The Yugoslav Black Wave nobody mentions
Between 1963 and 1972, a group of filmmakers in Yugoslavia made some of the most politically dangerous and formally strange films in European cinema. Almost none of them are on streaming.
In 1968, a Yugoslav film called Early Works (Rani radovi), directed by Zelimir Zilnik, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Zilnik was 25 years old. The film was a low-budget, formally anarchic portrait of young Marxist radicals who had lost faith in Marxism — shot partly in a style that deliberately referenced Godard's Weekend, partly in a mode closer to agitprop newsreel, and partly as something that had no obvious model at all.
Back in Yugoslavia, the film was banned within the year. Zilnik was expelled from the Association of Film Workers. He left the country.
This is, in capsule form, what the Yugoslav Black Wave was: a group of filmmakers in a Communist state who were tolerated as long as they were prestigious and suppressed as soon as they became inconvenient. The films they made in the window between toleration and suppression are some of the most formally radical and politically honest films of the 1960s and 1970s. Almost no one in the English-speaking world has seen them.
Who made it and what they made
The core figures are Dušan Makavejev, Zilnik, Aleksandar Petrović, Živojin Pavlović, and Lordan Zafranović. They were not a school in any organized sense — they did not share a manifesto, they did not always like each other's work, and they worked across different republics of the federation (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia). What united them was a willingness to use cinema to examine what Yugoslav socialism actually looked like from the ground, rather than what it looked like from the official propaganda that constituted most of the country's film output.
Makavejev's work is the most accessible and the most widely circulated outside Yugoslavia. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) intercuts documentary footage of Wilhelm Reich — the Freudo-Marxist psychoanalyst whose work on sexual repression and political authoritarianism landed him in a US federal prison in 1956 — with a fiction film about a Yugoslav woman who preaches sexual liberation and falls in love with a Soviet ice skater. The tonal whiplash is the point. Makavejev described his method as "dialectical collage." It was banned in Yugoslavia on release and Makavejev moved to the West.
Pavlovic's films — particularly Budjenje pacova (The Rats Woke Up, 1967) — are bleaker and closer to Cassavetes in feel: handheld, loose, portrait-driven. Zafranovic's Occupation in 26 Pictures (1978) is a Dalmatian coast epic about the Italian and German occupation of Split during the Second World War, visually elaborate and far more critical of local collaboration than Yugoslav state history permitted. It was not banned outright but was restricted and rarely programmed.
What suppression looks like from the outside
The mechanism was not usually a single ban. It was the slow withdrawal of production resources, the exclusion from festivals, the blocking of international distribution, and the social and professional pressure on anyone who worked with a Black Wave director. Petrovic won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1967 for I Even Met Happy Gypsies (Skupljaci perja) and was subsequently removed from his teaching post at the Belgrade Film Academy. He continued working but at a reduced capacity.
The international film press knew about the wave in fragments — Makavejev's international profile was too large to ignore — but the non-Makavejev directors were essentially invisible outside specialist academic contexts until the 1990s, when the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed produced a wave of scholarly interest in the culture of the old federation.
Why streaming matters now
The digital archive has done more for Yugoslav Black Wave visibility than thirty years of academic writing. MUBI has programmed Makavejev extensively. The Criterion Channel added W.R. and Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator in 2021. Zilnik's own archive — he founded a production company after returning to Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and has continued working at the age of 80 — is increasingly accessible via European streaming platforms. The Yugoslav Cinematheque in Belgrade has digitized several films in the archive that had no prior international release.
If you are working through the world cinema canon or looking for films in our foreign gem mood category, the Black Wave is the most substantial blind spot in most educated cinephile viewing histories. The films are not difficult in the way that, say, late Straub-Huillet is difficult. They are funny, formally alive, politically engaged. The suppression that kept them from view is the main reason they aren't already canon.
Where to start
Start with Makavejev. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism is the easiest to find and the one that will calibrate your appetite for the rest. If that works for you, move to Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967), which is earlier and more contained but has the same energy. From there: Zilnik's Early Works if you can track it down, then Petrovic's I Even Met Happy Gypsies, which is the most classically beautiful of the bunch and the most emotionally direct.
Sources & further reading
- Goulding, Daniel. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945-2001 (Indiana University Press, revised 2002) — the standard English-language monograph.
- Criterion — essay on Makavejev and the Yugoslav Black Wave
- BFI Sight & Sound — Yugoslav Black Wave feature
- The Guardian — Zelimir Zilnik interview (2021)