The Icon of Rebellion

If it is true that each era and each society has such heroes and icons as it produces and, after all, deserves, then there is no doubt that Sonja Savić is one of those artistic figures that help us better and more completely understand the diversified, exciting and, unfortunately, final phase in the film history of former Yugoslavia. For it was precisely during the eighties, that the remarkable and fascinating career of this actress was flourishing and reached its acme, to be transformed later into a paradigmatic, qualitative and quantitative phenomenon capable of defining by itself most of the vital characteristics of the period and milieu from which it sprang up and to which it belonged.The first and probably the only genuine film star of the era after Tito and before the collapse of former Yugoslavia, Sonja Savić designedly based her media charisma on the most progressive and, as it turned out later, mainly utopian beliefs and aspirations of Yugoslav society in the eighties. In a series of impressive and totally different roles in terms of their genre, style and character, this bold, determined, imaginative, uncompromising and often unadjustable actress gave the Yugoslav audience what it had never had before: the figure of an authentic and uncompromising rebel. For, despite her partisan, self-management and film-noir predecessors asserting that they wished to and could do more, the web of social and historical circumstances was irrevocably on her side, permitting her repeatedly to warn a dominantly conservative and traditional environment of the necessity of a human, civil and artistic rebellion.
The bitter realities of the time soon devalued and denied not only the commitment and proclaimed goals of Sonja Savić, but all the essential attributes of the society, state and cinematography on the foundations of which the specifics of her identity as an actress had been built. Faced with the new political and cinematic order in her country during the nineties, and having lost some of her former enthusiasm and creative freedom, the actress stoically endured both a lack of work and a certain marginalisation of her previous work, channelling her unrestrainable energy to other media and technologies and to other artistic programmes and concepts as well. In the process of maturing as an artist, Sonja Savić has obviously realised that commercial films are not the ideal tool of a revolution of the mind, but this bitter and slightly delayed revelation has nevertheless left the momentum of her private rebellion unimpaired.
Aleksandar D. Kostić

Program SONJA SAVIC

Wednesday, 13. oct., 6pm: Living like the rest of us - dir. Milos Radivojevic, 1982.
Thursday, 14. oct., 6pm: Sugar Water - dir. Svetislav Bata Prelic, 1983.
Thursday, 14. oct., 10pm: The Strangler - dir. Slobodan Sijan, 1984.
Friday, 15. oct., 5pm: Una - dir. Miloš Radivojevic, 1984.
Friday, 15 oct., 7pm: Recent videowork by Sonja Savic. Followed by a discussion with Sonja Savic, Aleksandar D. Kostic and Maja Weiss. Moderator: Katarina Pejovic.

In collaboration with: Slovenska kinoteka