Liberated Cinema, Revised and Expanded Edition

Book excerpt: Originally published in 1985, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience received the first annual "Close-up" award from the Yugoslav Film Institute in 1986 for "outstanding scholarship and for promoting the values of Yugoslav film art internationally." This new edition has been revised and updated throughout. It has been expanded to complete the story of the new Yugoslav cinema of the 1980s and to address major film developments that have taken place in the former Yugoslavia's five successor states. As in his analysis of past periods of Yugoslav cinema, Goulding situates the most recent developments within the context of film economics, state subsidies, and changing patterns of political control. Most significantly, however, he provides an insightful discussion of the ways in which critically important domestic feature films produced or co-produced from 1991 to 2001 reflect on recent brutal internecine warfare and other contemporary social, cultural, and political realities after the breakup of Yugoslavia.