![]() ![]() Already in 1960, two exemplary spy films were produced in Yugoslavia: X-25 javlja/X-25 Reports (František Čáp) and Kota 905/Point 905 (Mate Relja). In the context of this intensive commotion, and with regards to popular culture and genre patterns, the decade’s beginning was marked not only by the two early modernist oeuvres by Hladnik and Petrović, but also by an intensive interest in spy film. However, the decade was not marked solely by auteur film, it was also a period of intensive reception of (mainly American) popular culture in Yugoslavia (Vučetić 2018), a period whose beginnings were marked by a ‘commercialization’ trend (Boglić 1963 Crnovršanin 1963) in the country’s cinema-which reached its peek with the scandalous musical comedy Šeki snima, pazi se/Šeki Is Filming, Watch Out (Marijan Vajda, 1962)-and a period in which the Yugoslav variant of the war film genre-the partisan film-developed into a spectacular form. ![]() Already within the 1960s period itself, and almost to the present day, this development was perceived by film critics as beginning with two movies, both appearing in 1961: Boštjan Hladnik’s Ples v dežju/A Dance in the Rain and Aleksandar Petrović’s Dvoje/And Love Has Vanished (Čolić 1967 Munitić 1966 Novaković 1967). In the history of Yugoslav cinema, the 1960s are often described as the ‘golden’ decade (Kirn 2012, 5 Levi 2007, 15), the period when auteur film flourished and consequently led to an affirmation of the national cinema on the modernist world stage. Taking film genre theory as its issuing point, this article attempts at offering an insight into this cluster of problems. The generic structure of the spy film combined with a position of non-alignedness therefore produced specific ideological effects within Yugoslav cinema. Through the spy’s infiltration, this enemy was then represented in ways which cannot be found in earlier war (partisan) films. Consequently, Yugoslav spy films not only systematically (re)turned to the context of World War II, but also, the ‘enemy within’ became the fundamental neuralgic point of their symbolic strategies. On the one hand, spy films witness to a process of ‘genre-grafting’ highly symptomatic of the developments in the Yugoslav cinema of the period on the other hand, however, they also introduce specific problems into this process: with Yugoslavia occupying a nonaligned position in the Cold War context, the metaphor of the ‘Iron Curtain’, largely fuelling the international spy genre of the 1960s, remained inaccessible to Yugoslav spies. Through an analysis of three films ( X-25 javlja/ X-25 Reports, František Čáp, 1960 Kota 905/ Point 905, Mate Relja, 1960 Abeceda straha/ ABC of Fear, Fadil Hadžić, 1961) the article inquires into roles spy movies acquired within the Yugoslav cinema of the 1960s.
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