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).