Kinoteka spends August on what Serbia actually watched

On August 1, at nine in the evening, the Makavejev hall opens with a Danish film almost nobody talks about today. “Otkrice ljubavi” entered no canon, appears on none of the lists that get copied from one site to the next, and few younger viewers could place it in the right decade. Yet in 1969 no film in the country sold more tickets.

That is how the Yugoslav Film Archive opens an August cycle that is less a festival programme than a report from the box office. It follows the most-watched foreign films in Serbia year by year, from 1969 to 2002. No curatorial favouritism, no rescue mission for forgotten masterpieces, not a single title slipped in because it would look better that way. The criterion is singular and distinctly odd for an institution whose professional business is the canon: tickets sold.

Which is why the list looks the way it does. David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago”, the biggest draw of the 1970/71 season, shares the month with Arthur Hiller’s “Love Story”. Next to them sits Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia saga “The Godfather”, then the musical “Grease”, then Tony Scott’s “Top Gun”. The cycle closes on August 30 with “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” and on August 31 with “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”.

What does this list actually say about the audience?

The first thing that stands out is how fast taste moved. The late sixties and early seventies belong to melodrama, to grand emotion and long running times, to the film watched the way a novel is read. By the middle of the seventies that space has been taken over by something else entirely, and the eighties deliver genre in its purest form, action and speed. The nineties and the early 2000s finish the job with franchise and spectacle, worlds invented consistently from nothing.

The second and more interesting point is that this curve does not always match what was being written about film in those same years. Several titles on the list spent decades on the margins of serious criticism while filling halls. Several others are now taught as course material though at the time they were simply successful commercial products. Distance decided their standing, not the review.

The third point is the least comfortable for anyone attached to the idea that the local audience was somehow special: most of the programme is American. Not for lack of alternatives, but because that is what people went to see. The cycle offers no consolation here, only the figure.

An institution letting the box office speak

What makes this programme worth the trip is not nostalgia, though there will be plenty of it in the room. It is worth it because an archive that exists to preserve and interpret the canon has agreed, for one month, to set the canon aside and let a different kind of document speak. A list of best-attended titles is a historical source like any other, and a more honest one than most, because nobody assembled it with an agenda.

Watching “The Godfather” in a hall normally reserved for restored Yugoslav heritage means watching the ritual of cinemagoing itself. What it looked like when going to the pictures was an event rather than one option in a streaming menu. How an audience chose when it had little to choose from, and what survived that choosing.

Perhaps the largest question is the one the cycle poses without saying a word. If someone built the same programme thirty years from now, covering 2003 to the present, what would be on it, and would we be proud of that list or quietly embarrassed by it? What would you send into that hall from your own cinema history?