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The Ninth Circle (1960).As with much of communist Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia’s film industry exploded in quality and international reach across the 1960s. With generous state investment in film in an era of social liberalization, Yugoslav filmmakers of the 1960s—or certainly those who fell under the Black Wave banner—were, at their best, politically radical and timeless, creating films that captured a unique historical moment and yet—60 years on—have lost none of their anger and impetus. But as a recent retrospective of Yugoslav cinema programmed by Mina Radović at Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato shows, this radical Black Wave cinema did not emerge from nowhere, but rather had its roots in the earlier cinema of the postwar era. Earlier films, such as Zenica (1957) and The Ninth Circle (1960), looked forward to the radicalism of the forthcoming movement, while canonical Black Wave films such as Tri (1965) grew from the foundations...