When Ships Don’t Come Ashore – a Yugoslav cinema club production’s dissent in-between the personal and the political

Abstract

As in other Eastern European Countries, film industry and culture were of central interest for the newly established socialist Yugoslav state after the Second World War. Besides the institutionalisation of a professional and profitable film industry, amateur cinema clubs were inaugurated all over the Yugoslav republics for educative purposes in the field of technical culture. Due to a prevailing underestimation of their activities and the specific, relatively liberal Yugoslav socialist path, some of these clubs became hubs of an experimental and critical film scene. This article discusses the film ‘Ships don’t come ashore’ (1955) which Mihovil Pansini – one of the leading figures of Yugoslav experimental film – made in Cinema Club Zagreb in his initial years as a film maker. It is discussed as an early example of a filmic counterpoint to political ideologies and mainstream film themes. A detailed analysis reveals that the dissent of the film, with its story of a person’s impossible escape from an island, comes in three dimensions: the individual stance, the artistic experiment, and the political message.