Rada Iveković’s text on women’s creativity provides an ideal theoretical framework for incorporating the work of Yugoslav women amateur filmmakers. The artist’s “conquering of technique” as a path towards his/her creation37 and Iveković’s ideas of women’s creativity as emancipatory elements38 are concepts which could “prove” the feminist character of women’s Yugoslav experimental film avant-garde. Tatjana Ivančić confidently wielded her Super 8 film camera and openly detested technical incompetence, winning a prize for the high artisanal and technical level of her films in 1975.39 The motifs in Milica Zorić’s tapestries, which Iveković writes about in her article on “Woman’s Creativity and the Creation of Woman,”40 uncannily resemble the motifs Divna Jovanović uses in Rondo (1963) – it seems that both of these artists used Mexican (Aztec) art as the basis for their work.

• 41 A term coined by Agnès Varda to describe her particular practice of filming.

16Whether these authors were thematizing the particularities of their own women’s experiences, or surpassing social constraints through artistic creation, their work could easily have been incorporated into the discourses surrounding the New Yugoslav feminist movement. But as already mentioned, Yugoslav women who experimented with the medium of film remained on the margins of visibility, consigned to the spheres of amateurism. Why have feminist discourses in Yugoslavia recognized only already-legitimized artists, and whether the(ir) institutional position caused this tunnel vision, represent valid questions for further analysis. Spanning from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the films of women Yugoslav avant-garde filmmakers invite us to rethink the position of academic feminism and institutional art, opening new avenues for the interpretation of the early feminist film practice we could now begin to call cinécriture feminine.41