Modernization, Crises, Cultural Revolutions

Drawing from a thematic and formal analysis of over 170 ciné club productions, as well as original archival research, this study explores Yugoslav amateur films beyond their crucial role in experimental and professional cinema. The study provides a nuanced account of the creative, pragmatic, intermedial, and political strategies employed by amateur filmmakers to depict, comment on, criticize, and make sense of the “world around them.” Politics, practices, and productions of film amateurism are examined as lenses through which to view the history of everyday life in Yugoslavia, which emerges as an audiovisual history of vast sociopolitical transformations, and a complex interplay of political ambiguities, cultural revolutions, and global entanglements during the 1960s and 1970s.