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The article inquires into how an international success of the 1960s auteur films influenced the Yugoslav cinematic canon. Through scrutinizing an array of reviews and articles appearing in the Yugoslav press of the period, it reconstructs an 'international gaze': a semi-imaginary, yet authoritative instance for which the Yugoslav film-maker, the Yugoslav critic and the Yugoslav film historian needed to perform. This 'gaze' encompasses three mutually intertwined gestures: it deals in political 'subversion' and makes it into a means of cultural self-fashioning; it is underpinned by Balkanist exoticizations, and it severs what it regards as modernist-critical works from their popular-cultural context. The article claims that an analysis of the effects which the 'international gaze' produces changes the perspective on the 'dissident' Yugoslav auteur as means of canonization. Furthermore, it inquires into how the 'international gaze' can create blind spots in the critic's perspective and how the period's non-canonized films (a privileged example being Dragoslav Lazić's popular comedy Sirota Marija/Poor Mary, 1968) can fill-out these blind spots by turning the tables and making both the canonized works of the 1960s and the 'international gaze' that helped canonize them into objects of their own critique.
Adrian Pelc (Wed,) studied this question.