The Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) warmly invites you to the Film Seminar on Želimir Žilnik’s film “Rani Radovi/Early Works”.

The seminar consists of a short introductory lecture, followed by the screening of Želimir Žilnik’s film “Rani Radovi” (eng: “Early Works”) (1969), and a discussion with the participants afterwards.

Special guest:

Želimir Žilnik, award-winning filmmaker and director of the film “Rani Radovi/Early Works”.

Speakers:

• Sanja Bahun, Professor at the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, and Executive Dean at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Essex.
• Dušan Radunović, Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University.
  

Synopsis:

“Rani Radovi External link, opens in new window.” (1969) is Želimir Žilnik’s first feature film. In an allegoric manner, it recounts a story of young people who took part in student demonstrations in June 1968 in Belgrade. Three young men and a young woman named Jugoslava (Yugoslava) travel to villages and factories in hopes of inspiring a revolution among the locals.

“Rani Radovi” won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1969, the Youth Film Award: Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People, and four prizes at the Yugoslav Film Festival of Pula.
It is also included in the list of Serbian feature films (1911-1999) declared as cultural heritage of great importance by the Yugoslav Film Archive.

About the participants:

Želimir Žilnik External link, opens in new window. is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and director of numerous feature and documentary films. He is one of the major figures of the Black Wave, a Yugoslav film movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, known for its non-traditional and politically critical character. His extensive filmography tackles various social and political issues entangled in everyday life in the form of short films, feature films, documentaries and docudramas. It includes, among many others, The Unemployed (1968), June Turmoil (1968), Black Film (1971), Uprising in Jazak (1972), Paradise (1976), Pretty Women Walking Through the City (1986), Marble Ass (1995), Fortress Europe (2000), Kenedi Goes Back Home (2003), The Old School of Capitalism (2009), Pirika on Film (2013), The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018). His long feature debut, “Rani Radovi/Early Works”, was awarded the Golden Bear in 1969.

Sanja Bahun is Professor at the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, and is Executive Dean at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Essex. Bahun's area of expertise is international modernism, and her research interests include theory of comparative arts, world literature, psychoanalysis, and women's and gender studies. She is the author of Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (2014), the co-editor of The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (2006), Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (2008, 2015), From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women's Aesthetic Production (2009), Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras (2011), Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions (2012), Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013), Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions (2014), and Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2018, second edition 2020), and she has published articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects concerning modernism, world literature, psychoanalytic theory and intellectual history. She has also authored two books of creative writing: On the Atomic Bomb, Pain, Spaghetti, and All the Rest... (1994) and To Icarus, with Love (1998).

Dušan Radunović is an Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham, where he teaches Russian cultural and social history and film theory. He has published on a range of subjects, from intellectual history to critical and film theory. Dušan is the author of monographs on the genesis of the concept of form in the twentieth-century Russian humanities (forthcoming) and on Mikhail Bakhtin and co-editor of the volume Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions (Routledge, 2012). Dušan is also interested in the archaeology of film medium and in the way in which the medium of cinema interacts with other media. In this context, he has worked on Sergei Eisenstein’s late writings on cinema and on the interaction of post-war avant-garde cinema and art practices in Eastern Europe.