As part of the SOTA@GARAGE educational program, we are holding a screening of Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, directed by Marta Popivoda. The film was inspired by a two-year research project, Performance and the Public, which Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić, and Marta Popivoda worked on in 2011 and 2012.
The film deals with the question of how ideology is performed in public spaces through mass performances. The author collected and analyzed film and video footage from the period of Yugoslavia focusing on state performances (1945–2000, with youth work actions, May Day parades, the celebration of Youth Day, etc.) as well as counter-demonstrations (1968, student and civic demonstration in the 1990s, the October 5th revolution, etc.). Going back through the images, the film traces how communist ideology was gradually exhausted through the changing relations between the people, ideology, and the state.
According to the director, “This research-based essay film is a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end, and its recent transformation into a few democratic nation states. Experience of the dissolution of the state, and today’s ‘wild’ capitalist reestablishment of the class system in Serbia are my reasons for going back through the media images and tracing the way one social system changed by performing itself in public space.”
The screening is preceded by Bojana Cvejić’s lecture Notes for a Society of Performance. She will also give a short introduction to the film.
Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body
Director: Marta Popivoda
Serbia, France, Germany, 2013
Duration: 62 minutes