‘Cinema Komunisto’ Shows Yugoslavia’s Tito As a Movielover

“This is the story of a country that no longer exists, except in movies.” That country, Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, also known as “the second Yugoslavia,” endured from World War II until around 1991. A founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the name officially adopted in 1963) granted some freedoms of commerce, speech, travel, and religion, assumed a neutral stance during the Cold War, and developed mostly friendly relations with the United States and Western Europe. A partial explanation for Tito’s unusual openness, suggests Cinema Komunisto, might be found in his love of movies.

Screening at Stranger Than Fiction as the Fall Season’s Closing Night Film on 22 November (followed by a Q&A with David Walker Leitner), Mila Turajlić’s film is more cunning collage than standard documentary. It takes shape around Tito’s longtime projectionist, Leka Konstantinovic. Introduced as he lays flowers at Tito’s grave, Konstantinovic explains that he kept a diary of the films he showed Tito over some 32 years, remembering how difficult it was “to find a good film for every day.”

The film invites you inside Konstantinovic’s memories, as he visits Tito’s former residence where he ran the screening room, now in ruins after NATO bombings in 1999. The film approximates his emotionally layered views. When he walks up the front stairway into the grand foyer, the frame pans over rubble, before cutting to old photos of the way it used to be, vast floors covered with colorful rugs, walls adorned with expensive art. Inside the screening room, in black-and-white stillness, the projectionist stands by “my machine,” Comrade President and his wife, Comrade Jovanka, seated in the foreground.

In the old days, Konstantinovic says, he drove frequently into Belgrade or to other, more distant spots, in order to find films to show. Cinema Komunisto shows old fiction film footage of cars, stylish convertibles in sunlight, sedans in the rain, cars careening into parking space or screeching around corners. The pursuit of films was an adventure, but so too was the production. For, as the documentary recalls, Yugoslavia was once home to a thriving studio, Avala Films.

Konstantinovic’s memories are here framed and elaborated by those of Yugoslavia’s filmmakers, including producer Steva Petrovic, studio boss Gile Djuric, actor (and “screen legend” Bata Živojinović. “We had a great opportunity, says set designer Veljko Despoto, to “make world-class films.” And so they did. At least part of the country’s success under Tito was a function of its film industry, as foreign makers came to conjure epic dreams. Kirk Douglas, Orson Welles, and Richard Widmark appeared in films shot in Yugoslavia, their visits remembered here in news footage as well as clips from 1969’s Battle of Neretva and 1964’s The Long Ships, a Norse adventure, in which a be-robed Widmark asserts, “May Allah strike me dead if everything I have told you is not true.” The film cuts from the scene in the film to Despoto watching the scene on an iPod: history as fiction as constant loop.

The assertion is something of a touchstone for Cinema Komunisto, which repeatedly probes the interstices between fiction and real experience. In part this has to do with the “magic” of movies, their capacity to create and recreate, construct and warp “history.” It also has to do with the makers’ awareness of this power. Looking back on Avala’s heyday — as the film shows wide expanses, dressed up as battlegrounds and wildnerness — Despoto says the sets were “truly huge,” and “that was how we drew them in,” promising “great locations and a qualified crew, even though we were actually learning from them.” They assured their clients that anything could be managed, their mantra, “Nema problema,” essentially, “No problem.” But then, he adds, “That’s what the film business is all about. Film is a lie, basically. We just try to make it look real.”

Indeed. Tito’s favorite productions, those most encouraged, were war movies, specifically, partisan war movies, celebrating Tito’s own brilliance as a military leader, as well as the fight for “freedom,” ever resisting the oppressive state. “A ton of partisan films got made,” says director Veljko Bulajić, “And they were absolutely terrible.” They were also tremendously popular, part of the output of Tito’s not-so-perfectly orchestrated propaganda machine.

“Since we judge greatness in a man usually by leadership,” ordains Orson Welles in one interview, “It is a self-evident fact that the greatest man in the world today is Tito.” One aspect of this greatness culminates, actually and fictionally, in Sutjeska (1973), starring Richard Burton as Tito. The star was handpicked by the president, a process recounted here in clips of the two men walking and smiling together as well as visits with Liz Taylor and Jovanka, and photos emphasizing their physical differences, the much taller Burton standing over the by-then rotund Tito.

Such disparities only reinforce the effects of movies, of course, their capacity to change and mold perception, to forge memories, to affect the present no matter how past they may seem. And this is the acute point of Cinema Komunisto. As Tito added to his mythology and shaped Yugoslavia’s self-image, his legacy is not so different from any that uses movies and other mass media to conjure “greatness.”