Breaking the wave: A commentary on ‘Black Wave polemics: Rhetoric as aesthetic’ by Greg DeCuir, Jr

ABSTRACT This commentary critically engages with a description of the Yugoslav ‘Black Wave’ elaborated by Greg DeCuir, Jr. In contrast to DeCuir, the author argues that the group of film-makers usually labelled as the ‘Black Wave’ are by no means a movement with a single ideological outlook, let alone with the one that DeCuir brands and defines as Methodical Marxist. The author draws on writings and interviews by the film-makers and the Yugoslav cinema scholars who are symptomatically absent from DeCuir's article. Although criticizing it for recycling the ‘Artist versus Regime’ dichotomy, the author nevertheless maintains that DeCuir's article is at odds with the totalitarian paradigm that dominates post-Yugoslav film criticism and historiography on Yugoslav cinema.