Cart

Your cart is currently empty.
purchase
July 2021, English
16.5×23.5 cm, 328 pages, 56 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-320-2
Status
Available
Antonia Majaca, Rachel O’Reilly, Jelena Vesić (Eds.)

Feminist Takes

“Early Works” by Želimir Žilnik

With texts by Ivana Bago, Angela Dimitrakaki, Branislav Dimitrijević, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Rose-Anne Gush, Vesna Kesić, Vedrana Madžar, Antonia Majaca, Jaleh Mansoor, Ruth Noack, Bojana Pejić, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Rasha Salti, Kerstin Stakemeier, Jelena Vesić, Giovanna Zapperi

Canonical within the Yugoslav New Film of the late 1960s and the 1970s, Želimir Žilnik’s Early Works (1968) follows the female revolutionary Jugoslava as she leaves her lumpenproletariat family to spread the teachings of young Marx and Engels among the peasants and factory workers. The violent responses to this proselytizing mission, which include the rape of Jugoslava and the beating of her three male comrades, invoke the repression of the 1968 student movement in socialist Yugoslavia. The film’s allegorical examination of the contradictions of Yugoslav state socialism culminates when Jugoslava becomes the object of her comrades’ violence, who shoot her and set her body on fire. This edited volume, a part of Antonia Majaca’s ongoing collaborative investigation Feminist Takes, initiates a discussion of the filmic—and historical—fate of Jugoslava and the prospects of revolutionary feminism.