“(…) Milica Rakić’s experimental film, Red, if You Didn’t Exist, You Should Be Invented, introduces the character of a heroine, fighter and activist, who – in two figures and three voices – personifies the character of the new woman, developed in the struggle, the character already abandoned during the period of consolidation of power in the FNRJ (Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia). By montaging feature and documentary film scenes, along with the off-screen narration, a narrative is built that does not treat the national liberation struggle and the socialist revolution as something completed in the distant past, but as unfinished processes, interrupted in order to establish a stable government and reach a basic standard of living, while the bearers of those processes were temporarily pacified. That temporality, however, has become relatively permanent, and the demobilized woman fighter and revolutionary remained in a kind of internal exile, wandering like an apparition or ghost around the villa where she had had an illegal Partisan printing press, and from which she had set off to fight. She is occupied with the dialogue between the two poles of her physically split personality, through which some slogans break out now and then, and which is contrasted with a very dry and rough report on the shortcomings of the AFŽ’s work in 1947. She wears the clothes and make-up for movement, but there is no demand for it.”

From the text Amazon, Partisan, Ghost, written by an art historian Stevan Vuković

Participants and collaborators: Vladimir Bjeličić, Olga Dimitrijević; Montage: Irena Parović, Srđan Ćešić; Camera: Vladimir Jevtić; Photo: Aleksandrija Ajduković: Music: Ludmila Frajt; Script: Milica Rakić; Make-up: Dragan Vurdelja; Hair stylist: Jovanka Lujić; Translation: Aleksandar Milajić; The film uses parts of Tereza Kesovija’s song “I onda kradom gledam lice tvoje” and “Budi se istok i zapad”.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon and the Artist Collection
Mining agreement: III-30-186/11.10.2023.
Inventory no: 184
Photo: Aleksandrija Ajduković