&quot;The Engine Room of a New Ustasha Consciousness: Cinema, Terror and Ideological Refashioning.&quot; In ed. Yeomans, The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia (Rochester University Press, 2015)

Rory Yeomans

This article advances an interdisciplinary and multifactorial socio-cultural approach to the fascistization of the Ustaša in interwar Yugoslavia, leading to terrorism and racial cleansing. It concentrates on the life-trajectories of Mijo Babić and Zvonimir Pospišil, two nationalist activists notoriously known as the first Ustaša terrorists. Drawing on the previously unknown political memoirs of Pospišil and Babić, the article argues that the two activists bridged several phases of cumulative radicalization in the Ustaša organization, from the adoption of political violence at the grass-root level in the 1920s to international terrorism in the 1930s and then state-sponsored genocide in the first half of the 1940s. The article points out that Ustaša underwent most forms of political radicalization to terrorism identified by McCauley and Moskalenko (2008), but it also adds to their typology a case of radicalization to mass violence in the regime phase. Ustaša’s trajectory thus illustrates a rare process of transition from the radicalization of an oppositional, non-state group to mass radicalization leading to racial genocidal policies under a fascist-totalitarian regime. It is hoped that the biographical approach to radicalization advanced by the article contributes to a better understanding of politically motivated terrorism and mass violence in post-1918 Europe.

This chapter explores the political messages and formal methods of the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and 1930s through three films: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s montage film Mother (Mat', 1926), Boris Barnet’s everyday-life (bytovaia) comedy The Girl with the Hat Box (Devushka s korobkoi, 1927) and Ivan Pyr'ev’s kolkhoz musical The Tractor Drivers (Traktoristy, 1939). The analyses unpack each film’s key ideologies, in order to 1) refine the often crudely applied term ‘propaganda’ to montage cinema (Mother); 2) explore how propaganda works in a film considered as mere entertainment (The Girl with the Hat Box); and 3) explain how a socialist realist film –in its original version, that is, before its ‘restoration’ (alteration) in the post-Stalinist era – contributed to the Stalin Cult (The Tractor Drivers). The chapter also examines how, in different periods of Soviet history, the filmmakers employed different ways to propagate the Bolskevik ideas and endow them with the maximum of appeal.

The Engine Room of a New Ustasha Consciousness: Cinema, Terror and Ideological Refashioning Rory Yeomans In early 1945, a column began appearing in the newspaper Hrvatski narod relating the disconcerting adventures of a commentator with cultural modernity. Clearly satirical on one level, the appearance of the column in the midst of a plethora of articles relating the heroic sacrifices of Ustasha warriors, the “terror” of the Bolshevik hordes and invocations from regime officials for ordinary citizens to fight fanatically to the death for the Ustasha state lent it an incongruous air. In spite of its pretence of normality, though, the writer’s exaggerated confrontations with archetypes of everyday life served to explore in comic form the regime’s anxieties about the failure, even at this late stage, to refashion Croatian citizens into Ustasha subjects. This was illustrated in the very first column in which the commentator related his experience visiting a local cinema. Having been induced into seeing the latest cinematic “gala production” by a young sophisticated cineaste despite having no money for it, the jostling, pushing and rough behaviour of the cinema-going public he encounters while trying to make his way to the ticket office speaks eloquently of the state’s inability to remake the conduct of the masses. Furthermore, as he is pushed forward by the straining masses, he is appalled to realise that he too “burns with an unquenchable desire” to see the film. “I am already by the doors. Ah, the rear end of the column moves; a bit more and I will gaze on the shining face of the ticket seller.” IRIS, “Idemo na slikokaz!” Hrvatski narod, 15 February 1945. For Ustasha cultural theorists, cinema represented a medium through which the masses could be transformed from ordinary citizens into Ustasha subjects with Ustasha values. As the most modern form of mass propaganda, cinema constituted a central element in the state’s social and cultural programme to enlighten and modernise the masses. Party ideologues, meanwhile, envisaged the construction of a new concept of cinema imbued with the social ideals of the Ustasha movement and its radical cultural and nationalist orthodoxies. Moreover, in the same way as its programmes of worker mobility, house building and mass education, through cinema the state sought to offer ordinary citizens a glimpse of the good life and a space of normalcy in a profoundly abnormal time of deprivation, bloodshed and conflict. But this good life did not apply to everyone. Since terror was woven into the very fabric of cultural and economic life, racial and national persecution quickly became an integral element of the programme to construct a new social cinema. Serb and Jewish cinema owners and workers, identified as responsible for the materialist, anti-Croatian and cosmopolitan values of interwar cinema, were quickly and ruthlessly removed from the industry as part of a wider programme of economic regeneration. For them, the experience of a new Croatian cinema was less a factory of dreams and more a production line of nightmares. While party ideologues aspired to the building of a mass, anti-capitalist cinematic culture, this proved extremely hard to achieve in practice. Not least, the very worker and peasant masses living in remote regions who were supposed to be the recipients of the expansion of the film industry and the new cinematic ethos were often those least interested in cinema and most suspicious of its modern and technological nature. It also proved difficult for the central film agencies to monitor the structure and content of cinematic activity in the regions and more remote locations where mobile cinema and weekly newsreels were designed to act as an engine room of ideological refashioning. Meanwhile, the predominantly urban educated population which had embraced commercial cinema so enthusiastically in the 1920s and 1930s continued to constitute a large proportion of the cinema-going public under the Ustasha regime too. Identified by Ustasha theoreticians as possessing a set of cultural and social attitudes inimical to the party’s revolutionary ideas, they represented a significant barrier to the incarnation of a new kind of ethical cinematic audience. Subsequent attempts by a succession of film agencies, institutes and sections to shape cinematic culture through censorship, fines and regulation were largely a failure. Moreover, the competing agendas of cinematic agencies and economic directorates as well as the shifting priorities of the state itself meant that the idea of using cinema as a means of transforming unconscious citizens into actively-engaged subjects was never likely to be achieved. For these reasons, the history of the experimental attempt to create a radical film culture and cinematic audience with new-found tastes, behaviours and attitudes provides an ideal frame through which to explore the broader Ustasha program of ideological refashioning. Serving as a case study of how ideas about social, economic and cultural transformation were utilised to mobilise support for the state’s campaign of terror against “undesired elements,” and how socio-economic pressures drove popular support for these campaigns, it demonstrates that the inability of the new cinema to create an ideologically-attuned and culturally-enlightened audience reflected broader challenges problems inherent in the program to remake the masses as Ustasha subjects. Until now, much scholarship related to cinema under the Ustasha regime has concentrated on the production and premiere of the state’s first feature-length film Lisinski, a lush musical biopic of the nineteenth-century operatic composer Vatroslav Lisinski or other landmark productions. See e.g., Danijel Rafaelić, Lisinski: prvi hrvatski zvučni dugometražni igrani film (Zagreb: Hrvatska kinoteka, 2010). Given the film’s immense popularity, the way it captured the imagination of the cinema-going public and the sense of romance and elegance it evoked in the midst of the state’s violent collapse, this is not surprising. While other studies have addressed a range of other topics ranging from the state’s participation in the 1942 Venice Bienniale to the influence of German cinema, they have tended to utilise a linear top-down approach from which the perspectives of both the architects and recipients of film policy have largely been absent. As a result, the history of cinema under the Ustasha regime has frequently been presented as organised and unproblematic in ways which, ironically, replicate the propaganda of the regime itself. See e.g., Ivo Škrabalo, Izmedju publike i države: povijest hrvatske kinematografjije, 1896-1980 (Zagreb: Znanje, 1984), 97-112; Danijel Rafaelić, “Raj Amerika u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 13, no. 52 (2007): 4-13; Rafaelić, “The Influence of German Cinema on Newly-Established Croatian Cinematography, 1941-1945,” in eds. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (Palgrave: 2007), 99-111; Rafaelić, “NDH na filmskom festivalu u Venecija 1942. godine,” Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 14, no. 56 (2008): 64-70, 171-72. In fact, the attempt to construct a new concept of cinema was, behind the opulent artifice of Lisinski, frequently characterised by contestation, terror, utopianism and experimentation. New men, cinema and the Ustasha style of living Ustasha cultural visionaries aimed at nothing less than the transformation of society and the individual. In his essay, “The Second Revolution,” published in Hrvatska smotra in December 1941 the critic Stanko Vitković set out a problem that troubled many other commentators. Despite the many technological, economic and social achievements of the Ustasha state, the task of remaking ordinary people and everyday life along Ustasha lines had not been achieved. True liberation would only occur, Vitković insisted, when “every manifestation of public life is given an Ustasha expression and branded with an Ustasha stamp, in a word: when everywhere and everything is embodied with the Ustasha style of living. And this is the second revolution. This is the incarnation and shaping of new men.” Stanko Vitković, “Druga revolucija,” Hrvatska smotra 9, no.12 (December 1941): 621-5. How was this to be done? Ustaša argued that the state was constructing “the man of the future,” a vanguard of Ustasha revolutionary values and the architect of the new Croatia. The Ustasha revolution would transform the Croatian citizen into the Ustasha subject in order to transform Croatia into the Ustasha state. “Čovjek ustaške revolucije,” Ustaša, 16 November 1941, 5. Anti-bourgeois sentiment, hostility to consumerism and opposition to capitalism constituted central elements in the Ustasha value system and hence the Ustasha man; these were also intrinsically linked to its ideas about race. On Ustasha workers’ radio in May 1941 Vjekoslav Blaškov, commissioner of the Croatian Workers’ Union (Hrvatski radnički savez—HRS), argued that the struggle of Croatian workers against Jewish and foreign capital was the “struggle of the mechanics’ bench against the cafe-bourgeois table, that is the struggle of the earnings of one dinar an hour versus the earnings of one million an hour.” He argued that the only way for national society to purify its surroundings from foreigners and “to treat the illness” of foreign capital was through state control of the economy. The leading theoretician of what became known as “Croatian Socialism,” Aleksandar Seitz pointed to the foundation of a new social and economic system and the “disappearance” of the bourgeois citizen as evidence of the social radicalism of the Ustasha state. In this way, the national revolution served a dual function as a social revolution returning dignity to Croatian workers and ending their exploitation by Jewish and Serbian plutocrats. Aleksandar Seitz, “Društvovna revolucija ustaškog pokreta,” Nova Hrvatska, 3 May 1942; “G. Vjekoslav Blaškov o ulozi Židova u odnosu rada i kapitala,” Novi list, 26 June 1941. But since Ustasha theoreticians argued that the Croatian worker could only be truly liberated if he was educated and enlightened, programmes which aimed at cultural enlightenment were, unsurprisingly, central elements in the construction of a new consciousness. This position was articulated by the head of the Directorate for National Mass Enlightenment (Državni ravnateljstvo za obće narodne prosvjećivanje—NARPROS) Mile Starčević in early 1942. In Prosvjetni život he argued for a reconfigured Ustasha movement with culture at its core. The Ustasha state, he wrote, should be an all-encompassing “engine room” of national consciousness. and “active agent of culture.” For his part, the citizen emerging from school should be encouraged to be “an active member of the national community.” Being Ustasha, he insisted, meant waging a liberation struggle not only in the social and ideological fields but in the cultural arena too. Mile Starčević, “Ustaška država i kulturno-prosvjetna djelatnost,” Prosvjetni život 1–2 (1942): 4–8. Through bringing culture and education to ordinary workers in the suburbs and peasants in the village, the state would imbue them with Ustasha values. In Spremnost, meanwhile, the former Marxist activist Milivoj Magdić explained that a programme of worker advancement—whether through attending night school, listening to a symphonic orchestra or visiting the theatre—would “hasten the revolutionary processes of society” and lead to the incarnation of a new “technological elite” in factories and on shop floors. Milivoj Magdić, “Radnik prema narodnoj zajednica,” Spremnost, 9 August 1942. NARPROS, Croatian State Radio, the Croatian State Cinematic Institute and other cultural and educational institutions organised open competitions for workers in acting, scriptwriting, theatre direction and playwriting skills; typically, they emphasised the ways in which the involvement of workers would remove them from their monotonous jobs in offices and factories. Worker and employee organisations such as the HRS or the Union of Croatian Private Employees (Savez hrvatske privatne namještnike—SHPN) established their own leisure sections where members could pursue cultural, intellectual and sporting activities. V., “Kulturni zbor SHPN-a oživljana rad,” Novi list, 13 May 1941 As well as bringing culture, education and art closer to ordinary workers NARPROS and others aimed to make workers more cultured in a behavioural sense too. By becoming cultured, they would learn to practise culture in a more enlightened manner. But being active agents, as much as workers benefited from their contact with culture, they were also helping to improve the ethos of the cultural consumer by bringing authentic Ustasha values to popular culture and sweeping away the bourgeois behaviours of the past. The theatre director Dušan Žanko writing in Hrvatski radnik observed that as a result of the promotion of culture among workers, the worker himself had become “a more complete person,” satisfying his intellectual needs and demonstrating that he possessed the intellectual capacity to appreciate and understand “our national operas.” This fact opened “completely new pathways in the educational life of our Croatian worker,” but, more importantly, ensured a new, more conscious theatre audience, replacing the “old small-town criticism and perpetually ill-tempered behaviour of corrupted urbanites.” Dušan Žanko, “Radničtvo u kazalištu,” Hrvatski radnik, Christmas 1942. Peasants in the socially-dominant countryside were also to be included in these programmes. Social planners envisaged students, youth brigades and cultural workers going into the villages to improve their levels of literacy, challenge conservative practices, raise their national consciousness and enlighten and educate them through culture and exposure to Ustasha values. As Franjo Lačen postulated in Ustaški godišnjak, through their work in villages, activists would bring modernity and transform the rural environment. A new kind of village with agricultural work made more efficient by tractors and mechanised ploughs, and everyday life characterised by electrification, offices, health clinics and educational colleges was the aim. Franjo Lačen, “Rad, radnici i seljaci u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 165–71. In the campaign for Ustasha values, cinema presented the second revolution’s architects with both the greatest opportunities and biggest challenges. On the one hand, they recognised film’s status as a form of mass communication which could act as the engine room of national consciousness to which Mile Starčević had referred, enabling them to inculcate ordinary citizens with Ustasha values. At the same time, many Ustasha theoreticians were deeply hostile to its associations with American culture, liberal cosmopolitan values and its consumerist capitalist ethos. In his 1943 polemic Ustaški pogledi Mijo Bzik famously personified cinematic culture as inimical to Ustasha values. He wrote of the vapid shamelessly-dressed young woman and her Anglophone moustachioed ladies’ man out in town to watch the latest Hollywood offering as the antithesis of everything that the new Ustasha man and woman represented. Meanwhile, in his regular column in Hrvatska pozornica the young poet and cultural commentator Vladimir Jurčić unfavourably compared the brash, “vaudevillian” commercial tastes of the cinema goer with the cultured anti-consumerist instincts of the theatrical audience. Mijo Bzik, Ustaški pogledi (Zagreb: Glavno ravnateljstvo za promičbu, 1943), 100; Vladimir Jurčić, “Razmatranja o kazalištu i kazalištnom obćinstvu,” Hrvatska pozornica 15-16, no. 2 (1 April 1943): 230-31. Paradoxically, these cultural prejudices were popularly-held enough to sometimes prevent citizens, even in large cities, from visiting the cinema, thus undermining the state’s endeavours. Elsewhere, as an art form which presented such contradictory dilemmas, only through the incarnation of a different cinematic vision could the communicative and technological promise of cinema be harnessed safely in the reshaping of citizens’ moral, social and national universes. Constructing a new national cinema from the wasteland The Ustasha state’s celluloid architects saw themselves as constructing a revolutionary new social cinema from a wasteland. In a review of the first year of Croatian film in May 1942 the director of the Croatian State Film Institute, Hrvatski slikopis (Croatia Film) Marijan Mikac recalled that when the Ustasha state had been founded, the nascent film industry had been built from ashes. The state, he recalled, “took over nothing from the former Yugoslavia—not one film camera, not even the smallest piece of apparatus needed for the synchronisation and editing of film.” In the early days, the first Croatian film institution, the Directorate for Film, bought two old cameras with which they had made the first short films and even in the first few weeks “of our new state” had established a weekly information reel. From these unpromising beginnings, Mikac explained, in the intervening period cinematic production in the state had been transformed: “Behind us stands a year of strenuous work which has provided us with our first success.” Two cameras had been purchased, with two put aside for the making of feature films and a van equipped with cameras “for the filming of talking features.” At the time of writing, he continued, the institute had made plans for the construction of a temporary studio while at the same time talks were in progress with a foreign film company for the erection of a permanent film studio complex on the outskirts of Zagreb at which feature films would be filmed. As well as the development of a studio system and the purchase of modern equipment, film professionals had been sent on a series of courses to improve their expertise. Nonetheless, Mikac admitted that “we are far from having everything we need so that we can create cinema in the quantities and with the speed common in other small states.” But, then again, he noted, “our film industry, irrespective of how small it is at the beginning, has exceeded what has been achieved in some other states that achieved their liberation and independence a long time before us.” Marijan Mikac, “Početci hrvatskog slikopisa,” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 1 (15 May 1942): 1. Two years later, Mirko Cerovac, a senior adviser at the institute, compared the endeavours of Hrvatski slikopis to the lack of activity in interwar Yugoslavia: “Is it really an insignificant fact that in the space of three to four months after the establishment of the state, at the height of the war itself, we were successful in achieving what the former artificial state did not achieve in twenty-three years of peace when for a little money it was possible to acquire as many products and devices as one could have wanted?” he asked, adding, “And we started off at a time when it was difficult even to purchase a simple nail!” Cerovac also listed the large number of cultural and documentary films which had been produced. In addition to an award-winning documentary about the exploits of the Ustasha Black Legion militia, films had been produced about the work service of the Ustasha Youth, the city of Dubrovnik and a docudrama about Đuro Arnold’s poem Domovina. A film that celebrated the first anniversary of the state Slavlje slobode epitomised the ambitious pioneering new spirit of Croatian cinema, he contended. Moreover, by April 1942 the number of cinemas had increased from 111 to 150, with twenty-two in Zagreb alone and seating capacity rising from 35,531 to 52,390 seats. While initial film editing and the process of turning silent documentaries and cultural films into speaking pictures had taken place in an apartment, with commentators talking from a bedroom and a cable transferring his words to an amplified camera in the dining room, foreign experts had congratulated them on the quality of the reels. No one would be able to tell, as Cerovac tartly put it, that “they had been assembled in a bathroom and former pantry and edited in a bedroom.” Mirko Cerovac, “Tri godine hrvatskoga slikopisa,” Hrvatski slikopis 3, no. 5 (1 May 1944): 3. When Mikac published his account of the first three years of Croatian cinema in 1944, Tri godine hrvatskog slikopisa, one of the most striking aspects of it was the bewildering number of personnel, name and structural changes it endured in just the first year of existence before it attained its final form. The first film institution was the Directorate for Film (Ravnateljstvo za film) within the State Secretariat for Enlightenment (Državno tajništvo za prosvjećivanje). Created on 23 April 1941, it included a censorship section, the Commissariat for the Oversight of Film (Povjerenstvo za ocjene slikopisa—POVSLIK) which decided whether films could be shown, whether any cuts or amendments were required and if films were to be broadcast, what age classification they should be classified under. For Mikac, the establishment of the Directorate for Film demonstrated the importance the state placed on cinema from the very beginning while the inclusion of the film directorate in the secretariat was an “historical and meaningful act” which illustrated that cinema had ceased being only a commercial product. As the state’s first film institution and the producer of films, the directorate brought into its organisation a large number of young officials, experts and advisers including, according to Mikac, a new generation of “young, talented and self sacrificing” film professionals. They stood in stark contrast to many of the established experts who had judged initially that the new directorate would not succeed. Mikac, Tri godine hrvatskoga slikopisa (Zagreb: Hrvatski slikopis, 1944), 23-29, 31. The pioneering work of the directorate came to an end at the beginning of 1942 with the founding of a section for film (Slikopisni odsjek—ODSLIK) within the State Information and Propaganda Office (Državni izvještajni i promičbeni ured—DIPU). ODSLIK had responsibility for the production of films in terms of content, technical aspects and commercial prospects. It also had oversight for the purchase of foreign films and their screening, censorship and the editing of films whether domestic or foreign in agreement with the ministries for the interior and national education and the Ustasha Supervisory Service (Ustaška nadzorna služba—UNS). As well, it issued permits for new cinemas and the production of films. Mikac stressed that the production of film was to be tightly controlled by ODSLIK. “We should not repeat the mistakes of the past when anyone could make a film whenever and wherever they liked without taking measures to secure the right conditions under for film production,” he stressed. According to him, the right conditions consisted of the training of experts, the purchase of technical aids, equipment and devices, and the construction of film studios. “Thus,” he declared, “the state has taken into its hands responsibility for the entire process of the production of Croatian films.” This was something which would not be possible without the acquisition of advanced technical equipment and substantial finance. Private capital was “unimaginable” because businessmen and bankers would want to see a profit from their investment irrespective of the cultural value or social utility of the films and because it contravened the new social cinematic ethos. Instead, Mikac envisaged the state as being the “sole pioneer” of cinema. The centralisation of film was theoretically increased further in January 1942 after a legal statute conferred on DIPU the sole right to purchase films from overseas. While this action prevented the “relentless increase in prices and the speculation” of cinema companies when new foreign films were purchased, it also allowed the state control over which films were being shown. The technical supervision and oversight of cinemas was another key responsibility of ODSLIK. In his study, Mikac wrote with disdain about the neglected status of regional cinemas in the 1930s. By contrast, Mikac vowed that ODSLIK would prioritise the opening of new cinemas in small towns; these would not be “situated in taverns but in dedicated beautiful buildings; cinemas which will serve not only for leisure but will also be centres of education and culture.” Mikac, Tri godine hrvatskoga slikopisa, 23-29, 31. Ever since the creation of the Directorate for Film, officials had been discussing the need for an autonomous cinematic institute. On 19 January 1942 the Ministry for National Education introduced a legal statute announcing the establishment of the Croatian State Cinematic Institute Hrvatski slikopis. This enabled the creation of an institute “full of enthusiasm” which would be financially independent from the state budget and secure from the financial point of view, although its work continued to be overseen by ODSLIK. Despite the rising costs of cinema and increasing demands being placed on Croatian cinema, Mikac argued that the introduction of the law had enabled “fruitful and successful work” and the realisation of anti-commercial cinema culture. Had the law not been introduced, he insisted, it would not have been possible to “subordinate the commercial character of cinema to its more high-minded instincts.” In fact, the income which Hrvatski slikopis derived from its commercial activities funded its productions and educational and cultural projects. Hrvatski slikopis, operating initially under the guidance of DIPU and later the GRP, the Main Directorate for Propaganda (Glavni ravnateljstvo za promičbu) had six divisions, including sections for cinema administration, film production, mobile film and film purchase while another produced the state’s cinematic weekly newsreel, educational and feature films and propaganda features and advertisements. By 1944, Hrvatski slikopis owned three cinemas in Zagreb, Sisak and Banja Luka, the third of which it had renovated with its own resources. Mikac, Tri godine hrvatskoga slikopisa, 32-35. Like many other parts of the state bureaucracy, the complicated structure of Croatian cinema was exacerbated by the numerous changes of name and function, the parallel functions of Hrvatski slikopis and ODSLIK and in the case of Hrvatski slikopis the large number of sections with overlapping competencies. Like many other state agencies, the efficient working of Hrvatski slikopis and ODSLIK was made more challenging by the variety of directorates in which they were located. Since the personnel and perspectives of these parent departments differed sharply, Hrvatski slikopis, in particular, regularly found itself in conflict with not just its own department but other ministries and agencies which shared a common interest in cinema, but very different economic and financial agendas. Personal rivalries, interest groups and diverse outlooks all played a significant role in stymieing the competent administration of the institution. Mikac himself, while a trusted official in the Ustasha state, had never actually been a supporter of the movement or even a nationalist. Formerly, a surrealist writer with the Zenithist artistic group and scriptwriter for the Yugoslav franchise of Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers, as head of the Directorate for Film he appointed a number of young ambitious film-makers, screenwriters, producers, film enthusiasts and interns such as Milan Katić, Branko Marjanović, Branko Blažina and Mladen Prebil, non-ideological technocrats, committed to the pragmatic development of the state film industry. While many of these young cinematic enthusiasts did drive Croatian film forwards, others such as Stjepan Barberić, Božidar Metzger and Franjo Fuis worked clandestinely for the Communist resistance. In Fuis’ case, this involved undertaking a doomed journey by plane to deliver film equipment to the Partisans under the guise of making a film about war operations in the Zagreb region. Škrabalo, Izmedju publike i države, 102-3; Franjo Fuis, Zakon Rieke: osnova sadržaja za veliki hrvatski slikopis, ed. Mladen Pavković (Varaždin: Varteks, 2004), 5. The factionalism of the nascent Croatian film industry resulted in a system of administration which was, by turns, antagonistic and bureaucratic. Public indifference and weekly newsreels If the new national cinema was defined by one achievement it was, Mirko Cerovac argued in his 1944 review of its early pioneering days, the development of the weekly Croatian film weekly (“Hrvatski slikopisni tjednik”). The film weekly had begun transmitting regularly under the title of “Croatia in words and pictures” (“Hrvatski u rieci i sliči”—HURIS) on 28 August 1941. As Cerovac pointed out, it was now considered among the leading newsreels in Europe having produced 120 editions with 1000 scenes or, as he put it, “a thousand events from all regions of Croatia!” Despite the supposedly spontaneous nature of the newsreels, much of the filming was highly planned, with advance notices sent out by Hrvatski slikopis to those who were going to be the subject of filming. Whether they were factory bosses, regional Ustasha camp leaders, commune heads or workers’ representatives, the notice arrived a few days beforehand. Ivo Hrenćević, the owner of a foundry in Klanjac, received just such a notice in May 1942. In it, Mikac curtly informed him that a cameraman would be arriving to film him, his foundry and employees and instructing them to give the cameraman all possible assistance. This was not an offer which could be declined. Mikac to Hrenčević, 27 May 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/8274. Yet there is little doubt that many officials at Hrvatski slikopis were genuinely enthusiastic, as Cerovac was, about what had been achieved through the newsreels. Not only did the newsreel document the rich range of experiences and lives in the new state, but it was hoped that, as a mass form of communication, it would inculcate the citizens with the qualities of industry, self-sacrifice and nationalism required to become Ustasha subjects. Just as importantly though, the newsreel demonstrated to the outside world how the lives of the new state’s citizens were being refashioned and modernised. As Cerovac put it, the construction of Croatian cinema was a visible sign to the rest of the world that “we Croats don’t belong in the ranks of those few European nations which intellectually or spiritually have not developed far enough to be able to provide the precious gift of modern culture and civilisation that is cinema.” Cinema was not only an important part of the national economy, he added, but “one of the most powerful means of the education of the widest classes in society, a document of its time and, as such, a constant mirror of the militant strength and creative power of the Croatian nation through the past three years because the film lense has honestly set down and preserved for all time everything valuable and important that took place among us.” Cerovac, “Tri godine hrvatskoga slikopisa,” Hrvatski slikopis 3, no. 5 (1 May 1944): 3. In a context of initially modest cinematic resources, Cerovac argued that the weekly film newsreel constituted both an ideal kind of film for an embryonic national cinema—simple, cheap and immediate—and a necessary testing ground without which the later triumphs of Croatian cinema could not have been achieved. As such, it represented the Croatian will to succeed against all odds. “If our people in the Hrvatski slikopis institute had said: ‘We don’t have the necessary technical means nor can we buy them right now so we can’t create anything’ we would not now have had the film Lisinski nor our short films or, indeed, our weekly newsreel. We would have remained in the order of those three to four most isolated European countries which don’t have a permanent film industry. But lazybones and cowards give up in the face of difficulties, not those who have the will, inclination and decisiveness for work.”Newsreels, then, not only captured the festivals and events of the Ustasha state but embodied its values too. Cerovac, “Tri godine hrvatskoga slikopisa,” 3. Film Institute officials proclaimed the founding of HURIS as a symbol of the modernity of the new state, an achievement which, despite the limited resources at its disposal, demonstrated that Croatia had joined the ranks of technologically and culturally-progressive societies represented by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, departing the Balkan backwardness and cultural darkness of the former Yugoslavia for good. Hrvatski slikopis pointed out in September 1943 somewhat defensively that less than four months after the establishment of the new state, Croatia had its own cinematic weekly news reel, the best evidence, it claimed, of the importance of cinema as ‘an educational, entertainment, information and propaganda tool’ in the Ustasha state. It pointed out that from August 1941 until the time of writing, there had been 85 editions even if, it added waspishly, the public was not be aware of the “effort and difficulty” which had gone into the making of each individual edition. This was only known by those who “had the opportunity at least to peer into these more than anonymous and modest rooms in which – sometimes through the entire night – they worked just so that the new edition could come out on time and appear on Saturday evenings at the premier cinemas in Zagreb.” Compare this with the conditions those producing the LUCE and UFA newsreels worked in, it exclaimed: “large, light, airy and comfortable studios with advanced technology” on side and on the other HURIS accommodated in “small rooms, former bathrooms and pantries where one could hardly move and the devices that we had to use had already been thrown in the trash can in other countries.” Despite all this, in its external appearance the newsreel betrayed no trace of the conditions in which it had been made but, on the contrary, was equal to German and Italian newsreels produced in far more ideal circumstances. As well as being shown at the Venice Biennale, Hrvatski slikopis emphasised that HURIS had been screened in Rome, Berlin, Bucharest and other international cities “surely never giving any foreign experts cause to think: ‘Ah, this is something primitive, amateurish.’ On the contrary, in this field we presented ourselves as a young state, still undeveloped perhaps, but with a serious film industry.” ‘Još nešto o našem domaćem slikopisnom tjedniku,’ Hrvatski slikopis 11, no. 9 (1 September 1943): 4. Despite the growing number of HURIS newsreels and the bold assertions by Hrvatski slikopis that in recent months the film institute had provided the most modern equipment and comfortable rooms for the technical production of contemporary newsreels, the journal nonetheless fretted that ordinary members of the public did not feel engaged by or interested in the newsreels either because they were not aware of its significance and importance or did not feel it was really “Croatian.” Hrvatski slikopis aimed to counter these perceptions. It argued that the medium of the newsreel was an equivalent to radio and newspaper, but it could be more powerful than both because it appealed to the eye and the ear at the same time and thus had far more influence, Hrvatski slikopis insisted. It illustrated this point with the example of an art museum director in Zagreb who pointed out that although newspapers had written frequently about his museum and state radio had mentioned it on numerous occasions, there had been few visitors and the public had only begun to show interest in his museum when it was shown on newsreels. “When this museum was shown for the first time in the film newsreel, the very next day—even though it was a Sunday and the museum was closed—more people came to look around than in the previous months combined. And they had all become interested because of the film newsreel!” This illustrative story, the journal concluded, showed the importance of HURIS. It was also important to reassure the public that despite the use of film-making technology from Germany and Italy, it was untrue, as many Croatian cinema goers assumed when they looked at the HURIS reels, that they were “not our own work, but foreign.” This was “completely wrong,” it explained: only the equipment came from overseas; the filming of images, sound recording, mixing and other production, on the other hand, was carried out by “our national experts here in Zagreb”; none of the production processes were completed overseas. It was something “which has been completely developed in our state, which has been developed from the beginning to the end by our people inside our state...and, as the name suggests, shows our most important political, cultural, economic, sporting and other events and which, in the light of day, carries our unknown cultural heritage. Thus our Croatian newsreel deserves the nickname that it widely carries: the eyes and ears of the world.” ‘Još nešto o našem domaćem slikopisnom tjedniku,’ 4. There were also concerns that because the vast majority of ordinary Croatians, especially outside the major towns, did not visit the cinema they were not getting the chance to become acquainted with the state’s achievements. According to a critical editorial in the Sarajevo newspaper Novi list in February 1944, the fact that the newsreels were played before each feature-film screening was not much use if most citizens did not attend. True, Novi list conceded, the newsreels were the best evidence of the progress of the Croatian film industry in the past three years “screened daily at the beginning of every cinematic presentation in our Sarajevo cinemas.” Nevertheless, while some cinema owners had done their best to draw attention to these presentations, the truth was there was a lack of promotion and advertising. Thus “while romantic and adventure films are frequently advertised, at the moment many valuable and fascinating cinematic weekly reviews remain unnoticed by the wider general public which very rarely attends film presentations.” The solution, it argued, was for the weekly newsreel to be advertised widely so that citizens were not deprived of the incredible images and experiences it captured. Film reporters and investigators from Hrvatski slikopis, Novi list pointed out, had “in the past year circumvented all the Croatian regions which abound with historical landmarks of incalculable cultural worth. They have explored with their cameras every part of our Croatian homeland which is full of romanticism and not the slightest detail has escaped their eyes. On the celluloid screen, this has awakened the interest of the general and foreign public. They have visited every village and town, the unconquerable towers of Croatdom and Ustashaism in which are located and concealed so many details which until now have not been known to the Croatian public.” “Kako naš domaći slikopisni tjednik prima hrvatska pokrajina,” Novi list, 14 January 1944. The fact that the weekly cinematic newsreel was screened prior to every feature film led Novi list to two conclusions. First, not enough people were choosing to watch films. More effective advertising of these newsreels would encourage citizens ordinarily alienated by the superficial image of movies to visit the cinema in order to see themselves or regions familiar to them on the big screen. Over time, they would begin regularly visiting the cinema and so gain the modern tastes and values which film inculcated citizens with in addition to cultural enlightenment. For those who did frequent the cinema, better-targeted advertising would ensure that the newsreels “were seen by many more of our citizens who will get to know the warriors and national heroes bravely defending national liberation and state independence on the battlefield with guns in their hands.” Thus they could serve an important propaganda function. Moreover, if the end result was more ordinary people visiting the cinema, since the newsreels also covered a range of international events, it would increase not just the size of the audience but expand their worldview too, bringing them into contact with images and information which “unwind sometimes in closed rooms and sometimes in places far outside the regions of our narrow homeland.” “Kako naš domaći slikopisni tjednik prima hrvatska pokrajina.” Croatian cinema as a new moral and racial economy Campaigns of racial purification and moral rebirth represented central elements in the remaking of everyday attitudes and life. As in all other branches of economic life in the new state, the removal of Serbs, Jews and all other “undesired elements” was a prerequisite for the construction of a healthy anti-capitalist culture, in this case a cinematic one. Since Jews and Serbs were associated not just with racial inferiority but a range of moral vices such as cosmopolitanism, materialism and capitalism, the liquidation of Serb, Jewish and foreign influence in film represented the transformation of film into a new social and moral economy. In an editorial of May 1942 in Hrvatski slikopis Mikac explained what this meant. In the past, he wrote, cinema had been based exclusively on commercial and “immoral ‘principles’ which Jewish plutocrats imposed on cinematic production.” These consumerist and degenerate moral values had been destroyed. In place of the old commercial values, a new cinematic culture was emerging which extolled “a new spirit and order in the world.” It promoted collaboration between nations and spread education and culture. As part of the destruction of free market principles, not only had the dominant Jewish influence been removed, Mikac explained; institutions “which produced and showed provocative films were banned from all work.” Mikac, “Početci hrvatskog slikopisa,” 1. His colleague Cerovac emphasised that the new social practices underpinning the construction of a national cinema needed to be combined with new moral guidelines too. Writing on the state’s first anniversary in April 1942, he pointed out that only a year previously cinema had been considered as a means of “personal enrichment by certain individuals” of “non-Aryan origin” or a form of mindless “entertainment for the wider national public.” The establishment of the Ustasha state meant that such materialistic thinking had come to an end. Instead, cinema would be required to fulfil elevated tasks in the service of national life, attuned to Ustasha principles. One of the film directorate’s earliest initiatives was to ensure that cinema advertisements were brought into line with the new cultural orthodoxies. Extravagance and excitement was to be substituted for simplicity, seriousness and the “strictest business morals” which had been “so neglected and distorted” in interwar Yugoslavia. Within its first few weeks, the directorate had published an order stating that film advertisements served “neither the honour of the film industry or cinema” and were “with few exceptions, frivolous, inaccurate and often plain lies.” Relying on a low level of perception among cinema goers, they had “seduced the public with indecent text and images which sometimes had barely any connection with the film.” Such “frivolous dishonourable” practices must immediately cease. The purpose of film advertising, he insisted, was not to swindle but “draw the attention of the public to certain films, pointing out their main features and appeal.” As a result, only “serious and exemplary” adverts would be permitted and were restricted to pointing out the characteristics, contents and plot of the films insofar as the films were “in the spirit of the new age.” Mirko Cerovac, “Slikopis (film) u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Hrvatska smotra 10, nos. 3-4 (March-April 1942): 254-55. By contrast, cinema goers were provided with details of the film’s leading actors and actresses, director and details of other members of the production cast only if the directorate considered it crucial to audiences reaching an informed decision about the quality of the film. The directorate considered the choice of advertising image crucial since, it noted, in the past images had consciously appealed to the “baser instincts” of the public. It decreed that images had to avoid “excess and weirdness” and it pointed out to production companies that in the new state film assumed a worthy place “in the service of the Croatian people and the state” and was not therefore an ordinary business. On the contrary, film had the task of influencing the public “in a positive and not destructive way” and, as a result, had to be seen “from the point of view of the community and not the narrow individual point of view.” Cerovac, “Slikopis (film) u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” 254-55. The directorate was not content to address only immoral practices in advertising since it believed that it was a symptom of wider depravity in an industry characterised by distorted ethics. Ironically, while cinematic characters chattered about morals on the basis of “the superficial understanding of Hollywood scriptwriters,” in the film business, “a special kind of ‘film morality’ was asserted which differentiated itself in every respect from the morals on the big screen and which shared only a name with authentic morals,” Cerovac complained. He pointed out that this lack of morality extended to the corrupt buying and selling of films, a practice informed by the idea that the film industry and cinema were just another form of commerce. Rather than being “the pride of civilisation and the most powerful weapon in the service of education,” cinema had become “a business of the most squalid kind.” While film institutes tricked cinematographers, cinematographers in turn swindled film institutes and, as a result, they acted as two enemy camps in which “disharmony, factionalism and back stabbing” ruled rather than working together as one camp serving the nation. For their part, cinema owners inflated prices, tried to outwit business rivals and frequently inflicted mediocre films on the cinema-going public. Meanwhile, film companies damaged the business of cinema owners and, where they could, cinema owners damaged film companies as well as the state and their patrons. Thus, while shadows served to flatter the actor on the screen, the real man outside the celluloid fantasy was swindled in the most “shameless” way and, as Cerovac observed, “Jewish plutocrats in their skyscrapers weaved threads with which they entranced the whole world, including the Croatian man.” Thankfully, he announced that state cinematic culture had freed itself from these inequities. “Film and cinema have already been liberated from the control of unscrupulous businessmen and dark speculators and placed in the service of the state and the people. International profiteering will cease. Poorly-structured competition will come to an end. In the Independent State of Croatia film will take the place that belongs to it as a powerful instrument of education. The film and cinematographic business liberated from all damaging influences will be reorganised at its root.” This new structure aimed to ensure not just that the film industry was in harmony with Ustasha principles, but that it was based on the interests and preferences of the hardworking cinema-going citizen. Cerovac, “Slikopis (film) u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” 256-7. As part of the transformation of cinematic culture, throughout 1941 and early 1942 the directorate and then ODSLIK in its turn initiated the nationalisation of the major Hollywood film company franchises. These were liquidated in collaboration with the Ministry for Trade, Industry and Handicrafts. British films had been banned by the directorate immediately after it was created and American films in December 1941 following its entry into the war while the major American film studio distribution companies had quickly been placed under the control of commissioners appointed by the State Secretariat for Enlightenment. Nonetheless, it was not until the beginning of 1942 that the franchise companies themselves were liquidated and their remaining assets transferred to DIPU and ODSLIK. ODSLIK to the Ministry for Trade, Industry and Handicrafts, 7 February 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/2117. The liquidation of “enemy” Anglo-American film companies was only one aspect of the nationalisation process, however. A far more wide-reaching programme involved the purification of cinema from all Serb and Jewish influence and involvement. One of the first initiatives of the Directorate for Film had been the appointment of commissioners to administer the cinemas appropriated from their Serb and Jewish owners. The commissioners represented a wide cross section of both the party and state bureaucracy and included businessmen, office workers and advisers in the film directorate. Nevertheless, the majority were already involved in the film industry as owners or employees of American film franchises or Croatian distribution firms. One of the first commissioners appointed was Mato Kovačević, the secretary of the SPHN, a radical workers’ organisation founded in the late 1930s to defend workers’ conditions, agitate for a centrally-planned national economy in place of “Jewish capital” and imbue Croatian workers with an ideological consciousness so that they could resist “anti-national influences.” Unsurprisingly, as Kovačević revealed to Novi list in May 1941, some of its members had “actively participated in the Ustasha revolution” and were enthusiastic about the new state’s radical “nationalist and social” values.” In fact, some of its leading young activists such as Mirko Bilić and Zdravko Belamarić had since become spokesmen for Ustasha worker organisations, journals and cultural societies. U., “SHPN energično nastavlja s radom,” (interview with Mato Kovačević), Novi list, 13 May 1941. Simultaneously, on the suggestion of the Department for Social Care, the health minister Ivo Petrić had appointed him commissioner with responsibility for regulating relations between cinema owners and employees in Zagreb. Since Kovačević had been a labor dispute specialist in the 1930s and there was already a section for cinematographic operators and ticket office sellers in the SHPN his appointment, according to Novi list, was welcomed by employees with “open arms.” One of Kovačevic’s key tasks was the signing of collective agreements demarcating labor relations, pay, vacation and other working conditions. From the beginning then the appropriation of Serb and Jewish cinemas—like the wider national revolution—was defined as a question of social justice and collective worker’s rights in which worker exploitation and capitalist practices would be swept away as much as unwanted racial and national enemies. “Povjerenik g. M. Kovačević ima regulirati radne odnose u svim zagrebačkom kinopoduzeća,” Novi list, 27 June 1941. In the case of Serb and Jewish-owned cinemas in more remote regions, by contrast, commissioners tended to be drawn from among local party activists, students, youth members and workers either because local Ustasha councils and communes had their own processes or because there was no one qualified to act as a commissioner. In some instances, this meant that commissioners seemed completely at a loss to know what was required of them as was the case with the commissioner appointed to run Jovan Bakić’s cinema in Livno. Directorate for Film list of commissioners for cinemas in Zagreb to NARGOS, 2 May 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/14/41; reference for Ivan Oršanić from NARGOS to the State Secretariat for Propaganda, 6 June 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/414; reference for Marijan Korečić from Mikac to State Secretariat for Propaganda, 20 June 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/554-1941; letter from the commissioner of Cinema Europa in Livno to the Office for Economic Renewal, 1 July 1941. In other cases, film agency officials struggled to gather information on the activities of regional commissioners. See e.g. Mikac to Stjepan Anić, 21 February 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 23.237/2968/42. At its most extreme, it resulted in the appointment of candidates judged entirely unsuitable to be commissioners. Sometimes, these were appointed by the State Directorate for Economic Regeneration (Državni ravnateljstvo za gospodarskog ponovo—DGRP) which was in competition with the film directorate for the control of the cinemas. This rivalry sometimes led the DGRP to arbitrarily replace commissioners appointed by the directorate. On 1 August 1941, for example, Mikac sent a letter to the State Secretariat for Propaganda complaining that the DGRP had substituted “without any kind of justification” the commissioner of Cinema Urania in Zagreb Fran Grlanić barely a week after his appointment with the “amateur” Slavko Budić. He pointed out, too, that commissioners could, “in principle,” only be appointed by the film directorate. Mikac to the State Secretariat for Propaganda, 1 August 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/872-1941. Mikac and his officials also expressed concern about the background and qualifications of those seeking to purchase nationalised cinemas. In a letter of January 1942 to the workers’ co-operative Hrvatska radiša explaining why ODSLIK could not give its support to its plan to sell its cinema, he pointed out that in the proposed sale it was not clear who was intending to buy the cinema and whether they possessed the necessary expertise. It was of crucial importance for ODSLIK, he stressed, that those running cinemas had professional qualifications. “From the former Yugoslavia,” he explained, “we inherited a number of cinema owners who did not possess sufficient qualifications to manage cinemas because in those days the job of cinema manager was an ordinary commercial job. Since these businesses have been placed in the sphere of state propaganda and have to serve educational and propaganda aims, we must be careful about whom these businesses are sold to.” He reminded the co-operative that, at that precise moment, ODSLIK and the DGRP were implementing the liquidation of American and Jewish companies. This would result in a significant number of expert professionals remaining without work. In order to ensure that cinemas were managed by mindsets in tune with Croatian cinema’s anti-commercial values, it was the intention of the film directorate to find among them candidates for the purchase of Jewish and Serb cinemas. As well, Mikac pointed out that there were cases where “in the current war situation individual cinemas had to be closed or the owner was injured in the war. These people must be given priority in the purchase of Jewish and Serb cinemas.” ODSLIK would therefore be unable to come to a decision about the sale of the co-operative’s cinema until it had sent him more information about the prospective buyer. Mikac to Hrvatska radiša, 7 January 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/228. Despite the idealistic claims of the nationalisation programme, its fundamentally acquisitive nature was made clear in a report by Mikac in September 1942 to the Office for Nationalisation of Assets (Ured za podržavljeni imetak—UPIME) in which he discussed the fate of a number of Jewish and Serb-owned cinemas. The report illustrated how far those agencies tasked with leading the nationalisation programme viewed their work in pragmatic terms. Mikac’s report, despite the stated anti-capitalist principles which animated the Croatian Film Institute, was characterised by a highly commercial assessment of the amount of revenue which could be generated by the sale and use of assets belonging to absent Serb and Jewish owners. Even the smallest assets such single film projectors were deemed suitable for nationalisation. In contrast to the careful detail of the inventories, nothing was said about the fate of the owners who were reduced to their essentialist racial identity: “expelled Serb Lazar Rakijaš” and “the Jew Katić.” Mikac to UPIME, 23 September 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/15131. The nationalisation of cinemas was a slow process. In part, this was connected to the number of agencies involved in nationalisation, rivalry between different departments and disagreement about what to do with assets at both the institutional and individual level. The tensions between different agencies involved in the nationalisation and liquidation of Jewish and Serb property was obvious in the rivalry between the DGRP and ODSLIK. In a letter to the head of Hrvatska radiša about the proposed sale of its cinema—apparently already agreed with the DGRP—the head of DIPU Rieger had warned the co-operative that it needed to send every potential application for the taking over of Jewish and Serb cinemas to DIPU as it had ultimate oversight for ensuring that confiscated property ended up in “Croatian hands.” Vilko Rieger to Hrvatska radiša, 2 January 1943, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27. 237/40192. Rieger’s instruction reflected wider concerns in DIPU and ODSLIK at the increasing tendency of the DGRP to lead the liquidation of Jewish and Serb cinemas on the basis that this was, like such programmes of nationalisation, an economic issue; by contrast, Mikac and Rieger saw it as a cultural one in which the cinematic expertise of DIPU and ODSLIK should take precedence over the economic knowledge of the DGRP. The conflict between these two agencies went back as far as June 1941 when, as head of the film directorate, Mikac began complaining about the interference of the Ministry for National Economy (Ministarstvo narodnog gospodarstvu—NARGOS), the forerunner of the DGRP to the State Secretariat for Propaganda. In a report, he related a visit from representatives of the Society of Cinema Owners in Zagreb. “They arrived very agitated and worried because they had heard that the Independent State of Croatia intended, in a period of two days, to take over Zagreb cinemas. I answered that I knew nothing about this and they told me that they were going to visit [Vladimir] Košak and [Drago] Šulterer,” both of whom were officials in NARGOS. For Mikac this event was emblematic of a wider problem and in the light of “various alarming stories” about Zagreb cinemas, he asked for an investigation to establish what the real situation in Zagreb’s cinemas was because it appeared that NARGOS “has taken various matters into its own hands, not informing the State Secretariat for Propaganda, and frequently placing me in an uncomfortable situation so that I am not able to give any information about the real state of affairs and cannot provide answers to people who come to me for advice.” Mikac to State Secretariat for Propaganda, 23 June 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/959. The zealous attitude of NARGOS also led it to arbitrarily confiscate cinemas from owners it assumed were Jewish and Serb even in cases where this was in question. On 18 June 1941, for instance, Mikac complained to the secretariat that officials from NARGOS had attempted to purchase Cinema Urania which belonged to Gita Pelossy. This was despite the fact there was no commissioner appointed to the cinema and nor had the owner ever expressed a wish to sell. According to Pelossy’s account, after the NARGOS official found the owner was not there, he left her a message instructing her to come to a specific address in four hours. “When I tracked down the official Barić,” she recalled, “he asked me for information about my nationality, religion and informed me that the state was going to take the ownership of all cinemas into its hands. To my question about why I was being affected when I am an Aryan woman, a Croatian woman, he replied that the state needed the cinema for propaganda. Then, as I recall, Dr Barić announced to me that I would have to hand over the cinema this Sunday because he was travelling to Rome and everything had to be settled by then.” Mikac protested that NARGOS was interfering in areas that were the responsibility of the film directorate. The state purchasing of cinemas by the state needed caution and a system; the actions of NARGOS were, by contrast, “inconvenient and even damaging.” Cinema was a “noble” industry which should be led by experts. This especially needed to be taken into account in the current time “when great difficulties exist with obtaining films and it is virtually impossible to get good new films. Apart from this, there is the fate of cinema workers whose existence could be threatened by mediocre management.” In any case, he concluded, NARGOS was reckless in purchasing cinemas such as Urania which had disastrous business models and “enormous” debts. Mikac to State Secretariat for Propaganda, 18 June 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/527/1941; letter from Gita Pelossy to Directorate for Film, 17 June 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/523. Added to this, Mikac continued, NARGOS officials were interfering in the payments awarded to cinema commissioners. “I should mention,” he wrote, “that NARGOS has, against the advice of this directorate, ordered an incredibly small bursary for film company commissioners. Only today I read the order sent to Vladimir Benković, the commissioner for Fox Films, which stipulated a monthly bursary of 1000 dinars for him. However, one must take into account that Mr Benković and the other commissioners are giving up their free time which they should be spending in the businesses in which they are employed and, instead, are being reproached by their bosses.” Bearing all this in mind, it was in the interests of the state if NARGOS did not act unilaterally, but instead consulted the film directorate. In fact, it would be best, he added crisply, if the State Secretariat for Propaganda “took responsibility for all questions related to cinema and films as envisaged in the legal statute of the Directorate for Film.” Mikac to the State Secretariat for Propaganda, 18 June 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/527/1941. In fact, it was only in October 1942 that the outline of an agreement was reached between ODSLIK and UPIME. See Mikac, “Podržavljenje slikokaza,” 24 October 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 23.237/15775. A few weeks later NARGOS, nevertheless, placed Cinema Urania under its control. The commissioner appointed to Cinema Urania acted ruthlessly to eradicate Jewish and Serb influence both in the ownership and management of the cinema; one of the first acts undertaken by the newly-appointed commissioner was the purging and purification of the cinema from Jewish and Serb employees as well as Croatian employees suspected of having “Yugoslav” or seditious tendencies. An Ustasha police investigation of 2 June had already found that Cinema Urania was infested with undesirable employees. It noted that the plans of NARGOS for the reorganisation of the cinema had revealed the extent of Serb employment: as well as the “suspicious” Savo Marić, the deputy manager, who lived in Streljački Street with his “concubine” Elza Milecher there was Nenad Vukelić, the film operator, and Žarko Stupar, the night watchman, “both of the Serb Orthodox religion who, according to the new movement in our state, are not desired. In general, this cinema is of doubtful provenance and it appears that Jewish capital stands behind it.” The police report observed that the owner Pelossy, a former manicurist, had lived for many years in concubinage with “a notorious Jew Gutman/ Godmen, an Englishman who has now fled.” In addition to the racially undesirable employees, the chief manager of the cinema was a retired teacher Eugen Dabac, an emphatic “integral Yugoslav” who “has always been and still is to be found in the company of Serb societies and Serb officers.” Other cinema employees confirmed that Dabac “placed his trust only in Marić and the other Serb employees in this cinema while he harasses the others.” While the cinema had ten Roman Catholic employees, including two ticket sellers, they were “neglected.” As such, the cinema and its employees were, for NARGOS, a representative example of everything that was disreputable in the current structure of Croatian cinema and needed to be purified in order to construct a truly national culture. Mato Kovačević, the new commissioner, carried out the purging of the cinema with ruthless efficiency. On 2 July 1941, ODSLIK reported to the Ustasha police that Kovačević had already dismissed from service all “undesirable employees,” informing the secretariat that “the employees of the Cinema Urania Savo Marić, Nenad Vukelić, Žarko Stupar and Eugen Dabac have been dismissed from service and no longer work in this business.” State Secretariat for Propaganda to the Ustasha police, 2 July 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/1107/41. While the nationalisation of their cinemas represented for urban Serbs and Jews part of a campaign of economic terror against them, in some regions authorities did not carry out the expropriation of Jewish cinemas as rigorously as they should and that as the zealousness of the programme of economic regeneration dissipated, some “national enemies” did attempt to reclaim their former assets. In January 1942, for example, ODSLIK wrote to the head of the Hum region asking him to clarify the accusations by the local male Ustasha Youth camp and the former commissioner of the Cinema Corso that it was “once again in the hands of the baptised Jew Kaće Jovanović.” Since it was “in the interests of state prosperity that this cinema is in trustworthy hands,” this clearly excluded property being returned to Jews. Some dismissed Serb employees also successfully appealed. One of these was Savo Marić who, just one month after being sacked as Urania’s deputy manager and banned from working in Croatian cinemas, submitted an appeal requesting reinstatement. In his letter, accompanied by affidavits from Ustasha officials including one from Ivan Oršanić, a policy adviser at the directorate and cinema commissioner, he asked for the decision to be overturned. This was on the basis not only of his recent conversion to Catholicism, but because he had “permanently collaborated with the Croatian people” in its struggle for liberation, considering himself a Croat despite his Orthodox upbringing. While he was not permitted to return to the Urania, the ban on working at other cinemas was revoked on condition his state sector eligiblity was cleared by GUS personnel office. However, these examples were almost certainly the exception rather than the rule. ODSLIK to the leader of Hum, 9 January 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/427; Marić to Directorate for Film, 16 August 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/921; State Secretariat for Propaganda to Mikac, 28 August 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/2709. Elsewhere, the liquidation of Serb and Jewish cinemas fired the idealism of the movement’s supporters who saw in it evidence of a wider programme of social mobility and socioeconomic transformation. Ordinary members of the public as well as professional, cultural and educational organisations submitted applications to acquire confiscated cinemas. On 17 June 1941, Slavko Furdek and the novelist Zlatko Milković, both officials in the Educational Institute, wrote to the Ministry for Religion and Education requesting the use of Cinema Europa for “educational and cultural aims which would serve primarily the contemporary education of the entire Croatian youth.” They pointed out that not one cinema in Zagreb was currently being used for this extremely important purpose. The teachers intended to dedicate their work in the framework of European cultural values “to imbuing our youth with a new life, youth which, unfortunately, in recent years has been poisoned with degenerate films with altogether no artistic value, placing it on the wrong path and making it complicit in its own downfall.” The Educational Institute, with high-school teachers at its head and excellent teachers, intended to pay careful attention to films shown to youth. Before the screening of films about cultural subjects, it planned to hold film lectures, from time to time organising children’s concerts and in this way “increasing further the already-great love for beautiful art and beauty.” Milković and Furdek pointed out that national cinema was still in the hands of Serbs and Jews who “are working against the spirit of the Croatian people and the Croatian Ustasha movement and, what is more, against the spirit of the Poglavnik’s order that Jews and Serbs may not have any role in the construction of Croatian culture.” Milković and Furdek to the Ministry for Religion and Education, 17 June 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/15401. Mobile cinema and the education of the masses The idea of film as a vehicle of cultural enlightenment was central to the vision of Croatian cinema’s architects. In particular, they believed that film should play a key role in educating and modernising the peasant masses in the countryside; additionally, they hoped that through indoctrination cinema would mobilise peasant support for the Ustasha movement. More fundamentally, though, mobile cinema’s new reels, documentaries and cultural films would expose peasants to Ustasha values and, in publicising the achievements of the state and the movement, foster a spirit of solidarity, thereby reducing the social division between the city and the village. But since many of the more remote villages lacked access to electrification or even power generation, never mind cinema, how was this to be achieved? The answer was the establishment of a mobile cinema unit which would bring films to the most inaccessible regions of the state. Looking back in May 1942 Hrvatski slikopis recalled the challenge this had represented: “Although it is the twentieth century, a century of technology which has already become an important part of our lives, our villages lived the lives of their ancestors. It was not until the establishment of a liberated state that they could feel the gift of contemporaneity.” The creation of the mobile film section then allowed the state to bring films to remote regions so that its citizens could see “world and domestic events of historical importance on the screen.” This task, however simple it might look in a period of normality, presented, according to Hrvatski slikopis, “great difficulties in this extraordinary era.” Nonetheless, in March of that year, officials in the Croatian Film Institute embarked on educational work in villages such as Vrbovac, Zlatar, Vinica and Marija Bistrica among others and immediately it was clear to see the impact on ordinary villagers: “One needed to witness the delight on the faces of the peasants when they looked at the screen and heard the Poglavnik and other high officials of their state as well as learning about events in the outside world. Ordinary folk could not find enough words of thanks for those who had enabled them to have such great satisfaction.” As well as an educational function, the mobile film section possessed important propaganda value, something Hrvatski slikopis acknowledged: “When we recognise the great value of this work, we cannot help but warmly thank all those who have a lesser or greater role in this because we are conscious how important it is in the current time to offer our rural population truthful facts about world events.” “Prosvjetni slikopis u narodu,” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 1 (15 May 1942): 5. Irrespective of the priority placed on mobile film, the resources of the mobile film section were initially modest. In May 1942, for instance, the section only possessed two vans equipped to present films and four generators to enable films to be shown in localities without electricity; Mikac wrote hopefully that it was anticipating the arrival of seven more vans from Germany, one of which would allow the section to show films in the open air enabling “many thousands of people to see films.” In addition, some of the future vans were equipped with their own generators so that films could be shown in regions where there was no electricity supply. This meant, Mikac pointed out, that “the most far-flung regions of our homeland will benefit from the wonderful invention that film is.” Mikac, “Početci hrvatskog slikopis,” Hrvatski slikopis 2: no. 1 (15 May 1942): 1. By June 1942 Hrvatski narod, however, was claiming that no other state had invested as much effort in the spreading of education and culture in the villages as the Ustasha state had. As a result of this “excellent means of propaganda” which carried education to the most remote village, the state illustrated its “great concern for our village and the desire that it comes closer to the city and the world outside its borders.” “Putujući slikokaz u selu koje nema električnu struju,” Hrvatski narod, 30 June 1942. By July the new vans had arrived. According to a feature in Hrvatski list, the mobile film vans had their own generator, loud speakers and audio sound and were ideal for villages without electricity: “The apparatus is modern, the sound is excellent and the pictures are clear,” it declared confidently. Thus the most “far-flung villages have the opportunity in their locality, in their village, to see films for the first time and, in this way, gain a picture of today’s struggle for a better future for the whole of humanity.” Great care, the newspaper explained, was taken in the kinds of films shown to peasants; only films of the highest quality were screened: propaganda, war and feature films to be sure but also films which addressed the contemporary problems of the peasant economy and economic life. As a result, the peasants welcomed mobile cinema with great happiness since “after twenty-odd years, education and learning have finally come to their villages. Many notes of appreciation testify that in cinema the peasant has found an answer to all those questions that troubled him in the long years of ignorance and darkness.” Moreover, the peasant had been presented with an extraordinary impression of cinema’s possibilities. “Until today he had only heard about cinema, told about it by relatives and neighbours who had been to the city and watched it. He never dreamed that one day he would enjoy ‘these pictures about which people talk’ in his liberated independent state and see faraway lands and battlefields where his Croatian brothers fight.” The weekly newsreels were of particular interest. Seeing images of soldiers on the Eastern Front or in North Africa, he was able to view things he had only heard about from older villagers who had already been to war. This helped to shape his mind, Hrvatski list explained, in the correct ideological direction. “The contemporary weaponry and arms of friendly states and the discipline and bravery of our army: all of this has provoked reverent amazement in them. In these pictures, the Croatian peasant has seen his homeland, his Poglavnik and his great concern for the welfare of the Croat people. It has also been confirmed to him that there are people who are mercenaries, who provoke unrest and quarrels among small nations, who have malign and corrupted souls.” “Slikopis u hrvatskom narodu,” Hrvatski list, 30 July 1941. While an important aspect of the work of the mobile film unit involved promoting education and cultural enlightenment in the village, the films shown to ordinary workers and peasants were not just dependent on their quality but also their content: censorship from the centre dictated that what was shown often differed from what was shown in the city. In fact, the film institute argued that there was no contradiction between the screening of feature-length films exclusively in cities and the type of short films shown in remote locations since the latter would “penetrate” into the “smallest and most poverty-stricken villages” more easily and play their role in the education of the masses. By July 1943, Hrvatski slikopis was claiming rather defensively that, in partnership with the film company Svjetloton, the mobile unit had already offered “thousands and thousands of peasants who had perhaps reached old age without ever seeing a film the opportunity to become acquainted with the fruits of European civilization” through short films. “Today,” it added, “we have access to technical equipment, especially vans and generators, that enable the holding of short film screenings in all parts of the country and even in those places far removed from modern transport links and in such places where there are no sources of electricity.” In Its reasoning, Hrvatski slikopis provided technical explanations why short documentaries and cultural films were suitable for mobile cinema: “In a country as mountainous and wooded as Croatia, in which not even the most basic transport have been developed, the easy transmission and simple handling of such short films represents the enduring progress and success of short films. Short films are the means by which European, educated and healthy beliefs in the most far-flung and inaccessible regions can be spread, regions in which normally cinema would not penetrate.” “Putujući slikokazi uzkog slikopisa u Hrvatskoj,” Hrvatski slikopis 11, no. 7 (1 July 1943): 19-20. In another defence of the choice of films screened by the mobile unit, Kazimir Vrljčak, a young official at the film institute, emphasised the dual role cultural films, in particular, played as a driver of enlightenment and propaganda. “Cultural films,” a common feature of cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, were short documentaries and docudramas depicting some aspect of artistic, social or economic life. According to the standard format, they were always shown before the main feature. The establishment of the Ustasha state, he argued, meant the transformation of the nation’s entire cultural life. Cinema especially had been given “new directions and new possibilities for work in incomparably healthier and better circumstances than before.” As a result of the changed conditions and expanded opportunities for cultural films, two things were clear. First, the production of cultural films had stopped the involvement in the film industry of “various unworthy anti-Croatian elements which until then had enjoyed the dominant say in film questions.” Also, since these films were financed and co-ordinated directly by state institutions, the industry had been liberated from the “environment of those who saw everything, not least cultural films, through the lense of profit.” As a result of the commercial ethos, even “the most dubious productions” had been given the title of cultural film despite the fact that the producers of such films “consciously and unconsciously in their work were led to ideas and desires which at their root clashed with the Croatian man’s understanding of life and the most sacred traditions of the Croatian nation.” For the future of the cultural film in Croatia, then, “happy and wide horizons” were opening. The ideological purging of cultural films did not imply that this genre of film was narrow. On the contrary, he insisted, cultural films could incorporate all sorts of educational, scientific and documentary films about medicine, hygiene and racial biology, social policy and expeditions. Yet while cultural films in the state would soon enjoy “almost unlimited possibilities for development,” Vrljčak argued that they played a special role in “raising the cultural levels of all our national classes.” In this sense, the cultural film had the same task in the villages as elsewhere: it was to “open new horizons and elevate the intellectual enlightenment of the individual milieu. In an interesting and easygoing way it must acquaint the widest layers of society with worthy and virtuous thoughts, screening scientific and cultural work so that the screenings never lose their attraction irrespective of how complex or little known the subject matter of them is.” Kazimir Vrljčak, “Hrvatski prosvjetni slikopis,” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 1 (15 May 1942): 4. Nonetheless, Vrljčak insisted that cultural films needed to serve an ideological purpose and educate “in the intellectual and spiritual sense of the word.” Cultural films must ensure that they were Croatian “both in their contents and intentions” so that they provided “a detailed review of our entire cultural, economic, social and political essence and an encyclopaedia of our history and our contemporary life, our people and our land, all our ethnographic richness and our natural beauty.” As such, they should represent a “real and complete mirror of the Croatian name from the first emergence of national cultural and political life through the centuries until today.” When, he added, Croatian cultural film incorporated “all the political and cultural monuments of our bloody and celebrated past, a witness of the splendour of the glory, strength and will of Croatian life, and when we see in the cinema once again that the thousand-year Croatian past and culture are not discarded words or empty propaganda slogans, but the great and living reality,” then it would be “promoting our cultural property and educating its milieu.” Cultural film, Vrljčak concluded, had a unique propaganda role in the external regeneration of the nation and the internal rebirth of the individual as an Ustasha subject. Vrljčak, “Hrvatski prosvjetni slikopis,” 4. In spite of countless features in journals and newspapers about the positive impact the mobile film section was playing in education and cultural enlightenment in rural and remote regions, it faced significant challenges. Often short of equipment, urgent deliveries of projectors were frequently delayed due to misunderstandings, hindering the cultural work of the state as Mikac complained in a letter to the Foreign Ministry’s Section for Journalism and Cultural Contacts in June 1942. Mikac to the Section for Journalism and Cultural Contacts, 30 June 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/10278/1942. In addition, most of the mobile film unit’s projectionists were required to obtain permission from the UNS to travel around the state since the Ustasha security forces, always uneasy about mobility, had early on introduced strict laws curtailing the freedom of movement for those with no fixed address or place of work. As a result, travel permits such as the one granted to Rudolf Perger from Koprivnica in October 1942 by DIPU usually lasted only for a year and had to be renewed annually, a process which could be bureaucratic and involve lengthy delays. Moreover, any permit to travel had to be approved by the Ustasha local commune in which the traveller was ordinarily resident. In other cases, though, local film enthusiasts such as the Mostar cinema commissioner Stjepan Anić were simply given projectors by DIPU or the film institute. In this way, they could screen films in locations where there were no cinemas since the number of mobile vans was even more limited than the number of projectors. See e.g., DIPU permission for Rudolf Perger, 8 October 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 9.237/13.755; DIPU confirmation for Stjepan Anić, 22 May 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 9.237/7905. In October 1941 cumbersome regulations for mobile cinema were drafted by ODSLIK. They stipulated that mobile film screenings could only take place in areas where there was no existing cinema and placed onerous burdens on the premises where films were to be screened. The screening of all films was to take place in indoor accommodation fitted with fire exits and fire safety equipment to ensure public safety; doors had to be closed for the entire duration of the screening and limitations were placed on the source, form and positioning of the electrical generators and lights, and storage of reels during the screening of the film. Chairs for viewers had to be fixed firmly to the floor wherever possible and all exits highlighted by permanently illuminated red lights. At the same time, regulations made it mandatory for those in charge of screening films to be professionally trained. They had to provide evidence of their qualifications and suitability, with the evidence produced at the request of the regional police authorities. Meanwhile, all films proposed for screening had to be evaluated by POVSLIK and any films not submitted for evaluation resulted in the mobile film agent being punished with the revocation of their licences. While some of the regulations were, taken individually, sensible precautions to ensure a safe screening environment, taken together they made spontaneous screenings in often treacherous conditions before raucous audiences almost impossible. The regulations were, furthermore, contradictory since the film institute was aiming to dictate the terms of an inherently autonomous and intrepid creative process. “Uvjeti rada putujućeg slikopisa,” 8 October 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 9.237/13.755. This contradiction inevitably led to conflicts between agencies like ODSLIK and regional Ustasha authorities, especially where film licences were concerned. Although all films were supposed to be viewed by ODSLIK before they could be shown in remote locations, increasingly, Ustasha communes made independent decisions about the screening of films without ensuring they had been cleared by Mikac and his staff. This tendency resulted in Mikac sending a letter of warning to the Interior Ministry in June 1942 reminding it of the oversight function which had been afforded to ODSLIK in law. Pointing out that ODSLIK was responsible for all cinematic questions, including mobile cinema, he complained that it was becoming impossible to gain any insight into the work of the mobile unit because communes were publishing licences for mobile cinemas on their own initiative. As a result, “this office was subsequently unable to carry out an assessment of the licences and an evaluation of all the films that were being screened by the special mobile cinemas.” Mikac requested the ministry publish an order to all communes instructing them “unconditionally” to carry out a review of licenses for cinemas and licences for the screening of films and send complete details to ODSLIK’s main office. “Until such time as this office publishes new licences for special mobile cinemas and is able to evaluate the films, all such cinemas should be banned from further work,” he added firmly. Mikac to the interior ministry, 19 May 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/7837. There were also problems with local tax offices. As Mikac complained to the Section for State Revenue in June 1942, according to the law of 1 January 1942 which had established the film institute it was exempt from the paying of both direct and indirect taxes, including fees on tickets. Stressing the socially and ideologically important work carried out by the mobile unit in bringing propaganda films about the state to inhospitable regions, Mikac complained that “officials of regional tax offices are making the work of employees of Hrvatski slikopis more difficult owing to a lack of knowledge about the legal order.” Emphasising that “these cinematic presentations are screened at great expense and solely with the aim of furthering propaganda, insofar as the State Treasury continues to try and charge a ticket fee for these cinematic presentations Hrvatski slikopis will be forced to stop the screening of these films.” Mikac stressed that such a drastic step would cause great harm “because it is precisely this mobile cinema which enables the widest layers of society to become acquainted through cinema with all the events inside and outside the homeland.” Consequently, he instructed the section to “urgently publish an order to all tax offices so that in future they will no longer impede officials from Hrvatski slikopis in their work.” Mikac to the Office for State Revenue, 11 June 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 9.237/9134. The limits of a mass celluloid culture For the film institute and ODSLIK the development of mobile cinema was only a beginning. Ultimately, film officials dreamed of a time when cinematic culture was embedded in the consciousness of the population, something which could only be achieved by increasing the number of cinemas. State film agencies developed a variety of schemes to increase the number of cinemas, particularly in more remote areas; mobile cinema was imagined as a temporary measure to inculcate the masses with the new Ustasha values until such time as there was a cinema in every city, town, suburb and village in the state. Conscious that there were only 150 cinemas in the state, in July 1942 Marijan Mikac wrote to the Office for Price Control and Wages (Ured za oblikovanje ciena i nadnica) suggesting that in order to maximise taxes from cinema for the state treasury and increase the number of cinemas in remote inaccessible locations with population of fewer than 7000, a smaller entrance fee tax could be levied on cinema owners in these regions. This would result in larger audiences and wider margins for cinema owners, benefitting state finances in increased revenue due to an expansion in the number of small and medium-sized enterprises paying tax. It would also avoid the need to raise entrance fees at all cinemas and unnecessarily drive away audiences. But lower taxes for successful cinemas in remote and sparsely-populated localities could also be seen as a form of investment in the film industry as some of the revenue could be reinvested in the construction of Croatian cinema. Policy proposal from Mikac to the Office for Price Controls and Wages, 16 July 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 23.237/11679. This was only one solution. ODSLIK also encouraged the construction of new cinemas by local entrepreneurs. In January 1942, Miroslav Novak from Varaždin successfully applied to open a new cinema under the name Cinema Tomislav. ODSLIK informed him that he must open it “in a specially-built auditorium with entirely new equipment.” But it approved the idea since “in principle we encourage the opening of new cinemas.” The next month ODSLIK permitted Viktor Pilar to commence work on the opening of a new cinema in Djakovo on the basis that there was a lack of cinemas in the town. In this way, new cinemas in smaller towns and more sparsely-populated locations contributed to the aspirations of ODSLIK and Hrvatski slikopis for a cinema easily accessible to every citizen. See ODSLIK to Miroslav Novak, 30 January 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 23.237/169/42; ODSLIK to Viktor Pilar, 12 February 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 23.237/244/42. In its publicity for new cinemas, the journal Hrvatski slikopis differentiated them from those constructed in the Yugoslav era by emphasising both the “national” character of these cinemas and their anti-elite origins in the proactive efforts of local citizens. When Cinema Gaj was opened in Varaždin in For example, when Hrvatski slikopis reported on the opening of Cinema Gaj in Varaždin in December 1943, it stressed that the construction and design for the cinema as well as the initiative “were realised by native inhabitants.” Meanwhile, it pointed out, “its perfect workmanship demonstrates that it is not necessary to call on foreign people if we want something to be done well.” Despite the fact that every aspect of the design and construction of the cinema had been carried out by local or national companies, as the magazine explained, the cinema had been designed to the most contemporary and advanced standards which included a state of the art heating and air conditioning system purpose built for the comfort of cinema goers. Similarly, Cinema Croatia, opened in Banja Luka on 12 June 1943 on the eve of Antunovo, had been “systematically renovated” under the instructions of the Croatian Film Institute in the “most modern manner.” On the opening gala evening, the invited guests—which included Vladimir Dodigović, the leader of the local Ustasha Youth Centre, and other local party and state officials—were “astonished” at the “contemporary foyer” and impressed by the quality of the sound and images on the screen provided by the latest technological equipment. This, Hrvatski slikopis reported, reflected the plans of Cinema Croatia to show “only the best films under the leadership of the manager Edhem Malkić, a native son, who aside from being a cinematic expert aims to please Banja Lukans in all ways possible.” “Varaždin dobio novi slikokaz,” Hrvatski slikopis 11, no. 2 (1 December 1943): 26; “Svečano otvorenje novog slikokaza u Banja Luci,” Hrvatski slikopis 11, no. 7 (1 July 1943): 18. Despite the opulence of Cinema Croatia in the expansive seating and, in the case of Cinema Gaj, in the “delightful” foyer, the report in Hrvatski slikopis emphasised the number of ordinary citizens who had also attended the cinemas’ opening nights: Cinema Gaj frequently charged serving soldiers no admission while the first ticket at the opening gala of Cinema Croatia was bought by Jovo Borojević, a local car mechanic. “Varaždin dobio novi slikokaz,” 26; “Svečano otvorenje novog slikokaza u Banja Luci,” 18. While officials in Hrvatski slikopis and ODSLIK encouraged the construction of new cinemas in the provinces accessible to all, what these nascent audiences were permitted to view was strictly circumscribed, often on the basis that certain subjects were not suitable for populations in remote locations and might provoke unwelcome reactions. This could apply to the weekly newsreel as much as it did to foreign feature films. In May 1942, a circular from ODSLIK to its rental section drew its attention to the fact that while the showing of the weekly newsreel was “permitted in its entirety,” the director of DIPU Vilko Rieger had ordered that “the preliminary snapshot about the fashion show in Zagreb can be shown only in one part of the state and only in the cities of Zagreb, Karlovac, Sisak, Varaždin, Bjelovar, Osijek, Zemun and in those small towns which are located between these cities.” Therefore, it concluded, “this film may not be shown west of Karlovac, in Dalmatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina nor in Slavonski Brod.” Why was a preview of a fashion thought to be so provocative that it could not be screened in certain regions? The reasons are not clear, but it might have been related to concerns about the film’s potential to offend rural and Muslim conservative moral sensibilities; it is also possible that Rieger’s moratorium reflected anxieties that details about fashion shows in Zagreb might provoke a negative reaction among hard-pressed peasants. Traumatised by the Communist insurgency in their villages and the counter-terror of Ustasha militias, a film offering a taste of the good life risked causing social resentment and exacerbating divisions between the city and the countryside which the Ustasha regime—partly through cinematic culture—had attempted unsuccessfully to close. Head of ODSLIK to Section for Purchase of Films, 7 May 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27.237/7285. By April 1945 as it approached its fourth anniversary the state was close to collapse. With the violent purge of regime moderates the previous autumn, the return of hardliners and the relaunch of the original programme of terror, this time against disloyal cadres as well as racially “undesired elements,” newsreels were characterised by an apocalyptic tone, frequently warning citizens that the fall of the Ustasha state would expose them to certain annihilation at the hands of Eastern Bolshevik hordes. The factory of dreams increasingly became a production line of nightmares for its beneficiaries as well as its victims. On 5 April 1945, a circular was sent from the director of the GRP by express post to the management of all the state’s cinemas instructing them to place the following message at the beginning of all film screenings after the lights of the auditorium had dimmed and, where possible, accompanied by national music and Ustasha marching songs: “Through the centuries, the Croatian people always held onto the idea of their own Croatian state and have never by any act renounced this!” Director of GRP to cinema managers, 5 April 1945, HDA, NDH, GRP, 9.237/887/45. A month later that state collapsed in violence, flight and chaos. Conclusion The Hrvatski narod columnist who went in search of cinematic culture at the Cinema Danica and found only unruly mobs did eventually get to see his film. Finding the ticket window empty by the time he gets there and, after banging angrily on the window for a couple of minutes, a member of the cinema staff informs him that there is no point trying to buy a ticket as they all sold out early in the morning. After inadvertently attempting to purchase a ticket from one of the illegal teenage black marketeers whose appearance on Zagreb’s streets commentators had interpreted as a symbol of increasing bribery and corruption in the state, the usherette lets him in: under the false assumption that he is an inspector for the economic police. Thus he becomes a consumer of celluloid culture only through an encounter with an adolescent racketeer and an act of deception, itself driven by a mistaken assumption of order, morality and economic justice. IRIS, “Idemo na slikokaz!” Hrvatski narod, 15 February 1945. This was not the kind of cinematic experience the state’s celluloid architects dreamed of when they launched their utopian vision four years previously. As the story of the hapless cinema goer suggested, the attempt by the state to construct Ustasha subjects imbued with Ustasha values through the building of a national cinema never really succeeded. Instead, the unregulated economy of cinema, the jostling, coarse manners and black market bribery spoke of a cinema-going public which far from representing a new ethical class imbued with Ustasha values remained the same urban materialistic elite it had been in the 1930s. Unlike its campaign to purify the nation through terror and mass murder, the state’s programme to remake the masses through the moving image left little mark and was swept arbitrarily away, as a cartoon in the Communist newspaper Vjesnik suggested, as if it had never existed. “Naša borba neće prestati sve dotle, dok i posljednji tragovi fašizma u našoj zemlji ne budu izbrisani,” Vjesnik, 13 May 1945. A microcosm for the problems and contradictions of the wider program of ideological refashioning, four years of utopian dreams, debates and aspirations about cinema as the engine room of a new mentality could never step out from under the shadow of the terror which the architects of Croatian cinema had not only legitimated, but constructed their experimental visions on. Notes PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 5

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Log In

"The Engine Room of a New Ustasha Consciousness: Cinema, Terror and Ideological Refashioning." In ed. Yeomans, The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia (Rochester University Press, 2015)

"The Engine Room of a New Ustasha Consciousness: Cinema, Terror and Ideological Refashioning." In ed. Yeomans, The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia (Rochester University Press, 2015)

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS