This presentation, based on recent archival discoveries, will introduce the never-before-seen material pertaining to Dušan Makavejev’s 1990s idea for a film about the war of Yugoslav disintegration. Bringing together visual and written threads pertaining to documentary war-photography, Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, human-animal relations, techniques of montage, and computer-generated imagery, the talk will aim to reconstruct a peculiar cinematic concept, which encapsulates the late phase of Makavejev’s work and deepens our understanding of socialist Yugoslavia's breakup in unorthodox ways. The lecture will be followed by a discussion.

Pavle Levi is Chair of the Department of Art & Art History and the Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts in Stanford’s Film and Media Studies Program. He is the author of numerous books on film, including Cinema by Other Means, Jolted Images, and Hypnos in Cineland.

23 January 2026, 14:00-16:00
Universität Zürich, Rämistrasse 73, 8006 Zürich RAK-E-6

No registration required. For any questions, please reach out to Nikola Radić at nikola.radic@fiwi.uzh.ch.

This event is organized by Nikola Radić, as part of the SNSF-funded research project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich.