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In the early 60s, after Tito’s split with Stalin, a loose trend emerged in Socialist Yugoslav cinema. Disaffected filmmakers, living in the unrealized promise of a post-war utopia, equipped themselves with the tools of their contemporaries on the vanguard across Europe. The humanistic pessimism of the Italian Neorealists, the rebelliousness of the French New Wave, and the absurdity (and not to mention state funding) of the Czechoslovak New Wave found fertile ground in the rapidly urbanizing Yugoslavian landscape. Elements of satire, violence, polemics, sex, liberation, disillusionment, dark humor, and experimental techniques held together this burgeoning movement across genres.
It wasn’t until 1969, in the official newspaper of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Borba, that journalist Vladimir Jovičić derisively coined the term “Black Wave.” Jovičić called out “the systematic distortion of the present, in which everything is viewed through a monochromatic lens. Its themes are obscure and present improper visions and images of violence, moral degeneracy, misery, lasciviousness and triviality.” Two months later, a meeting was held among Yugoslav officials to discuss the present, film-induced demoralization, and the censorship began in earnest. Films like W.R.: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM (1971), inarguably the most famous contribution to the Black Wave, and BREAKFAST WITH THE DEVIL (1971), which we’re screening in this series, were banned and sealed for decades. PLASTIC JESUS (1971), even led to the filmmaker’s imprisonment for “spreading enemy propaganda.”
Despite the supposedly “monochromatic lens,” we at Spectacle are pleased to share a selection of Black Wave films entirely in color. The early 70s marked both the end of the movement formally and one of its most productive periods. Shedding some of the severity from the war dramas of the 60’s, the Black Wave films of this era lean into style and cinematic ambition without dulling their political edge.