UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Figure 22 | People along the Blue Train trail, SerbianGhost‘s video.
“Triput sam video Tita”
Moving now to more explicitly SFRY related digital memorials, on mejerchold‘s channel one can
find another digital memorial by the same maker. Here mejerchold takes a once extremely popular
song by ĐorĊe Balašević ―Triput sam video Tita‖ [I‘ve Seen Tito Three Times] 268 as an audio part
of the memorial and a selection of video clips from a Serbian Radio Television programme and a
show on History Channel, and a selection of material already used in ―Tatu – Jugoslavija.‖ Now,
the 1981 Balašević‘s song is a first-person memorial narrative in which the singer recounts the
three occasions he saw Tito: first as a five-year-old, second as a youth playing at a concert and
third when Tito was taken across Yugoslavia in the Blue Train in 1980. An overtly personal
narrative was at the time of its first release an expression of grief over the loss of the president, but
at the same time an appraisal of youth and perhaps even more an adoration of a country that
‗materialised‘ precisely through the mythology/cult of Josip Broz. The nostalgic tone with which
the song is invariantly invested in many present day interpretations could only have developed
over the years. And it has, clearly, as since the collapse of Yugoslavia the song came to be used in
268 ―Tri put sam video Tita,‖ mejerchold, accessed 6 August 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2N-
WUeHwRo
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