Slike iz života udarnika (Life of a Shock Force Worker). 1972. Yugoslavia. Directed by Bahrudin Bato Čengić. creenplay by Čengić, Branko Vučićević. With Adem Cejvan, Stojan 'Stole' Arandjelovic, Zaim Muzaferija. North American premiere. In Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian; English subtitles. 79 min.
The controversial and once-censored Life of a Shock Force Worker is a major rediscovery of Yugoslavian cinema, a film that resulted in director Bato Čengić and cinematographer Karpo Godina (the subject of a MoMA retrospective in 2018) being banned from making movies for 10 years. Thanks to a new restoration overseen by Godina himself, we can once again marvel at the film’s uniquely sooty palette—the result of shooting roughly 600 meters underground in dangerous methane-choked coal mines using only battery-powered miners’ lamps. Čengić’s portrait of the famous proletarian shock worker Alija Sirotanović—a propaganda hero of the television airwaves and countless stilted medal ceremonies who quickly became forgotten—captures the glaring disconnect between manufactured glory and hard-bitten reality in building a new socialist utopia. Inspired by Godina’s own subversive short documentaries, Čengić exalts the thankless yet valiant drudgery of the film’s real-life coal miners in striking tableaux vivants.
Digital restoration by the Slovenian Cinematheque in cooperation with the Sarajevo Film Center, the Croatian State Archives and the Austrian Film Museum, with funding provided by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, with an additional contribution of “A Season of Classic Films,” an initiative of ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes, supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme; courtesy Sarajevo Film Center.