Reimagining Collective Identity: Ideology, Cultural Representation and Aesthetic Transformation in Macedonian Cinema

National cinema histories often narrate archives, state institutions and post-independence production as successive stages of a coherent national tradition. This article challenges that teleology by examining how Macedonian cinema represents collective identity across the pre-socialist moving-image archive, socialist Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav independent/transnational field. The purposive corpus contains twenty-five analytical units: twenty-four individual films and one group of Manaki actualities. Ten nodal units receive extended close readings, while fifteen satellite films provide targeted comparisons. The analysis connects time and space, framing and light, and sound and music to the institutions and practices through which collective subjects become perceptible. Three relational concepts organise the findings. Archival territoriality concerns the retrospective national attribution of images. Institutional collectivity concerns the production and regulation of collective visibility through studios, language, public institutions and recognisable social roles. Precarious assemblage concerns relations sustained through repeated practices without secure guarantees of continuity. These mechanisms overlap rather than replace one another. Socialist films already expose vulnerable solidarities, while post-Yugoslav films continue to depend on institutions and to stage their demands for recognition. The comparison therefore does not describe a passage from collective ideology to individual freedom. It identifies changing arrangements of bodies, spaces, media and labour through which a “we” becomes representable. Its contribution is a long-duration, form-sensitive account of cultural representation that does not treat 1991 as an absolute origin. The findings remain bounded by purposive selection, unequal analytical depth and the absence of audience-reception research.