How the love was tempered: labour, romance and gender asymmetry in the classical Yugoslav film

Abstract

This article tackles the relationship between gender and work as screened by classical Yugoslav cinema. It focuses on a string of films produced from 1948 to 1958, set in the context of the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and socialist society. Relying on the thesis concerning the dwindling of revolutionary morale in the 1950s, the analysis explores the ways in which the devaluation of work in the name of consumption, and the re-domestification and objectification of women correlated with a telling divide between the male and female protagonists in the ‘construction cycle’. While the films privileged the man as a natural born worker, they designated the woman first and foremost in terms of her love for the man. In this respect, the gender politics of the classical Yugoslav cinema were more indebted to Hollywood melodramas than to the socialist-realist celebration of gender equality, as manifested in Eastern European cinemas.