Early Works

Early Works (1971)

Рани радови

Inspired by Karl Marx's "Das Kapital", three men and a girl named Jugoslava decide to wake up the conscience within the working class and peasants. Faced with the primitivism and a lack of morale, their revolution fails and the girl is the one to be sacrificed as a witness of their unsuccessful attempt.

Date of release
1971-03-12
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Drama
Director
Želimir Žilnik

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Golden Bear

Early Works is a 1969 Yugoslav film by Serbian author Želimir Žilnik. It critically depicts the aftermath of the 1968 student demonstrations in Yugoslavia. It won the Golden Bear at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival in 1969. The film belongs to the Yugoslav Black Wave movement.

Background

Žilnik found inspiration the previous year in the stormy worldwide student demonstrations that had their reflection in Yugoslavia at the time, as well as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the suppression of the Prague Spring, which prompted him to seriously question the gap between the high ideals of the official Marxist ideology and its application in practice.

The title was borrowed from the popular anthology of the early work by Marx and Engels published first in Yugoslavia in 1953. These early texts had a significant influence on the development of the Yugoslav Praxis School of philosophy.

Žilnik expressed his attitude by creating a strong contrast between the young, idealistic protagonists who fanatically adhere to Marxist principles and the far more banal and prosaic reality in the rural areas of Vojvodina at the time, i.e. through the presentation of the conflict between ideals and reality, which turns into a darkly humorous grotesque.

Žilnik originally planned to direct a sequel entitled Capital, which was supposed to be inspired by Marx's work of the same name, but instead became the subject of official condemnations, and was expelled from the Party and forced to live as an émigré in West Germany for a while.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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