Discussion

My Apartment

Dir: Zvonimir Berković; Yugoslavia
Short Film; 1963; 13 mins
Starring: Liljana Gener, Ivo Kadić, Ivan Uzelac, Gordana Skok, Marijan Saridžić

A young girl writes about her family’s apartment in this delicious satire of housing conditions on the outskirts of Zagreb. She writes of her old, cramped, pre-war tenement. Then she writes glowingly of her new post-war block. The new socialist utopia is being built for the working family… so long as you don’t focus too closely on the details. And director Zvonimir Berković focuses on quite a few details: audio is restricted to a few sound effects and the young girl’s voiceover, ensuring that the gags themselves are largely silent.

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Dir: Dušan Makavejev; Yugoslavia
Feature Film; 1967; 66 mins
Starring: Eva Ras, Slobodan Aligrudić, Ružica Sokić, Miodrag Andrić

Of Dušan Makavejev’s astonishing first four features, Love Affair appears to be the lightest and frothiest. After all, it seems set on simply telling a love story, about two lost souls in Belgrade, where Izabela (Eva Ras) meets Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudić) and the two immediately hit it off. Yet Makavejev throws in mock documentarian affects – an interview with a sexologist, and a visit to the mortuary to analyse the body of a dead woman who, it quickly becomes obvious, is Izabela. The awkward sterility of these segments clashes with the light breeziness of the romance at the heart of the film and the darker undercurrents sleeping underneath.

Because this is also a film about a Belgrade attempting to come to terms with its own modernity. Izabela is an ethnic Hungarian from Vojvodina, Ahmed a Bosnian Muslim; the modern metropolis where the new multiethnic Yugoslavia emerges. She is a switchboard operator, he a rat exterminator (how sweet!): two jobs at the grubby end of urbanisation. Love Affair is deeply conscious of the way in which romance and sex is tied to wider ideological structures and to cinema; when Eva Ras tells the camera her desires and fears, she is recognising the camera’s importance to this relationship.