Women on the Cutting Edge:

Editing in Yugoslav Film, and the Authorship of Olga Skrigin

Author

Dijana Jelača

Abstract

This paper discusses the vast but heretofore rarely acknowledged or properly historicised contributions of women film editors in Yugoslav cinema. As in many other film industries, editing was frequently considered ‘women’s work’ in Yugoslavia’s film industry. In the context of socialist Yugoslavia this phenomenon needs to be examined in its own cultural, political and historical context in a way that pays close attention to the postwar development of a thriving film industry under state socialism, the country’s foundational goals of both class and gender equality, as well as deep roots in antifascism and non-alignment. Moreover, I am interested in further contributing to the scholarship that considers women’s editing as a form of film authorship in its own right (Kaganovsky 2018, Hole & Jelača 2019). In particular, the essay focuses on one of the most important editors in Yugoslav film – Olga Skrigin (1927-1997) – whose editing career almost perfectly spanned and bookended the socialist country’s existence (she edited her first film in 1948, and the last one in 1992). Over the course of her accomplished career, Skrigin edited all of the film work of her spouse, photographer and filmmaker Žorž Skrigin, as well as nearly all the films by one of the most lauded auteurs of the Yugoslav Black Wave, Živojin Pavlović. Additionally, she was the co-editor behind Bato Čengić’s montage-driven masterpiece Life of a Shock Force Worker (1972) and some of the most significant films of Goran Paskaljević. My feminist historiographic research seeks to reclaim Olga Skrigin’s editing work as a foundational authorial contribution to the richness of both socialist Yugoslav cinema and women’s film history writ large.

Keywords

Olga Skrigin, Živojin Pavlović, Yugoslavia, socialist film, the Black Wave, Yugoslav New Film, editing, female editors, feminist historiography.

Introduction

The historical turn within the field of feminist film studies, has, since the 1990s, significantly redirected scholarly focus towards not only re/discovering the ‘forgotten’ women pioneers in cinema’s history writ large, but also towards a broader challenge to the patriarchal definitions of the notion of film authorship to begin with (including the challenges to the often elitist connotations of the concept of an auteur). These feminist historiographic approaches have increasingly asked who a film’s author is, and whether the director is (inevitably) a film’s most central creative force in the final instance. In recent years, the notion of authorship, particularly when it comes to women’s work, has been expanded by feminist scholars to also include, for example, screenwriters (Gaines 2017), cinematographers (Hole & Jelača 2019), as well as film editors (Kaganovsky 2018). This essay concerns itself with the latter: the female editor as an author in her own right (albeit in an inherently collaborative environment), specifically situated within the context of Yugoslav socialist cinema. The essay is not intended to be an exhaustive overview of the women’s vast and varied work as editors in Yugoslav film; rather, after I situate women’s work as editors in Yugoslav film historically, culturally, and politically, I focus on the case study of one of the most renowned and respected editors of Yugoslav film, Olga Skrigin (1927-1997).

In the context of the region formerly known as the socialist Eastern Bloc, assuming a homogeneity within its political, social and cultural landscape – including its cinemas – is both frequent and inherently flawed, as it eschews, or downright flattens, the often radically different trajectories of the region’s state socialisms, and their political, cultural and social (after)effects(their respective cinema histories included). To wit, the question of feminist politics itself is equally as complex and decidedly heterogeneous when it comes to the region in question. It needs to be noted that feminist politics writ large appear most vibrant and transgressive when their local manifestations and applications are taken into consideration in their complexity, heterogeneity and uniqueness with which they become articulated to both the socialist state, and to class struggle in particular, rather than emptied of these intersectional vectors as a way to fit them into a unifying umbrella category of a global feminist project that is the same for everyone, everywhere. Moreover, rather than merely dismissing feminism as a western bourgeois concept that traditionally does not have a radical political bearing on the region and its state socialist histories, feminism’s relationship to state socialism is endemic, dynamic and complex. It does not follow the trajectory of western-based feminisms and their definitions (often recounted in “waves”); rather, it has its own unique histories, complexities and phases (Zaharijević 2017). In Yugoslavia, each phase of feminism is closely tied to the movement’s complex relationship to state socialism and the socialist state, one of whose foundational principles was gender equality (Lóránd 2018).

The role of women in Yugoslav socialist cinema, both on and off camera, is likewise complicated, multifaceted, oftentimes fraught and ideologically charged, patriarchally framed, but always deeply informative of the broader dynamics of Yugoslavia’s rich and heterogeneous film history and its ever-shifting cultural/political climate. Existing analyses of the role of women in Yugoslav film most frequently focus on the representation of women on screen, and therefore, women’s work in Yugoslav cinema is most typically focused on actresses who bring female experiences to life in front of the camera as envisioned by the filmmakers who tend to be overwhelmingly male. Most of these studies identify a history of patriarchal misogyny that often dominates said representations of female experiences – representations that, in the process, either deliberately or inadvertently betray a misaligning between women’s lived experiences and the official policies of state socialism’s stated commitment to gender equality (Jovanović 2014; Stojčić & Duhaček 2016). Significantly less attention has so far been given to the work of women behind the camera in Yugoslav cinema. This is perhaps due to the fact that there were very few female directors in Yugoslav socialist cinema. In fact, for a period of time, there was only one prominent female director in Yugoslavia: Sofija “Soja” Jovanović, Yugoslavia’s first woman feature film director, who made her first film in 1954. In my essay on her work, I point out that Jovanović's contributions to Yugoslav cinema are major and significant, yet often overlooked by film scholars and historians, likely because she was making wildly popular mainstream comedies, a middlebrow genre that is all too often not taken seriously as an object of critical acclaim, cultural relevance, or scholarly study. In the aforementioned essay, I suggest that class-based taste hierarchies contribute to Jovanović's work being taken less seriously than that of her male counterparts (Jelača 2020).¹

And while the Yugoslav film industry had a remarkably small number of female directors relative to the number of films produced, female film editors were omnipresent. According to Petra Belc:

Between 1946 and 1990, Yugoslavia produced 883 feature films made by 266 directors. Although by 1976, there were around seven hundred women working in the film industry in Yugoslavia, only seven among them were able to produce a total of fifteen feature films in the span of fifty-four years. (Belc 2022: 156)

Belc goes on to point out that in Yugoslav cinema, women “habitually worked as editors” (ibid.: 156). And yet, even with their omnipresence as editors, there has been little to no scholarly attention given to women’s editorial work in Yugoslav cinema. For the special issue on women editors in East and Central Europe published in this journal (2018),² Jelena Modrić contributed an essay on Radojka Tanhofer (née Ivančević) titled “Radojka Tanhofer, Croatia’s Pioneering Film Editor”.³ Tanhofer edited some of the most acclaimed Yugoslav films, including H-8… (Nikola Tanhofer, 1958, Yugoslavia) and Rondo / Roundabout (Zvonimir Berković, 1966, Yugoslavia). While Modrić’s essay is an important contribution to the much needed historicising of the work of female editors in the region, the author chooses to situate Tanhofer’s work specifically within the context of Croatian, not Yugoslav, cinema, thereby contributing to the dominant revisionist paradigm of the post-Yugoslav period that tends to parse and disassemble Yugoslav socialist, and decidedly multiethnic, film legacy along strictly delineated ethno-national lines drawn during the period of Yugoslavia’s disintegration and its aftermath. With respect to the Yugoslav film legacy in the country’s aftermath, a fascinating case of a female editor’s professional arc materialises in Christel Tanović (née Röhl). Namely, Tanović was of German background, a citizen of East Germany who, in the early 1960s, edited her first films in East Germany’s DEFA studio. After meeting a Sarajevo-based Yugoslav filmmaker, Sejfudin Tanović, she married him and moved to Yugoslavia, where she continued her editorial work.⁴ Besides editing the documentary work of her husband, she also edited some notable Yugoslav narrative features, such as Draga Irena / Dear Irena (Nikola Stojanović, 1970, Yugoslavia) and Moj brat Aleksa / My Brother Aleksa (Aleksandar and Srđan Jevđević, 1991, Yugoslavia). However, her most important contributions to Yugoslav cinema come in the form of her collaborations with the director Ademir Kenović. Tanović was the editor of Kenović’s essential and widely-regarded works that include the Ovo malo duše / This Much of Soul (1987, Yugoslavia) and Kuduz (1989, Yugoslavia). Likewise, she edited Kenović’s first Bosnian postwar film, Savršeni krug / The Perfect Circle (1997, Bosnia-Herzegovina). Tanović’s editing career, therefore, transcended the boundaries and borders of the socialist Eastern Bloc’s cinematic landscape, as well as the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav historical periods. Filmmaking appears to be a family tradition: it should also be noted that she and her husband are the parents of the contemporary Bosnian woman director of both documentary and narrative films, Ines Tanović.

Woman Editor, Patriarchy, and Meaning

In her writing on Yugoslav cinema’s female editors, Vesi Vuković specifically focuses on their contributions to Yugoslav New Film (also often referred to as the Black Wave), a famed film movement that emerged in the early 1960s and lasted until the early 1970s, heralded by a new generation of (male) filmmakers:

Besides Tanhofer, other important female editors who contributed to the Yugoslav New Film movement included Katja Majer, Lida Braniš, Kleopatra Harisijades, Ivanka Vukasović, Jelena Bjenjaš, Marija Fajdiga Pirkmajer, Olga Skrigin, Marija ‘Manja’ Fuks, Maja Lazarov, Milanka Nanović, and Mirjana Mitić. (Vuković 2022: 70)

Vuković at the same time points out the overwhelming presence of male-driven stories in Yugoslav New Film, as well as the seeming omnipresence of patriarchal violence towards women in these films. She concludes that:

This is indicative of how the strong presence of female editors could not balance out the striking absence of women in positions as directors, and directors of photography, as well as their insufficient presence as scriptwriters. The question poses itself as to whether violence (and self-violence) and sexual objectification, which recur in many Yugoslav New Films, would not be so prominent had the stories been told from a women’s perspective, by women, and as seen by women, through a female gaze. (ibid.: 70)

While Vuković’s observations are pointed, it should also be noted that women’s work (in this case, editorial) should not necessarily, or inevitably, carry an assumption of feminist work. At the same time, the fact that many of these women were seasoned editors who wielded a lot of power over the postproduction process, final cuts and directorial visions of the younger male directors of Yugoslav New Film attests to their agency and influence, whether feminist or otherwise. Yugoslav New Film director Želimir Žilnik attests to the fact that for these young men (himself included) who were emerging as filmmakers in the 1960s, encounters with the editors such as Olga Skrigin or Milanka Nanović were downright intimidating, as these editing veterans commanded attention and held a great amount of sway and authority over which film ideas would be approved to begin with, and likewise, what the final cuts would look like.⁵ Similarly, Živojin Pavlović stated the following about Olga Skrigin, one of the most prominent and respected editors in Yugoslav cinema: “I know I was afraid of Olga Skrigin” (2001: 66). However, the intimidation appears to have existed only in the beginning, because Skrigin ended up editing the majority of Pavlović’s films and became one of his most important and trusted collaborators over the course of subsequent decades. It is precisely Skrigin’s editing work that I aim to highlight in this essay, a significant portion of which includes her collaborations with Pavlović. It should be noted that this particular creative partnership is far from her only contribution to Yugoslav cinema.

Before I discuss Skrigin in more detail in the latter parts of the essay, it is important to note that many of the aforementioned female editors of Yugoslav New Film effortlessly navigated between editing the innovative, often controversial works of the directors clustered under the umbrella of said film movement, and the more lighthearted, mainstream fare, such as the works of Soja Jovanović. Milanka Nanović (who was married to director Vojislav Nanović), for example, frequently edited Jovanović’s aforementioned middlebrow comedies (for example, Pop Ćira i pop Spira / Priests Ćira and Spira [1957, Yugoslavia], or Put oko sveta / A Trip Around the World [1964, Yugoslavia]), and also worked with the more critically-minded directors of the younger generation, such as Andzrej Wajda (Sibirska ledi Magbet / Siberian Lady Macbeth [1962, Yugoslavia]), Miodrag Popović (Čovek iz hrastove šume / Man from an Oak Forest [1964, Yugoslavia]), and Dimitre Osmanli (Žeđ / Thirst [1971, Yugoslavia]). Similarly, Ivanka Vukasović, whose first editing job was Dušan Makavejev’s film Čovek nije tica / Man Is Not a Bird (1965), subsequently edited, in short order, Makavejev’s tour-de-force of Yugoslav New Film, WR: Misterije organizma / WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971, Yugoslavia), and the lowbrow popular comedy TV series Kamiondžije / The Truckers (1973, Yugoslavia). These female editors, therefore, seamlessly moved between a range of cinematic approaches, genres, and styles, but also between the different ideological implications that these diverse and wildly versatile films were reflecting. They navigated the apparent boundaries between entertainment cinema and socially engaged cinema without much difficulty, perhaps attesting to the permeable boundary between the two within the context of Yugoslav film, where the state was highly involved in supporting and funding the films of both established and emerging directors (even if the authorities sometimes ended up frowning upon, or ‘bunkering’ the resulting work, delaying or stopping its release).

Editor as Collaborative Author: The Case of Olga Skrigin

The breadth of Olga Skrigin’s film career almost uncannily bookends the existence of socialist Yugoslavia. After appearing in her only acting role in the first Yugoslav postwar feature narrative film, Slavica (Vjekoslav Afrić, 1947), her first editing credit is a short documentary Beogradski univerzitet / Belgrade University (1948), notably by a female documentarian Vera Crvenčanin. Her final editing credit comes in 1992 – Živojin Pavlović’s Dezerter / Deserter (which she edited alongside her long-term assistant Ljiljana-Lana Vukobratović). In between these two films, Skrigin (née Kršljanin) amassed more than 120 editing credits, which include a vastly diverse body of work: from documentaries, to nearly the entire oeuvre of Živojin Pavlović, to editing other notable works of Yugoslav New film, to her frequent subsequent work with the “Prague school” director Goran Paskaljević. Skrigin also edited all of the films of her husband, Ukrainian-born Žorž Skrigin (née Георгий Владимирович Скрыгин), a famed photographer who captured some of the most iconic and widely disseminated images of the Second World War in Yugoslavia, including Kozarčanka (The Kozara Girl, 1943/44), Majka Knežopoljka (Mother Knežopoljka, 1944), and the definitive wartime portraits of Josip Broz Tito, with his partisan hat emblazoned with the red star, at the centre of which are the hammer and sickle (1942).⁶

Olga Skrigin, in fact, may be considered as one of the key film workers who seamlessly bridged (and therefore interconnected) all the major phases of socialist Yugoslav cinema – from its classical, nascent postwar iteration, to the emergence and peaks of Yugoslav New Film of the 1960s and 1970s, to the prominence of late Yugoslav “Prague School” movement. And yet, despite these vast and varied contributions, Skrigin is predominantly defined through her association with the creative forces of the (better known and more broadly historicised) male directors with whom she collaborated, including her husband. She is the often-unnamed editor to their often unquestionably bestowed auteur status, an invisible hand whose contributions are not generally considered authorial in nature from the outside looking in. However, the very fact that certain directors actively insisted she edit all, or nearly all, of their films testifies to the fact that she was considered by them an essential creative partner, perhaps even the most important one. Živojin Pavlović has, in fact, said as much in his conversations with director Slobodan Šijan, film critic Nenad Polimac, and scholar Nebojša Pajkić. Parts of these interviews were subsequently published in a book of Pavlović's interviews by Pajkić. In one of these interviews, Pavlović outright states: “Olga Skrigin played a crucial role in my maturing as a filmmaker” (2001: 67).⁷ This statement comes in his discussion of the postproduction process of his film Povratak / The Return (1966, Yugoslavia). Pavlović recounts being unsure about using a long take that had been filmed, worrying that it would disrupt the film’s otherwise edit-heavy rhythm. He recalls Skrigin saying to him: “No, you see, this is intense, full, let’s leave it as is” (referring to the long take). “But it is boring,” Pavlović recalls replying. Skrigin’s retort is: “It only seems to you that it is boring” (ibid.: 67). Pavlović’s conclusion about Skrigin’s pivotal insight, which allowed him to admittedly grow as a filmmaker, is the following:

When Olga Skrigin started to single out the long takes, I realised that they enhanced the attention significantly more than the material that was cut up. It made me realise certain things, and as a result, in Buđenje pacova / The Rats Woke Up [1967, Yugoslavia] I relaxed and liberated myself, I put aside the security of separate shots” (ibid.: 67).

In a different section of his recollections, Pavlović yet again reiterates Skrigin’s essential role in the creative process:

Up until The Rats Woke Up, I was a slave to the idea. I was extremely fortunate that my first films were edited by Kokan [Rakonjac] and then Olga Skrigin, who dissuaded me and liberated me from my ideas. Olga Skrigin was constantly convincing me that the footage itself needs to dictate the film, and not the idea on the basis of which the footage was created, because that footage never ends up being what one initially had in mind. And at that very moment I realised that an idea needs to be thrown into the garbage can, and that I need to listen to the pulse and the rhythm of the footage in the editing process, and use that as my guiding idea… because, if an idea exists, then it has already permeated that tissue, it is an essential element of that footage. If we passed an idea by, if we didn’t catch it, then it won’t be in the footage. This is where Olga Skrigin helped me more than anyone else (ibid.: 39, emphasis mine).

Pavlović here attests to the pivotal role that editing plays in a film’s creation, in the process of its ideas being extrapolated, discovered, or even outright created from assembling and cutting up raw footage, and the credit he gives to Skrigin testifies to her crucial creative role in the process of finalising his films – she is acknowledged as his essential creative collaborator in her own right. Director Slobodan Šijan has reiterated the crucial influence of Olga Skrigin on Pavlović’s film aesthetics, alongside Pavlović’s occasional cinematographer Milorad Jakšić-Fanđo, as evidenced in Pavlović’s growing reliance on long takes and dynamic shots that carefully stage the scenes and choreograph the actors within the frame. This amounted to a noticeable editing and stylistic shift between Pavlović’s early films on the one hand, and his subsequent work starting with, and following The Rats Woke Up on the other.⁸

And while Skrigin helped Pavlović “liberate” his filmmaker self through accepting and becoming at ease with the long takes, this does not mean that, as an editor, Skrigin had a general preference for long takes over montage-heavy edits. If the range of her editing work is anything to go by, she herself practised what she taught Pavlović: she closely listened to, and was guided by the pulse and rhythm of the raw footage that any filmmaker she worked with brought to her editing suite. Skrigin’s body of editing work is eclectic and diverse, and in fact, includes one of the most iconic montage-driven films of Yugoslav New Film, Bahrudin “Bato” Čengić’s Slike iz života udarnika / Life of a Shock Force Worker (1972, Yugoslavia), which she coedited alongside Marija (Manja) Fuks. This socialist-modernist masterpiece is, among other things, a collage of a series of beautifully shot, often still images and colorful tableaux (the cinematographer was the legendary Karpo Aćimović Godina), which frequently pass by in quick succession, giving the film an intense tonal and metric rhythm that matches the frenetic efforts of the shock force workers (udarnici) to break new records with regards to their miners’ workload. The focus on the montage and the quick successions of images and shots is, in fact, reflected in the film’s original title, Slike iz života udarnika (Images from the Life of a Shock Force Worker), which the official English translation does not fully convey. It is no coincidence that, for this montage-heavy film, three iconoclastic names of Yugoslav New Film – director Čengić, cinematographer Aćimović Godina, and screenwriter Branko Vučićević – entrusted the footage to two of Yugoslav cinema’s most experienced editors, Skrigin and Fuks, who were by then editing veterans and who, by this point in their respective careers, edited both the popular entertainment films and the often “dissenting” films of the filmmakers of the younger generation. Given their participation and their poignant editing contributions to Life of a Shock Force Worker, it is impossible to watch the film and not notice the exceptional montage (among the film’s other exceptional elements). It is also impossible not to consider the editors as essential creative forces in the collaborative process of finalising said film.

For instance, the film’s wordless opening (dialogue is instead replaced by the roaring sound of a train engine) starts with three quick-succession jump cuts which move from an extreme close-up of the train locomotive adorned by two Yugoslav flags, to a close-up and a medium close-up (Figs. 1-3). Soon thereafter, these jump cuts are reverse-matched in the introduction of one the film’s protagonists, whose static pose, holding on to the outside of the train and facing the camera, is depicted in three jump cuts, from a wide shot, to a medium wide shot, to a medium close-up (Figs. 4-6). This edit-intense start immediately sets the film’s tonal and metric pace and establishes editing as one of its most essential and noticeable features.

The jump cut is one of the film’s key editing devices, a quick succession of shifting frames of tableaux scenes where the protagonists are most often seen directly facing the camera in still, carefully arranged poses deliberately evocative of socialist realist paintings. Nearly every scene in the film is very deliberately performed for the camera, and the actors are often framed in wide shots. It could be argued that, while a narrative arc of a shock force worker’s life here certainly exists, Life of a Shock Force Worker is an example of what film theorist Tom Gunning has called the ‘cinema of attractions’ (2006), a type of cinema that calls attention to the visual spectacle, and privileges visual astonishment over the narrative itself – in this case, a socialist cinema of attractions par excellence. Indeed, outside of a few exceptions – the film’s opening sequence included – the actors and scenes are often framed in proscenium shots, their entire bodies seen in wide frames, akin to the aforementioned early cinema of attractions. The act of spectatorship is likewise emphasised, for example, when the miners are seen watching a live opera performed at the factory, the entire scene depicted in a succession of wide shots of the performance and the captive audience (Figs. 7 and 8).

The opera performance is interrupted by the arrival of the mine manager, who informs the workers that he submitted the mine for the shock force workers’ competition. The shot/reverse shot edit that accompanies the scene again calls attention to the act of spectatorship (Figs. 9 and 10).

As the attentive miner audience looks on, miner Adem, the film’s central protagonist, is chosen to be the leader of the effort, and he is invited up to the stage in order to pick his team. Here the film switches to its dominant jump cut editing mode, as each member of the team is called out and added to the group with a jump cut, as each successive frame following a jump cut is more populated and the camera zooms further out, ending in a full body wide shot of the now-fully assembled shock force team (Figs. 11-14).

The cinematic apparatus and the act of spectatorship are yet again overtly revealed when a film crew is shown filming and directing the miners, film-within-a-film style. Reacting to the filmmaker’s direction to throw Adem up in the air, a fellow miner’s deadpan response, “Man is not a bird”, is simultaneously a direct reference to the title of another Yugoslav New Film staple, Dušan Makavejev’s 1965 film that carries that very name (Figs. 15-18).

One of the film’s unmistakable thematic preoccupations is that of patriarchy, and the role of women who are expected to be the homemakers and obedient child caretakers for their miner husbands. Adem’s new wife, in fact, immediately becomes a stepmother to his numerous children, the fate of their biological mother unknown (but certainly assumed to be grave). The new wife’s role is emphasised in a sequence that sees Adem’s ailing labourer’s body wrapped up and the mostly girl children obediently demonstrating their schoolwork as their stepmother proudly looks on. Subsequently, in an isolated shot, the wife coyly smiles directly at the camera (Figs. 19-22). The children and the wife are acknowledged as subjects only inasmuch as they are in the service of their ailing shock force worker father and husband, which can be interpreted as the film’s astutely critical observations about the precarious position of women, and about Yugoslav socialism’s failure to fully relinquish patriarchy.⁹

With the pointed and illustrious cohesion between the direction, the screenplay, production and sound design, cinematography and editing, the socialist-modernist tour de force that is Life of a Shock Force Worker positions Skrigin and Fuks as equal and as important co-collaborators alongside Čengić, Vučićević and Godina, bestowing upon them, I argue, the status of co-creators, or co-authors of this iconic Yugoslav film.

Olga Skrigin’s Dialectic Editing

While she may have reached the heights of her montage editing prowess in her collaborations with Yugoslav New Film directors, Olga Skrigin was no stranger to the importance of montage cinema from her earliest editing work. In fact, her feature debut – Priča o fabrici / The Factory Story (Vladimir Pogačić, 1949, Yugoslavia) – features a climactic montage sequence that sees a female textile factory worker, Marija, operate six weaving machines (rather than the usual three), while the supervisors and other workers look on in astonishment (she is doing it in order to prove that it is possible to achieve this, as the factory is under pressure to increase productivity). The editing dynamically switches between the machines weaving the threads of fabric, Marija’s face, and the close-ups of her hands, as she herself repositions and realigns the threads that are being processed by the machines. The scene is overtly meta-cinematic: the thread weaving and the close-ups of the hands evoke film editing itself, and these shots are, in some important ways, evocative of Elizaveta Svilova being shown sitting at the editing table as she edits the very movie in which the scene featuring her appears – Chelovek s kino-apparatom / Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, USSR).

In his analysis of The Factory Story montage sequence, Adrian Pelc similarly detects the meta-filmic dimension of the montage. Noting that the sequence does not reveal whether Marija’s attempt was actually successful, Pelc makes the following observation:

Marija’s attempt is primarily a spectacle. The sequences representing it are accompanied by a symphonic score that builds up tension. The machines’ rhythmical movements almost call to mind avant-garde experiments such as Ferdinand Leger’s Ballet mechanique. (…) Furthermore, the whole attempt is performed for an audience – the coworkers and the commission – which is shown following it with the utmost attention, almost in the way one would watch a suspenseful movie (2024: 5).

It could be observed, then, that in her very first feature narrative film, Olga Skrigin edits a montage sequence that “hints at its own mechanisms” (Pelc 2024: 5) – mechanisms that include the work of editing itself. With that, Skrigin reveals her own presence as an editor within these self-reflexive layers of the film, acknowledging (perhaps inadvertently) the labour behind the finished montage sequence, just as Marija’s labour is being acknowledged on screen.

But is an editor a potential collaborative co-creator only when a film is montage-heavy, and the editing, therefore, more obviously calls attention to itself as an essential element in the emergence of a film’s meaning or idea? The case of the collaborations between Pavlović and Skrigin, and his recollections about their process, would certainly suggest that this is not the case. Skrigin’s skilled editorial eye recognised the intensity and importance of the long take in Pavlović’s raw footage – a type of shot that, in fact, does not require the editing of a scene contained in it, other than attaching it to what comes before and after it – and insisted on its usage in order for the idea, or meaning to emerge, which in turn helped her younger collaborator, Pavlović, grow as a filmmaker and become more confident in his choices as a result. In fact, the frequent use of long takes may be where the editor is at their most essential, as she helps construct an illusion of visually uninterrupted storytelling that renders any editing seemingly invisible altogether (and thereby potentially all the more pointed).

Here I focus in particular on two of Pavlović’s notable WWII/partisan-themed films. Partisan war films were, more broadly, a mainstay genre of Yugoslav cinema. The genre was wide-ranging and included big budget epics sometimes referred to as Red Westerns – such as Veljko Bulajić’s Bitka na Neretvi / The Battle of Neretva (1969) – as well as smaller scale works of the filmmakers of Yugoslav New Film, such as Aleksandar Petrović’s Tri / Three (1965, edited by Mirjana Mitić), and audience favorite, action-packed works of Hajrudin “Šiba” Krvavac such as Most / The Bridge (1969, edited by another editing veteran, Blanka Jelić) and Valter brani Sarajevo / Walter Defends Sarajevo (1972, edited by Jelena and Vojislav Bjenjaš). In effect, Yugoslav partisan films are a key cinematic genre that, according to Boris Petrović, amount to an exercise of soft power turned inwards, where soft power “was meant to culturally and nationally cohere a diverse, war-torn country” (2022: 91). Some of Živojin Pavlović’s most lauded works are indeed partisan films, including the two I discuss here vis-à-vis their notable editing that significantly contributes to the effective symbiosis between the films’ narratives, and their aesthetic and formal styles.

Attesting to Pavlović’s growing confidence with the long take, one of his most prominent and acclaimed films, Zaseda / The Ambush (1969, Yugoslavia), edited by Skrigin, starts with one such shot, where the camera initially centers on the projection of a Soviet film about Stalin and then slowly pans across members of the audience to find and center on the protagonist, Ive “Vrana”, the projector whirring behind him. The shot/reverse shot sequence that follows cuts back and forth between the projected film and a close-up of Ive “Vrana” watching it intently. In fact, the film, which takes place around the end of the Second World War and thematises young partisan Ive’s growing disillusionment with the revolution, contains a series of long takes that frequently convey complex layers of visual storytelling. For example, an early scene shot in a long take starts off as a jubilant group celebration in which Ive begins to play his accordion alongside a musical ensemble he was just introduced to. As the jovial music plays and bystanders begin to dance kolo [traditional dance performed by dancers lining up and holding hands, a performance of unity], the camera’s panning movement reveals a Yugoslav flag being waved in the background, but then refocuses and hones in on two men being led away at gunpoint, a development that is in stark contrast to the jovial music and bystanders dancing in the foreground. Soon thereafter, the two men are summarily executed because they are deemed to be fascist collaborators. Many scenes in the film are deep focus long takes, with the camera frequently lingering on the events, dollying, panning, tilting, zooming in and out, as well as refocusing, all in the service of the pointed yet subtle shifts between the foreground, middle ground, and background action.

The internal scene edits are reserved for some of the most intense situations, enhancing said intensity. For example, in the scene of the partisan firing squad killing the suspected collaborators, the sequence starts with the men lined up for the killing, cuts to the executors firing their rifles, then cuts back to the dead men on the ground – the moment of death remains offscreen and rendered only by the editing itself. One particularly fascinating scene, both narratively and editing-wise – attesting to the inseparable fusion between the story and the editing – takes place when the father of Ive’s love interest, Milica, is put on trial, as he stands accused of war profiteering. The trial scene starts with a quick sequence of four shots that immediately and deftly foreshadow everything that is about to transpire. These four quick shots amount to one of the clearest examples of what I propose to call Olga Skrigin’s dialectic editing. First comes the wide shot of the energised courtroom audience chanting socialist slogans. Then we cut to the close-up of the man on trial. When he addresses “Mr. Judge,” the following cut, which shows the three-person judging committee in a medium shot, takes place as the female member of the court interrupts the accused to say: “Comrade. Nowadays we say ‘comrade’”. The following cut reveals the accused in a wide shot of the courtroom. With the backs of the judging committee in the foreground, the accused alone in the middle, and the audience in the background, the camera’s tilted angle emphasises the man’s precarious position (Figs. 23-26). In this scene, dialectic montage is deployed as follows: the wide shot of the crowd and the medium shot of the three-part judging committee visually ‘trap’ the close-up of the man on trial, as they appear before and after it. These shots of the onlookers and the judging committee effectively amount to a thesis: just as he is visually trapped, the accused man is trapped narratively. These shots are starkly juxtaposed to their antithesis – a close-up of the accused, isolated and alone, with seemingly no one on his side. The fourth shot synthesises the meaning: he is now a detested pariah for both the authorities and their supporters in the form of the ordinary people, as their socialist revolutionary fervour does not stand to tolerate the war profiteering behaviours that the man stands accused of. And just like being trapped by the shots that precede and follow his close-up, in the fourth shot of the scene, the accused is visually trapped in the middle ground, between the authorial figures in the foreground and their numerous supporters in the background.

At the conclusion of the scene, and as the verdict of guilty is being read, the wide shot of the courtroom slowly zooms into a medium close-up of the accused, his gaze directed downwards. The courtroom scene then ends abruptly, but the final zoom once again visually confirms the entrapment and isolation of this social pariah within the emerging ideological landscape. As the judging committee is zoomed out of the frame, its gaze within the frame is replaced by that of the camera standing in for the spectator, more overtly aligning the jury and the spectator in the process.

In the final stretch of the film (Figs. 27-30), Ive encounters three armed men who question his identity and suspect him to be a Chetnik (a term used for Serbian fascist collaborators), not a partisan soldier. Ive’s reassurances do not convince them, and they decide to kill him on the spot. Before they shoot him, Ive’s iconic final words crystalise his disillusionment with the revolution, which had been growing over the course of the film: “You peasant motherfuckers. Some kind of a revolution you are.” As the shooters leave, Ive’s dead body is seen lying on the ground in a wide shot. From there, in another instance of dialectic montage, the film cuts to its final sequence, a stark juxtaposition with Ive’s disillusionment and unjustified killing: a celebratory parade across town, with jovial music playing, and soldiers and civilians happily marching. The final shot zooms in on the larger-than-life portrait of Stalin, synthesising the inferred meaning of ideological dissonance, where the jubilant tone of the parade stands in sharp contrast to the injustices Ive first witnessed, and then ultimately succumbed to himself. The final shot of Stalin also encases the film in a full circle, since its opening sequence also featured Stalin, as Ive was shown watching film footage of Stalin being projected on screen.

Eschewing conventional establishing shots, Hajka / Manhunt (1977, Yugoslavia), another notable collaboration between Pavlović and Skrigin, starts with a close-up of a character reciting poetry. Without cutting, the camera zooms out to scan the crowded room full of partisans. Manhunt is about a group of partisans trying to escape from fascists who are in close pursuit. This again displays Pavlović’s ever-growing reliance on longer takes and camera movement, from panning and tilting to zooming in and out, further attesting to Skrigin’s foundational influence while he was still going through his formative years as a filmmaker in the decade prior. Such prominent reliance on long takes and wide shots only serves to further accentuate the close-ups when they do appear, as well as emphasise the more intensive editing within any particular scene.

Manhunt conveys a complex, action-packed narrative that layers and sometimes juxtaposes literal survival and existentialist philosophy, and is an ensemble piece with numerous characters. Throughout the film, shots contain medium close-ups of numerous characters, particularly in interior spaces, creating a sense of claustrophobic tension as the camera moves to reveal the layouts of rooms, and as the edits within these scenes cut to additional close-ups in order to reveal an ever-greater number of characters in high stakes life or death situations. Being positioned within a crowded frame has the effect of establishing the partisan soldiers’ connection and unity, where the collective – and particularly the collective struggle and resistance efforts – are greater and of more importance than any one individual member’s arc or fate. Likewise, in the moments of disagreements, the characters are separated by cuts, each in their own frame. This happens, for instance, in a boat scene, when the isolated unit of partisans that the film centers on are deciding whether to go to Bosnia in order to reach safety, or stay on the volatile territory they find themselves in, and risk being hunted down by Italians and their local collaborators, the Chetniks. From the initial crowded shots of them huddled together on the small boat, the editing switches to individual close-ups of different men as the disagreement and doubt grow. When the senior ranking partisan fighter among them makes the call that they will stay on dangerous territory and head for the dugouts, therefore exposing themselves to grave harm, the decision is followed by a quick, silent succession of individual close-ups, and each man is now separated by a cut – each looking at the senior ranking soldier who made the call – as each individual separately ponders (and in some cases questions) the likely dire consequences of this decision (Figs. 31-36). The editing within the scene, therefore, becomes noticeably more prominent, and individual shots become significantly shorter as the tension rises and the stakes grow, and as the partisans’ united front is increasingly called into question.

In a perhaps deliberately self-reflexive nod to the editing style that Pavlović and Skrigin excelled in in their collaborations, one of the film’s protagonists, Lado, overtly calls attention to the Hegelian dialectic, in the context of his controversial “marriage” to a woman who is already married and whose husband had been taken away by Germans a year prior. As Lado insists that his personal choices are his private business, Ivan retorts to another character that personal things are “sometimes not private business, it depends on the circumstances.” This prompts Lado to ask whether one should instead get married on the principles of the Hegelian dialectic thesis/antithesis/synthesis triad. This exchange is accompanied by editing that cuts back and forth between the shot/reverse shot close-ups of the two characters. Their disagreement is emphasised by the two being separated through editing, as they do not occupy the same frame during the testy exchange in question (before the exchange started, the opening shot of the scene had both men, alongside the other people in the room, shown in a single wide frame).

A similar editing pattern occurs when the now-decimated group of the partisan fighters being hunted down are taking a brief reprieve at a cottage and having food. From the wide shot of the ever-smaller group, the scene increasingly becomes more fragmented by cuts and individual close-ups as an older group member reads out loud about the socialist promises of a classless society. Lado interrupts to voice suspicion about a post-revolutionary classless society, as it reminds him too much of a “Christian heaven.” His disillusioned speech, as the camera zooms into a close-up, perhaps quite accurately predicts that the future comrades will make the partisans’ spaces of struggle into “museums for tourists,” where a few partisan photographs will be hung and reminiscent of religious paintings. Clear parallels are being evoked between the partisan struggle and religious sacrifice, for better or worse.

Arguably, the film’s most striking sequence, both narratively and when it comes to editing, comes when a number of now-dead partisan fighters’ bodies are lined up for a series of “trophy” images to be taken alongside the Italians and the Chetniks by an Italian officer. After a shot of the fascist officer holding up his camera to take the gruesome photos, Pavlović and Skrigin insert a single red frame, a reference to blood that visually enhances the spectacle of the partisans’ violent death. The red frame is followed by a quick succession of silent and still close-ups of fallen antifascist resistance fighters whose ordeal the film had been following, the film cutting to the next close-up each time a camera is heard clicking. In this pointed montage, the gaze of the (photographic) camera is closely aligned with the brutal fascist annihilation of those who resist it (Images 37-45). To drive the point further home, the final shot of a dead partisan shows the deceased with his eyes wide open, and directly facing the camera, as if to return the gaze and break the fourth wall, calling our attention to the very act of making an atrocity into a grim spectacle.

These macabre images are subsequently discovered by the two surviving partisan soldiers, Lado and Šako, who discard them in disgust. The final stretch of the film conveys a more general, poignant moral indictment of the atrocities of the 20^th century (thesis), but also a hope of rebirth (antithesis). After Lado’s “wife” Neda gives birth in a horse drawn carriage and with the help of a nomad Roma group who chance upon her, there is a pointed close-up of the baby’s face, evocative of the cinematic classics that use such a visual device as a sign of hope and rebirth in the midst of stark calamity: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mat’ / Mother (1926, USSR) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d'Arc / The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, France). The final near-miss separation between Lado and his wife and newborn son amounts to the film’s final synthesis – a missed connection that leaves open the possibility of both further atrocity and rebirth alike.

Conclusion: Editing Women’s Work Back into the Frame

This article is a contribution to what I hope will become a growing body of scholarly interventions that more consistently recognise women’s work behind the camera in socialist cinema – here specifically the cinema of socialist Yugoslavia. Importantly, one should not all too simplistically assume that women’s authorial contributions can only happen at the level of writing/directing a film. Using the case study of Olga Skrigin, I aimed to illustrate that an editor can sometimes become a film’s vital creative force in their own right, through their essential input and influence that can potentially mark a turning point for the director with whom they are collaborating. There is no shortage of such thriving collaborative pairings between editors (often female) and directors (often male) in the context of global film industries writ large.

Another goal of the article has been to entice a more systematic scholarly scrutiny, and therefore recognition, of women’s editing work within the history of Yugoslav socialist cinema. The case of Olga Skrigin is but the tip of the iceberg. Due to the constraints regarding the length and scope of any single academic article, an editing career as extensive as Skrigin’s cannot be given the full justice it deserves. Therefore, rather than giving a cursory overview of a larger number of her editorial works, I chose to focus on a smaller number of cinematic case studies that illustrated the impressive range of Skrigin’s editing contributions to Yugoslav cinema. At the same time, that meant that entire portions of her editing career – her cinematic collaborations with her spouse Žorž Skrigin, or the later stages of her career, that include extensive work with director Goran Paskaljević, for example – are yet to be given proper historicization, attention, and analysis.

One of the most significant aspects of Olga Skrigin’s editing career was her skilled and effortless – intuitive, one might suggest – traversing between what has traditionally, in film studies, been referred to as a distinction between formalism/constructivism and realism – or more simply put, between the preference for either montage or the long take. When one examines her body of work and the diverse directors she worked with, it appears that Skrigin did not find the formalist and realist approaches to filmmaking to be mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary. In her extensive film legacy as an editor, they complement one another in insightful ways unique to cinema. This is particularly evident in her collaborations with Živojin Pavlović, where the two perfected what I have here referred to as Skrigin’s dialectic editing: juxtaposing with a cut visual, aesthetic, formal and, often, ideological meanings – in the process, and through striking counterpoints, arriving at new insights, as well as new possibilities of what cinema can do, and be.

Dijana Jelača
Brooklyn College
The City University of New York
Dijana.jelaca@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Želimir Žilnik, Sarita Matijević and Slobodan Šijan for generously sharing their valuable insights regarding the work of Olga Skrigin, particularly regarding her collaborations with Živojin Pavlović. Additionally, I want to thank Danica Kolev and Tanja Petrović for helping me locate and access important secondary materials that significantly contributed to the research conducted for this article.

Bio

Dijana Jelača is a Lecturer in the Film Department at Brooklyn College. She is the author of Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema (2016) and co-author of Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction (2019). Jelača co-edited several scholarly volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (2017) and The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia (2017). Her research interests include feminist film studies, cinema and trauma, socialist women’s cinema, and South Slavic film cultures. Jelača’s essays have appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, Senses of Cinema, Jump Cut, Studies in World Cinema, European Journal of Women’s Studies and elsewhere.

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Filmography

Afrić, Vjekoslav. 1947. Slavica / Slavica. Avala Film.

Berković, Zvonimir. 1966. Rondo / Roundabout. Jadran Film.

Bulajić, Veljko. 1969. Bitka na Neretvi / The Battle of Neretva. Bosna Film.

Crvenčanin, Vera. 1948. Beogradski univerzitet / Belgrade University. Avala Film.

Čengić, Bahrudin – Bato. 1972. Slike iz života udarnika / Life of a Shock Force Worker. Studio Film.

Dreyer, Carl Theodor. 1928. La passion de Jeanne d'Arc / The Passion of Joan of Arc. Societe generale des films.

Jevđević, Aleksandar and Jevđević Srđan. 1991. Moj brat Aleksa / My Brother Aleksa. Beograd Film.

Jovanović, Soja. 1957. Pop Ćira i pop Spira / Priests Ćira and Spira. Avala Film.

Jovanović, Soja. 1964. Put oko sveta / A Trip Around the World. Avala Film.

Kenović, Ademir. 1987. Ovo malo duše / This Much of Soul. Radiotelevizija Sarajevo & Centar Film.

Kenović, Ademir. 1989. Kuduz / Kuduz. FRZ Bosna & Avala Film.

Kenović, Ademir. 1997. Savršeni krug / The Perfect Circle. ARD Degeto Film.

Krvavac, Hajrudin “Šiba.” 1969. Most / The Bridge. Bosna Film.

Krvavac, Hajrudin “Šiba.” 1972. Valter brani Sarajevo / Walter Defends Sarajevo. Bosna Film.

Makavejev, Dušan. 1965. Čovek nije tica / Man Is Not a Bird. Avala Film.

Makavejev, Dušan. 1971. WR: Misterije organizma / WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Neoplanta Film.

Osmanli, Dimitre. 1971. Žeđ / Thirst. Makedonija Film.

Pavlović, Živojin. 1966. Povratak / The Return. Avala Film.

Pavlović, Živojin. 1967. Buđenje Pacova / The Rats Woke Up. Centar Film.

Pavlović, Živojin. 1969. Zaseda / The Ambush. Filmska Radna Zajednica.

Pavlović, Živojin. 1977. Hajka / Manhunt. Centar Film.

Pavlović, Živojin. 1992. Dezerter / Deserter. Centar Film.

Petrović, Aleksandar. Tri / Three. 1965. Avala Film.

Pogačić, Vladimir. 1949. Priča o fabrici / The Factory Story. Zvezda Film.

Popović, Miodrag. 1964. Čovek iz hrastove šume / Man from an Oak Forest. Avala Film.

Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 1926. Mat / Mother. Meshrabporn-Rus.

Stojanović, Nikola. 1970. Draga Irena / Dear Irena. Studio Film.

Tanhofer, Nikola. 1958. H-8… / H-8…. Jadran Film.

Vertov, Dziga. 1929. Chelovek s kino-apparatom / Man with a Movie Camera. Vseukrainske Foto Kino Upravlinnia.

Wajda, Andrzej. 1962. Sibirska ledi Magbet / Siberian Lady Macbeth. Avala Film.

Suggested Citation

Jelača, Dijana. 2025. “Women on the Cutting Edge: Editing in Yugoslav Film, and the Authorship of Olga Skrigin”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 20. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00020.388.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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