Preference for censorship

Abstract

Post-Yugoslav artists relatively often claim that the major international successes of Yugoslav films were the result of novel artistic approaches developed to circumscribe state censorship. Some filmmakers say that socialist censorship was better than being ignored, like they feel today. This article explores the preference for socialist censorship articulated by filmmakers from Serbia, suggesting that it needs to be situated in the change of the regime of visibility after the Cold War. The “regime of visibility” conventionally refers to the conditions of visibility within one particular social context, for example within a particular country. The post-Yugoslav preference for censorship indicates that there are also regimes of visibility that operate transnationally, regulating what can be seen and known across the borders of particular societies. In the Cold War regime of visibility, Yugoslav socialist “censorship without censorship” illuminated Yugoslav films in a way that made them visible in the West. The post-Cold-War shifts in the mechanisms of recognition made censorship preferable in comparison to the contemporary sense of invisibility.