3 - The Engine Room of a New Ustasha Consciousness: Cinema, Terror, and Ideological Refashioning

Summary

In early 1945, a column began appearing in the newspaper Hrvatski narod relating the disconcerting adventures of a commentator with cultural modernity. Clearly satirical on one level, the appearance of the column in the midst of a plethora of articles relating the heroic sacrifices of Ustasha warriors, the “terror” of the Bolshevik hordes, and invocations from regime officials for ordinary citizens to fight fanatically to the death for the Ustasha state lent it an incongruous air. In spite of its pretense of normality, though, the writer's exaggerated confrontations with archetypes of everyday life served to explore in comic form the regime's anxieties about the failure, even at this late stage, to refashion Croat citizens into Ustasha subjects. This was illustrated in the very first column in which the commentator related his experience visiting a local cinema. Having been induced into seeing the latest cinematic “gala production” by a young sophisticated cineaste despite having no money for it, the jostling, pushing, and rough behavior of the cinemagoing public he encounters while trying to make his way to the ticket office speaks eloquently of the state's inability to remake the conduct of the masses. Furthermore, as he is pushed forward by the straining masses, he is appalled to realize that he too “burns with an unquenchable desire” to see the film. “I am already by the doors. Ah, the rear end of the column moves; a bit more and I will gaze on the shining face of the ticket seller.”

For Ustasha cultural theorists, cinema represented a medium through which the masses could be transformed from ordinary citizens into Ustasha subjects with Ustasha values. As the most modern form of mass propaganda, cinema constituted a central element in the state's social and cultural program to enlighten and modernize the masses. Party ideologues, meanwhile, envisaged the construction of a new concept of cinema imbued with the social ideals of the Ustasha movement and its radical cultural and nationalist orthodoxies. Moreover, in the same way as it utilized its programs of worker mobility, house building, and mass education, through cinema the state sought to offer ordinary citizens a glimpse of the good life and a space of normalcy in a profoundly abnormal time of deprivation, bloodshed, and conflict.