Carnal encounters and producing socialist Yugoslavia: voluntary youth labour actions on the newsreel screen

Abstract

This article explores the role that the newsreel genre played in the production of socialist Yugoslav territory, understood as reshaping the body of the socius. We analyse news reports concerning voluntary youth labour actions, which were one of the most important features of Yugoslav socialist society and which featured heavily in Yugoslav official newsreels. We argue that the newsreel provided a specific liminal space in between the ‘real’/non-cinematic and ‘screened’/cinematic experience, where we locate occurrences of carnal encounters between the body on the cinematic screen and the body of the audience. In this regard, we discuss two characteristic types of frame which were present in the newsreel reports on labour actions: the somatic frame and the machinic-labour frame.