Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe 9789048532964

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Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

Eastern European Screen Cultures The series Eastern European Screen Cultures publishes critical studies on the screen cultures that have marked the socialist and post-socialist spaces in Europe. It aims to unveil current phenomena and untold histories from this region to account for their specificity and integrate them into a wider conception of European and world cinema. The series aspires to fill gaps in research, particularly by approaching Eastern European screen cultures in a transnational and comparative framework and exploring previously underrepresented theoretical issues. It considers moving images in all stages and aspects: production, text, exhibition, reception, and education. Eastern European Screen Cultures will also publish translations of important texts that have not been able to travel outside of national and/or regional borders. Editorial Board Greg de Cuir Jr., University of Arts Belgrade Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire Francesco Pitassio, University of Udine Advisory Board Anikó Imre, University of Southern California Dina Iordanova, University of St. Andrews Pavle Levi, Stanford University Eva Näripea, Estonian Academy of Arts Dominique Nasta, Université Libre de Bruxelles Elzbieta Ostrowska, University of Alberta Katie Trumpener, Yale University

Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

Edited by Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Vukica Đilas, Home Movies, 1970–199?. Film still from digitized 8mm original. Courtesy Academic Film Center ‒ Student City Cultural Center, Belgrade. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 299 4 e-isbn 978 90 4853 296 4 doi 10.5117/9789462982994 nur 670 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the authors of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 11 Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi

Part I  Key Figures 1. The Experimentalism of Gábor Bódy

35

2. Circles, Lines, and Documentary Designs: Tomislav Gotovac’s Belgrade Trilogy

59

3. From the Workshop of the Film Form to Martial Law: On the Intersecting and Bifurcating Paths of Paweł Kwiek’s and Józef Robakowski’s Cinematographic Work in the 1970s and the 1980s

77

Gábor Gelencsér

Greg de Cuir Jr.

Łukasz Mojsak

Part II  Production, Support, and Distribution 4. Amateur Cinema in Bulgaria

103

5. The Polish Educational Film Studio and the Cinema of Wojciech Wiszniewski

125

6. Home Movies and Cinematic Memories: Fixing the Gaze on Vukica Đilas and Tatjana Ivančić

151

Vladimir Iliev with Katerina Lambrinova

Masha Shpolberg

Petra Belc

Part III  Viewing Contexts, Theories, and Reception 7. Alone in the Cinemascope

177

8. kinema ikon—Experiments in Motion (1970–89)

197

9. AudioVision: Sound, Music, and Noise in East German Experimental Films

221

Aleksandar Bošković

Ileana L. Selejan

Seth Howes

Part IV  Intersection of the Arts 10. Intersections of Art and Film on the Wrocław Art Scene, 1970–80

245

11. Conceptual Artist, Cognitive Film: Miklós Erdély at the Balázs Béla Studio

265

12. Works and Words, 1979: Manifesting Eastern European Film and/as Art in Amsterdam

293

13. Wizardry on a Shoestring: Čaroděj and Experimental Filmmaking in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia

317

Marika Kuźmicz

Ksenya Gurshtein

Sonja Simonyi

Tomáš Glanc

Index 329

Acknowledgments The groundwork for this volume, and for our collaboration as coeditors, was laid with a film program and web-based project Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990 on which we worked together in 2013–2014. We are very grateful to Margaret (Peggy) and Joanna Raczynska at the f ilm department of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C., for believing in the need for both the film series and the site and for bringing us together. We are also grateful to all the contributors who gave presentations during the NGA series: Pavle Levi, Diana Nenadić, Luka Arsenjuk, Eric Zakim, and Mauro Resmini, as well as to the authors who wrote for the website: Līva Pētersone, Łukasz Mojsak, Marysia Lewandowska, Diana Nenadić, Eva Näripea, Aleksandra Kedziorek, and Jiří Horníček. Because of the dearth of resources available to us as researchers during this curatorial endeavor, we subsequently coedited a special issue of the journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema in 2016, which provided an initial scholarly engagement with the region’s experimental postwar cinemas. We are indebted to Ewa Mazierska, editor of the journal, for shepherding us through that process and for generously encouraging us to continue our editorial activities as part of Amsterdam University Press’s Eastern European Screen Cultures series. The work of the contributors to the Studies in Eastern European Cinema issue—Cristian Nae, Mark Svede, Aida Vidan, and Maria Vinogradova—further helped us recognize how much research material was untapped and rife for discovery. We also want to acknowledge Greg de Cuir Jr., who in his role as the series editor, a position he holds alongside Mazierska and Francesco Pitassio, readily responded to practical concerns during the publication process while also helping us untangle content-related issues, remaining an enthusiastic supporter of the project throughout. Our editorial path in finishing this volume was by no means a straight one. Beyond the usual challenges of finding time to work on a project of this scale alongside professional and family obligations, we encountered the issue of promising papers remaining uncompleted due to various changes in authors’ personal and professional lives, the sudden unexpected death of a prospective contributor, and the deeply saddening passing of one of our authors, Vladimir Iliev, before work on the volume was completed. We want to thank our fellow scholars and friends across the fields of film studies, art history, and beyond: Libby Boulter, Sirah Foighel Brutmann,

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Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

Katalin Cseh-Varga, Eitan Efrat, Candice Hamelin, Dina Iordanova, Yelena Kalinsky, Klara Kemp-Welch, Alice Lovejoy, Ainsley Morse, Doru Pop, Geoff Saxe, Stephanie Triplett, Maria Vassileva, Jaap Verheul, and Eszter Zimányi. In some cases, they suggested possible contributors and connected us with scholars unfamiliar to us, expanding our networks and our awareness of exciting new scholarship that we are now thrilled to have included in this book. They also offered us advice, suggestions, inspiration, encouragement, or assistance. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to fellow scholars who organized events from which we benefited as participants. For Ksenya, the 2015 conference Shared Practices: The Intertwinement of the Arts in the Culture of Socialist Eastern Europe, organized by Anu Allas at the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn and the 2018 Yugoslav Experimental Film symposium organized by Aleksandar Bošković at Columbia University were very productive in helping with work on this book. Ksenya was also a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 2015-2016 when work on this book began, and she is deeply grateful to the NEH for its support of her scholarship. For Sonja, participating in the 2016 conference Contested Spheres: Actually Existing Artworlds under Socialism held at the Kassák Museum in Budapest, organized by Maja and Reuben Fowkes together with Edit Sasvári, provided an important cross-disciplinary platform for discussions of late socialist experimentation. Co-organizing a screening and discussion of 1970s experimental films from Eastern Europe with Kaspars Reinis, Nell Donkers, and Jagna Lewandowska at EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam in 2017 similarly generated new ideas regarding the complicated history of Eastern Europe’s second public sphere. At the Amsterdam University Press, we are grateful to Maryse Elliott, Mike Sanders, Chantal Nicolaes, Lucia Dove, and Danielle Carter, as well as to staff members with whom we did not interact directly, but whose labor we very much appreciate. We also deeply value the labor of the book's peer reviewers, whose comments greatly helped us to complete work on the manuscript. We also want to express our gratitude to the authors whose work is featured in this volume. They tirelessly revised their texts, provided additions, and offered truly engaging intellectual debates that have greatly facilitated and enriched our experiences as editors and have enriched the book overall. Their excavating and highlighting of under-researched fields of Eastern European audiovisual culture will hopefully continue to engender many more inspiring conversations.

Acknowledgments

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Numerous evocative images on celluloid, accounts of vibrant artist gatherings, and depictions of thriving multidisciplinary creative communities across socialist Eastern Europe have accompanied our work as editors over the past six years. We wish to acknowledge the filmmakers and artists discussed within these pages, whose experimental spirit and creative tenacity in the face of often adverse circumstances have been our guiding lights in bringing this book to fruition. Finally, we would like to dedicate this book to our families: Josh, Maya, and Yasha; and Niels, Jens, and Nico. We thank our partners in particular for their support of our own perseverance in producing this book.

Introduction Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi Structure of the Book In the simplest terms, this volume seeks to bring together and share with an interdisciplinary readership the histories of experimental filmmaking in state-socialist Eastern Europe between the 1950s and the late 1980s. This introduction is our effort as coeditors to be as transparent and self-aware as we can about the motivations and underlying assumptions that guided us in putting together a book that could accomplish that seemingly simple goal. When we began this project in 2015, our assessment of the limited relevant English-language scholarly terrain1 came from having previously coedited 1 The English-language books published recently, but prior to 2016, on postwar experimental f ilmmaking in Eastern Europe that we referenced in our earlier research were all studies focusing on a single country’s experimental film culture; these include: Łukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang, eds., 1, 2, 3…Avant-Gardes: Film/Art between Experiment and Archive (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007); Bojana Piškur and Tamara Soban, eds., Vse to je film!: Eksperimentalni film v Jugoslaviji 1951–1991 / This Is All Film!: Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951–1991, exh. cat. (Ljubjana: Moderna Galerija, 2010); Ana Janevski, ed., As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiments in Yugoslav Art in the 60s and 70s (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2011); Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Alice Lovejoy, Army Film and the Avant-Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015); Kamila Kuc and Michael O’Pray, eds., The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film, 1916–1989 (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2014). Since 2016, new English-language publications include Pavle Levi’s Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2017 as part of the same series as this book; Marika Kuźmicz and Łukasz Ronduda, eds., The Workshop of the Film Form (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017); and a monograph by one of the contributors to this volume: Seth Howes, Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (Rochester: Camden House, 2019). Chapters that focus on experimental f ilmmaking can occasionally be found in larger surveys of postwar Eastern European art; for example, Edit Sasvári, Hedvig Turai, and Sándor Hornyik, eds., Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018). Individual filmmakers on whom English-language scholarship has been published and most of whom are also discussed in this book include Tomislav Gotovac, Józef Robakowski, Paweł Kwiek, and Dóra Maurer.

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_intro

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a special issue of the journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema (SEEC) on experimental cinema in socialist Eastern Europe and, prior to that, having worked together on the film series and accompanying web-based project Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990 (2014).2 Our first aim was to give the broadest possible regional account of experimental filmmaking in the former socialist bloc. The geographic scope of the Amsterdam University Press’s Eastern European Screen Cultures series, for which this book was commissioned, is defined as including “All of the former socialist and current post-socialist states in Europe, excluding Russia.” In soliciting essays for this volume, we chose to focus on state-socialist countries outside the former U.S.S.R., given that the conditions of cultural production in the latter (including the special case of the Baltic republics) have been more extensively addressed in the existing Anglophone literature. In the end, we identified case studies from seven countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Finding authors to address countries on which little to no scholarship existed, such as Bulgaria, or countries less frequently discussed in the context of Eastern Europe, such as East Germany, was a particular priority. The resulting book contains the widest geographic overview of its topic in one place to date.3 Another choice that shaped the book was its temporal focus, which is concentrated mainly on the long 1960s and 1970s. These two decades saw the greatest flourishing of experimentation on film stock globally, and Eastern Europe was no exception. If anything, the trend was, arguably, more pronounced in that region than others: it was only by the early 1960s that most places in the region had both enough post-Stalinist political freedom and enough film equipment available in circulation to allow for experimental film cultures to emerge. Similarly, by the early 1980s, a combination of a shift toward video, a very different medium technologically, and changing political circumstances seems to have inaugurated a new era of video and media art, which, given its different production, distribution, and circulation contexts, must be addressed as a separate topic. 4 2 Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi, guest editors, “Experimental Cinema in State Socialist Eastern Europe,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema vol. 7, no. 1 (2016). The web project can be found at https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe.html. 3 The book does omit Albania, which, to the best of our knowledge, is a special case where the region’s most severe autocratic conditions made the existence of any kind of experimental cultural practices impossible. 4 See, for example, Edit András, ed., Transitland: Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989–2009 (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2009).

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Finally, we sought to make the book as diverse as possible not only in terms of its geography but also in terms of its ability to address key contemporary methodological concerns in the fields of both film studies and cultural history of socialist-era Eastern Europe. Hence the book’s organization of its thirteen contributions, which mostly address distinctive national contexts, into four sections that strive to bring out different methodological lenses in a transnational perspective. The book’s four sections are Key Figures; Production, Support, and Distribution; Viewing Contexts, Theories, and Reception; and Intersection of the Arts. We readily acknowledge that these topical divisions are extremely porous. Most of the book’s essays could easily fit into more than one of these four categories. The groupings of essays, nevertheless, highlight some of the key aspects of the experimental film cultures they address: who made experimental films under a statesocialist system and how were they made; which institutional platforms were activated, appropriated, or bypassed through these creative processes; how the parameters of experimentation were shaped by existing film production or distribution circuits; and how experimental cinema interfaced with or fit into other artistic practices, from popular to experimental, in the larger cultures within which the niche activities of experimental filmmakers were nestled. One way in which the book’s essays signal shifts in both film studies and Eastern European cultural history scholarship is by moving away from telling stories of personal genius and individual dissidence toward seeing personal creativity as almost always embedded in larger social systems. Hence the book’s heavy focus on experimental cinemas’ relationship to institutions—official ones of the state, foreign ones, and self-created ones that existed, even if briefly, either in parallel or in a complex entanglement with official ones. The section titled Key Figures discusses influential artists and filmmakers who both made significant bodies of experimental cinematic work themselves and played central roles in organizing and disseminating experimental film culture, often connecting filmmaking to other creative disciplines or forms of artistic experimentation. Production, Support, and Distribution focuses on the institutional, organizational, and administrative structures that made the creation of many of the films discussed in the book possible—under discussion here are primarily statesanctioned and state-funded spaces of film production, such as amateur film clubs or smaller official film studios, and the ways in which these became centers of formal experimentation. The third section, Viewing Contexts, Theories, and Reception, turns to case studies concerned with theoretical framings of experimentation and how alternative conceptualizations of

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film culture, and the inherent possibilities of cinema, engaged novel sites of film distribution and consumption. The final section, Intersection of the Arts, zooms in on questions of interdisciplinarity and intermediality, predominantly in relation to experimental, neo-avant-garde visual art practices and institutions and the ways in which visual artists specifically engaged the possibilities of cinema during the late socialist period.

Tracing the Boundaries of Experimental Cinema One key methodological question that undergirds the entire book is what we mean by “experimental film.” This is a question that we have had to tackle in our earlier work as well, and we urge anyone interested in a lengthier discussion to read the “Co-Editors’ Introduction” to the SEEC issue cited above in conjunction with this text, because the discussion found here builds on the earlier work. In SEEC, we framed “experimental” film as filmmaking that deploys unconventional strategies—in other words, ones not (yet) codified as genre conventions—with regards to both content (typically character-driven narrative and plot coded as clearly f ictional or nonfictional) and form (audiovisual tropes used to convey and frame the narrative). Under the broad “experimental” umbrella, we also included practices that establish unconventional approaches to the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. For this publication, we continue to favor the more neutral term “experimental” over related concepts such as “avant-garde,” “underground,” or “independent” filmmaking, because it best encompasses different types of cinematic works that counter more mainstream approaches to film, covering both textual and contextual elements. As Patti Gaal-Holmes notes in citing Duncan Reekie’s usage of the term, its “open-ended possibilities” relate to the fact that it refers to both process and product, adapts easily as a noun and an adjective, and […] has been accepted by a significant number of divergent film movements and theorists as a transcendent historical term. Experimental in this context would not be limited to formal experimentation but would include experiments in narrative, acting technique, sound, mise-en-scène, technology, working practices, distribution, exhibition.5 5 Dunkan Reekie cited in Patti Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5.

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Given the still largely uncharted histories of experimental filmmaking in socialist Eastern Europe, particularly in comparative transnational frameworks, a primary goal of this volume is to engage the multiplicity and variety of modes of experimentation with moving images that existed in the region. Hence the book’s engagement with both the more familiar relationship between filmic experimentation and neo-avant-garde art (e.g., Mojsak, Kuźmicz, Howes, Gurshtein) and activities within a variety of other film cultural contexts. The latter include documentary filmmaking, such as the idiosyncratic nonfiction oeuvre of Polish filmmaker Wojciech Wiszniewski (Shpolberg), politically engaged amateur films from the Bulgarian town of Rousse (Iliev and Lambrinova), and even the realm of experimental feature-length narrative films, as in the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Gábor Bódy’s mature work, which deployed fragmented and disjointed formal techniques alongside established genre tropes to produce highly unusual works of fiction (Gelencsér). Given this range of sites for “experimental” practice, which, in their totality, surpass limited and contested notions of “independence” in filmmaking and states of being “underground,” the volume broadens our understanding of areas of film culture within which experimentation was and was not possible. It thus highlights that, in socialist Eastern Europe, virtually any field of moving-image production could and was appropriated, rethought, and disrupted to generate unconventional output. The one exception we as editors made in pursuing the breadth of sites of experimentation is the field of animation. We chose not to include histories of experimentation in that fascinating medium, because the particularities of production and reception of twentieth century Eastern European animation deserve more thorough stand-alone exploration than we could offer here. By focusing on the expansion of relevant contexts, our key aim was to move beyond scholarship that foregrounds filmic experiments as primarily grounded in formal developments that are traced textually. While an undeniably valuable analytic tool, textual analysis alone offers a limited framework for the adequate mapping of experimental filmic output in a broader social context. A similarly nuanced approach that focuses attention not just on aesthetic form but also on modes of labor and relations involved in filmmaking is relevant to understanding experimental film scenes, particularly given the complexities of the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural systems within which such experimentation occurred in state-socialist countries. Recent scholarship on Western experimental film, such as Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017), edited by Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey, and Erica Balsom’s After

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Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017), as well as earlier work by David Andrews, David E. James, Kathryn Ramey, and Michael Zryd,6 situates experimental cinema in its social, political, and institutional contexts, with the effect of vastly expanding canons first established in the 1970s and negating any simplistic definitions that equate experimentalism with formal innovation combined with an imagined unqualified cultural oppositionality and independence from institutions.7 Similarly, the essays collected in this book, while offering a diversity of scholarly approaches to their case studies, all seek to establish the ways in which creative work was embedded within concrete social realities and institutional settings. In this way, we consider Alice Lovejoy’s 2015 Army Film and the Avant-Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military as an insightful model for the study of experimental media in the region. Lovejoy’s work invokes both Michael Zryd’s call to avoid simplistic and romanticized notions of “the avant-garde as anti-institutional” and Jan-Christopher Horak’s call to study experimental films “not only according to their aesthetic achievements, but also in terms of the myriad contexts of their institutional frameworks and reception.”8 6 David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde and Beyond (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Kathryn Ramey “Economics and Culture of the Film Avant-Garde: Networks and Strategies in the Circulation of Films, Ideas and People,” Jump Cut, no. 52 (Summer 2010); David E. James and Adam Hyman, eds., Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945–1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015) and David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Michael Zryd, “A Report on Canadian Experimental Film Institutions, 1980–2000,” in North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980, William Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002), 392–401. 7 The approach we describe as textual is exemplified by Gregory Zinman’s recent study of the history of direct, manual interventions onto the celluloid filmstrip, Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). Such scholarship significantly deepens our understanding of certain formal preoccupations, such as filmic abstraction, and we hope that future scholars will continue to do close readings of individual films that offer iconographic, structuralist, psychoanalytic, and other analyses of both Eastern European regional trends and global trends in experimental filmmaking—indeed, such analyses abound in this book too. Based on the essays found in this book, some possible fruitful areas of further thematic research in individual films include aforementioned filmic abstraction, a preoccupation with deconstructing or refiguring language, and representations of urban life, labor, and “Otherness,” among others. Expanding makers’ and viewers’ capacities of perception and rethinking and activating the viewer’s role, shifting it from passive to more consciously active, are two additional concerns that emerge across the case studies in this book and deserves further exploration. 8 Zryd and Horak cited in Alice Lovejoy Army Film and the Avant-Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), 209, note 49.

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As our volume shows, this approach is particularly fruitful when applied to research on the constraints and possibilities that were offered by state-socialist systems. Whether the infrastructural opportunities that institutions under state socialism offered were used as intended, subtly subverted as covers for illicit activity, or overtly attacked as too rigidly adhering to the state’s oppressive tactics, they all were regularly activated in the creative process, shaping filmic form and content, as well as production and distribution practices. Degrees of “institutionalization” within a state-socialist context, then, should not be understood merely with regards to degrees of “subversiveness” or “conformity.” This approach often surfaces in Western-centric discussions on this topic; for instance, Duncan Reekie’s decrying of the institutionalization of experimental film scenes in the United States and the United Kingdom that resulted in the loss of a countercultural tradition.9 In Eastern Europe, the institutional apparatus that undergirded much of the output discussed in this book was an unavoidable reality tied, in most cases, to the very possibility of accessing technologies necessary to produce moving images. As the next section of the introduction discusses, then, within a state-socialist context, we understand the relationship between “underground” and “independent” films in Eastern Europe not as standing in opposition to, but as being complexly entwined with state cultural apparatuses and institutions.

Why and How to Define a Regional Identity? Another set of this book’s fundamental methodological questions and goals revolves around its focus on a particular region as it existed in a strictly bounded period of time. Here, we wanted to add to what we consider a growing and significant body of recent scholarship within what Anglophone academia calls area studies. On the one hand, this recent scholarship grants the basic assumption, as old as the Cold War era, that state socialism in the Soviet sphere of influence engendered distinctive forms of culture production that set Eastern Europe apart from other parts of the world. On the other hand, there is an emerging understanding among scholars that the forms such cultural production took were very different—far more complex, varied, and malleable—than popular Cold War narratives, particularly those produced in the West, led us to believe. The goal of the edited volume 9 Duncan Reekie, Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 2.

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in aggregate, then, is to identify and analyze the structural conditions that existed in Eastern Europe that made the existence and, in some cases, the flourishing of alternative film cultures possible. The last several years of scholarship saw the emergence among cultural historians of the socialist period of two closely related theoretical concepts that help frame the larger goals of this volume: the “second public sphere” and “the gray zone.” The former was most elaborately articulated in the essay collection edited by Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak, Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-Based Art in Late Socialist Europe.10 In the simplest definition that the coeditors of the volume offer in their introduction, the “second public sphere” is “a (pseudo-)autonomous arena of communication and opinion sharing, a network and cultural production of individuals and groups, which existed in addition to a dominant public sphere, with which it was interconnected.” “The differentiation of public spheres in actually existing socialism is important,” the coeditors go on to note, not only because it enables us to question the idea of a state regarded as a ‘control freak’ and to understand the atmosphere in which a given artwork was produced or presented. To reconstruct the exact functional mechanisms of public spheres in the late socialist era, we need to rethink the categorical distinctions between official and unofficial or legal and illegal.11

The other term, “the gray zone,” is central to a document titled “New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent: Joint Review Report” (NEP4DISSENT), released in the fall of 2019 as the outcome of a European Cooperation in Science and Technology grant and based on the responses of a large pool of scholars across European institutions to a state-of-the-art survey concerning research on cultures of dissent. In explaining the motivations behind their work, the report’s authors write: Although the most spectacular forms of dissent in […] former socialist countries are well known, we believe that after the period of growth and 10 Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak, eds., Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-Based Art in Late Socialist Europe (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2018). For an introduction to the book’s main ideas, see Andrea Bátorová, “Interview with Katalin Cseh and Adam Czirak about the Second Public Sphere in the Former Eastern Bloc,” October 23, 2014, Art Margins Online, https://artmargins.com/interview-with-katalin-cseh-and-adam-czirak-about-thesecond-public-sphere-in-the-former-eastern-bloc/. 11 Cseh Varga and Czirak, Performance Art, 7, 5.

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consolidation in the decades after 1989, this field of study and the related domains of cultural heritage have failed to achieve its full significance. This state of affairs results from, (1) the persistence of Cold War-era conceptual distinctions which are biased toward direct political and contentious activities, and so overshadow the indirect cultural challenges to state socialism; (2) the confinement of research within national and disciplinary silos; and (3) the difficulties in coping with the heterogeneity, ephemerality, and linguistic diversity of the cultural legacy of this period.12

The authors thus consider how much broader cultural histories, including those of experimental cinema, can be incorporated into more nuanced and ambiguous contemporary understandings of dissent under state socialism and introduce the term “gray zone” as operative to the work of two of the project’s working groups (Working Group 2: Culture in the Grey Zone and Working Group 3: Alternative Cultures).13 Concerning the term “gray zone,” the authors write: Understanding resistance as an act of negotiated autonomy and as an exploration of the ambiguous realm between the official culture of former socialist countries on the one hand, and openly dissenting cultural activities on the other, defines the research scope of Working Group 2: Culture in the Grey Zone. It examines the dilemmas confronting the members of academic and artistic communities who, without engaging in open dissent, cultivated ties to both organized opposition and transnational scientific and artistic networks; while frequently playing a mediating role in introducing subversive, often Western ideas, trends, and theories into the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well as to everyday cultural practices. This research will enable a better understanding of the dual roles played by these individuals and groups, namely, that of simultaneously legitimizing and subverting official culture, and engaging in East-West dialogue. [This research] also takes into consideration the circumstances 12 Maciej Maryl, Piotr Wciślik, Muriel Blaive, James Kapaló, Zsóf ia Lóránd et al., “New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent: Joint Review Report: Report prepared by the participants of the COST Action CA16213” (NEP4DISSENT) (Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2019). Available online at https://hal. archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02144983, 8–9. 13 Particularly relevant to our book is the work of the project’s Alternative Cultures working group, whose broad topics of research range “from club culture, avant-garde art, fan communities, and resourceful venues; to media, such as fanzines, do-it-yourself fashion, foreign news reporting, experimental film, and mail art.” Ibid., 11.

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affecting the life choices of the grey zone artists and scholars: the existence of organized cultural opposition outside of the official realm, the degree to which such professions are dependent on state patronage, and the extent of cultural isolation from the West and the relationships with Western institutions promoting cultural freedom, among others.14

In addition to identifying the “gray zone” as the space where much of the cultural dissent in state socialism happened, NEP4DISSENT articulates several other key ideas that are important to this book, as well. It identifies “spaces, communities and networks, and their relationships” as major areas of investigation—an idea consonant with this book’s emphasis on filmmakers’ embeddedness in larger social networks and sites of production, reception, and critical exchange in considering the forces that shaped experimental cinema in Eastern Europe.15 The report also notes the deeply problematic “sharp distinctions between official culture […] and oppositional culture […] that has often been taken for granted.” “This dualistic perspective obscures what should be seen rather as the interplay between imposed cultural exclusion, instances of negotiation, and conscious dissent. Taken together, this interplay shaped the space in which alternatives to official cultural values could emerge.”16 While we as editors did not proscribe the use of terms “official” and “unofficial” in this book—terms that we believe still retain significant use value for many of the authors—we hope the book as a whole complicates for its readers any easy dichotomy between them. Notably, neither the sources cited above nor the book in your hands seeks to deny or diminish the reality of marginalization, persecution, or censorship that befell participants and culture makers active in the second public sphere or the gray zone. But the scholarship presented here adds signif icant nuance to our understanding that most artifacts produced on the margins of state-socialist culture did not face direct censorship or persecution, and that, despite the long-standing self-perception of the makers of alternative culture as being completely outside “the system” in which they lived, a retroactive look suggests that it is vitally important for 14 Ibid., 10. For an excellent example of scholarship that explores these ideas in practice, see the recent special issue of Third Text. Guest edited by Reuben Fowkes, the issue is titled “Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism” (vol. 32, no. 4, July 2018). For an example of an exhibition project that delved into the complexities of Eastern European artists’ interactions with the most repressive parts of the state-socialist apparatus, see Kata Krasznahorkai and Sylvia Sasse, eds., Artists & Agents: Performance Art and Secret Services, exh. cat. (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2020). 15 Ibid., 32. 16 Ibid., 14.

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us as contemporary researchers to understand how individuals were, in fact, entangled in the system and still found room for maneuver within it.17 We believe that the particular sociocultural circumstances in statesocialist Eastern Europe—a peculiar mix of tacit, and sometimes generous, support from socialist states that was combined with often unpredictable periods of intense official hostility—for which the terms “second public sphere” and “gray zone” serve as shorthands, make a compelling case for the regional focus of this book. We also believe that this book’s transnational perspective provides insights that stand-alone national histories cannot—a point on which NEP4DISSENT insists, as well, arguing for comparative and transnational approaches to the study of alternative cultures as an essential counterbalance to the national historical narratives that have dominated the region’s historiography since 1989.18 In this regard, this book is one of a number of recent publications, mostly in art history, that embrace a similar perspective, looking for overarching patterns that defined experimental culture in the region while not losing sight of the real and significant discrepancies between different national situations. These include Cinema, State Socialism, and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: Re-Visions, edited by Sanja Bahun and John Haynes (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2014); Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989), edited by Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski (Budapest: Central European Press, 2016); Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Berenika Szymanski-Düll (London: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2017); Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, edited by Beáta Hock and Anu Allas (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Klara Kemp-Welch’s Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 17 It’s rare to find frank published acknowledgments that, as scholars, we may find ourselves at odds in our assessments with the lived experience and opinions of the living subjects of our research, an admiration and respect for whose work often inspires our scholarship in the first place. An exchange that at least acknowledges the possibility of this discrepancy can be found in a recent essay by Klara Kemp-Welch about the Hungarian artist and experimental filmmaker Dóra Maurer. “If it was a paradox that it was the state’s emphasis on amateur art that had given experimental artists access to a new audience, then it also took Maurer’s remarkable combination of verve and pragmatism to make the most of the creative opportunity. But she did not see these activities as forming part of a ‘gray zone’: she and Erdély were barely reimbursed their travel expenses for directing the workshops. Asked whether in those days she had made a clear division between official and unofficial art, she replied that she had; asked whether she had seen these two positions as fluid, her answer was just as clear: ‘NO!’” Klara Kemp-Welch, “Esprit de Corps: Collaborative Activities 1971–7,” in Dóra Maurer, ed. Juliet Bingham, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2019), 15. 18 NEP4DISSENT, 14.

22 Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi

1965–1981 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), a book that is so far unique as a sustained, meticulous mapping of specific interpersonal exchanges by individuals and groups who took part in cross-border exchanges. A particularly important benefit of the transnational aspect of the book is that it allows a plethora of critical voices, both historical and contemporary, from the region itself to take center stage in reflecting on shared experiences. This makes it possible for Eastern European experimental cinema to be theorized by those familiar with its particularities in lieu of turning to ill-fitting frameworks produced by Western theorists for different contexts. As the book demonstrates, a number of filmmakers in the region—Tomislav Gotovac (De Cuir Jr.) and Slobodan Šijan (Bošković) in Yugoslavia, Gábor Bódy (Gelencsér) and Miklós Erdély (Gurshtein) in Hungary, George Săbău in Romania (Selejan), and Józef Robakowski (Mojsak) in Poland, to name some—served as their own theorists all along and had a significant impact on defining the theoretical concerns of others around them. The book’s authors also invoke other thinkers from the region whose ideas we know historically to have been important in their own countries and which, in a transnational perspective, gain the ability to illuminate larger regional trends, as well. Oskar Hansen, whose theory of Open Form was highly influential on several generations of interdisciplinary artists in Poland, is but one example of such a figure (Mojsak). We hope that, with time, scholars will do more to understand the key critical voices that shaped and analyzed Eastern European experimental cinema, perhaps through publications of collected translations of primary sources of the kind that exist for visual art but not yet for experimental film in the region.19

Notable Sites of Experimentation The studies of experimental filmmaking in postwar Eastern Europe gathered in this book consistently touch on a number of key institutional sites and 19 Examples of compendia of primary sources include Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern European and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002); Ana Janevski, Roxanna Marcoci, and Ksenia Nouril, eds., Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018); and tranzit.hu, ed., Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia 1947–2009 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). There are also prominent living theoreticians of experimental film, such as Hrvoje Turković in Croatia, whose work we discuss in the “Co-Editors’ Introduction” to the SEEC special issue, whose writings are yet to be translated into English and would benefit the emergence of a regional perspective.

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social formations that defined the who, where, how, and why of this sphere of cultural activity. Some of these were the more marginal parts of their countries’ national cinema apparatuses. Examples include smaller state-run film studios (Shpolberg, Gurshtein), film and art schools (Mojsak), and international film festivals and events, which at times required nominations for participants through a given country’s official cultural channels (Simonyi) and which were places that allowed already active experimental filmmakers to connect to a larger community of practitioners and bolster their own legitimacy back home. As noted at the beginning of this introduction, spaces that encouraged intermedial and interdisciplinary work, ranging from official institutions to informal gatherings, were particularly fruitful sites of filmic experimentation, which often arose out of social experimentation with existing norms of cinematic production and reception (for the most evocative example of the latter, see Tomáš Glanc’s description of apartment film festivals in Prague).20 This was particularly true of filmmakers’ relationship with visual art (Mojsak, Kuźmicz, Gurshtein), but as Seth Howes’s East German case study demonstrates, sound and music could also become central to experimental filmmaking. Howes not only provides an analysis of form and content of a select group of films but also foregrounds issues of media exhibition and consumption through the ways experimental filmmakers “reincorporated their films into live performances, musical and otherwise—thus ensuring that their films were shaped by, and then used to shape, broader practices of making and exhibiting” multimedia and intermedia art. As he notes, an important effect of this was to destabilize the disciplinary divisions state authorities used to administer and ideologically contain creative output under socialism. [S]uch approaches challenged the hierarchical disciplinary structure that governed education in music, filmmaking, dance, or art at East German academies, and which also supplied the rationale for creating distinct professional unions with mandatory membership in order to discipline activities in each field.

Artistic interdisciplinarity more broadly was thus a key way to resist and evade the state’s attempt to discipline its art into a certain order. 20 For an important recent contribution to the history and theorization of cinema in relation to intermedia and experimentation across disciplinary boundaries in the West, see Jonathan Walley, Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

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Yet another case study that identifies a fascinating site of interdisciplinary activity at the juncture of f ilm and literature is Aleksandar Bošković’s analysis of Slobodan Šijan’s paracinema in the Film Leaflet fanzine, which explored the “cine-apparatus” in sophisticated visual ways but without any actual projected images. Freely combining, reassembling, and appropriating wide-ranging content across media, from the lowbrow to the popular, Šijan’s fanzine articulated a “new language” of film thought along with a practice of critical inquiry into cultural reproduction that sheds light on the playfulness and intellectual range of Yugoslav film culture of the 1970s. Finally, Sonja Simonyi’s chapter also illuminates the centrality of interdisciplinarity for experimental work across the region as a whole and highlights its flip side—the difficulties of showcasing it that arose out of the differences in art administration in the East and West, as well as infrastructural limitations on the ground at art and film institutions in Amsterdam, where the events she discusses took place. Of particular note in this book is the extensive exploration of Eastern European amateur filmmaking, a long neglected field of film studies that has become an expanding arena for research in recent years under the umbrella of such initiatives as the Orphan Film Symposium. In Eastern Europe, amateurism was embraced as nowhere else, often lending conceptual legitimacy to filmic experimentation that happened in other spheres, such as visual art, as when the artists running the Permafo Gallery in Wrocław proclaimed that it does not recognize the division into “professionals” and “amateurs” in creative practice (Kuźmicz). Indeed, amateurism, which was encouraged across most of the European state-socialist sphere as an edifying and wholesome field of creative expression for the masses, is the foremost sphere of “minor” film cultural activity that emerges as central to experimentation across the different national contexts discussed in this book. 21 Yet the ways in which it served experimentation differed considerably from one national context to the next. In Yugoslavia, amateur experimentalism was highly developed, institutionalized, and publicly interwoven with networks of avant-garde art and film culture, whose key figures, both celebrated ones such as Tomislav Gotovac (De Cuir Jr.) and lesser known ones such as Tatjana Ivančić (Belc), started out or worked 21 Two important recent publications include Film History (vol. 30, issue 1; Spring 2018), “Special Issue: Toward a Global History of Amateur Film Practices and Institutions,” guest edited by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez; and the forthcoming volume by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez, eds., Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021).

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exclusively within the amateur context. Belc’s essay on the amateur filmmaker Tatjana Ivančić is particularly notable here, because it addresses a f ilmmaker’s gender and her culture’s misogyny as forces that shaped Eastern European experimental film scenes—a topic that we as editors felt was vital to include and that requires the kind of scholarly attention in our subfield that it has increasingly been getting in other areas of cultural studies pertaining to both Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. In the case of the kinema ikon group in the Romanian city of Arad (Selejan), the infrastructure of officially sponsored amateur filmmaking was, by contrast, unambiguously subverted. kinema ikon took advantage of the available technological tools to produce clandestine experimental work that fell fully outside of the expected and accepted parameters of amateur production. In Hungary, in turn, experimentation on f ilm by creatives from diverse backgrounds, while developed independently from the official amateur cinema scene, was, nevertheless, resolutely tied to nonprofessionalism during a veritable takeover of an off icial f ilm site, the Balázs Béla Studio, originally established for professionals (Gelencsér, Gurshtein). Last, an important aspect of amateurism concerns ways in which it could engender social activism through film. The Bulgarian case study included here exemplif ies to what extent amateur f ilmmakers could seize their platforms, which were supported and embraced by the country’s professional f ilmmakers’ union, for social engagement and activism (Iliev and Lambrinova). Evidently less policed, the amateur scene in Bulgaria was, at least in one key instance, able to serve as a catalyst for a reckoning with the taboo issue of industrial-scale pollution, ultimately leading to public discussion and governmental action. The impact of amateurism in the larger social sphere can also be traced, in less obvious but important ways, in specif ic f ilms by kinema ikon (Selejan) and Tatjana Ivančić (Belc), as well as in the work of Čaroděj in Czechoslovakia (Glanc) and in the participation of artist-f ilmmakers in the jazz and punk scenes in East Germany (Howes), cases in which amateur filmmaking helped cohere whole subcultural communities and create alternative parainstitutions in places where co-opting state-funded institutions and resources was not an option. Today, when the internet and the availability of a video camera to virtually anyone with a phone has dramatically transformed the global landscape of moving image production, Eastern Europe’s embrace of amateur filmmaking decades earlier seems positively prescient and worthy of further exploration as notable cultural heritage.

26 Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi

What’s Next? This book does not address as an explicit topic of research the current locations and state of preservation of Eastern Europe’s socialist-era experimental film legacies, though a reader interested in pursuing this research further can glean a lot of useful information from the essays’ footnotes. As coeditors of the book, we hope that this volume will inspire future researchers to extend and expand the knowledge gathered in these pages. The last section of the introduction is meant to offer practical guidance for anyone trying to figure out where to look next. We also hope this book might draw attention to the value of Eastern Europe’s experimental film legacies and to the need for continued and increased efforts that would ensure their long-term survival. The internet has made access to previously obscure films possible on a scale that was inconceivable when the state-socialist era ended in 1989–91. Anyone interested in a particular film mentioned in this book should first do a web search and check a film’s availability online, because that’s a continuously shifting terrain. That said, as of summer 2020, the vast majority of the films discussed here cannot be found on publicly accessible websites. In many cases, they can only be accessed through in-person viewing in the countries of their origin, and it often requires a fair bit of effort for a researcher to figure out where a particular cache of films might be found. The conceptual and medium in-between-ness and cultural marginality of experimental films that makes them so interesting as works of art has also meant that they have often not found self-evident homes in the official institutions of heritage preservation and public exhibition as those existed prior to 1989 or as they exist in Eastern Europe today. Contemporary preservation and distribution are further complicated by a frequent lack of legal clarity as to who holds ownership and copyright of these works. Insofar as these films survive, it is through an uneven patchwork of preservation efforts and sites that vary from place to place. The NEP4DISSENT report mentions access to original archival sources connected to postwar Eastern European cultures of dissent as an overarching problem due to their heterogeneity, linguistic diversity, and the ephemeral nature of the documents and artefacts which form this unique legacy [as well as] uneven quality of the metadata, resulting from the uneven investment in this particular realm of cultural heritage in general.22 22 NEP4DISSENT, 15.

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All of this is certainly true for experimental filmmaking, for which even regional coverage by “digital cultural heritage infrastructure for knowledge discovery and popularization” is a far-off dream.23 This is to say nothing of the deeper philosophical issue that, as the state-socialist era recedes further from living memory, the particular conditions that shaped its art will become increasingly less comprehensible even in the countries of origin. There are no efforts that we know of related to experimental cinema that offer museological or archival methodologies for preserving and presenting coherent historical contexts (of intimate communities of makers, unusual exhibition venues, means of producing critical dialogue, etc.) in addition to film-based artefacts themselves. Notable nation-specific efforts by major state-funded institutions to preserve experimental and amateur films include the research collection of the Center for Audiovisual Studies at the storied Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, which has an extensive online database of unofficial, amateur films from the socialist era (http:// cas.famu.cz/research-collection/) and has begun to digitize such films in the last several years; the archives of Communist-era amateur films at the Yugoslav Kinoteka and the Academic Film Center at the Students’ City Cultural Center in Belgrade; and especially the Filmoteka—a web-based archive of artist films and other experimental media work—built by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (https://artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka). Thanks to the latter, works by filmmakers discussed in Łukasz Mojsak’s and Marika Kuźmicz’s essays, for example, are easily accessible. Other art museums in the region, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade or the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, also have holdings relevant to the history of experimental cinema, though they are not currently accessible online. Films being deposited in an off icial, state-supported archive is, of course, not always an unequivocal good. The total transfer in recent years of the contents of the Hungarian Balázs Béla Stúdió (BBS) archive from the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle), where it had a public outpost since 2006, to the Hungarian National Film Archive (Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum) exposes the complexities of archiving the socialist-era past in the present moment. The transfer has reduced access to the BBS material, though the online database of the BBS archive (http://bbsarchiv.hu/) remains a useful starting point. Similarly, Petra Belc notes in her essay that, while the archive of the Croatian Film Clubs Association (Hrvatski Filmski Savez) in Zagreb is 23 Ibid.

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valuable in exploring the legacy of Yugoslav amateur filmmaking, it, at the same time, still reproduces the biases of the past, in doing less to promote scholarship and presentations of work by female filmmakers who were also underappreciated in their own time. As Sonja Simonyi’s contribution to this volume demonstrates, there also exist surprising opportunities in archives outside the region, for example, in Western Europe, that can be mined for sources on transnational networks of intellectual and cultural exchange during the state-socialist era. This contribution is doubly valuable because it unearths a valuable archival resource not previously discussed in any publications and because it traces concrete ways in which exchanges conducted in Western Europe became a starting point for collaboration between filmmakers from different Eastern European countries—a fact that belies the Cold War assumption that recognition in the West was the pinnacle of Eastern European artists’ dreams. Western institutions have also more recently acquired collection materials related to Eastern European experimental cinema, as when the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a full set of Slobodan Šijan‘s Film Leaflet for its library collection in 2018.24 There are, however, no concerted efforts by individuals or institutions interested in Eastern European experimental filmmaking to locate and centralize information on archival resources in repositories outside the region. In addition to state-supported institutions, some important work has been done by private nonprofits in the region to promote preservation and scholarship of experimental filmmaking. This includes the activities of the Arton Foundation in Poland, run by one of the contributors to this volume, Marika Kuźmicz, and the private Marinko Sudac collection in Zagreb, which contains a number of Yugoslav moving image works searchable online (https://avantgarde-museum.com/hr/). Experimental filmmakers have also in some cases taken archival and historiographic matters into their own hands, as in the case of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute in Zagreb, which preserves the late artist’s legacy, or the case of the kinema ikon collective in Romania, whose members have worked to preserve, classify, and digitize their own work on the internet (http://www.kinema-ikon. net/2010_ki/filmexp.html). Though partial, the information found through such resources is a starting point for researchers. In Bulgaria, Vladimir Iliev, another contributor to this book and a long-time amateur filmmaker, wrote and published the only existing history of Bulgarian amateur cinema and 24 For more on this, see https://post.moma.org/who-is-shooting-over-there-slobodan-sijansfanzine-film-leaflet-1976-79/

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experimental practices, an excerpt from which appears in this book in English for the first time. As we write this in 2020 and survey the landscape of how the legacy of experimental filmmaking under state socialism has fared in the last thirty years, we wonder if it might not be time to consider parallels between the present moment and the object of our study, the past. If alternative cultures of the socialist period teach us anything, it’s that culture workers should strategically use the resources of the state when and if they are available while also developing grassroots parainstitutions as needed to create communities of shared concern around issues and activities that the state would not knowingly embrace and support. The continued existence of the Artpool Art Research Center, privately run from 1979 until 2015, when it became part of the Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI), and, to a lesser extent, the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (originally funded by George Soros), both in Budapest, are a testament to the staying power of institutions that emerged from below to address blind spots in official record keeping. Today, as some of Eastern European culture’s biggest players—Poland and Hungary—revert to evermore authoritarian right-wing politics and cultural policies, histories that reveal the complexities of socialist-era culture might have to be increasingly protected and promoted by people who take matters into their own hands and draw on the lessons of ingenuity demonstrated by the protagonists of this book. The same seems to have been true all along for other countries in the region (e.g., Bulgaria and Romania), which continue to contend with a general lack of resources for cultural preservation. In the meantime, those of us based outside the region (of the fourteen contributors to this book, seven are based in Eastern Europe while the remaining half live and work in the United States and Western Europe) must also continue to do our best to produce scholarship that makes complex, vital, and relevant a past whose contestation and discussion remain so important to the political present.

Bibliography András, Edit, ed., Transitland: Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989–2009. Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2009. Andrews, David. Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde and Beyond. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Bátorová, Andrea. “Interview with Katalin Cseh and Adam Czirak about the Second Public Sphere in the Former Eastern Bloc,” October 23, 2014, Art Margins Online.

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https://artmargins.com/interview-with-katalin-cseh-and-adam-czirak-aboutthe-second-public-sphere-in-the-former-eastern-bloc/. Bošković, Aleksandar. “Who Is Shooting Over There: Slobodan Šijan’s Fanzine Film Leaflet (1976–79),” in post: notes on art in a global context. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Accessed April 21, 2021. https://post.moma.org/ who-is-shooting-over-there-slobodan-sijans-fanzine-film-leaflet-1976-79/. Cseh-Varga, Katalin and Adam Czirak, eds. Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-Based Art in Late Socialist Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Fowkes, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, guest editors. “Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism.” Third Text vol. 32, no. 4 (July 2018). Gaal-Holmes, Patti. A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Gurshtein, Ksenya, ed., Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe 1960–1990. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2014. https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe.html. Gurshtein, Ksenya and Sonja Simonyi, guest editors. “Experimental Cinema in State Socialist Eastern Europe.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema vol. 7, no. 1 (2016). Hoptman, Laura and Tomáš Pospiszyl, eds. Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern European and Central European Art since the 1950s. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002. Howes, Seth. Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. James, David, and Adam Hyman, eds. Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945–1980. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. James, David. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Janevski, Ana, Roxanna Marcoci, and Ksenia Nouril, eds. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018. Janevski, Ana, ed. As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiments in Yugoslav Art in the 60s and 70s. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Kemp-Welch, Klara. “Esprit de Corps: Collaborative Activities 1971–7,” in Dóra Maurer, edited by Juliet Bingham, 10–15, exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2019. Krasznahorkai, Kata and Sylvia Sasse, eds., Artists & Agents: Performance Art and Secret Services, exh. cat. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2020. Kuc, Kamila and Michael O’Pray, eds. The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film, 1916–1989. London: Wallflower Press, 2014. Kuźmicz, Marika and Łukasz Ronduda, eds., The Workshop of the Film Form. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017. Levi, Pavle. Cinema by Other Means. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Levi, Pavle. Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Lovejoy, Alice. Army Film and the Avant-Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Maryl, Maciej et al. “New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent: Joint Review Report: Report prepared by the participants of the COST Action CA16213” (NEP4DISSENT). Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2019. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02144983. Piškur, Bojana and Tamara Soban, eds., Vse to je film!: Eksperimentalni film v Jugoslaviji 1951–1991 / This Is All Film!: Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951–1991, exh. cat. Ljubjana: Moderna Galerija, 2010. Ramey, Kathryn. “Economics and Culture of the Film Avant-Garde: Networks and Strategies in the Circulation of Films, Ideas and People,” in Jump Cut, no. 52 (Summer 2010), n.p.. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/rameyExperimentalFilm/index.html. Reekie, Duncan. Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Ronduda, Łukasz and Florian Zeyfang, eds. 1, 2, 3…Avant-Gardes: Film/Art between Experiment and Archive. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007. Salazkina, Masha and Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez, eds., Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. Salazkina, Masha and Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez, guest editors. “Toward a Global History of Amateur Film Practices and Institutions.” Film History vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 2018). Sasvári, Edit, Hedvig Turai, and Sándor Hornyik, eds., Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018. tranzit.hu, ed., Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia 1947–2009. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Walley, Jonathan. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Zinman, Gregory. Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. Zryd, Michael. “A Report on Canadian Experimental Film Institutions, 1980–2000,” in North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980, edited by William Beard and Jerry White, 392–401. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002.

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About the Authors Dr. Ksenya Gurshtein is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She holds a PhD in the history of art, and her academic research focuses on postwar conceptual, experimental, and neo-avant-garde art in Eastern Europe. Her scholarship and criticism have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines, exhibition catalogs, and online. Dr. Sonja Simonyi is an independent scholar working on the visual cultures of socialist Eastern Europe. She completed her dissertation in 2015 at New York University on the Western genre in socialist Eastern European cinema. Her work on both popular and experimental cinema has appeared in a number of edited volumes as well as the journals Film History and Third Text.

Part I Key Figures

1.

The Experimentalism of Gábor Bódy Gábor Gelencsér Abstract This chapter frames the work of Gábor Bódy within Hungarian avantgarde cinema. It connects Bódy’s output to László Moholy-Nagy’s films via intersecting modes of formal experimentation and social critique, a duality that regularly appears in late socialist Hungarian experimental cinema. It then highlights linkages between the film cultural activities of Lajos Kassák, the editor of the interwar journal MA, and Bódy’s function as an overall organizer of interdisciplinary film culture at the Balázs Béla Studio some fifty years later. Finally, it turns to Bódy’s feature films American Postcard, Narcissus and Psyche, and Dog’s Night Song to consider how experimental, documentary, and fictional elements coalesced in these works and how the juncture of such filmic forms pervades Bódy’s film theory. Keywords: experimental feature film; Hungary; Balázs Béla Studio (BBS); Gábor Bódy; film theory; film and history

Introduction Gábor Bódy’s (1946–85) short artistic career, which yielded exceptionally rich creative work, is an anomalous, almost inexplicable phenomenon of the post-1968 Kádár era in Hungary. This period was marked on the one hand by the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism, which allowed for an increasingly market-oriented economic policy closer to capitalism (while preserving state ownership), and on the other by the military suppression of the Prague Spring. The latter indicated the impossibility of reforming state socialism, and the measures aiming at the new economic mechanism were gradually stopped.1 The long period of stagnation this engendered lasted 1 For a primary source regarding the cutting back on the reforms, including statements made by the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party’s Central Commitee on November 14–5, 1972,

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch01

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until the 1989 regime change. Bódy’s fate and the spirit of his films, while exceptional, are, at the same time, inseparable from this era. A far-reaching universal and national, generational, and existentialist drama unfolds across the film frames and on the pages of his biography. Bódy was a larger-than-life personality. He opposed his circumstances, broke barriers, and broke out of tight frames. At the same time, he paid the price by becoming part of the system, which eventually consumed and destroyed him: he committed suicide at the age of thirty-nine.2 He attempted to be simultaneously inside and outside of the state-socialist system. As a result, he created a remarkable but incomplete oeuvre, bequeathing to us an impressively rich, diverse, open fragment in the Romanticist sense, the elements of which constantly hint at the desire for universality and completeness. Focused on Bódy’s rich creative output, this chapter will outline two central themes. One is the connection between the historical avant-garde and the 1970s, parallels between the historical avant-garde and the Balázs Béla Studio (BBS), and Bódy’s involvement as an organizer in the studio. The other is the influence of documentary forms as they informed avantgarde experimentation from Moholy-Nagy to the neo-avant-garde. Building on these contextual framings, the final part of the chapter will consider how experimental, documentary, and f ictional elements coalesced in Bódy’s three feature f ilms: American Postcard (Amerikai anzix, 1975), Narcissus and Psyche (Nárcisz és Psyché, 1980), and Dog’s Night Song (Kutya éji dala, 1983). Between 1971 and 1975, as a student of the College of Theater and Film, and also until the end of the seventies as member of the BBS, Bódy studied the boundaries of f ilmic signif ication. He repeatedly analyzed f ilm language, questioning the formal traditions of documentary and feature film and experimenting with new recording procedures in shorts such as The Third (A harmadik, 1971), Four Bagatelles (Négy bagatell, 1972–75) and Psychocosmoses (Pszychokozmoszok, 1976). The Third, based on improvisations, tries to track the rehearsals of Goethe’s Faust on the roof of a Budapest university; the process is repeatedly interrupted by the participants’ comments to such an extent that the f ilm ultimately see A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt határozatai és dokumentumai 1971–1975, ed. Henrik Vass (Budapest: Kossuth, 1979), 369–93. 2 Bódy’s death has been notably linked to revelations that he had worked as an informant to the socialist state from the early 1970s onward, reporting on several key figures of the marginalized avant-garde cultural milieus in the country. For more on Bódy’s complex legacy, see Sonja Simonyi, “The Man Behind the Curtain: Gábor Bódy, Experimental Film Culture and Networks of State Control in Late Socialist Hungary,” Third Text 32, no. 4 (2018): 519–29.

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blurs the boundaries between performative acts and private gestures. Four Bagatelles contains four experimental études exploring masking techniques: the first is a motion analysis of found footage showing folk dancers; the second focuses on the movements of a modern dancer; the third presents the drunken performance of an alcoholic, combined with the image of a sociologist talking about the social impact of alcohol placed in the foreground; the final part—distinct from the earlier ones—represents the infinite self-reflection of a video image chain. Finally, Psychocosmoses is the first Hungarian computer animation. The “visual obstacles” that accompany Bódy’s entire oeuvre provide the most significant means of “meaning attribution” within his films. This “hindrance,” in other words, the manipulation of photographically recorded images, foregrounds the disconnect between the otherwise inseparable elements of given and “acquired” meaning: in the case of American Postcard, this occurs on the special effects board or “second shooting” of the film; in Narcissus and Psyche, with the construction of the mise-en-scène through set design and lighting already in the moment of filming; and finally, in Dog’s Night Song, beyond filters and lighting, with the use of diverse image recording techniques, including 35 mm, Super 8, and video. While with these feature films, Bódy tried to satisfy the expectations of a wider public, he also sought to maintain his avant-garde, experimental attitude in them, an approach that reinforces his encyclopedic vision, coherent even in its fragmentariness. As such, these works continued the formal and conceptual motifs of his early short films. Thus, for instance, the crosshairs in American Postcard that cut across the film frame evoke the studies in Four Bagatelles, while the documentary and newsreel footage appropriated as the basic archival material for Private History (Privát történelem, 1978, with Péter Tímár) also constitutes an important visual layer in Dog’s Night Song. The special effect mimicking torn “pages” in American Postcard, its so-called fényvágás or light cutting (whereby the disintegration of a frame into bursts of light replaces the traditional “cut” from one sequence to the next) and fractured “pre-filmic” constitution of the frame are the main devices used to accentuate the experimental character of the film.

Bódy, the BBS, and Parallels with the Historical Avant-Garde Avant-garde filmmaking as such did not receive any institutional support in Hungary in the 1920s, a period during which traditional feature filmmaking

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struggled, as well.3 Regardless, the work of two Hungarian artists, László Moholy-Nagy and Lajos Kassák, who both emigrated (to Berlin and Vienna, respectively) in the early 1920s, remained a significant point of reference for artists and experimental filmmakers in Hungary during the late socialist period. In this way, they sought to establish their practice in conversation with the uprooted heritage of prewar experimentation in the country. The influence of these figures was considerable and engaged Moholy-Nagy’s striking experimental films, from abstract light plays to city films made during the 1920s ands 1930s, as well as the activities of Kassák’s journal MA, which published several film-related pieces, including Moholy-Nagy’s unfinished visual essay (film sketch) Dynamics of the Metropolis, stills from film experiments, and theoretical texts on moving images. 4 Postwar, it was notably the Kádárian consolidation of power following the failed anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 that gradually made possible the continuation of avant-garde ideas in Hungary, as well as a connection between Hungary and contemporaneous international processes in experimental art.5 One of the most important steps taken was the founding of the Balázs Béla Studio in 1959. After sporadic antecedents, from the 1970s on, a number of avant-garde experimental films were made at the BBS, and the studio became Hungary’s most important workshop of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960–70s.6 For Bódy, the BBS was not merely a place to make films, and he was more than its average member. It was largely thanks to him that the intellectual orientation of the Balázs Béla Studio changed from the seventies onward from providing opportunities for professionalization to aspiring film directors who were recent graduates of the film academy, to opening the door for artists with no prior film experience. This allowed poets, writers, visual artists, and composers to shoot films within the framework of the studio, the expanded list of BBS participants including visual artists Miklós Erdély, Dóra Maurer, 3 Gyöngyi Balogh, “A magyar némafilm kora,” in A magyar játékfilm története a kezdetektől 1990–ig, ed. Gyöngyi Balogh, Vera Gyürey, and Pál Honffy (Budapest: Műszaki, 2004), 36. 4 The following issues of MA all made references to aspects of film culture: Pál Acél, “Kollektív mozgás (Kino-mechanika),” MA 6, no. 5 (1921): 64; Victor Eggeling, “Elvi fejtegetések a mozgóképművészetről,” MA 6, no. 8 (1921): 105–6; László Moholy-Nagy, “Filmváz, A nagyváros dinamikája,” MA 9, no. 8 (1924): n.p. To access individual MA issues, see http://anno.onb.ac.at/ cgi-content/anno-plus?aid=maa&size=45. 5 András Bálint Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State: The Balázs Béla Studio,” in Experimental Film: The Missing Frames, ed. Benjamin Meade (Kansas City: Avila University Press, 2010), 65–88. 6 András Müllner, “Montázspolitika: Neoavantgárd nyomok magyar experimentális filmekben,” in BBS 50. A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve, ed. Gábor Gelencsér (Budapest: Műcsarnok and Balázs Béla Stúdió, 2009), 129–42.

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Figure 1.1. János Gulyás (photographer), Miklós Erdély and Gábor Bódy, Balatonboglár, July 8, 1972. Courtesy János Gulyás.

Endre Tót, and composers Zoltán Jeney and László Vidovszky (Figure 1.1).7 Their experimental works were initially made within the framework of the Film Language Series, which Bódy launched from within the BBS, and then later through the similarly functioning K/3 group. In 1980, Bódy established a new experimental film group, MAFILM K* section, this time as part of the Hungarian Film Production Company, MAFILM, one of the main state-run institutions that specialized in the production of full-length feature films. Around this period, Bódy also organized Infermental, the first international video magazine. He would not live to see the final product of his organizing and editorial activities, the international video art selection Axis, which was compiled together with his wife Vera Bódy and published in Germany in the form of a VHS tape and book in 1986. Through establishing workshops of experimental filmmaking within the BBS, as well as through his other organizing activities, Bódy continued the cinematic tradition of the avant-garde émigré artists of the 1920s. Facilitating the institutional contexts through which artists working in several other fields carried out their filmmaking activity notably developed in the spirit of Moholy-Nagy and Kassák, as an engagement with a type of Gesamtkunstwerk. Kassák applied his interest in film through his editorial work on MA, which became a central site for thinking about filmic experimentation in the 1920s. Similarly, Bódy largely took over the organizational tasks for the film experiments of the neo-avant-garde (as a workshop leader and overall networker) throughout the 1970s. At the same time, like Moholy-Nagy, 7 Gábor Bódy, “A fiatal magyar film útja,” in Gábor Bódy: Egybegyűjtött filmművészeti írások, ed. Vince Zalán (Budapest: Akadémiai, 2006), 113.

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he was also an active creator of films attached to experimental artistic practices. Finally, Bódy’s writings and film scripts clearly testify that, in all of his activities, he consciously looked toward the traditions of the classical avant-garde, linking his generation’s output to its historical precedents. He notably dedicated a short, unrealized plan from 1979 for a film that would have been called Light and Sound (Fény és hang) to László Moholy-Nagy. Later on, through an application submitted for a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship, he proposed to study the filmic activities of this internationally influential artist and the Bauhaus.8 Among Bódy’s articles, we can also find an important survey of the history of Hungarian experimental film, in which he explicitly outlines these connections: If we accept the division according to which the following great, influential generations developed in experimentalism: 20s–30s: French, Russian, German experimenters 50s: American experimentalism on the East and West Coast 60s–70s: international movement of independent cooperative film-makers, then Hungary has the intellectual connections in the first and third generations. We took part in the first one with German intervention through Béla Balázs, László Moholy-Nagy, Dénes Mihály, Sándor László and through the unknown György Gerő who was regarded by Kassák and Imre Pán as early as the late 50s as the author of the ‘first, and so far, only Hungarian avantgarde film.’ We can only talk about the later effects of the second one, and perhaps the Hungarian underground of the 50s could be reconstructed from private libraries. However, a relatively strong and undoubtedly significant, peculiarly Hungarian cooperative experimentalism joined the third one which was made possible by the activities of the Balázs Béla Studio.9

Formal Connections Between the Historical Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the 1970s Moholy-Nagy’s city films, in particular their social sensitivity and documentary aesthetics, provide a particularly strong link between the classical 8 Gábor Bódy, “Munkaterv,” in Végtelen kép. Bódy Gábor írásai, ed. Miklós Peternák (Budapest: Pesti Szalon, 1996), 312. 9 Gábor Bódy, “Creative Thinking Device: ‘Experimental Film’ in Hungary,” in Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of his Work, ed. László Beke and Miklós Peternák (Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987), 267.

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Fig. 1.2. László Moholy-Nagy, Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (Dynamics of the Metropolis), spread from the book Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), 1925.

avant-garde’s ideas on film and the filmic output of the neo-avant-garde. As Hungarian scholar Andrea Pócsik explains, in his completed films, MoholyNagy “draws his themes not simply from the bustle of the city, as it happened in the case of his early film plan entitled Dynamics of the Metropolis, but from the periphery, from being an outcast.”10 This observation pertains mainly to Moholy-Nagy’s two Berlin films. The topic of Gypsies (Großstadt-Zigeuner, 1932–3) points clearly to Moholy-Nagy’s social interest in a marginalized minority while most shots in Berlin Still Life (Berliner Stilleben, 1931–2) focus on workers, beggars, and children playing in and around tenement buildings. As a leftist, a progressive, and an émigré, Moholy-Nagy could easily identify with these social outcasts, and it is not surprising that his films were banned due to this sociocritical attitude. The two versions of Dynamics of the Metropolis, both published in different volumes of MA,11 as well as his subsequent city films, clearly show Moholy-Nagy’s shift from Constructivism to documentarism (Figure 1.2). In Berlin Still Life, only the high angles, the reflecting surfaces, and the graphic patterns of the asphalt and paving stones evoke his signature focus on visual style; Gypsies contains a few canted angles at most. In his city films, Moholy-Nagy was 10 Andrea Pócsik, Átkelések. A romaképkészítés (an)archeológiája (Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó and Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem, 2017), 51. 11 MA 9, no. 8 and no. 9 (1924).

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interested in the issue of social freedom rather than in the abstract freedom of motion—just as the neo-avant-garde experimental art of the 1960–70s would be. The most important connection between the classical avant-garde (rooted in MA and Moholy-Nagy’s works) and the experimental films of the 1970s is the social sensitivity of abstract forms and Constructivism. We can still find examples of an abstract visual style in several neo-avant-garde film works from the 1970s, which continue the tradition of Constructivism. What seems particularly relevant to note is that, while Constructivism’s abstraction uses different types of materials to examine the relationship between form, volume, and mass, habitually through geometric shapes, the materials used to give shape to these investigations (wood, glass, metal, concrete, etc.) connect the formal inquiries to reality. The materials notably contain, beyond abstract forms, relations with the natural and/or societal sphere. Building on this interconnectedness, it becomes clear how even the most radical experimental f ilms are related to political, historical, social, and ideological issues, especially within an urban context. As such, several f ilms reflect aspects of Moholy-Nagy’s city f ilms. János Tóth’s Arena (Aréna, 1970) is built around footage showing the assembly of crowds at a sports arena. Through evocative montage sequences, it depicts the common man through a documentary mode that is at the same time abstracted through interspersed shots of nature, details of the built urban environment, and a range of decontextualized archival photographs. Tibor Hajas has pedestrians pose as models in a bustling city square in Self-Fashion-Show (Öndivatbemutató, 1976), and in doing so, uses the documentary method while also self-reflexively criticizing its proclaimed truthfulness. 12 Another example is Tamás Szentjóby’s f ilm Centaur (Kentaur, 1975), which intentionally and at times humorously separates image and sound in a series of filmed segments evoking propagandistic newsreels, and by doing this destabilizes the meaning of everyday reality captured on film.13 12 For more on this film (in English), see Ksenya Gurshtein, “Self-Fashion Show (Öndivatbemutató).” In ”Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces.” Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2014. https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/city-scenecountry-scene/self-fashion-show.html. 13 For more on this film (in English), see Ksenya Gurshtein, “Kentaur (Centaur).” In ”Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces.” Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2014. https://www. nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/censored-and-salvaged/centaur. html.

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Bódy’s Theoretical Framework for Feature Filmmaking: Unpacking the Relationship Between Documentary and Fiction In “Alternatives for Young Hungarian Film,” written in 1977, Bódy argues that, when the fiction system of the sixties had dissolved, the void it left was to be filled, on the one hand, by documentarism and, on the other, by “experimental film,” that is, the avant-garde.14 He succinctly summarizes the reasons for the change of view (generational change in film production; confusion around, and loss of, the role of intellectuals as a consequence of 1968; the changed cultural status of film). To the question of why film art started to follow that twofold direction in Hungary, he also gives a more general answer in the spirit of Hegelian philosophy of history: “When a fictional system disintegrates, the solution is usually seen in two directions, either empiricism or critical formalism; it has always happened this way in philosophy or literature.”15 This train of thought can perhaps be rendered more concrete through another study by Bódy. “Attribution of Meaning in Cinematography” (1983) details the turning point of his film-theoretical thinking: “I simply had a blackout in my mind when I heard the word ‘reality,’ and one day the circuit was broken by another word, by the question of ‘meaning.’”16 That is, reality is an unmanageable term for film, it can only exist as meaning—in this way, however, its existence as a feature of the f ilmic communication is inescapable. The recognition of reality being embedded in meaning, or more precisely, the cinematic emergence of reality exclusively through meaning, refers to the twofold nature of film, reality and the image of reality. In the essay “Where Is ‘Reality’?” (1977), Bódy precisely formulated the idea that has since then become a film-theoretical commonplace: As if we were watching two films projected on the screen: one is the document, the other is determined by the already established conventions of perception and expression. The task of art would be in fact to bring these two films (although one carries ‛eternal’, the other perishable meaning) into some sort of durable correlation […] Meaning emerges from 14 Gábor Bódy, “Alternatives for the Young Hungarian Film,” in Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of his Work, ed. László Beke and Miklós Peternák (Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987), 257–62. 15 Ibid., 258. 16 Gábor Bódy, “Attribution of Meaning in Cinematography,” in Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of his Work, ed. László Beke and Miklós Peternák (Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987), 299.

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the tension of the pieces of reality divided into parts, more precisely, as this tension characterizes our memories acquired about reality. In their ultimate determinedness, the conventions and possibilities of structuring have to form a language. This is the basis of all kind of fiction. […] Thus, as the frames become sequences, ‘double projection’ starts again. The ‘pure document,’ although we know that it is projected onto the screen, is invisible for us, it appears only in the relationship between document and fiction. It is through this relationship that creating form and finding the practical method capable of creating such a form gain their validity, which is the innermost ambition of every decent filmmaker. Thus it is no exaggeration to say—at least when there is an attempt at this formcreation—that ‘documentary film’ is the philosophy of film.”17

Bódy’s move toward fictional representation does not arise from a disillusionment with documentarism, but rather from the essence of the meaning of film as medium. This is why he made, according to his own definition, analytical documentary films rather than documentary feature films.18 In the aforementioned “Alternatives for Young Hungarian Film,” he formulates the task at hand as “the need for the revival of epic realism having new sensitivity and for a ‘super-fictionalism’ in the cinemas.”19 Thus, he returns again to the general perspective of the philosophy of history: At the beginning of this essay, I was discussing the fact that the disintegration of the fictional system is necessarily followed by the new research of perception and means. Besides, the history of human thinking also proves that the most effective way of communication is a form of fiction and this will always remain the same.20

At the beginning of the eighties, this theoretical assumption emerged both in his film theory (“Attribution of Meaning in Cinematography”) and in his art (Dog’s Night Song, 1983): “Today it cannot be ‘shown what it is’; today it can only be ‘narrated’. And this is a new narrativity.”21 17 Gábor Bódy, “Hol a ‘valóság’?,” in Gábor Bódy Egybegyűjtött filmművészeti írások, ed. Vince Zalán (Budapest: Akadémiai, 2006), 105. 18 István Zsugán, “A filmnyelvi kísérletezéstől az új narrativitásig. Beszélgetés Bódy Gáborral a Nárcisz és Psyché készítése közben,” in Szubjektív magyar filmtörténet 1964–1994 (Budapest: Osiris–Századvég, 1994) 439. 19 Bódy, “Alternatives for the Young Hungarian Film,” 262. 20 Ibid. 21 Bódy, “Attribution of Meaning,” 317.

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Bódy’s concept of new narrativity is connected to new sensitivity, a postmodern movement in 1980s Hungarian cinema that followed earlier neo-avant-garde developments. New sensitivity centrally concerned the fictionalized, stylized first-person singular “I.” Bódy’s concept connects to the latter trend predominantly through a similarly amplified and stylized form of narration, making Dog’s Night Song the most significant work of new sensibility in Hungarian film history.22 The films of new sensitivity were primarily also made in the Balázs Béla Studio: Péter Müller, Ex-codex (Ex-kódex, 1983); András Szirtes, The History of the Pronuma Packs (A pronuma bolyok története, 1983); András Wahorn, Ice Cream Ballet (Jégkrémbalett, 1984). A few of these reached full-length feature film studios as well: János Xantus, Eskimo Woman Feels Cold (Eszkimó asszony fázik, 1983). Bódy’s last film, Dog’s Night Song, is the most important mainstream production made as part of this trend. With the principle of new narrativity, Bódy, in fact, created a connection between the neo-avant-garde and postmodernism, although his early death prevented him from further shaping this process. American Postcard The year is 1865, during the last days of the American Civil War. Three Hungarian soldiers are fighting on the side of the North; all of them emigrated from Hungary after the unsuccessful 1848–9 War of Independence. One of them, János Fiala, is a cartographer; the other, Boldogh, is his assistant; the third, Ádám Vereczky, is a strange, notorious figure who joins them for a short period of time to learn the cartographer’s profession. Vereczky ultimately dies in a freak accident (falling to his death from a giant swing), the assistant returns to Hungary, and the cartographer accepts a job offer from the Pacific Rail Company. Each of the three men illustrate a possible outcome of political emigration. In American Postcard, the more or less reassuring conventional system of the experimental form contrasts with the subject at hand, revealing 22 See also Ákos Szilágyi, “Az elmesélt én. Az ‘új érzékenység’ határai,” Filmvilág, no. 7 (1985): 27–29; Zsolt Pápai, “Kutyák éji dala. Az új-érzékenység és a magyar posztmodern f ilm első hulláma,” Filmtörténet online (2006), http://archiv.magyar.f ilm.hu/f ilmtortenet//mufajok/ kutyak-eji-dala-az-uj-erzekenyseg-es-a-magyar-posztmodern-film-elso-hullama-mufajelemzes. html; Gábor Meleg, “Egy pszeudo-irányzat. Közelítések az új érzékenység f ilmjeihez,” Metropolis, no. 4 (2010): 20–33; Zsolt Győri, “‘A mi agyunk téves kapcsolás’: az új hullám találkozása az új érzékenységgel,” Apertúra (summer 2018), http://uj.apertura.hu/2018/nyar/ gyori-a-mi-agyunk-teves-kapcsolas-az-uj-hullam-talalkozasa-az-uj-erzekenyseggel/.

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Figure 1.3. Gábor Bódy, Amerikai anzix (American Postcard), 1975. 35 mm film still. Courtesy István Jávor.

a profound denial of genre forms and film types. In a text on American Postcard, neo-avant-garde artist Miklós Erdély notably draws attention to the disavowed genre tropes of the film. Under the ruffled surface, the presence of a denied adventure film can be felt all through the film. Above the film, separated from it, so to speak, floats its artistic essence, which almost never manifests itself during the viewing of the film, but emerges instead in the form of a painful, anxiety-ridden memory.23

Erdély’s idea about American Postcard as memory can also be extended, beyond its genre aspect, to the entire film: indeed, we witness a film memory from 1865 (Figure 1.3). The word “memory” is also applicable to the basic structure of cinema, because it refers to something that no longer exists at the moment of watching a film. The uniqueness of American Postcard resides in embedding these elements into a false, nonexistent documentarism. While the narrative’s historical reality, that of the nineteenth century, provides the

23 Miklós Erdély, “Amerikai anzix,” in A filmről (Budapest: Balassi, BAE Tartóshullám, and Intermedia, 1995), 186–7.

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temporal context, the nonexistent historicity of the style creates distance from this temporal mode. Moreover, the f ilm is like a documentary where it should adhere to fictional genre tropes (for instance, in numerous action scenes where one would normally expect genre tropes, from Westerns or adventure films), and it is fictional where the possibility of documentary would open up (for instance, during a scene set in a cantina that involves real historical figures).24 The deteriorated, scratched, and torn fragmentary frames, as well as the distorted soundtrack, all gesture to the idea that one is watching a time-worn found film; the black-and-white images and masking throughout evoke the atmosphere of early cinema. Yet what we see is not archival footage from 1865. The imitation of archival footage thus produces an absurd reality: we can see the “found” film of a nineteenth-century period when moving images had not even existed! Certainly, Bódy doesn’t simply set up an impossible film memory: he also disavows it, similarly to the adventure film motifs as explained earlier. By technically manipulating the film material, he sets out in the direction of imitating a nonexistent nineteenth-century adventure f ilm, an idea that, at the same time, is supported neither by the story of the film nor by the composition of the images. The f ilm, through its three protagonists (Vereczky the fatalist, Fiala the pragmatist, and Balogh the idealist), is the story of three decisions. However, the decisions arise from states rather than deeds, and we don’t learn about possible deeds or happenings resulting from decisions. The world of the storyline is abstract, model-like; the generic images episodic. It is not the story that is elliptic, but, rather, what unfolds before our eyes. As such, the narrative structure of the film deviates the historical adventure f ilm away from genre conventions. The same thing can be said about the images, which show elements of the adventure film such as weapons, horses, uniforms, characteristic scenes such as the canteen or saloon, the field hospital, and recognizable situations such as soldiers harassing women, eating, drinking, reveling, playing cards, telling anecdotes, and singing. With regard to the composition, the film contains long shots alternating with close-ups of heroes that stylistically evokes 24 It is not accidental that, in his writing entitled Theory and Action, experimental filmmaker András Jeles alludes to Bódy when he expounds on the paradox that “documentary is f iction—fiction is documentary,” which also defines his own art. András Jeles, “Teória és akció,” in Töredékek Jeles András naplójából, ed. László Fodor and László Hegedűs (Budapest: 8 és fél Bt., 1993), 40.

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the Western. All these are present, however, only as alluring possibilities. The long shots are wantonly long and deliberately poorly composed (for instance, we can only see the legs of galloping horses in the upper corner of the frame while the rest of the frame is an irrelevant, unidentif iable surface). The close-ups of the characters are not always consistent with the dramaturgical accents. In its theme, dramaturgical structure, and plot, the story promises a dynamic narrative full of action. Yet all this appears only in traces, in fragmentary form—it is hardly visible as the f ilm is made to look like deteriorated f ilm stock; it is hardly audible as the sound is distorted throughout. In addition to all this, the experimental technique of adaptation provides yet another level of denial of conventions. Bódy stages these different forms of denial against one another, so that the whole film floats in our memory as a found but nonexistent, pseudodocumentary fiction. To create a uniform narrative, Bódy compiled highly eclectic sources borrowing fragments from them to depict the characters, the setting, the period, or distinct events. The sources span nineteenth-century memoirs and diaries (János Fiala, László Árvay, Gyula Kúné), a letter (László Teleki), an article (Karl Marx), poems (Walt Whitman, Sándor Csoóri), and a short story (Ambrose Bierce’s “George Thurston”). They constitute the elements of the narrative, but their totality results in a new quality that cannot be related to any one source. This is also indicated by the choice of the source material, because historically, culturally, and generically distant works, situated at or beyond the boundary of literature, are juxtaposed, their only common feature being the fact that they are texts. Their joint presence and connection in the narrative, however, “deconstructs” them on the textual level, turning them into components of a new, uniform film text. The freezing and deteriorating of images, the light cutting, the crosshairs, and the drawing of directional vectors onto the filmic image evoke the conventions of “experimental feature film,” constituting, at the same time, a more generalized denial of the conventions of film history, narrative structure, and visual imagery. Erdély interestingly drew attention to this contradiction in connection with the “unfilmlikeness” of American Postcard, evoking the reception of the film in the Balázs Béla Studio: You know what awkward, lengthy, terribly unfilmlike parts—unfilmlike in a traditional sense—it contains. There is one scene in it that is convincing, as the protagonist balances [on the swing]. Everybody watches that scene. The rest […] there is hardly anything in it. […] Still,

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the whole of it has a peculiar atmosphere. […] That evokes something unusual.25

Erdély’s “sloppy” phrasing, arising from live speech, ultimately correlates “unfilmlike in a traditional sense” and “unusualness”—the latter value resulting from the former peculiarity. Bódy thus rejects and subverts prior expectations, and he does this also in the context of the Hungarian past and present, analyzing the recurrent drama of fate in Hungarian history. The protagonists’ life in emigration, the apparent freedom of choice also illustrates, besides the emigration after 1848, the fate of the emigrants of 1919–20, 1939–40, 1956–7, and the 1970s. Like his most outstanding contemporaries, Bódy tried to test the boundaries of personal freedom in a closed sociohistorical system, in other words, the Soviet-style one-party dictatorship. His films engage the possibilities of motion and narration as they take shape at the point of contact between freedom and order or the system. Bódy rose above his contemporaries by turning this particular theme into a form-generating principle, thus exposing it not only as a social issue but also as an aesthetic form. In doing this, Bódy continued the historical legacy not only of the classical cinematic avant-garde of the 1920s but also that of 1960s modernist parables, most notably those of Miklós Jancsó. Thus, American Postcard excels not only through the radicalism of its language, but also through its connection with historical and film-historical tradition. Exactly one decade after Jancsó’s The Round-Up, a film that iconically laid out the tragic aftermath of the failed uprising of 1848 and the so-called Austro-Hungarian Compromise, American Postcard addresses similar issues. The films are connected not merely through a shared historical time frame (1869 and 1865, respectively) or the comparable position of the protagonists (in both cases, the heirs of the failed War of Independence). They also engage the possibilities for individuals in the playing field demarcated by history, power, and society. Through the hidden, again, “denied” allegorical meaning of American Postcard as it relates to Hungarian fates, Bódy thus importantly re-envisioned Miklós Jancsó’s modernist film language, marking the survival and continuation of the tradition of Hungarian art film from the 1960s into the 1970s.26 25 Miklós Erdély, “Beszélgetés Erdély Miklóssal,” interview by Miklós Peternák, in Miklós Erdély, A filmről (Budapest: Balassi kiadó, BAE Tartóshullám, and Intermedia, 1995), 21. 26 In doing this, Bódy at the same time, paved the way for Béla Tarr’s existential visions unfolding from the late 1980s onward, holding a key place within the transitional Hungarian film cultures of the 1970s.

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Psyche American Postcard was followed in Bódy’s oeuvre by a grand undertaking, in terms of both technical and artistic feats, namely, the adaptation of the 1972 verse novel Psyché by Hungarian writer and poet Sándor Weöres. This project also fit the “experimental feature film” category formulated by Bódy. The film retains a special status in Hungarian film production: measured by the standards of its time, the four-and-half-hour film Narcissus and Psyche was an enterprise with a gigantic budget, spanning several historical periods, filmed with richly designed sets and sumptuous costumes, and yet at the same time still using the avant-garde film language solutions familiar from Bódy’s experimental études. Narcissus and Psyche was edited in three versions: the version intended for foreign screenings was the shortest; Hungarian cinemas screened the three-and-half-hour version; and the longest, most complete form became a three-part miniseries for television. The story of the unfulfilled love between Erzsébet Lónyay and László Ung­ várnémeti Tóth spans a period of two centuries, from the early eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. While the characters remain invariably young as time passes, the backdrop features key periods in the evolution of Hungary’s national culture as it acquired its independence, from the Enlightenment, the language reforms between 1790 and 1820, and neoclassicism, through the Hungarian Reform Era, the War of Independence, and Austro-Hungarian Dualism, all the way up to the end of World War I. Bódy’s vision is not historical in the traditional sense. It is much more related to the history of ideas. Similarly to American Postcard, it engages the avant-garde’s form-dissolving mode of representation, while seeking to connect to the Hungarian film-historical tradition. As such, the film offers a kind of cultural-biological and spiritual-corporeal imprint of the formation of a bourgeois society, notably through the framework of the eternal male–female love triangle motif, expanded and amplified in the film so as to gain mythical proportions. The historical facts are shown in the refraction of poetic imagination, echoing the intentions of the original work of poetry it is based on, because both Erzsébet Lónyay and László Tóth—the former being a fictional character; the latter based on a real-life prototype—wrote poems, and even Psyche’s husband, Baron Zedlitz, is a kind of “poetic soul.” “Light refraction” appears in every frame of the film. Surprisingly, Bódy entrusted a much older master, István Hildebrand (b. 1928), who had become known as a director of photography of mainly classical adaptations, biographical films, and historical tableaux, with the film’s cinematography. At

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last, Hildebrand could freely put to good use his rich technical experience. He refashioned set designer Gábor Bachman’s spectacular backdrops, surrealist in themselves, mainly through physical manipulation that pre-dates the CGI era, through techniques that included filters, veils, lamps, and specially polished and colored lenses. In this way, the visual universe of the film is not only saturated with symbolic meanings, but with self-reflexive allusions to the technical cinematic apparatus itself. By doing this, Bódy preserved the experimental, neo-avant-garde character of his art, even in a feature film with a mainstream release in cinemas and on TV. This is how Bódy described Narcissus and Psyche in a letter to the famous French producer Anatole Dauman: “It is like a type of layered pancake. (If there is a dish like that in France!) It means that you can push aside everything that you don’t like, and there still remains something for you to eat.”27 The comparison is suggestive not only of the structure of the film, but it also indicates Bódy’s engagement with postmodern aesthetics in the films of the eighties. In the spirit of the concept of new narrativity that Bódy introduced, he interconnects grandiose stories within the film, or rather rolls them into one. These, on the one hand, reference easily identifiable historical patterns and even basic genres. Yet at the same time, such historical elements incessantly analyze, reinforce, or relativize each other. The basic plotline of Narcissus and Psyche evokes melodrama: we witness a love triangle, in which Psyche appears as a femme fatale; László Ungvárnémeti, that is, Narcissus, as the poet and man of thought who is unable to provide corporeal love to the young woman; and Baron Zedlitz, as the pragmatist who successfully navigates the real world, yet cannot conquer Psyche’s soul. Therefore, none of the characters can gain fulfillment from their relationships with one another, and Psyche ultimately succumbs to this lack. At the same time, the three protagonists live through 150 years of Hungarian history, from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries—while none of them age. The film can therefore be deemed historical as well, through the inclusion of key developments to do with the national and cultural independence of Hungary, including the language reforms and the Hungarian Reform Era more broadly, as well as the truncating of the country in the aftermath of the First World War. Despite these elements, neither of the generic frameworks appear in their totality in the film, as history incessantly infuses personal fates, and vice versa. This foundational aspect of the film can be illustrated 27 Gábor Bódy, “Dear Mr. Dauman,” in Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of his Work, ed. László Beke and Miklós Peternák (Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987), 128.

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with one particularly memorable scene in the film: Psyche and Zedlitz make love at a stagecoach station, while a battle of the Napoleonic Wars unfolds. In this scene, the entwined bodies and battle scenes are projected onto one another. This permanently reflexive relationship doesn’t allow us to become lost in the events; it confronts us not only with an extraordinarily unusual, often repugnantly bizarre spectacle and story but also with a cosmic view that overwrites both the spectacle and the narrative of the film. The film notably combines naturalist and exceedingly stylized modes of representation. We find numerous examples of this throughout the film, particularly within the gravely ill Ungvárnémeti’s immediate surroundings—for instance, the buckets filled with excrement and rats that populate his neglected living space. But there are other instances that connect Psyche to similar scenes, for example, at the gynecologist’s practice, where a uterine polyp is removed from her body. In the hospital, which exudes a haunted atmosphere, we see displays of half-formed embryos preserved in jars of formaldehyde, and we even see an eye operation, which the camera zooms in on, while Psyche’s recently removed polyp similarly appears through such a close shot, as a shrunken, bright red piece of flesh. Alternating with these gory scenes, the historical episodes are framed through striking indoor and outdoor scenes, with actors wearing lavish costumes evoking the era in which the action is set. Through all this, Bódy aims to grasp the totality of the universe: its beauty and ugliness, its singularity and universality, its smallness and greatness, the hidden and the visible condensed into a single “cosmic eye.”28 Dog’s Night Song Bódy’s last feature film, Dog’s Night Song, contained a number of artistic gestures that might be considered provocations. Perhaps the most “incomprehensible” among them was the fact that the role of the protagonist, a fake priest, was played by Bódy himself.29 The film exploded onto the Hungarian film scene without any sort of antecedents, and it instantly 28 Kozmikus szem was the title of a planned f ilm that Bódy started but never f inished. For an outline of the project, see Bódy Gábor, “Kozmikus szem,” in Gábor Bódy: Egybegyűjtött filmművészeti írások, ed. Vince Zalán (Budapest: Akadémiai, 2006), 202–8. 29 The character, given his duplicitous nature, can be regarded in retrospect as a hidden confession by Bódy about his secret life reporting to the state. However, it is important to stress that this could be deduced by no one at the time of the f ilm’s release, which is why the f ilm director’s presence in the film seemed “incomprehensible” to many who saw the work upon its release.

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became a programmatic work of the extremely important, though, unfortunately, rather isolated trend of new sensibility mentioned above. In this film, several plotlines run in parallel, occasionally becoming entangled. A priest (who later turns out to be a fraud) arrives to a village and establishes a friendship with the former party secretary of the township (who has lost not just his official function, but his ability to walk as well). At the beginning of the story, the religious man finds the elderly politician lying in a ditch, presumably following an attempted suicide. As the functionary dies in a successful next attempt, the priest flees the village. Alongside this strand, we have a couple, whose most dramatic plotline is centered on the wife leaving her military officer husband. She then travels to the capital, where she joins an underground band as a singer. It is this couple’s son who then forms a friendship with an astronomer living in the village. The three storylines are by themselves rather elliptical (especially that of the fake priest, which includes numerous mysterious and even mystical elements), but they also occasionally intersect as if by accident, although they never form a coherent storyline. Finally, the film concludes with a symbolic vision (narrated by Bódy’s extradiegetic voice) at the biblical site of Golgotha, about an “impenitent thief” who, without the crowds noticing, frees himself from the crucifix and disappears without a trace. As the anecdote concludes, we momentarily see the fake priest freeing himself from a cross and hurrying out of the scene. These storylines all appear through a highly stylized visual universe that alternates documentary aesthetics—for example, through the use of newsreels or the filmed performances—with other scenes captured through distinctly vibrant, alienating mise-en-scène and saturated color schemes achieved with filters. The first storyline concerns the relationship between the aforementioned fake priest and a former party secretary who uses a wheelchair; the second is that of a married couple in crisis; the third one is the strange friendship between the couple’s son and an astronomer living in their neighborhood. Here, too, we can easily recognize identifiable or even popular genre patterns, such as the crime movie, film noir, melodrama, musical, and the action film. What is more, the political motivation in the story is very accentuated. In one of the key scenes, Bódy, as the fake priest, holds an ideological debate with the former political functionary, which unexpectedly devolves—just like in an absurd drama—into an agreement. This conversation ironically deconstructs Hungarian political cinema. For one, the conversation, centered around faith and ideology, occurs within the sociopolitical context of a self-declared atheist socialist sphere. At the same time, the priest is a fake religious figure, therefore a fraud, while the functionary is paralyzed. These

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characterizations render ironic not merely the character types of political films, but through the relationship of these two figures, the actual politicalideological debate that is performed, a trope that was highly representative of Hungarian cinema during the 1960s in particular. Ultimately, the film dismantles, entangles, and relativizes in radical ways the immediate meaning of each particular episode. Instead of the perplexing story, images and motifs difficult to describe in detail become increasingly important, as if the filmmaker would prefer to replace speech and plot points with much more direct affects and sensory impressions. In this respect, the appearance of the Hungarian punk band Vágtázó halottkémek (Galloping Coroners) is of key importance: its members are shown in the film to “deconstruct” communication with a series of inarticulate, primeval howls, growls, and chaotic cacophony, the signature sound of the band. Similarly, Bódy builds Dog’s Night Song on primordial, basic, natural motifs, such as the phenomenon of gravity. The image of a ball rolling down the hillside, or the shot of the functionary in a wheelchair all exemplify a concern with the earth’s gravitational pull. Similarly, it is no coincidence that the story begins in Mátraszentimre, a settlement known to be situated at the highest altitude in Hungary, and it concludes in Budapest, at the water level of the Danube. In this way, the story gravitates from the top of the country to its water level. Bódy juxtaposes all these primordial elements according to the principle of serial structure familiar from his short experimental films, applying experimentalism within the framework of a feature film. Perhaps this is why, at first glance, Bódy’s last work seems even more complex than his previous films, because he radically breaks with the traditional rules of storytelling. Dog’s Night Song is a forceful, unsettling, and enigmatic film—just like Bódy’s entire oeuvre. Ultimately, it is due to this investment in new narrativity that Bódy’s research into the meaning of film language remains connected in his films to documentarism, to the exploration of the spirituality of contemporary Hungarian reality. Bódy, in the spirit of new sensibility and new narrativity, relativizes everything in the film. This includes the characters, as the priest is not real, but neither is the functionary his true former self; the wife is not a singer, and her husband cannot use his military talents to impress anyone beyond his son; the boy wanders across the neighborhood like a precocious eyewitness, and the well-educated astronomer ends up shrieking on stage as the leader of a punk band. This also relates to the narration, through the various parallel, and then randomly intersecting, plotlines as well as to the stylistic elements, given the pseudodocumentary solutions and exceedingly stylized visual universe. Through these elements, the relativization ultimately reaches not just the filmic universe, but also the reality of the

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contemporary setting that it is based on. As such, Dog’s Night Song is as if it was staged within a familiar, now defunct, fictional, absurd, or dead universe that is called Hungary.

Conclusion Gábor Bódy’s manifold artistic and organizational activities built a bridge between the tradition of the classical avant-garde interrupted after 1945 and the neo-avant-garde emerging in the 1970s. Besides experimentalism, the main characteristic of this connection is social sensitivity, the way in which both the classical and the neo-avant-garde represent reality and examine the historical and political processes in a critical way. With Bódy, this is stylistically linked to a provocative clash of the tropes of documentary and fiction filmmaking. His films draw on elements of reality—the plot of American Postcard is based on real people and memoirs; in Psyche, the figure of Narcissus is inspired by the eighteenth-century poet László Ungvárnémeti Tóth; in Dog’s Night Song, the director inserts real newsreels into the fiction film—but these elements are transformed through the means of experimental film language. Bódy’s innovative contribution to the Hungarian film art of the seventies and the eighties is to have introduced the awareness of film language and documentarism into film, in a way that film language and the represented world become equally visible, reflecting each other. This is what Bódy called the philosophy of film.30

Bibliography Acél, Pál. “Kollektív mozgás (Kino-mechanika).” MA 6, no. 5 (March 1921): 64. Balogh, Gyöngyi. “A magyar némafilm kora.” In A magyar játékfilm története a kezdetektől 1990–ig, edited by Gyöngyi Balogh, Vera Gyürey, and Pál Honffy, 12–40. Budapest: Műszaki, 2004. Bódy, Gábor. “A fiatal magyar film útjai.” In Gábor Bódy: Egybegyűjtött filmművészeti írások, edited by Vince Zalán, 111–6. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó, 2006. Bódy, Gábor. “A filmnyelvi kísérletezéstől az új narrativitásig. Beszélgetés Bódy Gáborral a Nárcisz és Psyché készítése közben.” Interviewed by István Zsugán. In Szubjektív magyar filmtörténet 1964–1994, edited by István Zsugán, 439–54. Budapest: Osiris–Századvég, 1994. 30 See note 17.

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Bódy, Gábor. “Alternatives for the Young Hungarian Film.” In Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of his Work, edited by László Beke and Miklós Peternák, 257–62. Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987. Bódy, Gábor. “Attribution of Meaning in Cinematography.” In Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of his Work, edited by László Beke and Miklós Peternák, 298–317. Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987. Bódy, Gábor. “Creative Thinking Device: ‘Experimental Film’ in Hungary.” In Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of His Work, edited by László Beke and Miklós Peternák, 265–70. Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987. Originally published in Filmvilág, no. 3 (1982), 11–13. Bódy, Gábor. “Dear Mr. Dauman.” In Gábor Bódy 1946–1985: Életműbemutató / A Presentation of his Work, edited by László Beke and Miklós Peternák, 127–9. Budapest: Műcsarnok and Művelődési Minisztérium, Filmfőigazgatóság, 1987. Bódy, Gábor “Hol a ‘valóság’?” In Gábor Bódy Egybegyűjtött filmművészeti írások, edited by Vince Zalán, 105–10. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó, 2006. Bódy, Gábor. “Kozmikus szem.” In Gábor Bódy: Egybegyűjtött filmművészeti írások, edited by Vince Zalán, 202–8. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó, 2006. Bódy, Gábor. “Munkaterv.” In Végtelen kép. Bódy Gábor írásai, edited by Miklós Peternák, 312. Budapest: Pesti Szalon, 1996. Eggeling, Viking. “Elvi fejtegetések a mozgóképművészetről.” MA 6, no. 8 (1921): 105–6; Erdély, Miklós. “Amerikai anzix.” In A filmről, 186–7. Budapest: Balassi, BAE Tartóshullám, and Intermedia, 1995. Erdély, Miklós. “Beszélgetés Erdély Miklóssal.” Interviewed by Miklós Peternák. In A filmről, 9–37. Budapest: Balassi kiadó, BAE Tartóshullám, and Intermedia, 1995). Gurshtein, Ksenya. “Kentaur (Centaur).” Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Accessed September 29, 2021. https:// www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/censored-andsalvaged/centaur.html. Gurshtein, Ksenya. “Self-Fashion Show (Öndivatbemutató).” Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Accessed September 29, 2021. https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/ city-scene-country-scene/self-fashion-show.html. Győri, Zsolt. “‘A mi agyunk téves kapcsolás’: az új hullám találkozása az új érzékenységgel.” Apertúra (Summer 2018). http://uj.apertura.hu/2018/nyar/gyori-ami-agyunk-teves-kapcsolas-az-uj-hullam-talalkozasa-az-uj-erzekenyseggel/.

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Jeles, András. “Teória és akció.” In Töredékek Jeles András Naplójából, edited by László Fodor and László Hegedűs, 39–43. Budapest: 8 és fél Bt., 1993. Kovács, András Bálint. “The Experimental Cinema of the State: The Balázs Béla Studio.” In Experimental Film: The Missing Frames, edited by Benjamin Meade, 65–88. Kansas City: Avila University Press, 2010. Meleg, Gábor. “Egy pszeudo-irányzat. Közelítések az új érzékenység filmjeihez.” Metropolis, no. 4 (2010): 20–33. Moholy-Nagy, László. “Filmváz, A nagyváros dinamikája.” MA 9, no. 8 (1924): n.p. Müllner, András. “Montázspolitika: Neoavantgárd nyomok magyar experimentális filmekben.” In BBS 50. A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve, edited by Gábor Gelencsér, 129–42. Budapest: Műcsarnok and Balázs Béla Stúdió, 2009. Pápai, Zsolt. “Kutyák éji dala. Az új-érzékenység és a magyar posztmodern film első hulláma.” Filmtörténet online (2006). http://archiv.magyar.film.hu/filmtortenet// mufajok/kutyak-eji-dala-az-uj-erzekenyseg-es-a-magyar-posztmodern-filmelso-hullama-mufajelemzes.html. Pócsik, Andrea. Átkelések. A romaképkészítés (an)archeológiája. Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó and Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem, 2017. Simonyi, Sonja. “The Man Behind the Curtain: Gábor Bódy, Experimental Film Culture and Networks of State Control in Late Socialist Hungary.” Third Text vol. 32, no. 4 (2018): 519–29. Szilágyi, Ákos. “Az elmesélt én. Az ‘új érzékenység’ határai.” Filmvilág, no. 7 (1985): 27–29. Vass, Henrik, ed. A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt határozatai és dokumentumai 1971–1975. Budapest: Kossuth, 1979.

About the Author Dr. Gábor Gelencsér is a professor of film studies at the ELTE University in Budapest. He has published on various aspects of Hungarian film culture in magazines, journals, and edited volumes and has written six monographs (in Hungarian), including books on the aesthetics of Hungarian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (2002) and a study of the relationship between cinema and literature in postwar Hungarian film (2015). He also coedited the exhibition catalog on the history of the Hungarian Balázs Béla Studio (2009).

2.

Circles, Lines, and Documentary Designs: Tomislav Gotovac’s Belgrade Trilogy Greg de Cuir Jr.

Abstract This paper looks at the Belgrade Trilogy (1964) of Yugoslav-Croatian alternative filmmaker and experimental visual and performance artist Tomislav Gotovac. The works Straight Line, Circle, and Blue Rider, filmed in the nonprofessional environment of the Academic Kino Club, can be defined as visionary protostructural cinema. The chapter provides a close reading of the films, placing them at the intersection of avant-garde and documentary forms. In doing so, it unearths wide-ranging and transnational textual reference points across all films, spanning American pop culture and allusions to canonical works of art and cinema. Additionally, the chapter provides a mapping of Belgrade’s distinct ideological and sociopolitical realities embedded in the films, connecting these elements to the historical avant-garde film genre of the “city symphony.” Keywords: Tomislav Gotovac; Yugoslavia; amateur cinema; Belgrade; city symphony films; Hollywood cinema (international reception of)

Introduction In 1964, the artist and cineast Tomislav Gotovac made what some consider his masterpiece, colloquially known as the Belgrade Trilogy, consisting of three short experimental films: Circle (Kružnica), Straight Line (Pravac), and Blue Rider (Plavi jahač). Gotovac produced these films at the Academic Kino Club (Akademski kino klub) in Belgrade, which was founded in 1958 as an alternative to the increasingly elitist and bureaucratic Belgrade Kino

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch02

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Club. The Kino Clubs were incubated in 1948 by a state-sponsored initiative called Narodna Tehnika, which was designed by the Yugoslav Communist Youth League to put technology in the hands of the masses, encourage their creativity, and foster knowledge. Around that time, the Belgrade Society of Photo Amateurs was founded, which was given the task of developing kino amateurs, eventually resulting in the founding of Belgrade Kino Club in 1951. The latter was the first Kino Club in Serbia to enjoy a degree of acclaim, which brought about a degree of pretention as well. As a collection of amateur cineastes—amateur in the sense that their cine-enthusiasm was not based on professional gain—the Academic Kino Club was open and democratic. If you showed up, you could shoot. That is exactly what Gotovac did, with the help of his cinematographer and editor Petar Blagojević. This general freedom incubated an environment that was both conducive to creative experimentation and free of the pressures of Yugoslav market socialism. Considering Gotovac’s Belgrade Trilogy alongside the work of some of his contemporaries at both Academic Kino Club and maybe even Zagreb Kino Club, his films stand out for their insistent engagement with reality. It was largely in Gotovac’s hometown of Zagreb where one could find abstract experimentation, such as the Antifilm movement founded and practiced by Mihovil Pansini.1 However, Gotovac did not care much for Pansini and his followers, which is one reason he traveled to Belgrade to make his trilogy.2 When he traveled, he brought these abstract sensibilities with him, but he married them to a representational documentary aesthetic and an amateur production context. Gotovac was the “film guru” of his generation, as Slobodan Šijan identified him in his biographical study.3 As Šijan also noted, Gotovac was a filmmaker that many could and did learn from, and whose relevance and legacy is felt even in the present day. This essay briefly addresses Gotovac’s place within Yugoslav amateur film culture and reconsiders the ways in which Gotovac’s seminal Belgrade Trilogy has been analyzed. Following the documentary theorist Bill Nichols, it examines it by avoiding the “false division between the avant-garde and documentary that obscures their necessary proximity.”4 As I argue, Gotovac’s 1 Pansini was the president of Zagreb Kino Club and also the founder of GEFF, one of the earliest experimental film festivals in Europe. 2 Gotovac would eventually settle in Belgrade in the late 1960s and early 1970s, completing his studies in film directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. 3 Slobodan Šijan, Tomislav Gotovac: Life as Film Experiment (Zagreb: Tomislav Gotovac Institute, and Croatian Film Association, Multimedia Institute, 2018), 16. 4 Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 580–610.

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films function not merely as formal experiments but as filmic documents capturing a distinct time and place. After introducing the general conditions within which Gotovac came to embrace amateur filmmaking, the essay will provide a close reading of the films aligning their documentary aspects with the rich art historical and popular cultural references that surface in all three works, while also connecting them to key aspects of the city symphony genre.

Postwar Amateur Film Culture After the liberation of Yugoslavia and the declaration of a Socialist republic, a film industry was organized very quickly. The Committee for Cinematography was formed in 1946, the medium serving as an effective means through which the League of Yugoslav Communists perpetuated their collective myths and ideology. As noted by Daniel J. Goulding in his definitive English-language study of the history of Yugoslav cinema, “[f]ilms were for reflecting the development of a distinctive socialist art based upon the principles of national realism (a Yugoslav variant of socialist realism).”5 The aforementioned Belgrade Society of Photo Amateurs was founded in this period with the task of developing kino amateurs, among other types of amateurs. It could be that the Yugoslav authorities had a beneficial disposition toward citizens, helping them to realize their full potential, thus encouraging participation in various amateur clubs. It could also be that amateurism served as a convenient “pressure valve” in which to isolate and marginalize alternative viewpoints or dissent. We do know there were Kino Club traditions in other socialist states, such as Poland and the Soviet Union, and that Kino Clubs date back to the early twentieth century in Western Europe and North America as well. The politics of amateurism is a wider subject than cannot be properly addressed here, but it is a burgeoning discipline within media studies and is slowly becoming more consequential to a fuller understanding of the roots of international Kino culture.6 Klub foto-kino amatera Beograd (Belgrade Photo-Kino Amateur Club) was founded in 19507 as an organization under the auspices of the larger 5 Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 2. 6 For a recent collection of scholarly sources surrounding amateur moving-image culture, see Film History (vol. 30, issue 1; Spring 2018), “Special Issue: Toward a Global History of Amateur Film Practices and Institutions,” guest edited by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez. 7 Marko Babac, Kino-klub “Beograd”/“Belgrade” Kino Club (Belgrade: Jugoslovenska kinoteka, 2001), 7.

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Yugoslav League of Photo-Kino Amateurs. The Belgrade Kino Club was founded a year later on May 27, 19518 as an offshoot of the Belgrade PhotoKino Amateur Club. The club immediately began its activities by hosting film screenings and organizing the production of its first short fiction film and a first short documentary reportage. Film production would continue to function concurrently with screenings as the main activities of the club. The Zagreb Kino Club was founded on October 14, 1953, and a few years later, in his early twenties, Tomislav Gotovac joined and began his filmmaking activities there.9 From the 1950s through the 1980s, the large Kino Club network in Socialist Yugoslavia was a real alternative to official state film production. Anyone could join a club, short films were produced quickly and inexpensively, and club members were free to experiment with form and content. They were also free to watch and discuss movies from all over the world—to exercise the same form of cinephilia that gave rise to new waves throughout Europe and the rest of the world in the postwar era. Kino clubs in Socialist Yugoslavia were established in a specific sociopolitical context that was, after the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, markedly different from other socialist Eastern European countries.10 The relative openness of film culture toward Western European films was one notable aspect of this idiosyncratic socialist context. A detailed outline of the specific ways in which this unique political framework drove amateur film culture is beyond the scope of this paper. Thus, while the above serves as a necessary introduction to these issues and the amateur realm within which Gotovac made films, this chapter will, in what follows, focus on matters of aesthetics as they relate to his films. My aim is to heed the call made by the amateur film theorist Ryan Shand that what we need now is an aesthetic history of amateur cinema, rather than a social or institutional one.11 8 Ibid., 12. 9 Duško Popović, ed ., Kinoklub Zagreb 1928./2003. / Zagreb Kino Club 1928/2003 (Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez and Kino klub Zagreb, 2003), 32. It should be noted that the Zagreb Kino Club has roots in the prewar Zagreb Photo Club, particularly in 1928 when a kino section was established. 10 Greg de Cuir Jr., “Yugoslav Ciné-Enthusiasm: Ciné-club Culture and the Institutionalization of Amateur Filmmaking in the Territory of Yugoslavia from 1924–68,” Romanian Review VIII, no. 2 (2011): 36–49. See also my “Early Yugoslav Ciné-amateurism: Cinephilia and the Institutionalization of Film Culture in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia During the Interwar Period,” in The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945, edited by Malte Hagener (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 162–79. 11 Ryan Shand, “Theorizing Amateur Cinema,” The Moving Image 8, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 36–60.

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The Belgrade Trilogy as City Symphony: Avant-Garde Film as Document Informal discussions with film scholars and cinephiles I encountered over the years have invariably framed the Belgrade Trilogy and Gotovac as an undisputed forerunner of structural cinema. I will sidestep this line of inquiry, because I have little interest in either mythologizing Gotovac as an underappreciated innovator or engaging in discussions on the nature and origins of structural cinema. I am rather more interested in investigating the documentary qualities of the trilogy, as they speak profoundly to the world that Gotovac lived in. As Scott MacDonald writes in his book Avant-Doc, “the histories of avant-garde film and documentary have been intersecting in a wide variety of interesting ways since the dawn of cinema.”12 Perhaps the most significant early melding of avant-garde and documentary forms were the cycle of films in the 1920s known as “city symphonies.”13 Taken together, the Belgrade Trilogy constitutes an interesting variant of the city symphony format. Ultimately, the city of Belgrade is the protagonist of Circle and Straight Line—its buildings and skyline in the former and its streets and traffic in the latter. The various protagonists of Blue Rider are the inhabitants of the city, particularly the kind that work or hang out in bars, cafés, and restaurants. The sum total of these three films is an invaluable and nuanced document of the capital of Socialist Yugoslavia in 1964, at the height of its belle époque. Again, quoting Nichols, “documentary, like avant-garde film, cast the familiar in a new light,” which is the creative strategy Gotovac deploys in capturing the urban space on film.14 A close analysis of these films will illuminate various layers of significance that speak just as much to the sociology and ideology of the socialist city as it does to experimental film culture of the time in a location far from the dominant maps of Western film historiographies. The inception of the Belgrade Trilogy dates to a fateful encounter in 1963. After showing his newest film at GEFF (the biennial experimental film festival produced by Zagreb Kino Club) in 1963, Gotovac met Petar Blagojević, a fellow kino amateur from Belgrade who also had a film in the competition. The two hit it off, and Blagojević invited Gotovac to Belgrade to make a film. At 12 Scott MacDonald, Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. 13 For a recent study on the subject of city symphonies, see Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, Anthony Kinik, eds., The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (New York and London: Routledge, 2018). 14 Nichols, “Documentary Film,” 583.

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that point, Gotovac had been frustrated with his experiences in the Zagreb Kino Club, perhaps because of a similar climate of elitism and not fitting in with his fellow club members. He saved his money, gathered some film stock, and arrived in Belgrade the following year with detailed production plans. Gotovac stayed as a guest in Blagojević’s home, which also served as their production office. Within a week’s time, they had shot and edited three films that would grow to become legendary works of cinematic art in Yugoslavia.15 Circle The film Circle (Figure 2.1) offers what the title describes: a repeating circular camera movement. The credit sequence of the film contains a series of visual and aural codes and keywords that detail Gotovac’s influences while also setting a template that recurs in the other two films in the trilogy. The first thing that we see and hear in all of these films is a rough head leader, the first section of the celluloid print that habitually serves a technical purpose, accompanied by the sound of the American radio series Moonlight Serenade (1939–42) featuring Glenn Miller. The inclusion of this film leader speaks to the inclusion of those bits that are normally left out of a conventional narrative film. This gesture follows Jean-Luc Godard‘s well-known directive that “everything can be put into a film, everything should be put into a film.”16 It also demonstrates Gotovac’s own well-known adage that “everything is a film.” This metacinematic moment and material forms an avant-garde expression that functions as a discrete, if very short, abstract film, with its dancing animated lines and technical markings. The insertion of the audio from Glenn Miller’s radio show furthers a collage aesthetic. The use of jazz music is significant here, because the Kino Club milieu, as described to me by old club members, was characterized by two pervasive things: cigarette smoke and jazz music, which is implicitly evoked through the soundtrack. Gotovac’s love of Glenn Miller as an artist and a symbol of American popular culture was intense. Some of his earliest fond memories were of listening to that radio show and basking in the American culture it represented.17 15 For a vivid account of these exploits, including a detailed interview with Blagojević, see Slobodan Šijan’s critical biography Kino Tom: Antonio G. Lauer or Tomislav Gotovac between Zagreb and Belgrade (Belgrade and Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art and Croatian Film Association, 2012). This book is the defining account of Gotovac’s life as well as his works of art across film, performance, painting, publishing, and other disciplines. 16 Tom Milne, ed ., Godard on Godard (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972). 17 Maybe some anti-American sentiments were prevalent during the early period of Tito’s regime, but, by the 1960s, the dramatic influence of U.S. culture prevailed. On Socialist Yugoslavia’s

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Figure 2.1. Unknown photographer, Tomislav Gotovac during the making of Circle (Jutkevič-Count), Belgrade, 1964. Collection of Sarah Gotovac / Courtesy Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb.

The title credits of the film comprise two words that also expose Gotovac’s influences.18 The first is “Jutkevič,” which refers to the Russian Soviet director Sergei Yutkevich, who had studied under Vsevolod Meyerhold in the early 1920s and later in the decade began a long career in cinema, which lasted until the 1980s. The camera movement in Circle was inspired by the circular camera movement in Yutkevich’s film Golden Mountains (1931). So this film can be seen as something of an extended homage, an act of cinephilic devotion. The second word that appears is “Count,” in reference to the jazz legend Count Basie. The soundtrack for Circle is the swing number “Sent for You Yesterday” by the Count Basie Orchestra, another big name from the big band era. However, the word “count” can also refer to the mathematical precision of the film, because it is broken into even parts by various intertitles and also the gradual increase of the radius and circumference of the circle that is traced by the camera. Swing music is characterized by a driving rhythm; if one does not keep count, one can neither perform nor dance to it. Similarly, Gotovac invites the viewer to keep pace with his film. Indeed, there is a sense of performance and a markedly physical element to the production of Circle. Blagojević, acting as cameraperson, was secured by belts tied around his waist and swung around the top of the building by Gotovac and another collaborator like a dance partner, so he could record images without losing his balance. As Circle begins, the camera is pointed down, spinning in a circle. The roof of the building is visible, as well as the roofs of other shorter buildings. At some complex relationship with American culture during this decade, see Radina Vučetić, CocaCola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018). 18 The fullest accounting of Gotovac’s influences can be found in Šijan’s critical biography Kino Tom.

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angles, we can briefly see the streets and the foot traffic below. The legs and feet of the crew members are also in view, as well as cables and other production tools. The film thus immediately presents both a self-reflexive experiment and a documentary tracing of the topography of the city of Belgrade. The intertitles dispersed throughout the film, which break the flow of the camera movement, riff on the circular motion of the camera with exclamations such as “near the circle” and “out of the circle.” The song on the soundtrack, “Sent for You Yesterday,” is sung by blues vocalist Jimmy Rushing, makes repeated reference to “the moon looking lovely shining through the trees,” which is another circular reference, in addition to echoing the idea of a “Moonlight Serenade.” This panoramic view of the city was an illegal documentation, because it was forbidden to shoot on the top of buildings without permission in 1960s Yugoslavia. The small crew did not have the proper authorization, and they snuck into the building and up to the roof as something of a subversive act in order to steal this one-take masterpiece. Circle was shot on top of the Albania Palace in the center of Belgrade. Construction was completed in 1940, and it became the first skyscraper built in southeastern Europe. This structure dominated the architecture of Belgrade for many years, so it was the ideal peak on which to shoot the film and a strongly defiant gesture of documenting it via illegal, amateur means. The name “Albania” dates back to a famous café located on the site in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was controversially demolished to make place for the towering structure. The significance of cafés and café culture to Yugoslav urban life will be discussed in more detail in relation to the film Blue Rider. Straight Line From a high-angle documentation of the city of Belgrade in Circle, we shift to a street-level view in the film Straight Line (Figure 2.2). Continuing with the combination of cinema and American popular culture via jazz references, the words appearing in the title sequence for this film are “Stevens” and “Duke.” The former refers to the director George Stevens, particularly his film A Place in the Sun (1951), which was one of Gotovac’s favorites.19 In Stevens’s drama, train tracks in the form of a straight line are used as symbols of fate or destiny, which was the inspiration for Gotovac’s film homage. “Duke” refers to Duke Ellington, another legendary American big band leader and composer. Straight Line is set to Ellington’s song “The Creole Love Call,” which is a slow and dreamy piece, unlike the bombastic and uptempo Basie recording used in Circle. 19 See the multiple references to this in Sijan, Kino Tom.

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Figure 2.2. Unknown photographer, Tomislav Gotovac during the making of Straight Line (StevensDuke), Belgrade, 1964. Collection of Sarah Gotovac / Courtesy Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb.

In Straight Line, the camera was placed in the front of a streetcar and pointed directly at the rails ahead, recording the view as the streetcar progressed, including buildings and traffic passing by. The linear construction of this film has a much more refined design than Circle, which is characterized by a chaotic and vertigo-inducing element. The street that is documented in Straight Line is Revolution Boulevard (Bulevar Revolucije), known again today by its pre-Socialist name, King Aleksandar Boulevard. This long and busy avenue progresses outward in a straight line from the center of Belgrade, forming an important axis. Because of the street name, some have read the film as a sly critique of the political revolution that so profoundly changed Yugoslavia after World War II and the official demand to depict this event positively in art and all facets of life. While this is a viable reading, especially when keeping in mind that Gotovac was an artist not afraid to pack his works with oppositional sentiments, it could just as easily be that the architectural grandeur of Revolution Boulevard presented the best opportunity for Gotovac to achieve his desired aesthetic effect. These sorts of fortuitous circumstances always seem to coincide in the best work of significant artists, adding to the mystery of their creations and the legend of their personalities.

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Straight Line is uncannily similar to the early film A Trip Down Market Street (1906), produced by the Miles brothers in San Francisco. Both films are shot from the front of a moving streetcar as it progresses in a straight line down a track in the center of the frame. Both films are valuable visual documents of the culture of a city. A Trip Down Market Street is fortuitous in its own right, because it depicts San Francisco mere weeks before the devastating earthquake and fire that hit the city in the same year. These two films might be used as exemplars of the imbrication between documentary and avant-garde cinema. For their comparative analysis in terms of the ideological context that shaped their production, it is useful to consider the names of the streets featured in Circle and the 1906 American production, respectively. That a street bearing a name pregnant with ideological meaning also tended to function as a major thoroughfare in socialist urban space adds an obvious symbolic layer to Gotovac’s piece. But it is also interesting to note that A Trip Down Market Street investigates a famous street named “Market,” in deference to the economic system governing the United States and the Western world, while the Yugoslav production evokes the “revolution” that launched a political reality that existed in many other parts of the world, often in opposition to the demands of the market and capital.20 It also bears mentioning that A Trip Down Market Street was remade and rephotographed by the filmmaker Ernie Gehr in 1974 and titled Eureka—exactly ten years after Gotovac’s film. This is an interesting parallel track that provokes the tantalizing possibility that Gehr might have seen or heard about Gotovac’s work, thus inspiring his “eureka” moment. Straight Line, like Circle, is fractured by numerous intertitles that offer wordplays on various phrases about lines (“on the straight line,” “around the straight line,” etc.). These intertitles also include random series of numbers that have never been fully explained by Gotovac. Yet, beyond these structuralist elements, Straight Line also exists as a valuable documentation of mid-1960s Belgrade, presenting an image of one of the most important streets in the city and the people and vehicles that moved around in it. The film evokes the drama of the everyday (something that city symphony films also made central to their construction), away from official representations of socialist urban space. But the visual of a straight line that dominates the middle of the frame and seems to extend out to infinity is at the same time 20 As another site of a fortuitous potential comparison, would it be too much of a stretch to mention the 1963 earthquake that struck the Yugoslav city of Skopje and almost destroyed it completely?

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not unlike the incessant circle in the other film that gradually rises to the sky and could easily continue into the heavens and beyond. Pursuing this line of reasoning, we can speak of a transcendent element in these films that moves them beyond the plane of pure nonfictional representation and to a certain extent abstracts the urban space. Quoting Nichols once again, “the explosive power of avant-garde practices subverts and shatters the coherence, stability, and naturalness of the dominant world of realist representation.”21 This might serve as a fine definition for all of the films in the Belgrade Trilogy. Both Circle and Straight Line are punctured by the unexpected appearance of photographs. In Circle, it is the 1953 photo Woman and Thistle by Wynn Bullock. Inserting this photo as a still image cutaway seems to be a brief humorous moment in the context of Circle, as if one of the buildings being documented might have a nude woman in one of its windows. Additionally, we should remember that Gotovac used nudity as a central strategy in many of his public performances. His insertion of Bullock’s photograph in the film thus implicitly references a key motif within his own interdisciplinary oeuvre. Sometimes, these performances related directly to his film activities. This included one action in which he stripped nude with collaborators and moved back and forth in front of a movie screen. In other works, they were experiments in filming the performances of others, such as Slikar, Model, Snimatelj / Painter, Model, Cinematographer (1970), in which Gotovac documented a happening staged by the painter Aleksandar Brusilovski and featuring the model Danica Mirković. In Straight Line, the photograph that is inserted is the 1944 portrait of avant-garde painter Georges Braque, titled Georges Braque in His Home in Paris, shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson. By referencing Bresson and Braque within the filmic text, it is as though Gotovac was channeling the spirit of these great artists in an attempt to align himself with significant traditions of the historical avant-garde. That Braque played a central role in the development of Cubism, an aesthetic that fractured the world into geometric forms to reveal its underlying structure, provides an alluring formal connection with Gotovac’s filmic attempts at rearranging documented reality through similar shapes, notably circles and lines. Blue Rider The title credits accompanying Blue Rider feature the words “Godard” and “Art.” Gotovac made a more thorough sonic reference to the French 21 Nichols, “Documentary Film,” 592.

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director in his previous film Morning of a Faun (Prije podne jednog fauna, 1963), codirected with Vladimir Petek, in which he used the music from the famous pool hall scene in My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962) that features Anna Karina doing her iconic dance. Blue Rider consists of footage Gotovac filmed of crowds gathered in Belgrade’s bars and cafés, implicitly calling to mind Godard’s affinity for documentary-style location shooting in similar urban environments across his New Wave films. “Art” is also something of a muted reference, as it alludes to the jazz drummer Art Blakey. In a previous version of the film,22 Gotovac used a song from the album The African Beat by Blakey. In 1977, he removed that music and replaced it with audio passages excerpted from the American television series Bonanza (1959–73), which considerably altered the possible avenues of interpretation for the film. The title of Blue Rider contains one of Gotovac’s more explicit art historical references. Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists active in Germany in the era leading up to the First World War. The group’s members (including Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee) were united in their rejection of the art world at large, which had become too strict and traditional for their tastes. Der Blaue Reiter was one of the forerunners of modernism in European visual arts, and the group’s members embraced trends that led them toward nonfigurative abstraction. Given this, the title of the film Blue Rider appears to have a double significance. It references Kandinsky’s 1903 painting, which depicts a man in blue riding a white horse over a grassy green field, or, alternatively, his expressionist cover image for the Blue Rider Almanac from 1912. Yet, in the context of Gotovac’s film, the title also leads the way—from the equestrian motif to the Bonanza soundtrack, which references the genre of the Western, with men on horses in open, natural surroundings, evoking tropes of freedom and the conquest of land.23 The Western is the American genre par excellence, and Gotovac loved watching these films.24 The original English-language dialogue that is used from Bonanza counters an idyllic vision of the conquest of the American West that 22 Gotovac re-edited the films in 1977 and also shuffled the order in which he wanted them presented. It was not uncommon for Gotovac to re-edit his works; he did the same with Morning of a Faun on no less than two occasions, in 1972–3 and in 1977. 23 I wrote an essay connecting the Western to Yugoslav Partisan war films for Frames Cinema Journal. See “Partisan ‘Realism’: Representations of Wartime Past and State-Building Future in the Cinema of Socialist Yugoslavia,” Frames Cinema Journal, 4 (December 2013). http:// framescinemajournal.com/article/1421/. 24 I will never forget the first time I met Gotovac, around 2007, when beginning my doctoral studies in Belgrade. My hope was to interview him on the history of Yugoslav cinema and his place in it. No matter what question I asked, he only wanted to talk about Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) and how amazing a film it was. Later, I came to realize that this was his special way

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most classical iterations of the genre perpetuated. In doing this, it reflects the lack of understanding and outright racism of White Americans toward Chinese people and other ethnicities, also evoking a xenophobic nationalism that numerous classical examples of the genre celebrated. In this sense, and maybe for the first time in the Belgrade Trilogy, we have an overt critical stance taken by the artist. This stance may or may not be applied to the Yugoslav social context. However, Yugoslavia as a multiethnic nation tied together across generations and eras (and imperial powers) in often tenuous balances makes for a tempting case study and an object of potential critique by Gotovac through the symbolic evocation of the multicultural American frontier, mediated in Blue Rider via a popular American TV series. Taking the textual references to American frontier tropes a step further, the men and women depicted in Blue Rider enjoying the café culture of Belgrade might stand in for the men and women populating the saloons of the Old West of America. One of the central tropes of the Western is a stranger riding into town and bursting into a saloon, making his presence felt through his outsider status. On a contextual level, one can imagine a similar narrative surrounding Gotovac, a visiting artist from Zagreb in Belgrade, bursting into the city’s cafés with his camera crew and confronting locals with the unexpected presence and power of the apparatus. Like Circle, this film can thus also be considered a record of a performative action. The people in the cafés react differently to this intrusion. Some join in and pose for the camera, acting, freezing in position as if for a photographic still. Others hide their faces from view, not wanting to participate or be identified. Many try to pay the camera crew no mind and go about their business. From a high-angle shot in Circle to a street-level wide shot in Straight Line, we finally arrive at a series of close-ups in Blue Rider. We gain an intimate view of how citizens of Belgrade dress, how they behave (at least with the intrusive presence of a camera), and how they live. The sum total is a cross section of Socialist Yugoslavia. From the geometric precision of Circle and Straight Line, we progress to the improvisation of Blue Rider. The camera is handheld and swings around in a rushed manner in an attempt to capture as many faces and bodies as possible. The editing skips quickly between the many cafés where the film was shot. Like Circle, we once again see the artist and his crew, this time reflected in the mirrors of the cafés. In Blue Rider, Gotovac gives himself up most completely to the spur of the documentary moment, letting his of “testing” me and also a most sincere attempt at communicating. This hunch was confirmed after I read Šijan’s book Kino Tom, particularly the chapter titled “Initiation into Hawks.”

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mise-en-scène be dictated by everyday life. To be sure, this was a brave act, and also illegal like Circle, making it another subversive work. At that time, it would not be normal or acceptable for a camera crew to storm into cafés and invade the personal space of those inside. In fact, Gotovac was afraid of being attacked. As a reward for this risk, Gotovac emerged with one of the rawest and most naked documents of Belgrade city life. The critic and artist Slobodan Šijan cited Blue Rider among the most modern and accomplished experimental films to ever come out of Yugoslavia, on par with the great works of Godard, the reference point that loomed particularly large for Gotovac. Blue Rider proposes a radical dialectic between image and sound. Along with the low-budget, black-and-white, documentary-style images, we have the sounds of a big-budget Hollywood TV production. With the images of waitresses, bartenders, and customers going about mundane daily routines is dialogue about racial contempt, shady political action, and ultimately the sounds of a gunfight. Perhaps Gotovac was commenting on the contemporary social situation, and perhaps he was predicting an uneasy future—though the latter reading is all too simple and common when it comes to studies of the cinema of Socialist Yugoslavia. Still, what may be at stake is what Slavoj Žižek postulates in his book Mapping Ideology: “What emerges via distortions of the accurate representation of reality is the real—that is, the trauma around which social reality is structured.”25 The fact is that Yugoslavia has had its fair share of traumas and restructured social realities throughout the twentieth century. Blue Rider suggestively ends with the following dialogue snippet from Bonanza: “That’s a terrible thing that happened here today, and we don’t ever want it to happen again.” In the notes for a program I organized at Los Angeles Filmforum in 2014, I have written that Blue Rider can be read as a love letter to a people, a city, and a country, as well as a film culture.26 Indeed, this is true for the entire Belgrade Trilogy. After the final line of dialogue in Blue Rider, and a brief shot of Gotovac moving past the camera, we hear the famous theme song from Bonanza accompanied by a cut to the aforementioned rough black f ilm leader that frames all three works. The closing notes of this song provide an apt send-off for the journey throughout the trilogy—call it Gotovac’s musical appropriation of a Hollywood ending. Through the years, 25 Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso, 1995), 26. 26 https://www.lafilmforum.org/archive/spring-2014-schedule/highlights-from-the-academiccine-club-belgrade-1960-1980/

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the ordering of the films in this trilogy have been shuffled, sometimes by Gotovac himself and other times by the curators exhibiting the works.27 Blue Rider seems a natural conclusion because of the closing theme song, as well as because of the complexity of the piece. Yet it is a capital work not only within this trilogy but perhaps also within the fleeting golden age of avant-garde cinema and Kino Club culture in Socialist Yugoslavia. The 1970s introduced video to the Yugoslav art scene, and by the 1980s, the formidable Kino Club network started to slowly disintegrate.28 Coinciding with this shift, Gotovac stepped up his activity in performance art, and his output in film became sporadic. In 2006, Gotovac remade his Belgrade Trilogy, producing the films at Academic Film Center (the successor to the Academic Kino Club). Made on video, these newer works document a post-socialist, postwar, twenty-first century Belgrade. Both the Circle and Straight Line remakes are executed in the same spots as the originals, but the Blue Rider remake, unlike the original, is shot entirely at one café/restaurant: Tošin Bunar, affectionately known as “Jakarta,” a popular hangout across the street from Academic Film Center in New Belgrade. The new Blue Rider is staged in a way that the original was not. There is less of an element of chance, less of a raw documentary image. In the twenty-f irst century, cameras themselves, for the most part, are no longer provocative objects when they make unexpected appearances in public places. The new Blue Rider is still a performance, but somehow a “scripted” one, which does not make it less valuable, only less vibrant. However, with the artists, curators, writers, and other collaborators placed in the restaurant like extras to fill it up, the new version is a different type of record, one that captured a new alternative cultural scene. These new actors on this new scene are still writing their own histories.29

27 I have done this in my own practice as a curator when presenting the works, and in some instances, I only show individual films, not the trilogy as an integral whole. 28 Though it bears mentioning that the festival Alternative Film/Video was founded in 1982 at the restructured Academic Film Center. It still operates today and exists as the oldest festival of experimental film and video in Europe. It is perhaps the only true remnant of this golden age of Kino Club culture that is relevant on an international scale. Gotovac was a friend and collaborator of the festival and attended regularly throughout the decades, even in the years just before he died. 29 These individuals include Stevan Vuković, curator of the Filmforum at Student Cultural Center; Aleksandra Sekulić, curator at the Center for Cultural Decontamination (and production manager on the Blue Rider remake); Dušan Grlja, editor of the journal Prelom; Mikrob, artist and writer.

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Conclusion In the 1970s and in the following decades, Gotovac himself enjoyed a degree of acclaim, though as a performance artist, and often in the context of museums and galleries, as part of the world of fine arts. People soon circled back and rediscovered his film work as constituting a significant oeuvre worthy of further attention. Today, Gotovac’s work can be found in the collections of such influential institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which recently purchased a print of Circle. His work is featured in many exhibitions that intersect with Eastern Europe and modernist trends. However, he is still a figure that has not often been studied or written about in detail, either within the context of Eastern European art in general or amateur film culture and how it engendered certain forms of experimentalism. Attempting to fill this gap, this chapter has argued that key to understanding Gotovac and his significance as an artist is an understanding of his place within postwar amateur film culture and Kino Club culture, and to frame his important Belgrade Trilogy at the intersection of avant-garde and documentary filmic expression. It seems that Gotovac’s position on the continuum of international avantgarde film history has yet to be properly accounted for. As mentioned in the introduction, most of those who engage with his work have tried to situate him as a structural filmmaker avant la lettre. This is fine. We know that the history of film is a history of unexpected beginnings and fortuitous, cross-cultural influences. Maybe Gotovac does deserve recognition for this particular element of his pioneering cinematic form. However, it is also apparent that he deserves recognition for his inventive mobilizations of documentary style and content when capturing the specificity of Yugoslav urban space. For the way he traces the city of Belgrade with his camera, it is just as important to acknowledge his extension of the aesthetic of the city symphony film. The documentary form and cinematic experimentation have been fused for some time now. Perhaps it is this aesthetic tradition that will allow Gotovac’s body of work to speak with cogency and immediacy across the divides of generations, geographies, and ideologies.

Bibliography Babac, Marko. Kino-klub “Beograd” / Belgrade Kino Club. Belgrade: Jugoslovenska kinoteka, 2001.

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De Cuir Jr., Greg. “Early Yugoslav Ciné-amateurism: Cinephilia and the Institutionalization of Film Culture in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia During the Interwar Period.” In The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945, edited by Malte Hagener, 169–79. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. De Cuir Jr., Greg. “Partisan ‘Realism’: Representations of Wartime Past and StateBuilding Future in the Cinema of Socialist Yugoslavia.” Frames Cinema Journal, 4 (December 2013). http://framescinemajournal.com/article/1421/. Goulding, Daniel J. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Jacobs, Steven, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik, eds. The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars. New York and London: Routledge, 2018. MacDonald, Scott. Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Milne, Tom, ed. Godard on Godard. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. Nichols, Bill. “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry vol. 27, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 580–610. Popović, Duško, ed. Kinoklub Zagreb 1928./2003. / Zagreb Kino Club 1928/2003. Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez and Kino klub Zagreb, 2003. Shand, Ryan. “Theorizing Amateur Cinema.” The Moving Image vol. 8, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 36–60. Šijan, Slobodan. Tomislav Gotovac: Life as a Film Experiment. Translated by Greg de Cuir Jr. and Žarko Cvejić. Zagreb: Tomislav Gotovac Institute and Croatian Film Association / Multimedia Institute, 2018. Vučetić, Radina. Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018. Žižek, Slavoj. “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology, 1–33. New York: Verso, 1995.

About the Author Dr. Greg de Cuir Jr. is an independent curator, writer, and translator who lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. He is cofounder and managing editor of the journal NECSUS, as well as editor of the book series Eastern European Screen Cultures, both published by Amsterdam University Press. De Cuir Jr. received his DPhil from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at University of Arts Belgrade.

3.

From the Workshop of the Film Form to Martial Law: On the Intersecting and Bifurcating Paths of Paweł Kwiek’s and Józef Robakowski’s Cinematographic Work in the 1970s and the 1980s Łukasz Mojsak Abstract Józef Robakowski and Paweł Kwiek both played signif icant roles in expanding experimental film paradigms within the Workshop of the Film Form (WFF)—the most important Polish experimental film group of the 1970s. While neither opposed the Socialist regime, both resisted institutional, social, and political structures driving its film culture. The chapter highlights the subtle political engagement of Robakowski’s work alongside his attempted reforms at the Łódź Film School, activities that the martial law of 1981 dramatically halted. It also addresses Kwiek’s collaborations with the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and how, informed by architect Oskar Hansen, he challenged authorities to open up channels of genuine communication with society, highlighting a social purpose for experimental filmmaking in the process. Keywords: Józef Robakowski; Paweł Kwiek; Workshop of the Film Form (WFF); Łodz; Poland; intermedia

The Workshop of the Film Form (WFF) is widely considered to have been “the most radical phenomenon among the New Wave tendencies in Polish cinema at the turn of the 1970s.”1 This chapter offers a comparative study 1

Łukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde (Warsaw: CCA Ujazdowski Castle, 2009), 267.

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch03

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Figure 3.1. Photographic reproduction of a collage with portraits of the Workshop of the Film Form members, 1973. Józef Robakowski is second from the left in the bottom row; Paweł Kwiek is next to him, third from the left in the bottom row. Photograph from the archive of Józef Robakowski, courtesy Józef Robakowski.

of its oldest and youngest core members—Józef Robakowski and Paweł Kwiek, respectively—whose similarities and differences illuminate the social conditions, artistic sensibilities, and ideological stances that informed the activities of the WFF. The WFF emerged from the Film School in Łódź and functioned initially as an informal network of its students and employees. Its core included, beyond Robakowski and Kwiek, Wojciech Bruszewski, Ryszard Waśko, Antoni Mikołajczyk, and Andrzej Różycki, among others (Figure 3.1). Robakowski is widely recognized as one of the most prolific figures in Polish contemporary art who pursued an innovative and influential practice as both an artist and a theorist from the 1960s to the present day. He notably pioneered practices throughout the 1970s that critically examined film as a medium using techniques broadly associated with structural cinema. Kwiek developed similar interests during this decade, but his later work followed a different path after the WFF period and has been less widely recognized.

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This chapter considers the two artists’ parallel trajectories, as well as key differences, through four loosely chronological sections. The first section traces the beginnings of the WFF and the ways in which Robakowski and Kwiek pursued a critique of narrativity in film and contested the cinematic conventions of state-controlled mainstream Polish film culture. The second section looks at the way Robakowski and Kwiek developed modes of engagement between cinema and visual art to both introduce formal innovation into their work and give it a political dimension that spoke to conditions of life in Socialist Poland. The third section looks at the artists’ shared desire to problematize the concept of authorship in filmmaking, at the same time underlining the distinct approaches they took to address this aspect of cinematic production. The final section, the chapter’s coda, examines the artists’ use of video technology and the way their output of the 1980s moved away from the analytical filmmaking of the earlier decade, a development that coincided with the state’s tightening of its grip on artistic creation and public life in Poland.

The Workshop of the Film Form: New Beginnings For both Robakowski and Kwiek, participation in the activities of the Workshop of the Film Form was a formative artistic stage, but for Józef Robakowski (b. 1939), it was not the f irst. Before becoming a founding member of the WFF around the age of thirty, Robakowski had already graduated in art history from the Copernicus University in Toruń, where he first became active as a photographer and experimental filmmaker. There he also met other future WFF members and formed several artistic collectives interested in artistic independence and in working across existing disciplinary fields.2 In 1966, Robakowski began studies at the Faculty of Cinematography at the National Film School in Łódź while maintaining close relationships with the Toruń circle.3 Soon after arriving in Łódź, he became a leader of a student movement to reform the film school’s educational practices. The students were dissatisfied both by the lack of guidance from their professors and their disinterest in 2 Marika Kuźmicz and Łukasz Ronduda, eds., Workshop of the Film Form (Warsaw and Berlin: Sternberg Press and Arton Foundation, 2016), 148. 3 For more on the story of Robakowski’s admission to the school, see Kuźmicz and Ronduda, Workshop of the Film Form, 156.

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contemporaneous developments in international cinema. The situation was aggravated when, in 1968, Poland experienced a wave of anti-Semitism stoked by official propaganda, resulting in purges that cost many film school employees their jobs. This politically motivated interference prompted the students and employees to demand that the institution be free from political pressure from the party and the Polish Filmmakers Association. 4 Their focus on gaining more creative autonomy and independence led Robakowski and some fellow students to establish in the late 1960s a group that at first functioned informally, and in 1970 gained the school’s official recognition as an academic club called the Workshop of the Film Form. The group’s new status guaranteed access to technological resources for the professional development of film projects, notably 35 mm stock. While Robakowski graduated in 1970, he remained affiliated with the school as an assistant professor and a leader of the WFF, where Paweł Kwiek was another active core member. Born in 1951, Kwiek was the youngest core member of the group. He hailed from Warsaw, had experimented with amateur 8 mm f ilm and photography in high school, and entered the National Film School’s Faculty of Cinematography in 1969. Although a mere freshman, he soon became an active participant of the WFF and one of its founders in its incarnation as an official film school entity. He established a special relationship with Robakowski, who became his mentor and a formative influence on Kwiek’s choice to pursue “an approach that opposed the history of cinema, the official commercial way of thinking about film.”5 The WFF vehemently opposed mainstream cinema, primarily criticizing its dependence on literary themes and content to the detriment of the visual aspects of the medium.6 As the group’s name suggests, WFF wanted to foreground filmic form instead of perpetuating the omnipresent focus on narrativity. As Robakowski wrote in this period, through work at the WFF, he could “conduct virtually unlimited research and experiments that consist in examining the borders of perception of my films.” Through these “tests,” he added, he could “determine the extent to which habitual 4 See Maeve Connolly, “The Place of Our Dreams. Łódź Film School and the Workshop of the Film Form,” in Workshop of the Film Form, ed. Kuźmicz and Ronduda, 205 and “The Eighth Cinema. Józef Robakowski in Conversation with Łukasz Ronduda,” in Polish Cine Art or the Cinematographic Turn in Polish Contemporary Art, ed. Jakub Majmurek and Łukasz Ronduda (Warsaw: Political Critique Publishing House, Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 38. 5 Kuźmicz and Ronduda, Workshop of the Film Form, 165. 6 Józef Robakowski, “Paszkwil na kinematograf ię,” in Józef Robakowski, Teksty (1970–1978) (Lublin: Galeria Arcus 1978), 39. Translation by the author.

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literary perception can be undermined at present.”7 One such “test” was Robakowski’s cameraless 1971 f ilm f ittingly titled Test. The artist worked directly on the f ilm stock by perforating it to allow the light of the projector to come through at certain moments. Grounded in the materiality of f ilm, the rapid succession of flashes produced a powerful visual spectacle that also provoked the appearance of afterimages on the retina. Another film, Exercise (Ćwiczenie, 1972), featured letters of the alphabet to which the artist ascribed different sounds. Through repetition, the conventional phonetic counterparts of letters were replaced with the newly attributed sounds, thus complicating the familiar relationship between visual and aural layers. As Łukasz Ronduda remarks, the use of the alphabet marks a reduction of the narrative layer to the lowest linguistic level, through which the artist “examined the most basic components of film’s representational discourse.”8 Though this work evokes parallels to structuralist experiments on film occurring elsewhere, it is worth noting that Robakowski categorically resisted the widely shared notion of structural film as an exploration of the “language” of cinema. As he noted, the “film record is a different order of signs, which is not a language, and therefore analyzing film by means of linguistic categories is impossible,” adding that “in pure cinema there are no counterparts of phonemes, morphemes, lexemes that occur in language, there are also no rules of grammar.”9 Market (Rynek) from 1970 (Robakowski’s collaboration at the WFF with Tadeusz Junak and Ryszard Meissner) critiqued the perception of film as a transparent medium for fixing reality and revealed its manipulability.10 The time-lapse film depicts a bustling marketplace seen from a single point throughout one day. By condensing the entire time span to a mere five minutes, the filmmakers aimed to make their intervention readily apparent while still “giving many viewers the impression of a continuous record of the event.”11 Enhancing that paradox is the film’s soundtrack: an accelerated ticking of the clock. Following the group’s focus on experimenting with the formal aspects of f ilm, Paweł Kwiek also created a series of works that problematized mainstream cinema’s subordination to narrativity. The Telephone and I (Ja 7 Józef Robakowski, “Jeszcze raz o ‘czysty film,’” Notatnik Robotnika Sztuki, no. 4 (1972): n.p. 8 Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde, 279. 9 Józef Robakowski, “Bezjęzykowa koncepcja semiologiczna f ilmu,” in Józef Robakowski, Teksty (1970–1978) (Lublin: Galeria Arcus 1978), 18. 10 Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde, 279. 11 Robakowski, “Jeszcze raz o czysty film,” n.p.

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i telefon, 1972) is divided temporally into two halves. One features sound but no image, while the other has image but no sound. Both halves depict the same action: the activities involved in making the film, as well as the artist directing in real time the movements of a model being filmed. Devoid of plot, the film examines the relationship between the visual and aural layers, decoupling them to disrupt viewers’ habits of extrapolating a mental construct from cinematic content. Kwiek’s Numbers (Numerki) from 1973 similarly challenged the viewers’ expectations by featuring a half-hour found footage sequence made up entirely of the numbers that would usually be used for a countdown before the opening credits of a film. Finally, Kwiek carried out perhaps the most radical deconstruction of narrativity in film in his performance Commentary (Komentarz, 1972), which limited his “filmmaking” to the recounting of a clichéd film plot to a live audience in a movie theater, expecting them to visualize the events being described entirely in their minds.

Filmic Eperiments Between Visual Art and Politics The WFF experiments discussed above became seminal contributions to the development of both structural film and intermedia practices in Poland. Equally importantly, the WFF’s formal innovations within cinema were in large part made possible by the group’s ability to seek inspiration and support beyond the institutional structures and strictures of traditional cinema. Lechosław Olszewski argues that WFF’s subversive strategy manifested itself first of all in the decision to pursue filmmaking activity outside mainstream film culture, which remained under strict control of the authorities and often served explicitly ideological functions. Instead, although they operated within a state institution—the National Film School—and relied on its means, they created work for which they controlled each production stage.12 Robakowski demonstrated a clear awareness that the WFF was creating alternative means of support for its cinema when, in 1975, he sent a letter to the minister of culture, Józef Tejchma, in which he announced his resignation from “cooperation with Polish film.”13 Robakowski’s approach not only expressed his profound disappointment with Polish film culture, which the WFF challenged, but also moved away 12 Lechosław Olszewski, “Działalność Warsztatu Formy Filmowej jako przykład strategii sztuki wobec władzy w latach siedemdziesiątych,” Artium Quaestiones vol. 9, no. 124 (1998): 140. 13 Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s, 273.

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from classic cinema more generally, situating their activities between cinema and contemporary art. As Robakowski noted at the time, WFF’s “main idea” was not to prepare filmmakers for professional work. The main idea is to practice art, and not a profession. […] We already knew then that it was absolutely indispensable to integrate our work […] with the authentic artistic movement in the country and internationally.14

One of the channels of such integration was WFF’s collaboration with the Muzeum Sztuki (Museum of Art) in Łódź, facilitated by Janusz Zagrodzki, an art historian and curator at the museum who was also Robakowski’s friend from Toruń. In 1973, the WFF organized “Action Workshop” at the museum—an extensive program of performances and film-related actions. The WFF was also the curatorial force behind the fifth Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg, a contemporary art event organized between 1965 and 1973 whose final edition—Kinolaboratorium—focused on film and new media. Just like Robakowski’s polemical “resignation” from mainstream Polish cinema, the WFF’s choice to position their artistic practice and institutional collaborations at the crossroads of visual arts and film had political ramifications as it allowed the filmmakers to operate in the less controlled and censored contemporary art scene. The influence of visual art, moreover, was not limited to its institutional spaces. The work of interwar avant-garde artists, particularly Constructivists such as Katarzyna Kobro, was essential to Robakowski’s formal investigations. As Ryszard Kluszczyński argues, this influence can be seen in Robakowski’s works through “sparse expressive qualities, rational structure, [and] careful approach to materiality.”15 Other influences included the analytical tendencies of the strong conceptual school within the Polish neo-avant-garde and an inclination towards artistic transgression, which can be situated in a neo-Dadaist context.16 The political implications of these influences in Robakowski’s art are complex. The neo-avant-garde tendencies that most appealed to him were generally viewed by his contemporaries as politically indifferent in 14 Józef Robakowski, Warsztat Formy Filmowej, unpublished typescript, available online at: http://repozytorium.fundacjaarton.pl/index.php?action=view/object&objid=3180&colid=75& catid=18&lang=pl. Translation by the author. 15 See also Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, “Tożsamość sztuki, tożsamość artysty. O twórczości Józefa Robakowskiego,” in Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Obrazy na wolności. Studia z historii sztuk medialnych w Polsce (Warszawa: Instytut Kultury, 1998), 72. 16 Ibid.; Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde, 282.

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their hermetic conceptual operations and explorations of media.17 Indeed, Robakowski himself declared years later that his dream was to “create art that cannot be manipulated, politically worthless art,”18 noting in the same text that art “should be extremely ‘formalist,’ but, contrary to appearance, humane and autonomous, marked for INDETERMINACY, because […] in totalitarian countries such kind of art causes the strongest social and political protest.”19 While both Kwiek and Robakowski were deeply engaged with contemporary visual art, they also diverged in how they understood the visual arts component of their filmmaking practice. Like Robakowski, Kwiek considered himself an artist rather than solely a filmmaker.20 His collaboration with the circle of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, however, brought a distinct quality to his film work that was marked by a strong focus on intermediality, interdisciplinarity, process, and the collective aspect of creative work.21 His approach was informed by the teachings of Oskar Hansen, head of the Faculty of Sculpture at which the Warsaw circle of artists with whom Kwiek collaborated had emerged. Hansen’s theory of Open Form, which focused on indeterminacy, flexibility, and collective participation in creative work, was particularly influential. Kwiek’s collaboration with this milieu and the influence of Hansen’s principles are particularly evident in such films as Open Form (1971) and Activities (1972). The latter was created in a television studio where a professional TV crew recorded a range of real time unscripted activities and exchanges between the participants. Their focus consisted in staging a process of collective creation which exposed real-time communication: “Participants were to perform actions meant to be observations of others’ actions and a creative commentary on their output, while maintaining openness to creative commentary on their own work.” As such, the work was supposed to function as a “study in creative collaboration for artists working in divergent forms, a laboratory of production methods and a means of cooperation.”22 17 Such tendencies have been criticized by some within Poland—notably, the art historian Piotr Piotrowski, whose 1991 book Dekada offered harsh criticism of Polish neo-avant-garde practices as comfortably devoid of political meaning and therefore convenient for the totalitarian state that wanted to show off its modern profile and openness to new art tendencies without the risk of being challenged by the artists that represented them. Piotr Piotrowski, Dekada (Poznań: Obserwator, 1991). 18 Józef Robakowski, “Wyznanie pseudoawangardzisty,” KRESY, no. 19 (1994): 180. Translation by the author. 19 Ibid. Translation by the author. 20 Kuźmicz and Ronduda, Workshop of the Film Form, 165. 21 Łukasz Ronduda, “Paweł Kwiek’s Artistic Activity in the 1970s,” in Paweł Kwiek. Cinematographer’s Exercises, ed. Marika Kuźmicz (Warsaw: Arton Foundation, 2014) p. 17. 22 Ronduda, “Paweł Kwiek’s Artistic Activity,” 18.

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Even as Robakowski carved out space for formal indeterminacy in his films, he and the WFF also pursued off-screen subversive and disruptive interventions, defined by Olszewski as “focal points of instability”23 within Polish film culture, challenging its hierarchies and values. As Robakowski explained, they “thought that intervention was the only possibility of protesting against […] widespread complacency […] particularly at […] various contests, festivals, reviews, celebrations, etc.”24 In one of the interventions, WFF filmmakers acted as audience members and fiercely criticized their own films for shunning conventions in order to unleash a wave of similar banal criticism from the official guests of the festival in Łagów in 1971; in another, they shot at the winner of the 5th Art Film Review in Zakopane in 1972 during the awards ceremony with a popgun; in yet another instance, Robakowski disrupted a public meeting with the director of a popular television series (who was late to the event) by pretending to be the director and staging a parodic performance. Such activities allowed the WFF members to disrupt what they perceived as an excessive focus on awards and celebration, rather than quality and relevance, in the Polish film world. Workshop members protested against the “complacency,” “self-satisfaction,” and “mediocrity” of which Robakowski accused the Polish cinematographic milieu.25 A related dimension of WFF’s practice that the group viewed as politically subversive was seeking to create more active viewers for their films in contrast to traditional cinema, which assigns a passive role to the viewer. As Robakowski wrote, “[A] mindless audience is completely superfluous,” but “an individual always has a chance, through his interest, to become an observer or co-participant of discovering reality.”26 Employed in their films, the “techniques of fragmentation or separation of the continuity of space, time or narrative, as well as visual techniques of rendering specific images separate, as it were, absolutely unique”27 elided the tropes that make films accessible to mass audiences, demanding creativity on the part of viewers and turning them into active coparticipants of the work. For both Robakowski and Kwiek, their pursuits were, in part, a response to the state’s deployment of ideological persuasion and propaganda through film. Yet, importantly, their attitudes towards the Socialist state, at least in 23 Olszewski, “Działalność,” 152. 24 Robakowski, Warsztat Formy Filmowej, n.p. Translation by the author. 25 Robakowski, “Paszkwil na kinematografię,” 40. Translation by the author. 26 Józef Robakowski, “O materii sztuki,” Nurt, no. 11 (1976); quoted in Olszewski, “Działalność,” 140. 27 Olszewski, “Działalność,” 146.

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the early 1970s, differed significantly. Robakowski, who viewed the indeterminacy of the artistic message as a protest against the totalitarian state,28 spoke from a staunchly anti-Communist position, of which he wrote in 2005: To me, as someone whose entire family estate had been parcelled out under forcible compulsory nationalisation, the matter was as clear as day, given that, from childhood on, I had had the chance of observing the socialist destruction of my homeland and family. [From] birth, I was already an implacable anti-Communist.29

Kwiek, however, as a student of the film school in Łódź, maintained an intense creative relationship with artists from the “soc-art” movement working at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw through his elder brother Przemysław.30 This group did not oppose Communism but tried to engage with the “new opening” that occurred in 1970 after a change in Communist Party leadership. The soc-art movement was supposed to implement the Party’s wish to develop artistic solutions to social concerns, particularly with regard to nonhierarchical, democratic communication and self-organization. Enthusiastic at first, the artists later became disillusioned with the lack of genuine action on the part of the state authorities. Nonetheless, some of Kwiek’s important early work as a filmmaker illustrates a moment when he felt that experimental cinema could be put in the service of reforming the Socialist regime. Both Kwiek’s attitude toward the Socialist state and his distinctive approach to creative practice at the beginning of the 1970s are well reflected in his most elaborate and well-known film, 1, 2, 3… Cinematographer’s Exercise (1, 2, 3… Ćwiczenia operatorskie, 1972) (Figure 3.2).31 This visually rich film comprises different kinds of formal elements—found footage, animation, filmed live-action scenes—all integrated on the basis of unscripted spontaneous improvisation to explore the relationship between an individual and socialist ideology. 1, 2, 3… recapitulates several threads present in Kwiek’s work and theoretical reflections: an interest in unscripted real-time activities captured on film, criticism of narrativity in cinematography, and the desire to disrupt viewers’ automatic inclination to formulate ideological 28 Robakowski, “Wyznanie pseudoawangardzisty,” 180. Translation by the author. 29 Józef Robakowski, “Art Is a Power!,” accessed December 1, 2019, www.robakowski.eu. 30 Łukasz Ronduda, “Soc-art. Próba rewitalizacji strategii awangardowych w polskiej sztuce lat 70,” Piktogram (Summer 2005): 108–31. 31 The title of this film is notable as a reminder that Kwiek studied to be a cinematographer at the film school, as did Robakowski.

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Figure 3.2. Paweł Kwiek, 1,2,3… Cinematographer’s Exercise, 1972. 35 mm film still. From the Archive of Paweł Kwiek, courtesy of Arton Foundation, Warsaw.

interpretations. The political aspect of the film comes through most clearly in the fact that, unlike in his other films, the images that Kwiek chose to render ambiguous refer directly to the officially sanctioned ideology of Socialist Poland. They included, for example, images of Lenin, a May Day parade, and statements on socialism, allowing “the elements with political connotations to be interpreted in many possible ways [so that] it was not clear if the film affirmed or criticized these symbols,”32 thus making it impossible to harness the film for the needs of straightforward, unambiguous propaganda.

Interdisciplinary Experiments in Transforming Authorship Robakowski and Kwiek both addressed the question of individual artistic authorship throughout the first half of the 1970s. Their films challenged 32 Ronduda, “Soc-art. Próba rewitalizacji strategii awangardowych w polskiej sztuce lat 70,” 119.

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the concept by limiting the role of the filmmaker to that of an initiator and facilitator, thus introducing the collective as author. The so-called assembled films, usually comprised of one-minute-long component pieces created or directed by other individuals, formed an important strand in their practice. They were also used to examine the possibilities of expressing a variety of perspectives within a single work. Many such films created by Robakowski and Kwiek were “assembled” of pieces made by representatives of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art scenes in Poland, who introduced other artistic disciplines into filmmaking.33 The first such film, titled 22x, was created by Robakowski in 1971 together with students of the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Łódź, who received unexposed 35 mm film stock that they were free to use as they wanted, many of them choosing to make drawings directly on the celluloid strip. Another such project by Robakowski, the twenty-five-minute color film titled Living Gallery (1975), gathered a circle of prominent Polish artists, each contributing a piece ranging from thirty seconds to three minutes. This exhibition-within-a-film sought to “uncover […] the mentality of currently active artists”34 and to transform a gallery or museum show into an alternative film-based exhibition format that showed the mutual influence that visual artists and WFF filmmakers had on each other. Similar ideas underpinned Kwiek’s work on his films Kinolaboratorium and Osieki. The former relied on the “assembled film” method to create a collective statement by participants of the aforementioned Fifth Biennial of Spatial Forms in 1973. George Clark remarks that a noticeable feature of the film is the way various works and artistic strategies influence other works through repeated motifs, actions, and characters,35 highlighting the importance of mutual influences across various media. Osieki, likewise, came into being during the 12th Meeting of Artists, Scientists, and Theoreticians of Art in 1974 in Osieki and featured contributions from seventeen artists representing a variety of disciplines. Clark interprets the films described above as works that “propose new models of exchange,” which are “focused on work with film as part of critical pedagogical practice; an analysis of

33 Ryszard Kluszczyński, Workshop of the Film Form 1970—1977 (Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, 2000), 97. 34 Józef Robakowski, “Aspekty motywujące powstanie filmu Żywa Galeria 1974–75,” in Józef Robakowski, ed. T. Maier and M. Jachuła (Leipzig and New York: MINI and Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, Spector Books, 2011), 27. 35 George Clark, “Contact with the Polish Avant-Garde Guaranteed: Modes of Exchange in the Workshop of the Film Form,” in Workshop of the Film Form, 225.

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modes of production seeking new methods to make and learn about art.”36 The effort to outline such a pedagogical perspective once again suggests the influence of Oskar Hansen‘s radical pedagogy and the theory of Open Form, in particular in Kwiek’s work.37 This direction also appears in the artist’s appropriation of the documentary genre, which sought to diminish the influence of the director/ filmmaker on the representation of individuals or groups, giving them an active role in creating their own records, instead. Kwiek’s long-term collaboration with young people from the village of Niechcice is a foremost example, which culminated in the production of two films: Niechcice and Sunday 15 April 1973 – Art Day in Niechcice (Niedziela 15 IV 1973 – Dniem sztuki w Niechcicach, both 1973). In those productions, Kwiek consciously limited his role to that of the cameraperson, while the participating youth were free to decide on the content and form of short scenes that filled the film. What emerged was a particular kind of documentary about a community portrayed from a collectively determined perspective that emerged from within that community. A different approach to the question of authorship emerged from Robakowski’s cycle of f ilms and theoretical ref lections on so-called Biological-Mechanical Records, developed in the second half of the 1970s. The underlying premise of the cycle lies in sharing authorship not with other humans, but with the camera, by foregrounding the relationship between the device and its operator. Robakowski explained: For many years I have investigated the relation between my psychophysical organism and the devices which I use to create mechanical records (film camera, photographic camera, television camera, tape recorder). These investigations have resulted in my belief in the fundamental significance of technological inventions since they offer the possibility to transfer my psychophysical states, temperament, and consciousness onto tape.38

In Robakowski’s cycle, as Ryszard Kluszczyński notes, the camera becomes a perceptible extension of the human organism and begins to form a single configuration with its operator, detecting and recording their psychophysical states and consciousness in ways that the operator would not be able to 36 Ibid., 223–4. 37 Ibid., 227. 38 Józef Robakowski, “Zapisy mechaniczno-biologiczne,” text in exh. cat. (Warsaw: Mała Galeria PSP-ZPAF, 1978), n.p. Translation by the author.

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Figure 3.3. Zbigniew Warpechowski (photographer), documentation of the making of Józef Robakowski’s Exercise for Two Hands, 1976. Photograph from the archive of Józef Robakowski, courtesy Józef Robakowski.

register or capture on their own.39 This is most clearly exemplified by the films I’m Going (Idę, 1973) and Exercise for Two Hands (Ćwiczenie na dwie ręce, 1976) (Figure 3.3). In the former, Robakowski climbs the stairs of a tower holding a camera and counting the steps aloud. Most of the artist’s body remains outside the frame as his voice betrays a growing fatigue, which influences both the aural and the visual layer of the work. Exercise… is a two-channel projection of film images created as a result of the artist moving his hands while holding a camera in each. In this case, Robakowski is not only absent from the frame but also unable to look in the viewfinder, allowing the cameras to act as semi-independent extensions of his body. Robakowski’s main pursuit in Biological-Mechanical Records was not to diminish or dissolve the presence of the filmmaker within collective 39 Kluszczyński, Workshop of the Film Form 1970–1977, 96.

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authorship, but to investigate the ways in which their particular psychophysical constitution shapes the hybrid formed by the human being and the camera. Robakowski wrote about his motivations: “Owing to their specificity and potential, [mechanical recording devices] offer the possibility of transcending my imagined visions of phenomena concealed in complex ‘reality’; they become a tool to penetrate the world’s secrets, another method of discovering them.”40 What is essential from the point of view of the filmic image is the shift in focus from the vision (in the sense of desired result) of the filmmaker to the vision (in the sense of sight) of the camera that is not determined by what the filmmaker sees, but by other aspects of his physical or interpersonal behavior.

Video, Television, and Beyond Given the WFF’s overarching concern with the relationship between visual perception, cognition, and moving-image technologies, the group understandably became interested by the early 1970s in video technology and its uses in television. In 1973, the members of the WFF became the first artists in Poland to use video in their work. But unlike their Western counterparts, who could access portable video equipment fairly easily, the WFF members had to overcome the extreme inaccessibility and high costs of using video equipment that was available to them only through the National Film School’s Faculty of Television Production. This logistical limitation foregrounded for the WFF artists the close connection between television and video, providing context for the group’s particular uses of video to address television broadcasting as an object of critical analysis. In 1974, Paweł Kwiek used a television studio to create a string of important video projects. The most well known was the live transmission staged by the artist within his work Video A. Studio Situation (Video A. Sytuacja studia), carried out in a TV studio during a live broadcast devoted to the activities of the WFF. Filmed by several cameras, Kwiek controlled the way he was portrayed by offering instructions in real time to the camera operators. In highlighting how technological mediation of an event manipulates the TV image of that event before it reaches the viewers, he challenged the seeming objectivity and transparency of television broadcasting. This gesture appears to have obvious political implications in a country where all TV broadcasts were controlled by the state, but what interested Kwiek beyond this reality 40 Robakowski, “Zapisy mechaniczno-biologiczne,” n.p.

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was the way television functioned as a collectively operated technology for mediating cognition and creating fast feedback loops. 41 This attitude betrayed a hopefulness about the kinds of communication that video could promote. As Kwiek noted, television made it “possible to create model situations, in which the effect of an action was immediate, so that it could be observed and turn the fact of observation into yet another object of cognition on which one operates.”42 Those investigations were underpinned by Kwiek’s interests in cybernetics and his fascination with the structure and nature of the television studio as a complex system of interdependent elements. In a cybernetic spirit, Kwiek perceived that system in analogy to the human brain, 43 thus revealing his own distinct take on the relationship between man and machine—more cerebral than the physical and physiological connections established by Robakowski in his Biological-Mechanical Records. Two years later, Kwiek moved closer to Robakowski’s biological-mechanical approach by using the TV set in one of his most iconic works—Video and Breath (Video i oddech) from 1976 (Figure 3.4). In this video performance, the artist, seated in a meditation pose, connected his chest to a TV set with a string and used his breath to regulate the brightness of the monitor that screened the image of both the artist and the TV set via a closed circuit in real time. Kwiek’s inhales and exhales made the image disappear and reappear on the screen, visualizing the interconnected human and machine. Robakowski’s contributions to the development of video art in Poland engaged some of the questions that he investigated earlier with regard to film, such as the analysis of the medium itself, its relations to the maker and the viewers, and the blurred borders between recording and producing the image of reality. 44 One such work—TV Face (Twarz telewizyjna) from 1976—is based on a closed-circuit installation whose elements include the artist himself, a camera operator, and a monitor that shows in real time the feed from the camera, in other words, images of Robakowski shot by the camera operator according to instructions provided by the artist. The work recalls the mechanism at play in Kwiek’s Video A, though lacking a studio 41 Proposed by Kluszczyński (Workshop of the Film Form 1970–1977, 100), an understanding of this piece in the political context of manipulation and censorship is deemed an to be an overinterpretation by the artist himself in an interview with Connolly (“The Place of Our Dreams,” 207.) 42 Paweł Kwiek, Foto – media a struktura rzeczywistości, leaflet of the Foto – Medium – Art gallery, Wrocław, 1978 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.

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Figure 3.4. Paweł Kwiek, Video and Breath. Information Channel, 1978. Photographic performance documentation. Photograph from the Archive of Paweł Kwiek, courtesy of Arton Foundation, Warsaw.

setup and broadcast possibilities, it became much more focused on the relationship between the self and one’s own image mediated by technology. In the same year that TV Face was made, Robakowski also explored the potential for manipulation and propaganda inherent in television, drawing a sharp opposition between television and the nascent video movement. In the text Video Art – A Chance to Approach Reality from 1976, the artist highlighted the omnipresence of television and its potential to manipulate viewers. 45 Robakowski saw this as something to be unmasked by video art. From the mid-1970s until the late 1980s, he largely focused his creative energies on building a critical distance away from television.46 In the 1980s, he created a series of works that expressed a critique of the manipulative function of television under state socialism by shifting focus from the television system to the TV set as an interface of media-based propaganda. Shot during the oppressive period of martial law imposed by the Communist authorities, the films In Memory of L. Brezhnev (Pamięci Breżniewa, 1982) 45 Józef Robakowski, “Video Art – szansa podejścia rzeczywistości,” in Video Art, exh. cat. (Lublin: Labirynt Gallery, 1976), 5. Translation by the author. 46 Kluszczyński, Workshop of the Film Form 1970–1977, 99.

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and Art Is Power! (Sztuka to potęga, 1985) consisted of images—captured directly from the TV screen—of the funeral ceremony of Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow and a military parade on the Red Square, respectively. The broadcasts, received by millions of viewers on their home TV sets, served as raw material for the artist to conduct a semiotic analysis of the images of rituals of totalitarian power.

Coda The ultimate bifurcation of Robakowski and Kwiek’s creative paths took place in the 1980s against the background of tightening political repression, which culminated with the Communist authorities’ imposition of martial law in 1981. The Workshop of the Film Form was officially dissolved as an entity within the National Film School in 1975. The last joint presentations of their work conducted by former WFF members took place at the end of the 1970s. In 1980, Kwiek joined the National Film School branch of the Solidarity Trade Union. Both he and Robakowski played active roles in another strike organized by the Committee for the Renewal of the Film School (Ruch Odbudowy Uczelni), seeking again to reform the school’s approach to film education. The imposition of martial law put an end to all the reforms and saw Kwiek and Robakowski expelled from their positions at the film school. Afterward, both men, like other former WFF participants, focused on their own individual practices. Neither of them wanted to collaborate with the authorities and situate their work in official institutional circuits. Kwiek turned to spirituality and became affiliated with the church exhibitions movement, which allowed him to remain active as an artist and show his work in churches when the regime tightened its grip on artistic life at the beginning of the 1980s. He also practically ceased to produce film or video work. Robakowski chose a different path and became active in the independent underground cultural circuit. In Łódź, during the 1980s, this scene concentrated around the unofficially operating art venue called the Attic (Strych), which attracted a variety of younger artists and generated the so-called Pitch-in Culture (Kultura Zrzuty). The venue and its circle represented the most radical wing of the artistic scene of the era, as contrasted with the state-sanctioned official scene and the church-affiliated movement. It was at the Attic, under the severely restricted conditions of amateur film production, that Robakowski hosted Silent Film, the 1983 film screening that was emblematic of the underground film practice possible under martial law.

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In a text that accompanied the event, Robakowski described the conditions that unofficial artists faced: the scarcity of film and photographic materials, which were withdrawn by the authorities from official circulation, and the ban on taking photographs in public spaces, which could lead to punishment by fines or imprisonment. This political situation determined the formal shape of the f ilms, which were produced under makeshift conditions, made up of silent, black-and-white, unedited footage mostly shot clandestinely from car windows or the windows of artists’ homes to capture images of public space. “The films,” Robakowski wrote, “addressed the simplest problems virtually derived from the street amidst the grim everyday realm […] streets, mini scenes, people’s appearance, propaganda posters, signs, slogans, banners, queues for everyday consumer products.”47 Such films retrospectively provide an important documentary record of life under the oppression of the Communist state. 48 The clandestine qualities of these quasi documentaries connect with the view of filmmaking as a deeply private, apolitical, and inward-turned activity that Robakowski adopted in the 1980s, as conveyed in the body of work labeled Personal Cinema (Kino własne) and a 1981 manifesto of the same title. “Personal cinema,” Robakowski wrote, “is a direct projection of the thoughts of the filmmaker. Released from any fashions and aesthetic rules, as well as fixed linguistic codes, it situates itself near the filmmaker’s life […] Let us, therefore, film everything, and it will turn out that we are always filming ourselves.”49 The most notable film in this group is From My Window (Z mojego okna), created systematically between 1978 and 1999 (Figure 3.5). As the title suggests, the work is comprised of footage shot from the window of the artist’s apartment on the ninth floor, which overlooks one of the central streets of Łódź. As he regularly recorded short fragments over a long period of time, Robakowski was able to capture and edit together a broad panorama of events, from everyday life during the Communist era and a state-organized May Day parade to the changes that occurred before the artist’s eyes in the period of transformation toward democracy and a capitalist economy since 1989. The artist’s autobiographical perspective in Personal Cinema marked a significant shift in Robakowski’s practice away from the deconstructions and problematization of subjective authorship 47 Józef Robakowski, Nieme Kino – 1983 (Łódź: Strych, 1983), n.p. 48 Robakowski’s own works presented at Silent Cinema included such f ilms as Notebook (Notatnik, 1980–1, with Małgorzata Potocka): a collage of randomly combined images of a variety of events in the early 1980s shot in the streets of Łódź or from a television screen. 49 Józef Robakowski, “Kino własne,” in Dekada 1980–1990. Sztuka poszukiwania decyzji (Koszalin: Moje Archiwum, 1990), 4.

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Figure 3.5. Józef Robakowski, photograph from a series of sketches for the film From My Window, 1978-1999. Photograph from the archive of Józef Robakowski, courtesy Józef Robakowski.

that he pursued in his earlier work and towards a focus on his own private subjectivity in the face of the oppressive political situation in the 1980s.

Conclusion The career paths of Józef Robakowski and Przemysław Kwiek are closely entwined with the history of the Workshop of the Film Form (WFF), marked by a series of cross-disciplinary and interpersonal influences and exchanges and informed by strategies of political resistance. Although they were not peers, and Kwiek hailed Robakowski as his artistic role model, the two artists formed part of the generation that pursued radical filmmaking experimentation, critiquing narrativity in film, and contesting cinematographic conventions. Another interest shared by both artist concerned

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problematizing the category of authorship. Both Kwiek and Robakowski created important works that implemented that pursuit, particularly with regard to portraying artistic communities. In Kwiek’s case, however, this strand of investigations also went beyond such circles and was informed by his commitment to sociological cinema pursued within his own distinct idiom of documentary filmmaking. Documentary film practice was also present in Robakowski’s work. Yet, insofar as Kwiek concentrated primarily on effacing the impact of the filmmaker, Robakowski in the later period of his activity established a connection between a documentary record of external reality and a focus on his own subjectivity. Pursued by both artists, investigations into the question of authorship led them to an interest in the creativity of technological devices and the relationship between human and machine. In this respect, the main focus of Robakowski’s work consisted in tracing and analyzing the energetic and physiological transmissions and influences between the camera and the camera operator. In turn, Kwiek tended to approach that question from the perspective of complex systems, informed by cybernetic theory. Working at the intersection of film and contemporary art, Robakowski and Kwiek reshaped the modes of cinema’s engagement with visual arts. While the former primarily pursued the constructivist and analytical paradigms, the latter additionally derived significant inspiration from the open-ended approach of Oskar Hansen‘s teaching and theory. Kwiek is also recognized as the WFF artist who, to the greatest extent, disseminated film practice in other arts. Differences in the two artists’ modes of engagement can also be observed in the context of politics and attitude toward Poland’s Socialist regime. While Robakowski maintained a staunchly anti-Communist stance, Kwiek was initially enthusiastic about the egalitarian ideas of socialism. He referenced political symbols and imagery in his work, albeit in an ambiguous and open-ended manner that disabled their propagandistic potential. Robakowski shunned such imagery and discerned the potential of political subversion in other aspects of his seemingly politically indifferent work. It was only much later that he began to address the visual language of totalitarian propaganda. These diverging attitudes intensified in their filmic work after WFF closed down and the political reality of Poland became increasingly bleak during the next decade, with Robakowski choosing a personal, introspective approach, and Kwiek exploring a spiritual context for filmmaking. As a whole, studying the overlaps, differences, shifts, and oppositions within their oeuvres during the 1970s and 1980s helps us understand the complex in-between spaces within which filmic experimentation took place in Socialist Poland.

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Bibliography Clark, George. “Contact with the Polish Avant-Garde Guaranteed: Modes of Exchange in the Workshop of the Film Form.” In Workshop of the Film Form, edited by Marika Kuźmicz and Łukasz Ronduda, 223–32. Warsaw and Berlin: Sternberg Press and Arton Foundation, 2016. Connolly, Maeve. “The Place of Our Dreams. Łódź Film School and the Workshop of the Film Form.” In Workshop of the Film Form, edited by Marika Kuźmicz and Łukasz Ronduda, 201–4. Warsaw and Berlin: Sternberg Press and Arton Foundation, 2016. Kluszczyński, Ryszard W. “Tożsamość sztuki, tożsamość artysty. O twórczości Józefa Robakowskiego.” In Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Obrazy na wolności. Studia z historii sztuk medialnych w Polsce, 69–84. Warsaw: Instytut Kultury, 1998. Kluszczyński, Ryszard. Workshop of the Film Form 1970—1977. Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, 2000. Kuźmicz, Marika, ed. Cinematographer’s Exercises. Warsaw: Arton Foundation, 2014. Kuźmicz, Marika and Łukasz Ronduda, eds. Workshop of the Film Form. Warsaw and Berlin: Sternberg Press and Arton Foundation, 2016. Kwiek, Paweł. “Foto – media a struktura rzeczywistości,” leaflet. Wrocław: Foto – Medium – Art Gallery, 1978. Olszewski, Lechosław. “Działalność Warsztatu Formy Filmowej jako przykład strategii sztuki wobec władzy w latach siedemdziesiątych.” Artium Quaestiones vol. 9, no. 124 (1998): 111-55. Robakowski, Józef. “Aspekty motywujące powstanie filmu Żywa Galeria 1974–75.” In Józef Robakowski, edited by Tobi Maier and Michał Jachuła. Leipzig and New York: MINI and Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, Spector Books, 2011. Robakowski, Józef. “Art Is a Power!” http://robakowski.eu/tx5_ang.html. Robakowski, Józef. “Bezjęzykowa koncepcja semiologiczna filmu.” In Józef Robakowski, Teksty (1970–1978), 17-18. Lublin: Galeria Arcus, 1978. Robakowski, Józef. “Jeszcze raz o ‘czysty film.’” Notatnik Robotnika Sztuki, no. 4 (1972): n.p. Robakowski, Józef. “Kino własne.” In Dekada 1980–1990. Sztuka poszukiwania decyzji. Koszalin: Moje Archiwum, 1990. Robakowski, Józef. Nieme Kino. Łódź: Strych, 1983. Robakowski, Józef. “O materii sztuki.” Nurt, no. 11 (1976): 19-21. Robakowski, Józef. “Paszkwil na kinematografię.” In Józef Robakowski, Teksty (1970–1978), 39-40. Lublin: Galeria Arcus, 1978. Robakowski, Józef. “Video Art – szansa podejścia rzeczywistości.” In Video Art, exh. cat. Lublin: Labirynt Gallery, 1976. Robakowski Józef. “Wyznanie pseudoawangardzisty.” KRESY, no. 19 (1994): 180-181.

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Robakowski, Józef. “Warsztat Formy Filmowej,” unpublished typescript. http:// repozytorium.fundacjaarton.pl/index.php?action=view/object&objid=3180& colid=75&catid=18&lang=pl. Robakowski, Józef. “Zapisy mechaniczno-biologiczne,” text in exh. cat. Warsaw: Mała Galeria PSP-ZPAF, 1978. Ronduda, Łukasz. “Paweł Kwiek’s Artistic Activity in the 1970s.” In Paweł Kwiek: Photography, Film, Video, edited by Marika Kuźmicz, 17–26. Warsaw: Arton Foundation, 2013. Ronduda, Łukasz. Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde. Warsaw: CCA Ujazdowski Castle, 2009. Ronduda, Łukasz. “Soc-art. Próba rewitalizacji strategii awangardowych w polskiej sztuce lat 70.” Piktogram (Summer 2005): 108-31. Ronduda, Łukasz. “The Eighth Cinema. Józef Robakowski in Conversation with Łukasz Ronduda.” In Polish Cine Art or the Cinematographic Turn in Polish Contemporary Art, edited by Jakub Majmurek and Łukasz Ronduda, 32–50. Warsaw: Political Critique Publishing House and Museum of Modern Art, 2015.

About the Author Łukasz Mojsak is an independent curator of art and f ilm as well as a writer and translator. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. Between 2011 and 2016, he worked at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. He currently collaborates with the Arton Foundation in Warsaw and was the cocurator of the Polish Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Part II Production, Support, and Distribution

4. Amateur Cinema in Bulgaria Vladimir Iliev with Katerina Lambrinova Translated from the Bulgarian by Maria Vassileva

Abstract This chapter traces Bulgarian amateur cinema’s development across four decades and how it engendered experimentation throughout this period. In the late 1950s, amateur output followed the dictates of socialist realism. Yet from the late 1960s onward, increasing openness, notably through international amateur f ilm festivals, introduced experimentation in this circuit, yielding several noteworthy films in the 1970s and 1980s. Beyond conducting formal experiments, amateur f ilms increasingly addressed societal crises in Socialist Bulgaria, from anti-war engagement to environmental issues, toeing the line between acceptable and politically subversive subject matter. The chapter, in addition to tracing formal and thematic developments, sketches how Bulgarian institutions of amateur film production were imbricated with a wide range of official infrastructures, while at times also functioning independently from them. Keywords: Bulgaria; amateur cinema; Rousse; amateur film clubs; second public sphere

Editors’ introduction: The following essay is a unique contribution in this book. Unlike all the other pieces, which are written by scholars who were not witnesses of the events they discuss, this essay relates a first-person account written by a participant of the Bulgarian amateur film scene. Vladimir Iliev first became an active member of that scene in the city of Rousse in 1964 and was the president of the Bulgarian National Federation of Alternative Cinema from 1993 until his death in 2020. He published a book in Bulgarian on this topic: Alternative Cinema in Rousse—Chronicles, Documents, Photos 1924–2013 (Rousse: Avangard Print, 2014). We are grateful to Mr. Iliev for

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch04

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Figure 4.1. Members of the Sofia Student Cinema Club: Miroslav Kovachevski, Svetoslav Lazarov, Christo Pelov, Zhivko Arabov, Stephan Gardev, and Vladimir Iliev. Courtesy Vladimir Iliev.

excerpting his book, which we have included here in English translation, with inserted section titles and minimal editing for flow and clarity. We are deeply saddened that Mr. Iliev passed away in 2020 before this book came out in print. We hope his contribution here will draw future attention to his many decades of work as both a filmmaker and film historian (Figure 4.1). The reader will note that Mr. Iliev did not use traditional scholarly conventions, such as citations for sources, and we did not ask him to supply addtional information beyond the contents of his book, which we view as a valuable primary source. Given the dearth of scholarly literature on the topics of Bulgarian amateur and experimental cinema, we hope that knowledge of Mr. Iliev’s work will spur increased interest by scholars who will be able to situate these topics in larger cultural histories of Bulgaria, amateur (film) culture, and the former Eastern Bloc in the future. We originally approached the film writer Katerina Lambrinova to write an essay on the topic of Bulgarian experimental cinema, and it was through her research that we became aware of Mr. Iliev’s work. While Ms. Lambrinova was ultimately unable to complete her essay for the book, the draft of her contribution contained analysis, information, and citations that we as editors felt would enrich and helpfully contextualize Mr. Iliev’s account. In what follows, we have excerpted sections from Ms. Lambrinova essay and inserted them into Mr. Iliev’s text. They appear below as italicized sections. It should be noted that both Iliev and Lambrinova, following him, had sections in their essays on animated films made by amateurs. Both authors

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argued that some of the most politically critical films made by amateaurs were animations. To avoid official sanction, Lambrinova writes, “amateur filmmakers learned to use cleverly allegorical language, which helped them to include in their narratives some ironic comments on socialist society. This tendency developed especially in animation.” We have taken out these sections of both texts because the study of animated films falls outside the scope of this book, but we hope this will be a fruitful area of research for future scholars.

General Historical Context1 The Society of Bulgarian Amateur Filmmakers (Druzhestvo na kinolyubitelite v Balgariya) was founded in Sofia on June 30, 1924. The idea for it came from journalist Pantelei Karasimeonov, who was probably inspired by French filmmaker and theorist Louis Delluc, author of the acclaimed book Photogenie (1920). This was around the time when some artists and intellectuals began to see the potential of cinema to become an art form, rather than just a technical invention or a means of entertainment. In Bulgarian, such a person became known as a kinolyubitel, a term that literally means “film lover,” and can denote either a cineast or an amateur filmmaker. The society lasted until the beginning of the Second World War, and it took on an active cultural and educational role. Local chapters were opened in other cities—Yambol, Plovdiv, Rousse, Pleven, Varna, Stara Zagora, Shumen, etc. The member body included local members of the intelligentsia, as well as high school students. These societies eventually grew their membership to between twenty and fifty people and started calling themselves film clubs. They had select films of special artistic merit mailed to them, and they regularly hosted screenings and discussions. The owners of local movie theaters were part of this endeavor and offered discounted tickets to club members. Members of both significant and moderate means bought film cameras and began to shoot newsreel or short fiction miniatures. There are 8, 9.5, and 16 mm reels preserved from that period at the amateur film club in the city of Shumen, as well as in private hands. During the war and in the years following, the activity of these societies was put on hold. There were, of course, certain exceptions: in Shumen, amateur filmmakers used an 8 mm camera to film the May 1st (or Labor day) celebrations in 1945. The Bulgarian economy was in crisis, and political changes were 1

For more, see Alexander Yanakiev, Cinema.bg (Sofia: Titra, 2003).

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underway. The influence of the U.S.S.R. was growing, resulting in the complete adoption of Stalinist norms of public life. After 1947, manufacturing plants were nationalized. In agriculture, private property was replaced by cooperatives. Chronicles of that period call this “a transition toward building socialism.” Announcements about film lecture series at Sofia University, as well as in Plovdiv, Pleven, and Shumen, can be found in the regional newspapers of those cities from 1947 to 1949. These series lasted a week or up to several months. Scholars or specialists would give an introductory lecture, followed first by a screening and then a discussion of the movie with questions from the audience. At the time, it was considered good practice to treat statements by Communist leaders as dogma. For example, Lenin famously declared that “Of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.” Thus cinema became a privileged art form and was used as an important tool of propaganda. The state invested in modernized movie theaters, and the film industry grew, as well.2 Like elsewhere in socialist Eastern Europe, state authorities tightly controlled the mainstream narrative film industry of postwar Bulgaria, with censors wary of both subjects that challenged official culture and the “formalist” styles frequently used to express these subjects. Some films did defy ideological control. Informed by Western auteur cinema, they deviated from the official socialist realist style in form, subject matter, or both. This can be said, for instance, of On the Small Island (Na malkiya ostrov, Rangel Valchanov, 1959), We Were Young (A byahme mladi, Binka Zhelyazkova, 1961), or A Nap (Dryamka, Georgy Stoyanov, 1965). Maybe the best example of such a movie is Rangel Valchanov’s The Unknown Soldier’s Patent Leather Shoes (Lachenite obuvki na neznayniya voin, 1979). The appearance of such movies was, however, rare and only possible in the short periods of relative internal liberalization of the regime.

Postwar Experimental Cinema Comes Into Its Own: 1957–733 In 1957, the young actor Ivo Kisimov, who was known for his spirited and emotional personality, was working in the Dimitrovgrad theater. 4 He was 2 For more, see Ivailo Znepolski, Bulgarskiat kommunizem. Sotsiokulturni cherti i vlastova traektoriya (Sofia: Ciela, 2012). 3 For general context on off icial Bulgarian cinema, see Ingeborg Bratoeva-Darakchieva, Bolgarsko igralno kino. Ot “Kalin Orelet” do “Misiya London.” (Sofia: Institute of Art Studies, 2013). 4 Dimitrovgrad was built in 1947 and named after the Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov. It was the largest industrial center in Bulgaria at the time, and it was called the City of Youth because it was built by young volunteer workers.

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eager to make a good impression and to build a successful career. He read in the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta that actors in Yaroslavl had formed a club called Surogat Film and had made an amateur film. This news item sparked Kisimov’s imagination and inspired him to do something similar in Bulgaria. His idea was well received, and a film club was founded in Dimitrovgrad, which is now considered the first amateur filmmakers association in the country during the socialist period. The professional Union of Bulgarian Filmmakers (Sayuz na bulgarskite filmovi deitsi, UBF) got involved, and together they produced the club’s first two documentary films, which are now regarded as valuable archival material. They used 35 mm black-and-white film stock. Almost immediately after the establishment of the club, the first film production started—it was a documentary about the newly built city of Dimitrovgrad called The City of Youth (Gradut na mladostta). The movie was filmed by the collective of the club under the tutorship of Kisimov. This first amateur movie in the new political era followed the official socialist realist aesthetics, and in a way, it even went further than that—it made the construction of the new socialist living and the new social order poetic. The movie has become more valuable with time, because it faithfully conveys the authentic city atmosphere of the era full of ideological optimism. Documentary cinema allowed for more freedom, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Filmmakers working with this form were able to make socially critical works, because their films were shown primarily at closed professional screenings in specialized national festivals. What remains underexplored by scholars is the even more separate world of amateur cinema, whose films were usually shown only inside specialized clubs or festivals, but which, as a result, could sometimes benefit from even greater thematic and formal freedom. From 1957 to 1972, the Union of Bulgarian Filmmakers (UBF) provided instruction and played an important organizational role for amateur filmmakers in Bulgaria. In the early years of that period, there were thirty to forty film clubs; by the end of the period, their number had grown to over three hundred. Amateur film clubs existed in almost every major city; the most important and creative were in Rousse, Plovdiv, Shumen, Sofia, and Dimitrovgrad. Socialist authorities tended to stimulate collective amateur activities, whether in sports or arts, as beneficial to socialist society. Some of the most prominent Bulgarian filmmakers of the time, such as Zahary Jandov and Gencho Genchev, were involved in the amateur film scene as tutors (with the task to control the creative process, as representatives of state authority).

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The less publicly visible culture of amateur film benefited from official film culture in several ways. Among other things, the UBF offered paths for professionalization through the amateur film clubs. At the time, it was quite common for a filmmaker to start out as an amateur, and, if his work showed potential, to become a professional. The best example of that is the club in Pleven. A number of its members, including the cameramen Dimiter Bebenov and Rumen Georgiev, the directors Ivan Terziev and Hari Stoychev, and the actor Nikola Chiprianov, went on to have professional careers in Bulgarian cinema. For filmmakers Stanimir Trifonov and Stefan Gardev, among others, amateur cinema became a stepping-stone to admission to film academies (The Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theater and Film Arts in Sofia and the Higher State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow) and into the professional film industry.5 After 1964–5, Bulgaria experienced considerable economic growth. Standards of living improved, which led to an increase in people’s interest in culture. The first amateur film festivals started to emerge. This made it possible for many foreigners to visit the country and for Bulgarian amateur filmmakers to travel abroad. In 1968, Bulgaria hosted the 9th World Youth and Students Festival that gathered some twenty thousand participants from 138 countries. During the festival, a World Festival of Amateur Cinema took place. Apart from the screenings, which were held in the House of Technology, there were also informal meetings and lectures. Bulgaria showed a huge national selection of amateur films at the festival, but more importantly, local amateur filmmakers got the chance to see what fellow amateurs in other countries were doing at the time and compare it to their own output, as well as exchange valuable experience. 5 Hari Stoychev was a colorful personality—an adventurer and bohemian, a screenwriter, cameraperson, and director. He studied nuclear physics, but then enrolled at the VGIK in Moscow, where he befriended the director Mikhail Rom, who later collaborated with him on the famous 1965 f ilm Ordinary Fascism (Obiknovenniy fashizm). The f ilm was released in the United States with the title Triumph over Violence and in the United Kingdom with the title Echo of the Jackboot. Stoychev also made a movie about the fate of German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, which earned him a Silver Bear at the Berlinale festival. He died young in a car accident. Ivan Terziev in 1961 made the 8 mm f ilm The Big Ones and the Small Ones (Golemite i malkite), an anti-war parable centered around a children’s game. In Terziev’s hands, the naive plot was deftly directed and compelling. The movie received a prize in Helsinki, and its author was accepted to VGIK. Years later, he made two of the most contentious Bulgarian f ilms that differed in plot and style from the countless state-approved stories shown in popular movies. These f ilms were Men without Work (Mazhe bez rabota, 1973) and The Village (Seltseto, 1980). They stood out with their realistic style and the original rhythms of their stories.

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This period marks the first encounters of Bulgarian amateur filmmakers with the experimental films made by their colleagues in Central and Western Europe. These were mostly short films: a time-lapse camera capturing an entire day on a busy street, animated colorful beads moving around the screen in random patterns, or the dynamic editing of shots with no obvious logical or visual connection.6 Officials and specialists monitoring the festivals were not thrilled about these movies and proclaimed them nonsense that sought to distract from proper ideological pursuits. These movies were primarily from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain, etc. Despite the disapproval with which such experiments were met, there were people eager to try them. On one such occasion, film enthusiasts in Stara Zagora spent an entire day in a public swimming pool. They did not have a time-lapse mechanism for their camera, so they took each shot manually. This was a curious experiment that remained unnoticed by higher-ups.7 Several student clubs existed during that period. Their work rarely reached a wider audience, but they made short films that they screened for a close circle of friends and other viewers. Everyone tried to imitate Federico Fellini—he was an idol for the younger generation, particularly for his 1963 film 8 1/2, which told simple stories in a complex and peculiar manner. This resulted in interesting projects that combined realistic scenes with fantastical visions, photographs, or simple animations. The films were difficult to follow, which was considered a compliment to their makers.8 Some of the students in the technical university student film club in Sofia were influenced by the French New Wave and they tried to make some shorts that resemble its stylistics and atmosphere. One of their new-wave style experiments was a remake of the emblematic last scene of Godard’s film Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960). It was symbolically shot on one of the most beautiful central streets in Sofia, Patriarch Evtimiy Boulevard, right in front of the Bulgarian National Film Archive Cinema, where many young cineastes used to watch pirated black-and-white copies of Western European and American movies and attend lectures from the prominent film critic Tony Andreykov. 6 Editors’ note: this description sounds like Josef Robakowski’s 1970 film Market (Rynek), but in our correspondence with Mr. Iliev, he has said that he does not know Robakowski’s films. 7 Editors’ note—Mr. Iliev could not recall the name of this film. 8 Editors’ note: Mr. Iliev recalls that, when he was a student in Sofia active in the amateur student film club there between 1967 and 1972, the films he liked included The Heart Line (Linia na sartseto), directed by Peter Gornev; Monologue (Monolog), directed by Evegeni Todorov; To Be Small (Da budesh nisak), directed by Nikola Rusev; and Iliev’s own 1971 film The Ballad of an Artist (Khudozhnicheska balada), among others.

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There were even more interesting experiments made by the amateur filmmakers from the technical university during these years—for example, a short movie in which a boxer is shaving his head in front of a broken piece of mirror, which, in its atmosphere and subject matter, recalls Taxi Driver (1976), though it was actually made several years before Scorsese’s classic. In fact, in the 70s and 80s, many of the films that were somewhat provocative in shape and form were influenced by Western (European and American) cinema and popular culture. This sometimes led to disputes and arguments between film club participants. After one such serious argument between Vladimir Iliev and Georgy Kiryakov (the official director of the club in Rousse), Iliev decided to take a risk by shooting a Western movie spoof called The Valley of Pigs (1977). It had a grotesque plot—a sheriff dressed up as a veterinarian tries to denounce illegal pig-breeding farms. The film was supposed to participate at the annual Golden Wheat farmer festival. After its first closed screening in the club, right before the festival opening, Iliev’s fellow club members, fearing a possible scandal, proposed that he show the movie with a supporting lecture, delivered with a serious intonation and written in an official style. This unusual artistic-administrative decision actually reinforced the parody effect of the movie and Vladmir Iliev eventually used something similar as a deliberate parody technique in his more important later movie Aromarama.

Amateurism Codified In 1973, the National Center for Amateur Artists (Natsionalen tsentar za hudozhestvena samodeinost, NCAA) was founded as part of an off icial policy that drew a f irm boundary between amateur and professional creative endeavors.9 Amateur art making was now understood 9 Editors’ note: According to Ivan Elenkov, as cited by Katerina Lambrinova, there had been a series of steps taken by the Socialist state to create “new spaces of public cultural exchange that became the places for displaying official cultural policy.” These steps included “Encouragement of amateur artistic activities and self-initiated artistic output from the masses. Building an institutional and thematic structure of amateur artistic activities. Creating a Central House of Popular Arts (1952–1968). The issuing by the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party on the 26th of February 1968 of a decree titled ʽFor the future development of amateur artistic activities,ʼ in which the transformation of The Central House of Popular Arts into a Creative and Methodological Institute for Amateur Artistic Activities was proclaimed. Issuing a resolution by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party on the 23th of March 1971 for creating the National Center of Amateur Art Activities and additional regional centers.” Ivan Elenkov, Populyarnata kultura prez epokhata na komunizma v Bolgaria. Lecture

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as mass-oriented, meaning that, it was made widely available, and it was meant to provide group activities for people in their leisure time. Professionals, on the other hand, received a specialized education and were expected to produce work that displayed skilled artistry and complex ideas, and to be competitive on the national and international level. Of course, this work also had to be rooted in the tenets of “socialist realism.” The transition from amateur to professional f ilmmaking became impossible without a degree in the f ield. The NCAA established a commission on amateur filmmaking. It was led by Zakhari Zhandov and Gencho Genchev. At the time, Zhandov was around sixty years old, a film director greatly respected by his colleagues. He was never affiliated with a political party, and he managed to avoid conflict with the authorities while also standing his own ground as an artist and citizen. He began working in film by chance: his degree was in economics, and he worked in a bank. He also loved the mountains and was an experienced hiker. This is why, in the 1930s, he was asked to shoot several newsreels about remote areas in the mountains. In 1946, he wrote and filmed the documentary People in the Clouds (Hora sred oblatzite), which won an award at the Venice film festival in 1947.10 He went on to make several fiction films, which became instant classics. Zakhari Zhandov was always on good terms with younger authors. He fostered an independent and experimental approach to amateur filmmaking. Gencho Genchev was Zhandov’s deputy, and he was one of the f irst Bulgarian directors to study at VGIK. He was the author of more than two hundred fiction and documentary films, but his work was not especially interesting. His greatest contribution was his extensive, successful work with amateur filmmakers. He served as their tireless teacher and inspiration for half a century. He combined great intelligence with great artistry and was precise and convincing when analyzing movies. There were several other professionals who were actively helping amateur filmmakers: the film scholar Aleksander Aleksandrov; the theorist, journalist, and lecturer Nedelcho Milev; the cameraman and director Vassil Keranov; the director Dako Dakovski; the cameraman Emil Vagenshtain; and the photographer and cameraman Rumen Georgiev, among others. series at St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, 2011. See also, Ivan Elenkov, Kulturniat Front (Sofia: Ciella, 2008). 10 Editors’ note: see Evgenija Garbolevsky, The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945–89 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 16.

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Amateur filmmakers from that period can be divided into two groups based on whether they were affiliated with a club or not. The latter comprised a large segment of the population, because film and projection equipment could easily be obtained at affordable prices. These amateur filmmakers recorded family holidays and trips to the mountains or the seaside. Along with private memories, these films contain valuable information about different objects and events, but, unfortunately, they are mostly inaccessible—stuffed in a drawer somewhere, or thrown out as old garbage. Film clubs were financially supported by their institutional patrons— schools, cultural centers, military bases, etc. Their budgets were usually modest: enough to produce a couple of movies each year, organize events with professional artists, host movie premiers, or acquire books and manuals. We should note that amateur filmmakers, who developed their own stock, inadvertently became self-taught chemists. They were also responsible for all the other technical work and maintenance—mechanical, optical, electric, etc. The amateur filmmakers were obligatorily organized in clubs, which were always attached to bigger party structures—local culture committees, Socialist youth organizations (Komsomol), universities, etc. This, however, meant that the responsibility for ideological control often lay mainly on the chairman of every club because the complex bureaucracy made it difficult for higher-ranked officials to tightly control the production (except for the production shown at the national-scale amateur festivals and reviews). So when the chairman of a given club had more liberal views and was favorable to experiments, this allowed the filmmakers more artistic and formal freedom. On the other hand, the formal, official status of the amateur movement made it exposed to all sorts of normative regulations, in accordance with the current cultural policy of the Party. Amateur film clubs participated in various national and international film festivals, events that usually attracted several hundred viewers and artists. Amateur films were not copied or distributed. This meant that amateur filmmaking remained isolated from the wider public, and the question of censorship, repression, or any kind of restriction by the government did not really apply. In practice, amateur filmmakers served as their own censors, so they could get approval and financing for their projects. Some of the clubs (in Plovdiv, Burgas, Pleven, etc.) were designated as state-supported “representative groups” (predstavitelen sustav) and received regular funding from their local municipalities, the ministry of culture, or the central governing body of the union. Their movies were seen as more successful and were selected to participate in international festivals.

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In his book Alternative Cinema in Rousse, Vladimir Iliev cites a report examining the period between 1974 and 1984, which shows that the number of amateur film clubs around the country increased considerably during that period—there were between 250 and 400 officially registered clubs.11 Those clubs were part of community centers, professional unions, factories ( for example, one of the most active ciné-clubs was the club of the biggest metalwork factories in the country, Kremikovtzi), universities, and schools. There were fifteen ciné-clubs in Plovdiv, ten in Rousse, and more than five in Sofia and Yambol. In 1976, the Bulgarian Television regional center in Rousse started a specialized TV program called Screen for amateur filmmakers, which was instrumental in popularizing the local scene.

Kyupsfilm Most amateur movies, especially fiction and documentaries, followed the dominant socialist realist dogma—they covered subjects from everyday life of the common people and praised the builders of the new society—the working-class heroes. However, experimentation with genre forms—Westerns, battle flicks, action films, etc.—was more easily allowed in comparison to the official professional cinema, where such experimentation was usually regarded as formalistic Western influence, and this accounted for some interesting experiments. Such experiments were more often made in students’ clubs in the universities, where young people had more freedom to experiment without having to necessarily show their work at festivals that were managed and controlled by the authorities. Youthful energy and enthusiasm were understandably the main fuel for the development of the amateur scene, where nobody got paid for their efforts and endeavors. It was high school students, for example, that were responsible for one of the most exotic initiatives in the sixties scene—the gathering of a group of like-minded friends who boldly named their association the Kyupsfilm Production House. At a time when film production (and all other kinds of production, for that matter) in the country was entirely centralized and organized by the state, it was eccentric to claim to have a “private” production company. It was, of course, a joke, but the founders—the young Vladimir Iliev and his classmates from the Technical High School in Rousse, Dragan Spasov and Rumen Yordanov, took the organization very seriously—they developed 11 Vladimir Iliev, Alternativnoto kino na Rousse. Letopis, dokumenti, snimki 1924–2013 (Rousse: Avangard Print, 2014), 37.

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their own do-it-yourself philosophy and created many short, witty movies that they usually showed in underground spaces and basements (they used to joke that this made their organization authentically “underground”) and even briefly issued a newspaper called Kyups Sermon. The Kyupsfilm phenomenon stands out in this context. Its founders were students at the technical high school12 for industrial chemistry in Rousse in 1966. The school’s laboratories all had large ceramic vessels—kyupove— where all the waste material and different chemical solutions were kept to prevent contamination of the sewerage system or the environment. The chemists would often joke that the kyupove were the site of secret chemical interactions that led to the formation of compounds unknown to science. This became the source of the name of their unofficial film studio—Kyupsfilm. Most of the people involved in the studio were students at the high school or at other educational institutions, and few were members of a film club. With time, Kyupsfilm grew into an independent and interdisciplinary society of intellectuals, made up of writers and poets interested in science fiction, scientists from different fields, philosophers, actors and painters, and even officers and police. A lot of truly experimental films—mostly fiction—came out of the Kyupsfilm creative laboratory. At the same time, in the United States, underground art was a growing cultural and civic movement. It turns out that you could find similar kinds of art in these two very different countries, separated by thousands of miles and inhabited by people who lived very different lives. This artistic activity must have been noticed by state security services, but there were no instances of intervention or restriction. Kyupsfilm used the club facilities in Rousse, but hosted screenings in abandoned basements, warehouses, or private residences. The audience was never more than a couple dozen people. The films usually took an ironic approach to popular cinema or false intellectual pretenses. Most of the experimentation happened on the level of dramaturgy and had less to do with the means of expression. In their quest to expand their technical capabilities, they resorted to making their own adjustments to the optics of film cameras—including homemade super wide-angle attachments and improvised filters. The central figures in Kyupsfilm were the author of this text,Vladimir Iliev, along with Dragan Spasov, Nikolay Vassilev, Rossen Yankov, Stoyan Yordanov, and Vesselin Grigorov. 12 Аuthor’s note: The technikum, or technical high school, is a four-year secondary school based on the Russian model of education, which, in turn, was borrowed from Germany in the early twentieth century. It provided practical technical education for workers and managers employed in manufacturing.

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Most of Kyupsfilm’s output consisted of live-action short films a couple of minutes long, but members of the group also made super short stories with a length of no more than twenty to forty seconds. Even though each film had individual subtitles, it was difficult to project them as separate units, so they were grouped into packets with a total length of seven or eight minutes. In 1974, Neohesychasm (Neoisihiazm) was released—a film that stood out at the time. Its makers were all atheists in their twenties who borrowed the title of their work from the name of a medieval orthodox sect—the hesychasts, hermits that communed with God by isolating themselves from society. The film, however, did not contain any tinges of religiosity. In structure and style, it recalled Buñuelʼs Un Chien Andalou, but it was considerably more complex: three plotlines developed in parallel. [Editors’ note: When asked to summarize the plot of this movie, Mr. Iliev wrote, “It is impossible to tell the story of Neohesychasm. It is a crazy thing. But the idea roughly is that you can keep going down in life for a long time, but in the end, the only path left is upwards.”] The film has two protagonists, but they never interact on-screen. Different characters appear around them, some played by actors with proven talent, while others are just members of the film crew, filling in with brief appearances as needed. Another group is made up of random strangers who were stopped on the street and asked to improvise an action or state. If they agreed to do it, they would be put in front of the camera. Depending on how events unfolded, the director would change the task, and the camera would capture the result. During the editing stage, the crew chose outtakes that, visually or dramaturgically, fit—or radically changed—the initial course of the plot. The atmosphere of absurdity is maintained throughout the movie. A hanged man is still suspended in midair as he carries on a lengthy conversation with one of the main characters; the other main character has been tied to the operating table, and the surgeons have a long discussion before sawing him in half with a giant saw. Of course, there was no way this kind of film could be shown at an official film festival. Instead, Kyupsfilm organized its own festival—the Forum for Free and Absolutely Clever Ideas in Cinema (Forum na svobodnite i absolyutno hitri idei v kinoto), which showed films that were creatively daring and experimental. You could watch fantasy movies—things that were unreal, invented, or absurd—alongside experiments with scratched film stock or films with special effects shot using homemade devices. The programs usually lasted several hours, and because they happened during the summer months, they took place outdoors or in small, unpretentious

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venues. The first forum took place in 1975, and the tradition continued for about thirty years. State security services found out early on about these informal gatherings of about fifty or sixty people, and we should admit that they acted wisely. They discreetly spoke to several participants, and, realizing that this was not a hotbed of illegal political activity, they did not report anything up the chain of command to their superiors. No repression took place. Vladimir Iliev later continued to initiate and participate in eccentric activities such as the organization of the Forum for Free and Absolutely Clever Ideas in Cinema. The particular subject of the first festival was sex. This alone, in Iliev’s words, was “enough to ensure a visitation to the cool basements of a local police department during the otherwise hot August,” but he somehow evaded such a fate. The organizers wished to screen the movies in “the retro atmosphere of the Cultural Activists’ club,” but its director “got a panic attack” when he heard about the idea, so the festival had to be moved elsewhere.13

Anti-War Sentiments Given the anti-war theme present in many movies at the time, we should note the tense situation during the 1970s. The Cold War was in full swing. Politicians in both the East and the West displayed staggering hypocrisy. They claimed to support peace efforts and conflict resolution, all the while spending enormous resources on stockpiling nuclear weapons. There was a brutal war happening in Vietnam, and millions of lives were sacrificed to its folly. We shouldn’t exaggerate the role of professional and amateur cinema in this context. It was a mere drop of sanity in the ocean of hate and conflict. And yet these millions of little drops accomplished quite a lot. One anti-war movie shown at the 1977 film festival in Hiroshima was the live-action short film The War Will End Tomorrow (Utre voinata shte svarshi) by the Plovdiv director Evgeni Todorov. On the last day of the war, a deserter has to cross a minefield. He forces a woman to walk in front of him, and they cross the field one slow step at a time. At the end, the deserter notices that the shabbily dressed woman is really beautiful. As he throws himself at her with bad intentions, he steps on a mine. At the Hiroshima festival, Evgeni Todorov received a prize from the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs. 13 Iliev, Alternativnoto kino na Rousse, 76.

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The 1980s Behind the growing financial and organizational mechanisms for amateur cinema that emerged in the 1970s, the real production activity was decreasing from the late 1970s onward, which became a reason for the authorities to be concerned. According to Vladimir Iliev: “At first they threatened the non-active amateur filmmakers with suspension from the official amateur movement. But soon after, they changed tactics and started to encourage the filmmakers with awards and medals.” The state was generously granting resources for seminars, meetings, courses, festivals, etc., before the economic collapse of the regime in the second half of the eighties demanded drastic cuts in social expenses. In his book, Iliev writes, “Despite all of the efforts, 1985 marks the downfall of amateur cinema.”14 Parallel to the deteriorating national economic conditions, there were also some specific technical reasons for that. The old technology (16 and 8 mm cameras, film stock, developing, etc.) was becoming too expensive for the amateur club system to support in the new situation, and at the same time, they couldn’t afford to buy new VHS cameras, which had just begun being used in Bulgaria (mainly by Bulgarian National Television). Relatively few amateur fiction films were made during the eighties. The main reason for that was the lack of appropriate film equipment—it was impossible to record sound and image simultaneously, and the days of silent cinema were already long gone. Contemporary parodies of silent film were sometimes, though not always, successful. A happy exception was the film Beyond the Wall (Otvud stenata) by Nikolay Lazarov, who started out making 8 mm films in Rousse around 1978. His short films show his impressive skill with the camera, a good sense of frame composition, and precise editing. A couple of year later, he made the first version of Beyond the Wall—shot in black and white and in 8 mm. The plot was unconventional for its time: a man is fighting for his spiritual freedom and independence, but he has to overcome estrangement and alienation, drug addiction, the snares of both death and love. Beyond the Wall, the 1985 fifteen-minute fiction film for which Nikolay Lazarov wrote the script, directed, and even played the leading part, is a good example of Western influences. The movie, which was inspired by Allen Parker’s dark musical, based on Pink Floyd’s eponymous album The Wall, can be described as an action film mixed with surrealist elements. The fragmented narrative includes visions (mostly nightmares) and nonlinear, 14 Iliev, Alternativnoto kino na Rousse, 40.

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associative editing, and the plot is focused on the main character’s inner conflict. The fillmmaker is dealing with the subject of limitations on personal freedom. Lazarov’s colleagues liked the film and offered to fund a reshoot in color on 16 mm. The film club of the official trade union also became involved in the production. Funds for the film stock were raised, and everything else was done by enthusiastic volunteers. One of them was a retired soldier skilled with pyrotechnics. Another worked at an auto shop and brought in an old car body, which was repainted to look like a brand new car, and blown up to great effect. The movie is impressionistic, free of dialogue, and quite far from conventional notions of what feature films should be. Even though it is, at heart, a drama about the human condition, it also looks like a super production with multiple cascades, pyrotechnics, and other impressive visual effects. The official premiere of Beyond the Wall at a national film festival in Bourgas in 1985 was an utter disaster. Its makers were accused of artistic formalism by various ideologues (administrators, party functionaries, and cowardly theoreticians) and denounced as agents of degenerative Western culture. Luckily, in 1986, the movie was chosen to participate in the international festival UNICA 15 in Tallinn, Estonia, where it won a bronze medal. It is significant that this took place in the U.S.S.R. during Gorbachev’s perestroika. Bulgarian critics were forced to not only withhold their condemnations, but even to recognize the filmmakers’ effective use of film language and the work’s indisputable cinematographic achievements. The 1980s saw the economic and the ensuing political collapse of the Socialist regimes in the U.S.S.R. and as a consequence in the whole Eastern European bloc. In Bulgaria, the decade began with a last desperate attempt by the Communist Party to consolidate the nation and the regime by embracing an openly nationalistic political agenda. The celebrations of the 1,300th anniversary of the creation of the first Bulgarian state (1981) presented the ideal occasion for imposing nationalist policies. A huge cultural-engineering project labeled 1,300 Years Bulgaria in honor of the anniversary unfolded, and official cinema was arguably entrusted with the biggest role in the process. Later in the decade, the unfolding nationalist policies culminated in the attempt to forcibly assimilate the 15 Editors’ note: UNICA (Union Internationale du Cinéma) is the international union of amateur f ilmmakers, founded in Belgium in 1931 by representatives from several Western European countries. It grew over the years and accepted members from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia. It hosts annual congresses and film festivals with competitions in different cities around the world.

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Bulgarian Muslim minority (comprising almost 10 percent of the population at the time), cynically labeled the “Revival Process“ (Vazroditelen process). Amateur arts were also called upon to participate in this huge propaganda project, and that is why they received one last big institutional and financial boost by the regime at the end of the decade. According to the anthropologist Vasil Garnizov, the text of the resolution of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party from April 11th, 1989 titled “For the Further Unity of the Bulgarian Socialist Nation” reveals that amateur structures and activities were used by the authorities as an instrument in the “Revival Process.” “This document, dating from the very end of the Communist era, indicates the desire to fully integrate the existing amateur art structures into the totalitarian apparatus for control,” Garnizov concludes, adding that “In the 70s and the 80s, the authorities imposed a new policy for the development of the national culture and the amateur artistic activities which allowed for a relative liberalization in the culture and scientific field. The ‘Revival Process’ that had started in the mid-80s, however, put an end to this relative liberalization, and the amateur artistic activities were charged with direct assimilation tasks.”16 Aromarama At the end of the 1980s, the regime was collapsing and the society was drowning in an atmosphere of total despair. That made the arising of a new wave of socially critical works possible. In 1988 and 1989, four fiction films, made by debuting young directors Lyudmil Todorov, Ivan Cherkelov, Petar Popzlatev, and Krassimir Krumov, appeared—Running dogs (Byagashchi kucheta), Pieces of Love (Parcheta lyubov), Me, the Countess (Az, Grafinyata), and Exit (Ekzitus). Those movies were connected by the gloomy atmosphere of total existential emptiness caused by the hermetic socialist living and resonated strongly within that part of the society that was demanding political and social change. Those strong fiction debuts, which were defined by critics as “The Bulgarian New Wave,” were stylistically and thematically in the same vein as the socially critical documentaries made in the 80s—they were all examining different aspects of the dark absurdity of socialist living. At the same time, amateur cinema was also socially sensitive and raised painful questions about society.

16 Vassil Garnizov, “Mestna vlast i mesten praznik: sotsialno i politichesko liderstvo” in Kulturni nasledstva – politicheski zalozi i rekonstruirane na teritorii. (Smolyan: New Bulgarian University, 2012). http://ebox.nbu.bg/ant14/view_lesson.php?id=10.

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Vl adimir Iliev with K aterina L ambrinova

The lower parts of the Danube river form the natural border between Bulgaria and Romania. Rousse is an industral city on the right shore, and across from it is the Romanian Giurgiu (Gyurgevo in Bulgarian). After 1980, this area was the site of an ecological disaster caused by the new chemical processing plant Verachim near Giurgiu. The plant produced large amounts of chlorine, hydrogen chloride, epichlorohydrine, and other products used in the manufacturing of plastics, rubbers, herbicides, and insecticides. The factory was a kilometer away from the center of Rousse, a town with 200,000 inhabitants. There were several industrial accidents at the factory, and the winds carried the gases toward the Bulgarian shore. After 1984, the city often found itself covered in a toxic fog. Government meetings at a high level proved unproductive, because the Romanian side blamed the local industry near Rousse, and both sides were bound by complex political and military agreements. Tensions in Rousse grew with each passing day. The civil defense, a state institution that steps in after natural disasters or similar incidents, compiled a brochure with instructions and handed it out among the population. This gesture was seen as incredibly useless and inane: the brochure included texts that encouraged people to take walks in the fresh air at a time when poisonous gases covered an area of tens of square kilometers. Amateur filmmakers were among the first to break the silence. Vladimir Iliev planned a movie that would criticize the useless advice of the pamphlets. He filmed people walking on the street with handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses. A young mother tries to protect her young child, as it is desperately struggling. On a day when pioneers17 receive their red neckerchiefs, they have to use them as gas masks. Soon, he came up with an idea for a title, Aromarama, the name of an American invention from the 1950s: each seat in the theater was outfitted with a pneumatic system that sprayed scents that matched the images on the screen. The four-minute film shows different people—children, women with babies, ordinary citizens—walking down Rousse’s streets, trying to protect themselves from the chlorine pollution in the air, caused by the big Romanian chemical factory located right across the Danube river. What makes it unusual in its form is that it begins with a title warning the audience that they are about to experience the first “film screening with a smell,” and it ends with a detail of an absurd document that gives instructions for security measures in case of chlorine pollution and poisoning. The seventh international festival Builders 17 Editors’ note: the Pioneer Organization was a Communist adaptation of the Boy Scout organization for children ages ten to fifteen.

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of Developed Socialist Society, which took place in the city of Bourgas September 24–27, 1987, turned out to be the last big amateur cinema festival with international guests and participants during the socialist era. Aromarama became the biggest event of the festival. Iliev came up with the idea to set off a smoke bomb that smelled like chlorine during the screening. Of course, he worried that the sudden gas attack would cause viewers to panic and lead to an accident. But he followed through with the plan. Close to four hundred viewers heard about the ecological catastrophe in Rousse for the first time. They remained seated in the smoky theater for the duration of the movie. The chairman of the festival jury, professor Nedelcho Milev, was asked to remove the controversial film from the competition, but he rightly decided that this would bring even more attention to the author. The film remained in the competition and even won an award. The chairwoman of the Young Filmmakers’ Cabinet, Malina Petrova, who had atteded the festival in Bourgas, decided to organize a special screening of Aromarama in Sofia to spread the news about the ecological catastrophe in Rousse, which was obviously concealed by the authorities and the media.18 She faced considerable problems in organizing the screening, and she couldn’t publicly announce the reason why it was so important this amateur film to be shown. Her colleagues from the Young Filmmakers’ Cabinet were skeptical, because their own socially critical documentary movies hadn’t had much public life and were kept for special professional screenings only. But soon after the first protests in Rousse, information about the ecological catastrophe spread by word of mouth, and documentary director Yuri Zhirov decided to make a movie about the crisis. The team from the Studio for Documentary Film headed by director Yuri Zhirov arrived in Rousse to interview a group of citizens who were openly fighting for clean air and for an end to this outrageous situation. Zhirov had found himself in the right place at the right time. He had been f ilming a different f ilm in Rousse when an activist group—consisting mostly of women—organized a small protest in early 1987. The protest was spontaneously supported by their fellow townspeople and turned into a gathering of several thousand protesters by March or April of 1987. This was the only informal demonstration in the history of Socialist Bulgaria. It was ecologically motivated, but it became a political act.

18 Malina Petrova, “‘Voivodite’ byakha ses zayashki sertsa—1989,” Marginalia, Novemeber 10, 2014. http://www.marginalia.bg/analizi/vojvodite-byaha-ss-zaeshki-srtsa-1989-ta/.

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Vl adimir Iliev with K aterina L ambrinova

During the winter of that year, Yuri Zhirov was finishing his movie Breathe (Dishai) when he learned about the existence of Aromarama. At the last moment, Vladimir Iliev was able to bring to Sofia and share with Zhirov the exact kind of footage the latter was missing in his film. At the beginning of March, Breathe premiered in Sofia. Its audience included the painter Svetlin Russev, then the chairman of the Bulgarian Painters’ Union, and Neshka Robeva, the coach of the national rhythmic gymnastics team, which was at the peak of its popularity. They were both Communist members of parliament, but they initiated the creation of the Citizens’ Committee for the Protection of Rousse. Breathe was shot in a very short time and did not have any pretentions to be an artistic masterpiece, but it was important for the time with its social message, and it had an immediate impact the day of the premiere in Sofia, March 8th, 1988, when the Citizens’ Committee for the Protection of Rousse was spontaneously founded by the over four hundred people in attendance at the House of Cinema. This was the first organized public initiative against Communist party policy in over forty years. At the core of this committee were members of the film community, but it was also supported by artists, philosophers, sociologists, and others. Members of the committee were subject to state repression, and the movie Breathe was banned as anti-Party and anti-state propaganda. The author of Aromarama did not suffer any repercussions, but his film was locked away in the offices of the Rousse Communist Youth organization after its only showing in Rousse in June 1988. It remained there for a year and a half, after which it was returned to its maker.

Post-Socialist Period The end of the Cold War unfortunately also marked a decline in the sphere of amateur filmmaking. Many amateur filmmakers moved on to careers in the many newly established private TV channels, while others went into the private sector or simply lost interest in filmmaking. Only the most devoted fans of the seventh art remained involved in its production. The NCAA closed down, and in its stead emerged independent organizations of amateur artists—among them, the National Federation for Alternative Cinema. It is important to highlight the fact that Bulgarian filmmakers were among the most active participants in the political and social changes that occurred at the end of the 80s. What’s more, in the early 90s, at the very beginning of the transition to free-market economy in the country, the filmmakers were

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the first artistic guild who dismissed the organizational structure of Socialist Bulgarian Cinematography and embraced freelance status. In the transition years between 1989 and 1992, the socialist structures connected with amateur arts maintained some organizational activity—organizing amateur film festivals, for example—but the general feeling was that of residual reflexes. At the same time, many local cultural institutions such as the Houses of Culture, community centers, and others were closing, blocked by the total lack of money. Finally, after the first democratic government was formed in 1992, all of the remaining totalitarian structures, including the National Center of Amateur Art Activities, were closed. Soon after the socialist amateur arts structures were dissolved, some amateur filmmakers from the clubs that were still active, like those in Shumen and Rousse, decided to unite themselves in a new nationwide organization. They debated about the name of the organization—one of the proposals was to return the name of Pantaley Karasimeonov’s organization, created in 1924, but in the end, the union was created in December 1992 under the name Bulgarian Alternative Cinema Federation. At the present moment, the Bulgarian Federation has strong international ties with UNICA.

Bibliography Bratoeva-Darakchieva, Ingeborg. Bolgarsko igralno kino. Ot “Kalin Orelet” do “Misiya London.” Sofia: Institute of Art Studies, 2013. Elenkov, Ivan. Kulturniat Front. Sofia: Ciela, 2008. Elenkov, Ivan. Populyarnata kultura prez epokhata na komunizma v Bolgaria. Lecture series at St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, 2011. Garbolevsky, Evgenija. The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945–89. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Garnizov, Vassil. “Mestna vlast i mesten praznik: sotsialno i politichesko liderstvo.” In Kulturni nasledstva – politicheski zalozi i rekonstruirane na teritorii. Smolyan: New Bulgarian University, 2012. http://ebox.nbu.bg/ant14/view_lesson.php?id=10. Iliev, Vladimir. Alternativnoto kino na Rousse. Letopis, dokumenti, snimki 1924–2013. Rousse: Avangard Print, 2014. Petrova, Malina. “‘Voivodite’ byakha ses zayashki sertsa—1989.” Marginalia, Novemeber 10, 2014. http://www.marginalia.bg/analizi/vojvodite-byaha-sszaeshki-srtsa-1989-ta/. Yanakiev, Alexander. Cinema.bg. Sofia: Titra, 2003. Znepolski, Ivailo. Bulgarskiat kommunizem. Sotsiokulturni cherti i vlastova traektoriya. Sofia: Ciela. 2012.

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Vl adimir Iliev with K aterina L ambrinova

About the Authors Vladimir Iliev (†) was a Bulgarian filmmaker who first began actively participating in the amateur film scene in the city of Rousse in 1964. He was the president of the Bulgarian National Federation of Alternative Cinema from 1993 until his death in 2020, and he published Alternative Cinema in Rousse—Chronicles, Documents, Photos 1924–2013 (2014). Katerina Lambrinova is a film expert for Bulgarian National Television, where she advises on film projects from the scriptwriting stage and throughout the production process. She is also a film critic, art journalist, film programmer, and editor in chief at FemGems in the Arts (https://medium. com/femgems). She is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

5.

The Polish Educational Film Studio and the Cinema of Wojciech Wiszniewski1 Masha Shpolberg

Abstract The 1970s Polish documentary style—retrospectively labeled “creative documentary”—had no contemporary equivalent in the West. No longer seeking to represent reality objectively, it borrowed from both fiction filmmaking and the interwar avant-garde to produce highly expressive films that presented “real” people’s life stories. This chapter concentrates on Wojciech Wiszniewski, a leading filmmaker within this movement, who produced his most remarkable f ilms with the Educational Film Studio (WFO). The essay explores how the WFO, located near the National Film School in Łódź but far from the prestigious centers of documentary in Warsaw, became an incubator for highly unorthodox film practices. Additionally, the essay sketches the relationship between the WFO and these other centers, where Wiszniewski also made several short films. Keywords: Poland; documentary film; Wojciech Wiszniewski; Educational Film Studio (Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych; WFO), Łódź; Documentary Film Studio (Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych), Warsaw; Polish Television

In 1978, journalist Małgorzata Karbowiak published a probing investigation of the state of affairs in Poland’s Educational Film Studio (Wytwórnia 1 The author would like to thank Jakub Krakowiak of the WFO Archive and Emil Sowiński, co-author of the forthcoming book on the WFO, for their invaluable assistance with the research that went into this article.

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch05

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Filmów Oświatowych, or WFO, located in Łódź) in Film, one of the nation’s leading cinema journals. The popular-science film, which had once been “the calling card of the WFO” was now at a “profound impasse.”2 Fewer and fewer documentaries of this kind were being produced. What’s more, the WFO was failing in its mandate to supply educational films to schools. “In 1977, the WFO produced 55 school films. This year, they plan to produce 50, and in 1979—only 30!” she lamented.3 Karbowiak partly blamed a recent round of budget cuts and a reorganization of award categories at Krakow’s annual film festival, leaving these genres without any chance at national recognition. Above all, she chalked up the “change in the profile of the studio” to the arrival of new talent. “It is not hard to notice something else,” she wrote: “that there is simply less interest in the subject on the part of filmmakers. The best proof of this is that the group of young artists gathered at the WFO is manifestly interested in different things.”4 Karbowiak was not alone in noting the changes at the WFO. As Witold Rutkiewicz wrote far less diplomatically in the film and television weekly Ekran: “For the time being, the WFO has ceased doing what it is meant to be doing—that is, expanding general education.”5 Both articles beg the question: if the Educational Film Studio was no longer producing as many nature and science documentaries, what was it producing? The films that Karbowiak characterizes quite simply as “different” and “new,” and that Rutkiewicz more denigratingly dubs “curios,” were nothing short of a small revolution, greeted enthusiastically in artistic circles and viewed by the authorities with a mixture of fear and disdain. Doubtless, both authors’ hesitance to engage with these films in greater depth stemmed from a profound unease regarding their aesthetic and political status. Produced by a handful of recent film school graduates, these were short films deeply invested in formal experimentation and the articulation of individual style—an approach that strongly contrasted with what was by then an established documentary tradition. The f irst movement to put Polish documentary on the map was the Black Series (1956–60): a group of voice-over-driven films that focused on social ills, such as alcoholism and prostitution, that had been taboo in the Stalinist period, and launched a wave of similarly critical films across the 2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Polish are the author’s own. Małgorzata Karbowiak, “Paradoksy,” Kino 47 (1978): 14. 3 Ibid., 15. 4 Ibid. 5 Witold Rutkiewicz, “Osiemnasty krótkometrażowy,” Ekran (1978): 5.

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Soviet bloc. The arrival of the Nagra portable sound recorder and lighter cameras brought cinéma vérité to Poland in the early 1960s and launched the term “Polish School of Documentary,” whose meaning has been expanding ever since. Although most of the filmmakers who had made a name for themselves with the “Black Series,” such as Kazimierz Karabasz, continued making films throughout the 1960s, their style evolved significantly. Unlike the “Black Series,” which was concerned with the collective (“alcoholics,” “prostitutes,” or “delinquent youth”), the documentaries of the 1960s began to focus on individual protagonists and to move beyond Warsaw to record daily life, with its struggles and rewards, in other parts of the country.6 What connected the two movements, however, was the directors’ self-effacing approach: both those associated with the Black Series and those who made their debut later in the 1960s held that the task of the filmmaker was to record reality, not to interpret it. All that would be put into question by the new generation that came of age in the 1970s. What is more, the films produced under the auspices of the Educational Film Studio throughout the 1970s—and, occasionally, the two other major producers of nonfictional film, the Army Film Studio “Czołówka” and the Documentary Film Studio, both located in Warsaw—were unclassifiable objects that blurred the boundary between documentary, experimental, and f iction f ilmmaking. In the process, they dared to introduce genre hybridity into a national film production and distribution system organized in terms of strictly defined filmmaking modes. The emphasis on style and subjective vision meant that each filmmaker’s output was so distinct that, only years later, in 1984, would film scholar Mirosław Przylipiak find a term capacious enough to group their works under one label: dokument kreacyjny or “creative documentary.”7 The importance of the Educational Film Studio as an incubator for this “movement,” broadly conceived, has long been acknowledged in passing by Polish film scholars. It is only in the past few years, however, that it has begun to attract the scholarly attention it deserves with a number of thoroughly researched articles in Polish by Emil Sowiński, as well as a monograph by Sowiński, Krzysztof Jajko, and Michał Dondzik.8 Anglophone scholars of 6 For a comprehensive study of the Black Series and its place in European documentary more broadly conceived, see Bjørn Sørenssen, “The Polish Black Series Documentary and the British Free Cinema Movement,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 183–200. 7 Mirosław Przylipiak, “Od konkretu do metaforu,” Kino 1 (1984): 16. 8 See Michał Dondzik, Krzysztof Jajko, and Emil Sowiński, Elementarz Wytwórni Filmów Oświatowych (Łódź: Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych, 2018), as well as Emil Sowiński, “Produkcja

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Eastern European film have also recently begun to adopt a more institutional approach, excavating the history of the less well-known, specialized, or geographically peripheral studios and collectives. Alice Lovejoy’s Army Film and the Avant-Garde (2015) has made a significant step by demonstrating that smaller film studios— even ones ensconced within the government and military apparatus—were often subject to less stringent censorship and so could produce more formally innovative films.9 Maria Vinogradova has similarly demonstrated that Soviet studios dedicated to the production of popular science films became an important site for formal experimentation in the late socialist period.10 This article builds on their work while taking into account the specificity of this politically turbulent decade in Poland, which saw workers, artists, and intellectuals come together to form an unprecedented mass opposition movement to the Socialist state. It first examines the institutional conditions that allowed a small, peripheral Polish film studio to become a center of experimental filmmaking during the 1970s, and then goes on to analyze the formal and thematic choices made by Wojciech Wiszniewski, widely taken to be the movement’s leading figure, in the films he produced at the WFO.11 Finally, it attempts to place Wiszniewski’s work within the broader context of aesthetic, social, and political developments in 1970s Poland. Without a doubt, the Workshop of the Film Form, which also operated in Łódź at roughly the same time (1970–7) and is discussed in Łukasz Mojsak’s chapter in this book, was the predominant center of “traditional” experimental filmmaking in this period. Yet the “creative documentaries” produced at the Educational Film Studio deserve a place in this volume precisely because of their unusual, hybrid approach. As films produced at a state-sponsored studio and made for both theatrical and nontheatrical distribution, they were also much more likely to be seen beyond artistic circles, exposing many Poles who would not otherwise have seen an experimental film to avant-garde filmmaking practices. filmu krótkometrażowego w epoce gierkowskiej na przykładzie działalności Wytwórni Filmów Oświatowych,” Panoptikum vol. 16, no. 23 (2016): 93–104, and Emil Sowiński, “Archiwa w badaniach nad cenzurą w filmie krótkometrażowym. Przypadek twórczości Wojciecha Wiszniewskiego (na podstawie materiałów archiwalnych z Wytwórni Filmów Oświatowych), 235–58. 9 Alice Lovejoy, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 10 Maria Vinogradova, “Scientists, Punks, Engineers and Gurus: Soviet Experimental Film Culture in the 1960s–1980s,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema vol. 7, no. 1 (2016): 39–52. 11 Tadeusz Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego: twórcy, filmy, konteksty (Katowice: Videograf II, 2009), 369–74.

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Finally, a study of these films illuminates the great changes that took place in the media landscape of socialist countries at that time, as television penetrated into ever more homes. Anikó Imre’s groundbreaking TV Socialism (2016) and Alexander and Elena Prokhorov’s Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era (2016) have demonstrated that this oft-derided media form was both aesthetically and ideologically more complex than many in the West had imagined.12 This chapter builds on their accounts by demonstrating that filmmakers associated with the “creative documentary” movement maintained a fraught relationship with the medium: due to resource scarcity, they eagerly allowed their films to be funded and distributed by television whenever possible, all the while overtly defining their work in opposition to its facile flow of predigested images.

Geography as Destiny The path along which the WFO developed in the postwar period was largely determined by geography. In 1945, immediately after the end of World War II, the Polish Film Institute’s Educational Film Department occupied a former factory building at 210 Kilińskiego Street in Łódź, the industrial city frequently described as “Poland’s Manchester.” On December 28, 1949, that department would be rebranded the Educational Film Studio. Meanwhile, the national film school (officially the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre), was also established in Łódź on March 8, 1949. The original plan was to move the school to Warsaw once the city had been rebuilt from near-complete destruction during World War II. In the end, only the acting school moved to the capital, while the film school remained in Łódź and continues to operate there to the present day. Rounding out Łódź’s landscape of film production was the SE-MA-FOR Studio of Minor Film Forms (established there the same year as the film school and largely focused on producing animated films for children) and the Workshop of the Film Form (active 1970–7), which was established by a group of film school graduates. This physical proximity between the country’s pre-eminent film school and the two studios ensured close ties from the beginning. On the thirtieth anniversary of the school’s establishment in Łódź in 1979, it was the WFO (rather than the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw) that was asked to

12 Anikó Imre, TV Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

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produce a film about the school’s history and leading figures.13 Because the cinematic purview of the WFO was far less circumscribed than that of SE-MA-FOR, many more graduates of the film school went on to work there in the first two decades of its existence. The number of graduates taken in by the WFO, however, increased dramatically in the mid-1970s. In 1975–6 alone, film critic Oskar Sobański noted that as many as twelve graduates of the Łódź Film School made their first films at the Educational Film Studio.14 This influx of new talent was the result of both a conscious policy change on the part of the studio leadership and a larger, industry-wide crisis. Piotr Szczepański was appointed director of the WFO in 1973; in 1974, he was joined by Maciej Łukowski as managing director.15 It was this dynamic duo—and Łukowski in particular—who consciously transformed the studio into a magnet for ambitious young filmmakers. Łukowski himself was only twentysix when he arrived at the studio, shortly after earning a PhD at the University of Łódź.16 Upon encountering Łukowski for the first time, Piotr Andrejew, whose films would later be grouped under the “creative documentary” label, was struck by the new managing director’s youth, long hair, and beard. Andrejew was even more surprised, however, by Łukowski’s attitude and ideas: I told him at the time of our first conversation that things at the studio could only get worse, because we were already making fine films there. He [Łukowski] answered: ‘No, it will get better because you will be able to do whatever you want to do.’ I had to check to make sure I had understood correctly: yes, total freedom. It sounded so strange coming from the mouth of an administrator in a socialist state, who had good reason to fear that his statement might be repeated several times before ending up where it shouldn’t. His words were later confirmed, however. We were given total freedom. We did what we wanted, how we wanted.17

In addition to following through on his promise to filmmakers, foolhardy though it may have seemed at the time, Łukowski took on the role of patron 13 “Jubileusz Szkoły Filmowej,” Film 43 (1978): 2. 14 Oskar Sobański, “Młodzi reżyserzy: fakty, liczby, sytuacje,” Kino 38 (1978): 5. 15 Łukowski’s title literally translates from the Polish “naczelny redaktor” as “editor-in-chief.” His duties, however, were primarily those of a managing or deputy director. 16 Elżbieta Drecka-Wojtyczka, “Maciej Łukowski: Wspomnienie 1947–1990,” Gazeta Wyborcza (March 28, 2000): 6. 17 Piotr Andrejew in conversation with Piotr Marecki, “Lekcje kaligrafii,” Kwartalnik Filmowy 82 (2013): 6. As cited in Emil Sowiński, “Pokolenie WFO,” (master’s thesis, University of Łódź, 2016), 17.

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saint for the new generation. He was present at meetings with party and film industry representatives, defending the social importance of “educational” films and fighting for increased resources.18 When necessary, he also used revisionist arguments to defend the more experimental films at screenings and in the press.19 Łukowski was able to guarantee such a great degree of freedom to the studio’s filmmakers through two clever moves. First, according to studio guidelines, proposed scripts had to fit into one of the thematic categories outlined by the studio. Łukowski expanded and revised these into thirteen categories that film critic Bogumił Drozdowski described as “capacious, accommodating of filmmakers’ different interests and genres of film.”20 Second, as Emil Sowiński points out, the studio and the filmmakers were careful to give their films innocent titles that would signal their connection to themes beloved by the authorities. If the official censor assigned to review the WFO’s films did not have any problems with what they saw, there would be no questions from their superiors concerning the list of correct-sounding f ilms.21 For this new generation of f ilmmakers, f ilms about sports and industry—two prized categories in all the socialist states—thus often became hooks on which to hang conceptual cinematography, mise-en-scène, and sound design.22 In 1976, only two years after beginning his work at the studio, Łukowski became the first nonfilmmaker to receive the “Vector” award given out by the Young Filmmakers’ Circle of the Polish Filmmakers’ Association (Koło Młodych Stowarzyszenia Filmowców Polskich) for “consistently facilitating a professional start for young filmmakers.”23 And in 1985, established film critic 18 “Perspektywy filmu krótko-metrażowego,” Film 44 (1975): 2. Sowiński, “Pokolenie WFO,” 18. 19 A telling example of this line of argumentation comes from Henryk Tronowicz’s review of the 1975 Łódź All-Polish Retrospective of Sociopolitical Films. Tronowicz writes: “Maciej Łukowski, the managing director of the WFO in Łódź expressed this thought most clearly. The artistic values of a filmic work may accentuate the propaganda potential of the film. We also cannot discount the growing intellectual level of our society. Maciej Łukowski also suggested to this end that we prepare special instructors who would be able, in their work, to draw on the sociopolitical film. This was not an isolated opinion.” Henryk Tronowicz, “Ważkie, ciekawy, potrzebne,” Film 45 (1975): 16. 20 Bogumił Drozdowski, “Wraca nowe,” Film 39 (1975): 5. 21 Sowiński, “Pokolenie WFO,” 37 and “Produkcja filmu krótkometrażowego,” 101. 22 Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego, 371. Maria Vinogradova has demonstrated that the Leningrad Educational Film Studio (Lennauchfilm) and the Central Educational Film Studio in Moscow (Tsentrnauchfilm) adopted a similar approach in the late 1970s and 1980s, producing popularscience films with bland, technical titles that were in reality highly innovative and formally experimental. Vinogradova, “Scientists, Punks, Engineers and Gurus,” 39-52. 23 Sowiński, “Pokolenie WFO,” 18.

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Alicja Iskierko would summarize Łukowski’s contribution to Polish cinema by calling him “a personality of remarkable dimensions, a man to whom the educational film owes the broadening of its artistic and intellectual horizons.”24 Both Szczepański and Zbigniew Godlewski, who replaced him as director in 1976, appear to have been tolerant and open-minded as well, allowing Łukowski to carry out his vision of a dynamic, director-driven studio. From the early 1970s until the imposition of martial law in 1981, the WFO thus became, in Andrejew’s words, “an open place that gave filmmakers money and opportunities.”25

An Industry in Crisis Young filmmakers’ eagerness to work at the WFO was informed in equal measure by the creative freedom the studio promised and what, by the mid1970s, was widely acknowledged to be the dysfunctional state of the Polish film industry. In a 1978 exposé entitled “Young Directors: Facts, Numbers, Situations,” Sobański decried the “overproduction of talented, educated, well-trained and technically competent directors.”26 This was not entirely the film school’s fault, Sobański admitted. The rapid expansion of television in Poland in the late 1960s had led the school to accept more students in the expectation of a greater demand for talent. “For several years, the School was acting as if tomorrow we were to become a second Hollywood, or at least a second Czechoslovakia,” he railed, venturing that between 1967 and 1977, the School had produced 102 graduates in the directing track alone. At the same time, Sobański argued, the Polish film industry had continued to produce approximately twenty-two films a year, of which only one or two might be by a first-time director. This created a highly competitive environment in which only a fraction of film school graduates were able to find gainful employment. The situation was aggravated by a set of ever-more complex “debut” requirements specific to the state-socialist system: to gain the right to produce a feature-length fiction film, directors had to obtain a film school diploma, work as an established director’s assistant, and produce an hourlong television film, in addition to meeting a number of other demands.27 24 Alicja Iskierko, Ekran (September 24, 1985): 198. 25 Ibid. 26 Sobański, “Młodzi reżyserzy: fakty, liczby, sytuacje,” 4. 27 Bolesław Michałek in “Filmowe Studio Młodych TV: Oczekiwania i nadzieje,” Kino 7 (1980): 22. Also Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego, 369. Similar rules were in place in many other countries of the Soviet bloc.

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This “problem of the debut” was much discussed in both the professional press and at film industry meetings. In a situation in which the time from degree to first fiction feature was growing increasingly long and many young directors found themselves working indefinitely as first or second assistants, the opportunity for complete ownership offered by the Educational Film Studio became eminently desirable. There, young filmmakers were able to make their own films the way they wanted, with minimal intervention. More experimental directors were also drawn to the profile of the studio by some of the innovative films produced there even before Łukowski’s tenure by Piotr Andrejew, Bogdan Dziworski, and Józef Robakowski.28 Łukowski’s arrival, however, yielded immediately noticeable results. Within a year, the number of “debuts” produced at the studio jumped from one or two to twelve.29 Łukowski’s “open door” policy, as Sowiński has termed it, also made itself known at the 1975 Krakow Film Festival, Poland’s main showcase for documentary, animation, and other types of short films.30 Writing in Film, critic Bogumił Drozdowski commented on the “highly unusual slate of films” coming out of the WFO, describing the program as “extremely varied in content and form, artistically aggressive, wholly committed […] to diagnosing social phenomena,” though he conceded that “at least a couple of the films may raise some doubts.”31 The WFO-produced films presented that year included Piotr Andrejew’s The Middle of the Road (Środek drogi), Bogdan Dziworski’s The Modern Pentathlon (Pięcobój nowoczesny), Stanisław Janicki’s Dream About Kurozwęki (Sen o Kurozwękach), Andrzej 28 It should be mentioned here that the WFO had a long and rich tradition of producing films about art in addition to popular-science f ilms. Filmmakers such as Bohdan Mościcki and Kazimierz Mucha had produced a great number of f ilms in this genre for the WFO. In 1973, Józef Robakowski, who had only three years earlier cofounded the Workshop of the Film Form, produced a short portrait of Polish painter Tytus Czyżewski (1880–1945) for the WFO, titled From The Mediomagnetic Atelier of Tytus Czyżewski (Z Mediomagnetycznego Atelier Tytusa Czyżewskiego). That same year, Piotr Andrejew, who would become associated with the “creative documentary” movement, produced a portrait of graphic artist Daniel Mróz (1917–1993) in Mróz/ Frost is Coming (Idzie Mróz—the title of the film is a pun on the artist’s last name, Mróz, which means “frost” in Polish). Finally, Bogdan Dziworski, who would become famous for his creative sports documentaries later in the decade and who had already worked as a cinematographer on a number of projects, directed his first film ever at the WFO, also in 1973. Titled The Cross and the Hammer (Krzyż i topor), it focused on a ruined castle built for the aristocratic Ossoliński family but that was never inhabited. 29 Sobański, “Młodzi reżyserzy: fakty, liczby, sytuacje,” 5. In a later article, entitled “Pokolenie WFO,” Film 34 (1979): 14, Sobański provides slightly different numbers, listing two debuts at the WFO in 1973, one in 1974, six in 1975, ten in 1976, five in 1977, and seven in 1978. 30 Sowiński, “Pokolenie WFO,” 15. 31 Drozdowski, “Wraca nowe,” 4.

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Papuziński’s Chronicle of the Faience Factory (Kronika fabryki fajansu), Władysław Wasilewski’s Their Case (Ich sprawa), and Wojciech Wiszniewski‘s Wanda Gościmińska, A Weaver (Wanda Gościmińska – włókniarka), along with several films more typical of the studio’s previous output, such as Let’s Talk About Computers (Porozmawiajmy o komputerach) and Amid the Lakes and Waters (Wśród lak i wód).32 A number of the new, more innovative films won awards, and the WFO as a whole was honored with the Film Critics’ Club Award for the best set of films in the competition.33 Writing several years later, in 1979, Sobański noted that “nearly half of the graduates of the Łódź Film School managed to go through the directorial workshop of this studio in the span of five years. Maybe in a dozen or so years, when historians of Polish cinema begin writing about Andrejew, Junak, Szułkin, Koterski, Wiszniewski, Barański, Górski, Starecki, Sijce, and others, they will label them ‘the WFO generation’? That would be a beautiful compliment for a studio which has perennially been considered the second violin in the orchestra that is our film industry.”34

A New Direction In the Polish press, the “unusual” films coming out of the WFO were explained in terms of both a reaction against the deleterious effects of television on the documentary film form and a rebellion against the “pure” (czysty) or observational documentary approach promulgated at the Łódź Film School by Kazimierz Karabasz, the “father” of Polish documentary. Karabasz’s teaching, writing, and practice stressed a noninvasive approach in which the task of the documentary filmmaker was to patiently and attentively wait for reality to unfold before the camera. Karabasz’s own films—from The Musicians (Muzykanci, 1960) to The Year of Frank W. (Rok Franka W., 1967)—presented cinéma vérité portraits of regular people going about their daily lives. The tone of the films was invariably optimistic: though the protagonists’ lives might be busy or difficult, Karabasz endeavored to show a beauty and dignity in certain dimensions of the everyday. Karabasz’s teaching had already produced one “new generation” of Polish documentary. When Krzysztof Kieślowski, Tomasz Zygadło, and Marek Piwowski premiered their first documentary films at the Krakow Film 32 Ibid., 4. 33 Ibid., 3. 34 Oskar Sobański, “Pokolenie WFO,” Film 34 (1979): 14.

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Festival in 1971, they were eagerly dubbed kino nowej zmiany, or “The Cinema of the New Change,” by the press. Their films, together with those of Marcel Łoziński, who premiered somewhat later, were both more critical and more politically and socially engaged than the films of their predecessors. Often, they focused on institutions, such as factories, hospitals, and schools, that were meant to serve as microcosms of Polish society. In their general tone and attitude, these films were the documentary analogue of the fictional “cinema of moral concern” associated with such well-known figures as Krzysztof Zanussi, Feliks Falk, Agnieszka Holland, and, of course, Kieślowski and his own subsequent fiction features. The aim of both the fiction films and the documentaries, for Łoziński, was to “draw us out of our complacency, to push us to ask the simplest questions: where, how, and why do we live, work, think, and feel—and not another way?”35 The 1975 Krakow Film Festival signaled that a second wave of documentary filmmakers had arrived—only it was not so clear just how “documentary” their films were. Polish film scholars Mirosław Przylipiak, Mikołaj Jazdon, and Piotr Pławuszewski all identify Wojciech Wiszniewski, Piotr Szulkin, Marek Koterski, and Piotr Andrejew as the movement’s key figures, along with Bogdan Dziworski, Andrzej Papuziński, and Andrzej Barański.36 The early works of Grzegorz Królikiewicz, although he made his first, ill-fated film at the WFO in 1969, are also retrospectively grouped under the “creative documentary” label. Although these filmmakers made completely different films, their works all argued that simply recording reality was insufficient, that it failed to get at the deeper reasons, the mechanisms by which ideology was internalized by the political subject. Moreover, if the films produced at the beginning of the decade were soberly critical of the reality they depicted, these later films dared to be ironic, even derisive. In his original definition, Przylipiak wrote that “creative documentaries make use of a weakening of the bond between filmic reality and the filmic image in such a way that the finished material is treated more like a collection of signs and symbols that serve to create new meanings rather than a photograph whose appearance could be described in social coordinates.”37 The departure from a claim that documentaries bear a purely indexical relationship to reality lands these films somewhere in between documentary 35 Marcel Łoziński in “Młody film polski—próba sondażu,” Kino 8 (1978): 3. 36 Przylipiak, “Od konkretu do metaforu,” 15. Mikołaj Jazdon and Piotr Pławuszewski, “Polski f ilm lat siedemdziesiątych: nic o nas bez nas,” in Historia polskiego filmu dokumentalnego (1945–2014), ed. Małgorzata Hendrykowska, 229 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2014). 37 Ibid., 18.

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and experimental cinema. On the one hand, the production requirements of the WFO and the filmmakers’ own desire to speak to a shared social reality meant that these were films invariably anchored in the contemporary. On the other hand, each filmmaker’s attempt to elaborate a personal audiovisual language and to counter the sloppiness of televised reportage made them more attentive to film form. As a result, many of the filmmakers in question began to adopt techniques previously reserved for fiction or experimental filmmaking, including staging, blocking, theatrical lighting, the speeding up or slowing down of film, the repetition of images, and other “tricks” that drew attention to the film as a constructed object. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s explanation, in a 1981 interview, perhaps summarized best the complex motivations driving this new wave: “many filmmakers began to chafe at this predominance of description as they were afraid it might cramp their self-development, stifle their imagination, prevent the articulation of ideas of a more philosophical nature, and militate against experimentation with form.”38

Wojciech Wiszniewski as artiste maudit All attempts to account for Wojciech Wiszniewski’s small but incredibly rich oeuvre are overshadowed by his biography: the filmmaker many considered to be the most radical of his generation died a day before his thirty-fifth birthday on February 21, 1981, having never completed a full-length fiction feature. The eleven short films and one hour-long television film he left behind, however, sufficed to cement his reputation.39 During his lifetime, Wiszniewski was known for his frenetic pace of living and creating, no doubt motivated by his awareness of his heart condition—his father had died young of a heart attack, and Wiszniewski himself was obliged to take a medical leave of absence after his first year of studies at the Łódź Film School. The threat of imminent death appears to have haunted him: it was his student short about a man who dies of a heart attack while behind the wheel that first set Wiszniewski apart from his classmates by winning him an honorable mention at the 1968 Oberhausen film festival. Wiszniewski 38 “In Depth Rather Than Breadth,” Polish Perspectives, 1981. As translated and reprinted in Renata Bernard and Steven Woodward, eds., Krysztof Kieślowski: Interviews (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 38. 39 As Emil Sowiński points out, Wiszniewski’s life and oeuvre were quickly transformed into the stuff of legend. In “Archiwa w badaniach nad cenzurą w filmie krótkometrażowym,” Sowiński uses the archival record preserved at the WFO to probe the central aspects of this legend.

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was also known for his fearlessness in the face of the Party apparatus and has, until recently, been reputed to hold the record for the greatest number of censored films. 40 Many of his films were not allowed to see the light of day until the momentary triumph of Solidarity, shortly after his death. For a significant period of time, between the moment Solidarity was officially recognized as an independent labor union on August 31, 1980 and the imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981, censorship was suspended and previously censored films—including Wiszniewski’s—were released on Polish screens. That summer of 1981, Wiszniewski received five posthumous awards at the Krakow Film Festival. His unique style and courage in the face of the authorities combined, in the wake of his death, to transform the director into a legendary figure. 41 Wiszniewski’s engagement with the WFO and the Polish film industry began at a precociously young age. As a widow in need of money in the 1960s, his mother Irena rented out rooms in the family’s apartment at 20 Sterling Street to students from the Łódź Film School. 42 As a teenager, Wiszniewski began working at the WFO as a technical assistant to help his mother financially. This early connection to the studio paid off later: in 1974, when Polish Television, disturbed by Wiszniewski’s short f ilm about the labor hero Bernard Bugdoł, pulled out of his next short film, the WFO stepped in, buying it out and allowing Wiszniewski to produce one of his masterpieces, Wanda Gościmińska, A Weaver (1975). Starting in 40 Tadeusz Lubelski, in line with many of Wiszniewski’s contemporaries, places the number at nine out of twelve (Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego, 318). Sowiński has recently shown that, in truth, only four of Wiszniewski’s twelve f ilms (Story of a Man Who Fulfilled 550% of the Norm, Random Love Story, Primer, and The Carpenter) were fully censored. Others received an extremely limited release (for example, Foreman on the Farm [1978] was released only to art cinemas [kina studyjne] and only in one copy). Nevertheless, this made it possible for them to be screened at the Krakow Film Festival and to be eligible for awards. Wiszniewski’s first film, produced at the “Czołówka” Army Film Studio was, for a long time, believed to have been lost. Sowiński has been able to locate it and discusses the reasons why it may have been overlooked in recent retrospectives dedicated to Wiszniewski, as well as the DVD box set of his films put out by the Polish National Audiovisual Institute in 2007 (Sowiński, “Archiwa w badaniach nad cenzurą w filmie krótkometrażowym,” 257–8.) Wiszniewski was only the sixth filmmaker to be included in the Institute’s Polish School of Documentary DVD series after Krzysztof Kieślowski, Kazimierz Karabasz, Maciej Drygas, Marcel Łoziński, and Andrzej Munk. 41 It is interesting to note that the first conference about Wiszniewski’s work was organized by none other than Łukowski at the Łódź Film School. Łukowski also authored the first critical reflection on Wiszniewski’s work. See Maciej Łukowski, Wojciech Wiszniewski: zapis faktów podstawowych: sesja naukowa (Łódź: Łódzki Dom Kultury, 1983), 1–27. 42 Marek Hendrykowski, “Wojciech Wiszniewski – szkic do portretu,” in Wojciech Wiszniewski, ed. Marek Hendrykowski (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2006), 13.

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November 1974, Wiszniewski was listed as an employee of the studio, and Marek Hendrykowski notes that “were it not for the particular affection of the director and a portion of the studio leadership for the young filmmaker, he would have very quickly ceased receiving requests for new films.”43 From the outset, Wiszniewski’s films were preoccupied with official ideology and representation. Przylipiak points outs that the director belonged to the so-called March generation (pokolenie pomarcowe), whose worldview was profoundly shaped by the events of March 1968 in Poland—when the government crushed student demonstrations and launched an “anti-Zionist” campaign that effectively expelled the remaining Jews from the country—as well as by the events of August 1968 in Czechoslovakia. 44 Wiszniewski’s earliest student films, Tomorrow. April 31–May 1 1970 (1970) and Wilkasy ’70 (1971), reportages from a May Day parade and a socialist summer camp, respectively, already display a fascination with Communist ritual and regalia. Wiszniewski’s commitment to this sphere of representation was sealed by his work alongside Krzysztof Kieślowski, Tomasz Zygadło, Pawel Kędzierski, and Tadeusz Walendowski on the 1971 documentary Workers’71—Nothing About Us Without Us, a response to the bloody suppression of the December 1970 workers’ strike in the port city of Gdańsk. Wiszniewski’s subsequent, individually authored films would continue to focus on the culturally sanctified image of “the worker” while abandoning cinéma vérité for a highly structured, almost theatrical approach. In his three f ilms produced at the WFO—the aforementioned Wanda Gościmińska (1975), The Primer (Elementarz, 1976), and Foreman on a Farm (Sztygar na zagrodzie, 1978)—Wiszniewski worked with the same team: Zbigniew Rybczyński or Jerzy Zieliński for cinematography, Janusz Hajdun for music, and Dorota Wardęszkiewicz for editing. Although Wiszniewski’s style continued to evolve across the three works, working with the same team gave the films a certain aesthetic cohesion: all three make frequent use of frontally staged scenes and tableaux vivants, as well as long takes and disconcerting camera angles that result in a surreal, at times oneiric, quality. This sense of a dreamscape is reinforced by the films’ structure: self-contained scenes or episodes are strung together using intentionally opaque logic. “Each cut constructs a new relationship between the screen and the spectator,” wrote the famous editor Lidia Zonn of Wiszniewski’s films. “Each shot is a surprise that forces the viewer to find some connection 43 Ibid., 22. 44 Mirosław Przylipiak, “Wojciech Wiszniewski,” text accompanying the DVD box set of Wiszniewski’s films, Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, 2008.

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to the previous one by himself.”45 The soundtrack varies the most between the three films but, much like the editing, demands an intellectual effort from the viewer. Wiszniewski asks the viewer at various times to identify well-known poems and songs that he layers over the images or to make sense of unexpected juxtapositions between often exaggerated sound effects and the image. Such use of nondiegetic sound to comment on the images moves Wiszniewski’s films further away from the traditional definition of documentary and toward the Eisensteinian notion of intellectual montage.

Chipping Away at the Facade Like his film about the record-breaking miner Bernard Bugdoł, Story of a Man Who Produced 552% of the Quota (Opowieść o człowieku który wykonał 552% normy), Wanda Gościmińska and Foreman on a Farm are portraits of individuals who embraced the official Socialist ideology.46 Slowly, in the way he films and records each one, Wiszniewski makes us aware of the price each has paid for it. Three years before the release of Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1976), Wiszniewski’s film about real-life labor hero Bugdoł opens with a visual match cut that compares Bugdoł to one of the idealized figures atop the Stalin-built Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.47 The rest of the film interweaves 45 Lidia Zonn, O montażu w filmie: o montażu elektronicznym (Warsaw: Centrum Animacji Kultury, 2001), 17, as quoted in Hendrykowski, Wojciech Wiszniewski, 164. 46 Viewers of these films often wonder how Wiszniewski managed to convince Bernard Bugdoł and Wanda Gościmińska to participate in these projects. No clear answer emerges from the archives. One possible explanation is that both Bugdoł and Gościmińska were used to being filmed and written about in the press. Both had been the subjects of newsreel segments and had books written about them in the Stalinist period. Both had become the subject of renewed interest in the 1960s when acclaimed journalist Hanna Krall began to write essays about the present lives of former shock workers. Indeed, both seem to have come to Wiszniewski’s attention by way of Krall’s reportages. For more on this connection, see Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska, Krall i filmowcy (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2006). 47 Andrzej Wajda’s 1976 film Man of Marble told the story of a brash young filmmaker named Agnieszka who will stop at nothing to make a documentary film about a fallen labor hero named Mateusz Birkut. In the film’s first scene, she discovers a marble statue of Birkut in a museum’s cellar. The rest of the film brings the “man of marble” to life in extended flashbacks as Agnieszka works to piece together his story. The film caused a sensation in Poland for its honest depiction of the Stalinist period. Polish f ilm scholar Tadeusz Lubelski has argued that the character of Agnieszka in the f ilm is based on Wiszniewski as well as on poet Agnieszka Osiecka and filmmaker Agnieszka Holland. Tadeusz Lubelski, “‘He Speaks to Us’: The Author in Everything for Sale, Man of Marble and Pan Tadeusz,” in The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance, ed. John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska (New York and London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 43. Piotr Andrejew, in a 2006 interview with Kino magazine, also revealed that Wajda, knowing

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observational camerawork with staged scenes including Bugdoł and his family watching himself performing labor feats on-screen in an old newsreel and Bugdoł carefully dusting the medals he has received from the state. Interviews and voice-over testimony from Bugdoł’s family and former colleagues explain how, in becoming a model worker, he made life difficult for his family and lost the companionship of his peers, as well as his (largely class-based) sense of self. In 1981, critic Bożena Umińska remarked that Bugdoł “is like the recovered private voice of Wanda Gościmińska—or she his social silence. These two figures are two sides of the same coin.”48 In many ways, Wanda Gościmińska represents a second, more audacious, take on the subject of the “shock” or “model” worker, who undertook the state’s challenge to surpass established production quotas in highly staged and mediatized labor performances. 49 This is signaled on both a visual and an auditory level. Where Story of a Man was shot in black and white, Wanda Gościmińska embraces the possibilities offered by color, contrasting the saturated pink of the heroine’s suit with the monotone dreariness of her surroundings. Conversely, Wiszniewski trades in the rich polyphony of the earlier film for a nearly single-voice soundtrack dominated by Gościmińska’s recital of her own biography: Wiszniewski edited Gościmińska’s original text and had her read it out loud for the film as if it were a script. The result is that she speaks in flat, declaratory sentences that feel impersonal and devoid of feeling. Gościmińska’s stylized narration is broken down into nine short chapters (the entire film is only twenty minutes long), each introduced by a black title card reading in red: “Lineage,” “Generations,” “Yesterday,” “Idea,” “Today,” “Home,” “Memory,” and “Tomorrow.” This distantiating device regularly reminds viewers that they are watching a de-construction of the traditional socialist realist narrative. As in Story of a Man, Wiszniewski contrasts the real-life labor hero with her official depiction. At one point, he has her stand in front of an immense portrait of herself painted on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Polish People’s Republic. As the camera pulls ever farther away, Gościmińska grows as small as a speck at one end of a long Łódź alley, entirely overshadowed by the portrait (Figure 5.1). Elsewhere, Wiszniewski that shock workers were Wiszniewski’s specialty, offered him the position of second director on Man of Marble. Wiszniewski refused. Piotr Andrejew, “Wolne żarty: wspomnienie o Wojciechu Wiszniewskim,” Kino (November 2006): 93. 48 Bożena Umińska, “A w co wierzysz?” Kino (April 1981): 27. 49 Both f ilms were based on reportages about the subsequent life of famous Stalinist-era shock workers by writer Hanna Krall. For more about the relationship between Hanna Krall’s writing and Wiszniewski’s films, see Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska, Krall i filmowcy (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2006).

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Figure 5.1. Wanda Gościmińska stands overshadowed by her own portrait in Wojciech Wiszniewski, Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver, 1975. 35 mm film still. Courtesy Educational Film Studio, Łódź.

Figure 5.2. Wanda Gościmińska and her family celebrate in front of newsreels rear-projected onto the back wall in Wojciech Wiszniewski, Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver, 1975. 35 mm film still. Courtesy Educational Film Studio, Łódź.

makes use of film and early video. The final shot of Story of Man had been of Bugdoł in a TV studio, his face multiplied across a dozen or so screens. In the later work, Wiszniewski films Gościmińska having dinner with her family. Everyone around her is talking, plates are being passed, but Gościmińska again remains motionless. On the wall behind her, we perceive a flicker of black and white. As the camera slowly zooms out, we see that these are images from postwar Polish newsreels projected onto the back wall of what

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is most likely a studio reconstruction of her living room (Figure 5.2). These scenes allow Wiszniewski to take his argument from Story of a Man one step further: here, the labor hero is not only revealed to be a mere mortal, but shown to have been overshadowed by her own myth and become alienated from herself. As Mikołaj Jazdon and Piotr Pławuszeski argue, she has no private persona—even with her family, she maintains a staid demeanor, her mind inhabited by the figures, needs, and beliefs of an earlier time.50

Exploring the Collective Unconscious This foray beyond appearances into Gościmińska’s inner world becomes an occasion for Wiszniewski to play with the visual as well as verbal clichés of socialist realist discourse. With the help of feminist performance artist Ewa Partum, who received a scenography credit, Wiszniewski makes visible and material the symbols and allegories that have colonized Gościmińska’s mind. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, she is seated at a table along with four other adults (presumably, her siblings). All five sit facing forward, as though on a stage. The camera glides from one end of the table to another while the adults deliver their lines, each time revealing a different figure in front of the table—allegories for the working-class professions with which the family would have felt solidarity (Figure 5.3). Wiszniewski makes use of the same device in a later scene that recreates Gościmińska’s reception of a distinction from the state. The hallway she traverses is peopled with living statues that serve as allegories of the other professions—miners, bricklayers, pig-breeders—frequently honored for their labor records. Wiszniewski films them all from below, mocking the monumentalizing angle beloved by socialist realist newsreels. In the subsequent Primer, Wiszniewski set out to do for his contemporaries what he had done for the generation that had come of age in the Stalinist period. Where Story of a Man and Wanda Gościmińska had featured historical actors, albeit in staged settings, Primer breaks free of any connection to the documentary genre. Wiszniewski’s initial outline, as presented to the WFO, had been a film about Marian Falski, author of the text used by all Polish children in learning how to read and write. Falski’s Primer was first published in 1910 and was continually updated and reprinted until 1974. Wiszniewski met with Falski to discuss the film, but the author died shortly before work on

50 Jazdon and Pławuszewski, “Polski film lat siedemdziesiątych: nic o nas bez nas,” 316.

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Figure 5.3. Wanda Gościmińska, presumably with her siblings, in the section which describes the poverty of her childhood in Wojciech Wiszniewski, Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver, 1975. 35 mm film still. Courtesy Educational Film Studio, Łódź.

the project could begin.51 The final version Wiszniewski ended up producing consists of two parts: the first was based on Falski’s Primer, the second on Władysław Bełza’s poem “Catechism of the Polish Child,” published in 1900—both texts fundamental to Polish national identity. Primer opens with a shot of an older man—presumably Falski, because letters of the alphabet are stapled to his overcoat—walking down a long hallway whose decrepit walls reveal snatches of a fresco by Jan Matejko featuring Polish kings of yore. “The author of the Primer has died, but his idea 51 Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego, 372.

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lives on,” a chorus of children’s voices excitedly whispers while a trumpet fanfare plays in the background. From there, we move into a typical Łódź courtyard in which elderly people stand clustered in groups, as if waiting for something. The light is bleak, and the people are dressed for cold weather. An ethereal song accompanies the camera as it glides seamlessly through the courtyard and its adjacent spaces. One by one, we are introduced to the first letters of the alphabet not by the expected, idealized images, but instead by images of exhaustion and squalor: a tired woman wiping the floor on her knees breathes out “aaaah”; a middle-aged couple having sex expels “be…be…be…”; an old man unlocking a wardrobe containing Artur Grottger’s patriotic etching Kucie kos (The Forging of the Scythes) whispers “tsssse…”; and an old woman feeding chickens calls out “de… de… de….” Finally, a crowd of Poles facing the camera chants the remaining letters. The second half of the film follows the question-and-answer format of Bełza’s poem. Alternating shots present adults engaged in scenes typical of Polish reality (guards on their lunch break, a priest visiting a sick man, a bride and groom posing for their portrait) and close-ups of children’s faces. All look into the camera gravely. The adults never move their lips—it is others’ voices that ask the poem’s questions from off-screen: “Who are you?” “Which sign is yours?” “Where do you live?” The children wait a long time before answering. Finally, the last question, asked by members of the Socialist Youth— “What do you believe in?” —goes unanswered. Two boys stare into the camera in silence before turning around and walking off into the countryside to the sound of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” The response that should have followed—”I believe in Poland” —would, of course, have been ringing in the minds of most Polish viewers. Like Wanda Gościmińska, Primer works to instill in its viewer a skepticism regarding indoctrination of any kind. It draws attention to the way human consciousness is culturally constructed from early childhood on. It then goes on to identify some of the images, phrases, and even sensations—what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling”52—encountered by Poles on a regular basis. It is this capacity of the film to solder external reality with affective perception that led Przylipiak to describe it as “a portrayal of the state of the Polish soul in the mid-1970s.”53 The film may additionally be read as a polemic against the gloominess of everyday life in Socialist 52 Raymond Williams first coined this phrase in Preface to Film (coauthored with Michael Orrom, 1954) and then developed it further in The Long Revolution (1961) and Marxism and Literature (1977). 53 Przylipiak, DVD booklet.

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Poland, against a grinding down of the public’s intelligence by propaganda, and, for Jazdon and Pławuszewski, a call “to return to basic principles: the alphabet in its purest form, before the Socialist Newspeak, before Gierek’s propaganda of success.”54 Finally, Primer dares to hint, in that final question, at the potential noncoincidence of Polish national identity with a Communist one. In a critically underexplored parallel to Stanisław Wyspiański’s 1901 play The Wedding (Wesele), it nestles a discussion of patriotism along with a call for Polish national emancipation within a surrealist text.

Legacy As a film whose irony might be lost on less perceptive viewers, Wanda Gościmińska was screened in theaters and at festivals, where it drew a great deal of attention and garnered numerous awards.55 Primer, on the other hand, was immediately banned by the censors and had its f irst public screening at the Krakow Film Festival in May 1981, three months after Wiszniewski’s death. The film was awarded the Festival’s Grand Prix, along with individual awards for art direction, music, and cinematography. Surprisingly, given the film’s narrative difficulty, it also won the third place in the Viewers’ Choice category in Lublin that year. Primer has since become enshrined in the canon of Polish cinema that continues to resonate with new generations. In a recent article, Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska traces Wiszniewski’s influence on contemporary Polish cinema and discusses Piotr Stasik‘s Opera about Poland (Opera o Polsce, 2017), which explicitly positions itself as a contemporary take on Primer.56 (Stasik even engaged Wiszniewski’s former editor at the WFO, Dorota Wardęszkiewicz.) Despite the banning of Primer, Wiszniewski went on to make two more short films—The Carpenter (Stolarz, 1976) at the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw and Foreman on a Farm (1978) at the WFO. Both films presented much more linear, if still aesthetically experimental, stories of the confrontation between man and history in one case, and man and his social environment in the other. It is important to note that, for all the distinctiveness of his films, Wiszniewski was not a solitary “visionary”; 54 Jazdon and Pławuszewski, “Polski film lat siedemdziesiątych: nic o nas bez nas,” 318. 55 Wanda Gościmińska won third place for best script in Krakow, an honorable mention in the Viewers’ Choice category at the Łódź National Festival of Sociopolitical Films, and the top prize in the short film category at the Lublin International Film Forum. 56 Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska, “Teraźniejsze momenty przeszłości – współczesny dokument kreacyjny w dwóch odsłonach,” Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu 3 (2017).

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the exceptional support provided to him by the WFO doubtless played a role in sensitizing him to the importance of institutional frameworks for film production. In interviews, Wiszniewski consistently showed himself to be attentive to the needs of his colleagues and those who might come after him. In 1978, he received the same “Vector” award as Łukowski from the Young Filmmakers’ Circle, and in 1980, a year before his death, he was elected chairperson of the programming council of a TV studio freshly created to facilitate the “debut” for young filmmakers.57 At a time when film form appeared to be deteriorating due to the rapid rise of the content-oriented TV model of production, Wiszniewski’s films and those of the other “creative documentarians” helped reaff irm its importance. In his 1975 review of the Krakow film festival, Drozdowski explicitly positioned the work coming out of the WFO as the antithesis of films produced for television: The studio seems to have taken on a most curious task: that of reaffirming cinematic values—image, movement, and montage of both picture and sound. The reconstruction of all that has been pushed off the screen by talking heads, static framing, and multiminute, lengthy shots.58

At the same time, the staying power of Wiszniewski’s films appears to stem from their ability to put form to work as a vehicle for cultural and political commentary. His films demonstrate that experimental cinema in deft hands has as much to contribute to our understanding of the historical processes that shape subjectivity as to discussions of medium specificity. In 1979, Film magazine reprinted excerpts from Wiszniewski’s master’s thesis in which the filmmaker argued that “culture is largely based on the process of giving symbolic form to the values common to a given group. […] I think that the artist’s complete self-fulfillment only takes place when he can feel and express what the collective is feeling.”59 Wiszniewski was one of a number of filmmakers straddling the divide between documentary and experimental film in 1970s Poland. His works are among those that have had the greatest impact precisely because of their ability to give visible and audible form to the abstractions of ideology and cultural identity. Such 57 “Filmowe Studio Młodych TV: Oczekiwania i nadzieje,” Kino 7 (1980): 20–22. 58 Drozdowski, “Wraca nowe,” 3. 59 Wojciech Wiszniewski in “Po 35 latach,” Film 32 (1979): 2. Wiszniewski’s master’s thesis has recently been translated in full and reprinted in Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska, Theory of Practice/Teoria Praktyki (Łódź: Szkoła Filmowa Łodźi, 2018).

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unconventional films would not have been possible in Socialist Poland without the resources and temporary protection afforded by the Educational Film Studio. The great irony is that, in the end, Wiszniewski’s films may be considered “educational,” but instead of communicating content as empirical, they taught viewers to think both of film and of their own consciousness as constructed.

Bibliography Bernard, Renata and Steven Woodward, eds. Krzysztof Kieślowski: Interviews. Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2016. Dondzik, Michał, Krzysztof Jajko, and Emil Sowiński. Elementarz Wytwórni Filmów Oświatowych. Łódź: Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych, 2018. Drecka-Wojtyczka, Elżbieta. “Maciej Łukowski: Wspomnienie 1947–1990.” Gazeta Wyborcza, March 28, 2000. Hendrykowski, Marek, ed. Wojciech Wiszniewski. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2006. Imre, Anikó. TV Socialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Jazdon, Mikołaj and Piotr Pławuszewski. “Polski film lat siedemdziesiątych: nic o nas bez nas.” In Historia polskiego filmu dokumentalnego (1945–2014), edited by Małgorzata Hendrykowska, 227–361. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2014. Lovejoy, Alice. Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Lubelski, Tadeusz. Historia kina polskiego: twórcy, filmy, konteksty. Katowice: Videograf II, 2009. Łukowski, Maciej. Wojciech Wiszniewski: zapis faktów podstawowych: sesja naukowa. Łódź: Łódzki Dom Kultury, 1983. Mąka-Malatyńska, Katarzyna. Krall i filmowcy. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2006. Mąka-Malatyńska, Katarzyna. “Teraźniejsze momenty przeszłości – współczesny dokument kreacyjny w dwóch odsłonach.” Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu 3 (2017). https://akademiapolskiegofilmu.pl/pl/historia-polskiego-filmu/ pleograf/za-dokumentem/9/terazniejsze-momenty-przeszlosci-wspolczesnydokument-kreacyjny-w-dwoch-odslonach/604. Mąka-Malatyńska, Katarzyna. Theory of Practice/Teoria Praktyki. Łódź: Szkoła Filmowa Łodźi, 2018. Przylipiak, Mirosław. “Od konkretu do metafory.” Kino 1 (1984): 13–16. Przylipiak, Mirosław. “Wojciech Wiszniewski.” Text accompanying the DVD box set of Wiszniewski’s films. Warsaw: Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, 2007.

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Sørenssen, Bjørn. “The Polish Black Series Documentary and the British Free Cinema Movement.” In A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre, 183–200. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Sowiński, Emil. “Archiwa w badaniach nad cenzurą w filmie krótkometrażowym. Przypadek twórczości Wojciecha Wiszniewskiego (na podstawie materiałów archiwalnych z Wytwórni Filmów Oświatowych).” In Archiwa we współczesnych badaniach filmoznawczych, edited by Barbara Giza, Katarzyna MąkaMalatyńska, and Piotr Zwierzchowski, 235–58. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2020. Sowiński, Emil. “Pokolenie WFO” (“The WFO Generation”). Master’s thesis, University of Łódź, 2016. Sowiński, Emil. “Produkcja filmu krótkometrażowego w epoce gierkowskiej na przykładzie działalności Wytwórni Filmów Oświatowych.” Panoptikum 16, no. 23 (2016): 93–104. Vinogradova, Maria. “Scientists, Punks, Engineers and Gurus: Soviet Experimental Film Culture in the 1960s-1980s.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7, no. 1 (2016): 39–52. Zonn, Lidia. “O montażu w filmie.” In Jerzy Matula, O montażu elektronicznym. Warsaw: Centrum Animacji Kultury, 2001.

Primary Documents “Jubileusz Szkoły Filmowej” (“Film School Anniversary”). Film 43 (1978). “Młody film polski – próba sondażu” (“Young Polish Film—Attempt at a Survey”). Kino 78 (1978). “Po 35 latach” (“After 35 Years”). Film 32 (1979). “Co nowego?” (“What’s new?”). Film 40 (1978). “Uchwała w sprawie rozwoju kinematografii” (“Resolution Regarding the Development of the Film Industry”). In “Co nowego?” section. Film 24 (1975). Andrejew, Piotr. “Wolne żarty: wspomnienie o Wojciechu Wiszniewskim” (“Free Jokes: Remembering Wojciech Wiszniewski”). Kino 11 (November 2006). Drozdowski, Bogumił. “Małe Kino Polskie” (“Minor Polish Cinema”). Film 45 (1975). Drozdowski, Bogumił. “Wraca nowe” (“Return of the New”). Film 39 (1975). Karbowiak, Małgorzata. “Paradoksy” (“Paradoxes”). Film 47 (1978). Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Interview in “Obserwacja i synteza” (“Observation and Synthesis”). Film 22 (1978). Kłopotowski, Krzysztof. “Buntownik, który miał powody” (“The Rebel With a Cause”). Kino 184 (April 1981). Michałek, Bolesław. “Filmowe Studio Młodych TV: Oczekiwania i nadzieje” (“Film Studio ‘Young TV’: Hopes and Expectations”). Kino 175 (1980).

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Płażewski, Leszek. “O Wojtku Wiszniewskim, z okazji pewnego festiwalu” (“About Wojtek Wiszniewski, on the Occasion of the Recent Festival”). Kino 217 (July 1985). Rutkiewicz, Witold. “Osiemnasty krótkometrażowy” (“The Eighteenth Short Film Festival). Ekran (1978). Sobański, Oskar. “Młodzi reżyserzy: fakty, liczby, sytuacje” (“Young Directors: Facts, Numbers, Situations”). Film 38 (1978). Sobański, Oskar. “Pokolenie WFO” (“The WFO Generation”). Film 34 (1979). Sobolewski, Tadeusz. “Film krótki umiera?” (“Is the Short Film Dying?”). Film 22 (1978). Sobolewski, Tadeusz. “Młodzi… i jeszcze młodzi” (“The Young… And Those Even Younger”). Film 21 (1978). Tronowicz, Henryk. “Ważkie, ciekawy, potrzebne” (“Weighty, Interesting, Necessary”). Film 45 (1975). Umińska, Bożena. “A w co wierzysz?” (“And What Do You Believe In?”). Kino 184 (April 1981). Wiszniewski, Wojciech. Interview with Elżbieta Królikowska. “O potrzebie powrotu do pojęć podstawowych” (“On the Need to Return to Foundational Concepts”). Ekran 34 (1975).

About the Author Dr. Masha Shpolberg is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches courses on Russian and Eastern European cinema, as well as global documentary. Her first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period. She is also the coeditor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (forthcoming).

6. Home Movies and Cinematic Memories: Fixing the Gaze on Vukica Đilas and Tatjana Ivančić Petra Belc

Abstract The remarkable films of Vukica Đilas and Tatjana Ivančić have been largely omitted from Yugoslav avant-garde film historiographies. This chapter outlines their creative trajectories within the thriving scenes of 1970s experimental and amateur filmmaking, focusing on the opportunities and limitations they faced within these milieus and relating their work to two central theoretical concepts of Yugoslav experimental cinema: the Antifilm and the fixation film. As the chapter argues, while Đilas and Ivančić were never closely associated with these theories, they nevertheless provided apt frameworks for their fascinating oeuvres as concepts carrying implicit feminist potential. Ultimately, the chapter proposes alternative understandings of women’s f ilmmaking under socialism, away from habitual frameworks of Western “feminism.” Keywords: Vukica Đilas; Tatjana Ivančić; women’s filmmaking; amateur cinema; Yugoslavia; Antifilm and fixation film

I was no longer ashamed of anything that was mine, I had no more secrets, and that is why I could not hide them anymore. Vukica Đilas1

1

Vukica Đilas, Napomene (Remarks), in Reč 72, no. 18 (2003): 115.

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch06

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The film camera is my toy; she keeps me company in the silence of nature or the sea. Tatjana Ivančić2 It was said not by mere accident that even the most oppressed proletarian had someone even more oppressed than himself, and that was his wife. Branko Prnjat3

In 1976, the Belgrade film festival FEST held an international symposium titled Žena na filmu (Woman on Film). The contributions published in the conference proceedings4 spanned Poland, France, the United States, U.S.S.R., Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy and seemingly encompassed a broad range of topics: from the position of women in the world of art and the relationship between women and film-as-commodity to the representation of women in various national cinemas and film genres. The most interesting articles did not merely analyze the figure of woman in the (male-directed film) frame, but centered on works made by women themselves. However, these articles mainly focused on a group of by then already established directors: Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, Leni Riefenstahl, Agnès Varda, Nadine Trintignant, Marguerite Duras, Binka Željazkova, Márta Mészáros, Larisa Shepitko, Mai Zetterling, Lina Wertmüller, Liliana Cavani, Wanda Jakubowska, Věra Chytilová, and Jeanne Moreau. In this international group of women, only one director—Soja Jovanović—was from Yugoslavia, and only two—Maya Deren and Shirley Clarke—were closely associated with experimental film. These omissions, as well as the occasionally dismissive tone of a couple of male writers regarding the symposium’s theme, point toward the lacuna in knowledge about women’s experimental cinema in Yugoslavia that this essay addresses. Although the Yugoslav experimental film scene did not consciously encourage women’s filmmaking, there were a number of women active in the amateur, experimental field.5 Two of them in particular—Vukica Đilas (1948–2001) 2 Mladen Hanzlovsky, “Velika prijateljica male kamere,” interview with Tatjana Ivančić. 3 Branko Prnjat, “Oslobodilačka dimenzija filma,” in Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta, ed. Milutin Čolić (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976), 92. The author does not state the source of the quote, but it is typically attributed to August Bebel. 4 Milutin Čolić, ed. Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976). 5 An exhaustive history of Yugoslav experimental cinema would include a number of women filmmakers who cannot be discussed in this essay, but whose names should nevertheless be mentioned: the innovative animator Divna Jovanović; the brave Biljana Belić, who opened new horizons with her sexual films; Bojana Vujanović, who made several remarkable experiments

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and Tatjana Ivančić (1913–87)—created remarkable works through their short and (today) largely invisible filmmaking careers. Their oeuvres have been largely overlooked within the larger context of Yugoslav experimental cinema, never examined in relation to its central theoretical and poetical traits—the Antifilm and the fixation film.6 Although Đilas and Ivančić were never closely associated with this movement, to read their work in this way, that is, through the key of Antifilm and the fixation film, might not only provide an apt theoretical framework for understanding their fascinating oeuvres, but also broaden the explanatory borders of these two poetic principles—revealing their feminist potential.

Antifilm/Fixation Film Yugoslav experimental cinema was established in 1962 during five declarative conversations in the Ciné-club Zagreb, whose participants set themselves the task of developing the idea of Antifilm. Antifilm served as the impetus for establishing a biannual gathering of Yugoslav experimentalists—the Genre Experimental Film Festival (GEFF, 1963–1970). Initially, its theoretical essence concerned “multiple reductions,”7 which attempted to reach the core of the film medium. This research into zero degree film and filmmaking, which Slavoj Žižek saw as a “rupture into the self-knowledge of the medium,”8 was visually elaborated in Mihovil Pansini‘s theory films9 K3 ili čisto nebo bez oblaka (K3 or Clear Sky without Clouds), Scusa Signorina, and Dvorište (The Courtyard) (all three films are from 1963). Characterized by observation, a relentless focus on a particular subject, object, or gesture, these films embodied the fixation principle which was subsequently recognized as Antifilm’s strongest common visual denominator and “the fundamental principle of ‘antifilm.’”10 K3 fixated on an awareness of the medium itself, represented by a blank film strip, while The Courtyard directed its fixed and many unfinished miniatures; the poet Mirjana Božin, with her quiet, intimate documentary shorts; filmmakers Dunja Ivanišević and Julijana Terek, as well as the painter Dubravka Rakoci, who each only made one film; and many other less productive and yet unknown filmmakers. 6 It is hard to argue against this omission, because the field is somewhat fragmented and generally unevenly researched. 7 Ana Janevski, “We Cannot Promise To Do More Than Experiment,” in Surfing the Black, ed. Gal Kirn et al. (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), 50. 8 Slavoj Žižek, “Odsotnost sveta,” Ekran, no. 53 (1967): 168. 9 My term to define the films of Mihovil Pansini made in 1963. 10 The Yugoslav film theorist Dušan Stojanović developed the theory of fixation film in 1965, drawing on the principles of Antifilm. It could be considered a subcategory of structural film

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gaze on daily life in an urban courtyard. Scusa Signorina, in turn, focused on minimizing the intervention of the author on the recorded material by liberating the camera. It did this by literally detaching the apparatus from the viewpoint of the director (who placed the camera freely around his body), resulting in what could be labeled an “automatic” city symphony. According to Dušan Stojanović, authors deploying Antifilmic principles began to shift the metaphysical drama it produced away from the screen, toward the spectator. In return, this visual procedure resulted in “[e]mpathy and the discovery of the self,” demanding the supremacy of emotion over reason: “We are directing our gaze not in order to learn, but to experience.”11 Although women artists and filmmakers did not participate in or engage directly with the shaping of Antifilm, its insistence on breaking with the traditional codes of filmic creation and modes of representation nevertheless evokes aspects of early feminist film theory,12 while the theoretical realm of fixation film seemingly aligns with a spiritual habitus traditionally considered female—that is the dominance of intuition, emotion, and sensation over rationality and intellect. It is these two conceptual avenues that the essay will pursue in analyzing the work of Vukica Đilas and Tatjana Ivančić.

Statistics and Socialist (Anti-)Feminism The abovementioned 1976 FEST conference illustrates the perception and status of women in Yugoslav cinema in important ways. Although it omits the amateur context and only cursorily touches on experimentation, it nevertheless represents a valuable historical framing for this study. Contributions to the conference were mostly characterized by either a Marxist or a nontheoretical “common-sense” perspective on the status quo, and it seems that none of the contributors sought a feminist theoretical framework, which, along with the theory of experimental cinema and Yugoslav feminism more generally, was in its initial stages at that time.13 Bojana Pejić notes as def ined by P. Adams Sitney in 1969. See more in Dušan Stojanović, Velika avantura filma (Belgrade and Novi Sad: Institut za film and Prometej, 1998), 78. 11 Stojanović, Velika avantura, 78. 12 See, for example, Laura Mulvey’s influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), which took aim at Hollywood’s representation of woman and her position “as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning,” calling for a politically and aesthetically radical alternative filmic expression which would “destroy the pleasure” feeding the (male) gaze. 13 For overviews of Western feminist film theory, see Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2004); Sue Thornham, ed., Feminist

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that “in the 1970s, there was no feminist art criticism in Yugoslavia,” and in the 1960s and early 1970s, “many women artists […] would never agree that their gender had anything to do with their art.”14 The same could be said of the amateur film scene. Second-wave feminist texts appeared in the mid-1970s in the circles of women gathered around the faculties of humanities and social sciences across the Yugoslav republics,15 culminating in the now legendary 1978 conference Drug-ca Žena. Žensko pitanje — novi pristup? (Comrade Woman. The Women’s Question—A New Approach?), which took place at the Belgrade Student Cultural Center (SKC).16 The conference included discussions, exhibitions, and a film program, the latter concerned with women both in front of and behind the camera. Yet the organizers screened only one film by a Yugoslav director, Jasmina Tešanović (1954), who neither studied in Yugoslavia nor lived there at the time.17 Among the theoretical texts

Film Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen, vol. 14 (London: Wallflower Press, 2002); Anneke Smelik, And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1998). Some of the key studies devoted to women’s experimental cinema are Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943–71 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Robin Blaetz, ed., Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman, eds., Women and Experimental Filmmaking (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Exceptionally valuable studies on the question of women’s art and feminism in Yugoslavia are Bojana Pejić et al., Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna: MUMOK and Cologne: Walter König, 2009) and Zsófia Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 14 Bojana Pejić, “Proletarians of All Countries, Who Washes Your Socks? Equality, Dominance and Difference in Eastern European Art”, in Bojana Pejić, ed., Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna: MUMOK and Cologne: Walter König, 2009, 19-29). 27. 15 Zsófia Lóránd, “‘Learning a Feminist Language’: The Intellectual History of Feminism in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s,” (PhD diss., Central European University, 2014), 151. Lóránd stresses that the dominant feminist theoretical model in Yugoslavia was the French one, with écriture féminine leaving a permanent trace in post-Yugoslav feminist theory, as well.

16 Details of the conference can be found in Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Belgrade, 1978. Remembering the Conference ‘Drugarica Žena. Žensko pitanje–novi pristup?’/’Comrade Woman. The Women’s Question: A New Approach?’ Thirty Years After” (master’s thesis, Utrecht University, 2008), https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/31158. 17 The remaining women’s films were 35 mm works by Věra Chytilová and Liliana Cavani, and 16 and 8 mm f ilms by experimentalist Annabella Miscuglio and writer Dacia Maraini. Bonfiglioli, “Belgrade, 1978. Remembering the Conference,” 123.

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distributed at the conference, only Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974) paid explicit attention to film. These oversights on the part of the organizers of Drug-ca Žena are somewhat understandable. Between 1946 and 1990, Yugoslavia produced 883 feature f ilms made by 266 directors. Although by 1976, there were around seven hundred women working in the f ilm industry in Yugoslavia, 18 only seven among them 19 were able to produce a total of f ifteen feature f ilms in the span of f ifty-four years. 20 Even in the f irst postwar decade, when the revolutionary spirit was still strong, 63 percent of leading roles were played by men. 21 Additionally, the roles that were available to women were caught in the thrall of misogyny and machismo.22 Women mostly found jobs in theater, on TV, and in radio; 23 in cinema, they habitually worked as editors and were active as directors only in the realm of short f ilms. “[T]he moving image medium in this region is predominantly of the male gender,” wrote the Croatian documentarist Petar Krelja in 2006. 24 Film and woman! Oh, god! Again this desire of the organizers to indulge the conventions of international political and class decorum 25 […] [W]e cannot simply grant women this equality which they would want because we know we are still integrated in a class society, in which parents govern over children, men govern over women, fathers govern over mothers, those who are socially and politically stronger govern over those who are weak.

So wrote the Slovenian philosopher Taras Kermauner somberly in his contribution to the Woman on Film symposium,26 disclosing some of the major points of misalignment between the position of Yugoslav women and the 18 Ranko Munitić, “Kako nacrtati ženu,” in Čolić, Žena na filmu, 65. 19 Soja Jovanović, Ljiljana Jojić, Vesna Ljubić, Gordana Boškov, Suada Kapić, Eva Petrović, and Mirjana Marić. 20 Miroslav Bata Petrović, “Debitanti u Ju filmu (Statistika),” Yu Film Danas, no. 17–18 (1990–1): 32–35. 21 Miša Grčar, “Lik žene u posleratnom jugoslovenskom filmu,” in Čolić, Žena na filmu, 95. 22 Nebojša Jovanović, Gender and Sexuality in the Classical Yugoslav Cinema, 1947–1962 (PhD diss., Central European University, 2014), 32; Munitić,”Kako nacrtati ženu”, 68. 23 Rapa Škulje, “Žene kao stvaraoci filma,” in Čolić, Žena na filmu, 26. 24 “Žensko pismo i hrvatski film,” in Petar Krelja, Kao na filmu: Ogledi 1965–2008 (As Seen on Film: Reflections 1965–2008) (Zagreb: HFS, 2009), 320. 25 The United Nations proclaimed 1975 International Women’s Year, which was the main reason for organizing the FEST symposium. 26 Taras Kermauner, “Žena na filmu” in Čolić, Žena na filmu, 78.

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official politics of the state. Although Yugoslav socialism programmatically proclaimed women’s emancipation and equality, writing them into the first Constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946,27 Kermauner’s statement fleshes out the inconsistencies and paradoxes of the state’s proclaimed emancipatory politics when compared to the actual position of women in the patriarchal consciousness of Yugoslav Socialist self-management. These tensions came to the fore in the mid-1970s, when a new generation of female intellectuals began challenging the state’s politics, a situation described by Zsófia Lóránd as an opposition between these women’s “neofeminism” and the state’s “anti-feminism,”28 as reflected in the latter’s calls for “generally human” (i.e., universal) emancipation.29

Common Denominator: Invisibility Programs of Yugoslav amateur film festivals that are available to today record the names of only a few women. Similarly, the recent wave of interest in Yugoslav experimental cinema has focused almost exclusively on male filmmakers, acknowledging only the work of a few women who gained recognition in visual art, rather than experimental film, contexts.30 Interpretively rich and innovative films made by Vukica Đilas and Tatjana Ivančić have, for instance, failed to find their place within this predominantly male experimental film canon. Each of these women created a unique poetic universe different from the acknowledged standards of amateur or experimental cinema in the 1970s Yugoslavia, yet they remain marginalized. Tatjana Ivančić, a doctor of law, was an older housewife, a fact that became an obstacle to the public recognition of her films.31 Vukica Đilas, on the other hand, had a degree in dramaturgy and was an ardent connoisseur of contemporary art, yet, during her lifetime, decided to eschew a public 27 УСТАВ ФЕДЕРАТИВНЕ НАРОДНЕ РЕПУБЛИКЕ ЈУГОСЛАВИЈЕ, Члан 24 (The Constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, article 24), 10, accessed january 8, 2019, http:// mojustav.rs/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Ustav1946.pdf. 28 Lóránd, “‘Learning a Feminist Language’”, 128. 29 Ibid. 30 Women f ilmmakers for whom this is true include Bogdanka Poznanović, Breda Beban, Sanja Iveković, Marina Abramović, and Nuša Dragan. See more in Petra Belc Krnjaić, “Some Remarks on the Position of Women in the History of Yugoslav Experimental Cinema: The Case of Tatjana Ivančić,” in Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future, ed. Renata Jambrešić Kirin et. al. (Naples, Zagreb, and Napoli: L’Orientale University Press, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, and Unior Press, 2019), 249–70. 31 Personal conversation with Vladimir Anđelković, Belgrade, March 2014.

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showing of her films. Despite these differences, both women shared a passion for small-format cameras, which they always carried with them to record the mundane fragments of their daily lives.

Home Movies: 8 mm Intimacy There are fewer and fewer books and films into which I can escape and hide myself. Vukica Đilas32

Vukica Đilas was a well-known figure in the Yugoslav underground circles of the 1970s.33 She studied dramaturgy at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and later worked mainly as a translator. She is probably most remembered for her leading role in Plastični Isus (Plastic Jesus, 1971), a controversial “plastic bomb”34 of a graduate film made by her colleague Lazar Stojanović. The film wreaked havoc on the lives of those involved in its production. After her death in 2001, Đilas’s expartner, Branko Vučićević, with whom she lived in the 1970s and who himself was a cult figure of the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde, deposited a number of her 8 mm film diaries (approximately two hours of never-beforescreened material spread over thirty-five film rolls)35 in the archive of the Akademski Filmski Centar (Academic Film Center) in Belgrade. Apart from one screening of the raw material in 2006, Đilas’s films were archived until the filmmaker Slobodan Šijan assembled a fifty-minute version called Home Movies, presenting it in 2015. Home Movies consists of eighteen mostly chronologically assembled rolls separated by brief intertitles contextualizing the images. The 2015 screening was accompanied by the live improvisation of the pianist LP duo, whose score became the newly assembled film’s official soundtrack. The material spans over twenty years—beginning in 1970 and 32 Đilas, Remarks, 153. 33 Đilas was the daughter of two (in)famous high-profile Socialist figures who divorced in 1952—the partisan feminist Mitra Mitrović and the political dissident Milovan Đilas. As Šijan has implied, this information usually overshadows the work and life of their daughter, so I will leave it to readers to research her family history for themselves. In Slobodan Šijan, Filmus (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2015), 203. 34 Šijan, Filmus, 206. 35 According to the Academic Film Center archivist Ivan Velisavljević, the boxes with Đilas’s films contain sixty-seven rolls; thirty-seven of them are marked and digitized (126 minutes), and the existing f ifty-minute f ilm is made from this material. There are still some ninety minutes of nondigitized material spread over thirty unmarked rolls (private correspondence with Velisavljević).

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Figure 6.1. Vukica Đilas, Home Movies, 1970–199?. Film still from digitized 8 mm original. Courtesy Academic Film Center – Student City Cultural Center, Belgrade.

ending sometime in the 1990s—while the soundtrack describes eight larger chapters of Đilas’s life.36 Beyond the intimate moments that Đilas shared with her mother and Vučićević (they all lived together in the old historical part of Belgrade), Home Movies records the vibrant artistic and social milieu she was part of, and presents a condensed story of her social and private life (Figure 6.1). For Đilas, her small “amateur” film camera was analogous to the “typewriter, a photo camera […] a pencil, a brush […] a chisel,” a material extension of its “user’s consciousness”37 with which one shapes the medium of their choice. Home Movies formally resembles Jonas Mekas’s style of staccato cinematography,38 a fragmented “single-frame” technique inspired by the films of Marie Menken,39 “a style he has made very much his own,”40 applying 36 Šijan gave provisional directorial instructions for the rhythm of the score. 37 Đilas, Remarks, 131. 38 P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89. 39 For the influence of Menken on Mekas, see “Jonas Mekas—I Find a Kindred Spirit in Marie Menken (43/135),” Web of Stories—Life Stories of Remarkable People, accessed April 28, 2019, https://youtu.be/n6hA5h4Mwq4.; Marjorie Keller, “The Apron Strings of Jonas Mekas,” in To Free The Cinema, Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 86, 88; J. Hoberman, “The Forest and The Trees,” in To Free The Cinema, 117. 40 Stan Brakhage, “Jonas Mekas,” in To Free The Cinema, 267.

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it in Walden (1964–9), Notes for Jerome (1966–78), and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000). In the afterword of Đilas’s posthumously published Napomene (Remarks, 2003), a unique mélange of her wartime diary and her art criticism, Vučićević noted that Home Movies might exist under her beloved filmmaker’s motto: “I make home movies—therefore I live. I live—therefore I make home movies.”41 Friends described Đilas as a “cinémathèque ‘nerd,’ film, art and literature connoisseur,”42 a person of “monumental erudition and intellectual honesty,”43 an “unusually independent woman, a feminist […] of outstanding learning, very sharp and quick with intelligent retorts,”44 and “the second loudest person in the Yugoslav Cinémathèque—right after the gigantic Tom Gotovac.”45 Many of these qualities are quite evident in Home Movies, an exhilarating and deeply startling portait of her personal, emotional, and social life, as well as a remarkable display of her knowledge of experimental cinema through the various formal techniques she used. The larger part of Home Movies is devoted to her life with Vučićević; we see the two lovers naked, writing, having coffee and smoking in bed, visiting exhibitions, traveling, and transgressing the borders of art and life. Đilas records the quirky and fleeting moments of their intimacy, her passion for newly acquired books, and the numerous volumes they both read—from Gene Youngblood’s seminal Expanded Cinema to the excited unpacking of a Claes Oldenburg book, P. Adams Sitney’s Film Culture Reader, Andy Warhol’s a, and the 1970 exhibition catalog Happening and Fluxus. Her room often appears in the film, its walls decorated with photographs of Edward Muybridge, Marcel Duchamp, Patti Smith, Michael Snow on the set of La Région Centrale, Nicéphore Niépce’s Point de vue du gras, and an Anthology Film Archives poster, while the social events she visited record Agnès Varda and John Cage in Belgrade, as well as Marina Abramović, Zoran Popović, and other prominent artistic figures of the SKC scene of the time. After 1985, the takes gradually become longer; in the sequence opening with the footage from Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Đilas turns the camera mostly on

41 “Napomene uz Napomene” (“Remarks on Remarks”), in Đilas, Napomene, 209. 42 Šijan, Filmus, 204. 43 “Vukica Đilas, naša prijateljica,” accessed May 23, 2016, https://www.vreme.com/cms/view. php?id=301083. 44 Lazar Stojanović in Danijela Purešević, “Art zona: Vukica Đilas—Domaći filmovi 1970–199?” (“Art zone: Vukica Đilas—Home Movies 1970–199?”), RTS, September 13, 2016, https://www.rts. rs/page/tv/ci/story/18/rts-2/2437963/art-zona-vukica-djilas---domaci-filmovi-1970-199.html. 45 Šijan, Filmus, 205.

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herself, her mother, and the sea, until the final roll (no. 35, undated) in which she mixes found footage and self-portraits to announce her imminent death. Đilas’s Home Movies diverges to an extent from Mekas’s formal techniques. Although the latter breaks up his scenes into strings of staccato visual flashes, he still mostly retains them in their entirety, offering the viewer a sense of the near completeness of the portrayed image, a unity of action, space, and time. In contrast, Đilas often uses double exposures and rephotography, condensing the form by recording only a few “blitzframes”46 per second, thereby reducing events to their minimal visual units and intensifying the fleetingness and elusiveness of each moment. 47 Home Movies resembles a series of photographs transposed into a moveable photographic album—disclosing the static in the dynamic and revealing the “dialectial principle which lies in the basis of the cinematograph,”48 a characteristic procedure for the fixation film. Her choice of visual themes in turn transforms her films into a highly coded visual diary. Đilas was obviously aware of the coded privacy of her films, on which she worked quite secretly—although it seems she was preparing them for a possible screening as early as the late 1970s,49 just as she was consciously editing and preparing Remarks in the 1990s for the book’s eventual publication, which happened posthumously only due to unforeseen complications and delays. The text abounds with quotes from various books, while its chronology follows her associative, rather than historically sequential, logic, resembling the workings of memory, which does not necessarily need to be chronological. Besides being a film diary/diary film,50 Home Movies can also be classified as a fixation film, a concept Dušan Stojanović defines as an experience as opposed to cognition, an exploration and discovery of the self and our own world against the backdrop of the worlds, things, and people outside of us.51 And, indeed, as Đilas writes in Remarks (Napomene):

46 Šijan in Purešević, “Art Zona,” n.p. 47 The film also contains a number of longer, uninterrupted takes, especially in the last part: of Vučićević sitting behind his typewriter in Paris, her mother and the sea, and, near the end, the superimpositions of herself smoking in bed. 48 Stojanović, Velika avantura filma, 78. 49 According to Saša Radojević, Home Movies were supposed to be shown in SKC around that time, but due to a change of management, the screening never took place. Purešević, “Art zona,” n.p. 50 David James has suggested that the “open-ended, nonhierarchical, impermanent form [of a diary] could be proposed as intrinsically feminist.” David James, “Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and product in Walden,” in To Free The Cinema, 150. 51 Stojanović, Velika avantura filma, 78.

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[B]y annulling the orderly graduality of history, I made a private mythology. I always only had the private signs, events, and a private country. […] Why so many quotes? Because in my autistic oasis—on my metaspacial island—it feels good to recognize my own story in other people’s voices. It feels good when someone else’s time for a brief moment crosses with mine. Then I am less lonely.52

This recognition appears to be the raison d’être for the superimpositions and the rephotographic strategies Đilas uses in her film, another strategy of structural film present in her work, in addition to the fixation on her everyday life. She records various programs from a TV screen using this material either in the final edit or as a superimposition in order to underline or explain some of her own thoughts and feelings.53 The superimposition of her mother, lover, and herself with images from Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) serves as one example. She presents its key plot points in a condensed version: Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) stealing the automobile, pulling out the gun, driving through the countryside, strolling down the street with Patricia (Jean Seberg), running from the police. Lazar Stojanović noted that Đilas “very much insisted on her independence,” with Seberg’s Patricia as a role model.54 The shot in which Mitra Mitrović’s image is superimposed with a shot of Seberg and the subtitles “I don’t want you to love me! I am very independent” appears to support this. The juxtaposition might be both a comment on Đilas’s relationship with her mother, with whom Đilas lived until the mother’s death (seven months before Đilas’s own passing), as well as on their status as women living on their own in a deeply patriarchal Yugoslav society. The last part of the film is particularly overwhelming. Originally titled Ja The End Ruža u Činiji (Me The End Rose in a Bowl), it displays Đilas’s grimly humorous, conscious farewell, condensing and overlaying many of the motifs dispersed throughout the film. The question of romantic love, the nature of male and female relationships, the idea of the woman as such, and the deceptiveness and tragedy of human existence—represented through footage taken from various TV shows, films, and drawings—are intertwined with images of her beloved coastal town of Rovinj, various “The End” titles and Looney Tunes excerpts, and the frescoes of the Etruscan necropolis of Tarquinia,55 the latter evoking an awareness of her own death. “I am 52 Đilas, Napomene, 190. 53 Šijan, Filmus, 210. 54 Stojanović in Purešević, “Art Zona,” n.p. 55 I would like to thank Ema Bakran for helping me identify the images from the frescoes.

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translating Auster. My bronchi hurt again. Moron, me, smoking,” wrote Đilas in her diary in 1995. In this final roll of the film, which Đilas edited when she was already ill, the camera gently moves in close-up across her naked breasts, the navel, and the clavicle, while her hand slowly embraces the suprasternal notch. Home Movies ends with the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes closing sequence title That’s all Folks! Đilas died of lung cancer in November 2001.

The Cinematic Memories of Tatjana Ivančić I am fiercly taken by the image, I shoot while the magic before my eyes lasts … Tatjana Ivančić56

Đilas never competed in ciné-amateur circles, although she was close to it through her personal connection to prominent filmmakers, including Tomislav Gotovac, Dušan Makavejev, and Karpo Godina. Tatjana Ivančić, on the other hand, emerged in the late 1960s and immediately became active in the amateur milieu proper, often under the category of the genre film. I began at the sea side, one bright quiet day in September, with a 160-dinar camera that my son threw away. The sea was crystal clear, the seaweed swaying in the shallows; little whelks and shells were passing by; it was an overwhelming challenge to shoot. A boy with a diving mask and fins appeared out of nowhere, dove in and out, and there was my first film. I called it Prelude after the Prokofiev composition, which is tailormade to accompany the gently heaving sea.57

Ivančić, a doctor of law who was fifty-five at the time,58 showed the film to her husband and two sons, whose reserved reactions—the husband found it lovely, one son said it wasn’t bad but not as good as Cousteau’s, 56 Undated synopsis of a radio conversation with Ivančić. Unnumbered physical folder named “Tatjana Ivančić,” Croatian Film Association. 57 “Portreti žena: Tatjana Ivančić, filmski snimatelj—amater” (“Portraits of women: Tatjana Ivančić, cinematographer—amateur”), archive box no. 14099, HRT. 58 “[At the Del Mare festival in La Spezia,] I won the first prize for debut film, a beautiful trophy, and a card congratulating the ‘Miss,’ of course ‘Miss,’ because who could imagine someone beginning to make films at the age of fifty five,” said Ivančić of her first award. Ibid. Ivančić’s quote refers to the French-language notification she recieved upon winning the award in 1969

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and the other son found it unbearably boring—encouraged her to pursue her newly discovered passion further. This stubborn determination to continue seems to have been a feature of her entire filmmaking career. By 1970, three years after her first film, Ivančić had accumulated enough points to become a Master of Amateur Film of Yugoslavia, a title awarded by the Ciné Association of Yugoslavia (CAY) based on a filmmaker’s success on the amateur film festival circuit,59 previously also given to filmmakers such as Gotovac and Pansini. In Ivančić’s case, after the award committee granted her the position of a candidate, it promised to grant her the full title within a year. Instead, she had to wait another ten years for the process to be finalized. “Can you please tell me what this is really about; is some kind of a bureaucratic procedure really necessary, even after such a long ‘apprenticeship’?” Ivančić wrote to the CAY in 1976, expressing her frustration at her status being put “on hold.” It is uncertain whether her gender as such had informed this considerable administrative delay, but to the best of my knowledge, Ivančić remained the only woman to carry this prestigious title in Yugoslavia until the country’s disintegration in the early 1990s. Ivančić won awards not only in Yugoslavia but also at various international amateur film festivals, including ones in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Lisbon, Spezia, Trieste, Berlin, Belsen, and Vienna. Contemporary newspaper accounts and rosters of festival participation60 place her alongside filmmakers who remain well known today among scholars of Yugoslav experimental and amateur cinema, including Lordan Zafranović, Ivan Martinac, Vladimir Petek, Mladen Stilinović, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Dalibor Martinis, and Sanja Iveković.61 Although she regularly won in competitions—especially for her excellent camerawork, which gained her ten gold medals between 1969 and 1978—Ivančić seems to have been unwelcome at the Zagreb Ciné-club, so much so that she eventually registered her own club under whose aegis she competed, often signing her films with the gender-neutral “T. Ivančić.” One from the “La nuovo Moviola” ciné-club, which was probably part of the Italian Federazione Nazionale Cineamatori, addressing her as “Mademoiselle.” 59 The organized amateur festival circuit in Yugoslavia was markedly competitive, with a distinct scoring system. Festivals were ranked according to the number of participating organizers and screened films, and each winning filmmaker was awarded a particular number of points in addition to the actual prize. The title of master required one thousand points, and the f ilmmaker had to f irst become a candidate (six hundred points) and undergo a certain period of apprenticeship, which, in Ivančić’s case, was supposed to last a year. 60 ZAGFIDA, 1974; Vjesnik, March 1, 1977; Večernji list, June 19, 1976. 61 Curiously enough, Ivančić was Iveković’s aunt. One of Iveković’s photographs from her Double Life series (1975–1976) carries the inscription “1962. In aunt Koka’s apartment on Krajiška 19.” Koka was Tatjana Ivančić’s nickname, and this photo of Iveković was taken by Ivančić herself.

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possible reason for this animosity, as her son suggests,62 was the fact that her films “could easily cause the envy of many men”63 on the festival circuit, which was, just as the ciné-clubs themselves, a path to the world of professional cinema. For Ivančić, however, filmmaking was but a mere jouissance: I make pictures out of pure pleasure […] without any kind of pressure. […] when one takes up the camera at the age of fifty-five for the first time, they probably won’t be able to shoot something meaningful […] and so out of pure necessity and great pleasure, I began filming little things, that which allegedly has no real or visual value, but it seems that precisely these things have brought me the most success.64

Her films were undoubtedly recognized and appreciated at the time, but Ivančić was also dismissively refered to by some as “a housewife with a camera,”65 her work predictably discussed in terms of its “feminine sensibility.” For film critic Mladen Hanzlovsky, for example, nature, which was quite often the focus of Ivančić’s films, seemed to be “portrayed gently, with sophistication, in a womanly way.”66 Ivančić instead explained this chosen subject matter due to her strong attachment and longing for the seaside where she was born and raised, as well as her deep awareness of the ecological disaster threatening the Adriatic Sea. “The Bay of Bakar and [the town of] Omišalj are ruined completely, up to the point of the very survival of life in our sea,”67 Ivančić wrote, most likely referring to the ecological damage done by the coke-processing industry that was built next to Kvarner Bay in the 1970s. Records of the Zagreb Ciné-club account for seventy-four films made by Ivančić, but only fourteen of them exist as accessible digitized copies.68 The films are preserved poorly, yet the beauty of the images and the choice of motifs are readily apparent. Nature, animals, her home, and the sea all figure prominently in both the titles and the content of her work, be it the 62 Interview by the author with Aleksandar Ivančić, Zagreb, February 2018. 63 A fact acknowledged by Mladen Hanzlovsky in “Amaterizam naš nesvakidašnji,” Večernji list, Zagreb, June 19, 1976. 64 Excerpts from the TV shows Portraits of Women and I godine ove Tatjana Ivančić, archive box no. 24501, HRT. 65 SAM svoj majstor, no. 2 (1977): 111. 66 Hanzlovsky, “Velika prijateljica male kamere.” 67 Undated synopsis of a radio conversation with Ivančić. 68 For a detailed account on Ivančić’s work, the current state of her films, and the archivallegislative afterlife of Ciné-club Zagreb films at the Croatian Film Archive, see Petra Belc Krnjaić, “Some Remarks on the Position of Women”.

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small microcosm of the shallow shores (Igra Života [The Play of Life, 1972], Rapsodija u zelenom [Rhapsody in Green, 1970]); animals (Od zore do mraka [From Dawn to Dusk, 1971], Dosada [Boredom, 1973]); potted plants, trees, and flowers (lost films known only by name: Kaktus [Cactus, 1968], Sajam cvijeća [The Flower Fair, 1968]); the texture of the sea (Varijacije [Variations, 1975]; Dobro staro veslo [Good Old Oar, 1976]), her cat or her grandchildren (Do posljednje kapi [Until the Last Drop, 1972], Od 0 do 2 [From 0 to 2, 1972]); or even the crystals of frosty snowflakes (the lost film Dizajner zima [Designer Winter, 1970]). “My main actors […] almost forcefully present themselves to the camera, I only have to press the shutter at the right place, at the right time, and under the right light,” said Ivančić.69 She devoted herself to other topics, as well, and in her oeuvre, two films strike the viewer as foremost examples of both structural thinking and technical mastery—Grad u izlogu (City In The Shop Window, 1969) and Putositnice (Travelogue, 1976). City in The Shop Window focuses on the vistas and bustle of Zagreb, its traffic, and pedestrians, as reflected in the numerous urban shopwindows. Here, Ivančić uses the camera in two distinct ways. When portraying buildings, the camera mostly focuses on the image in the upper corner of the window, panning slowly downward to follow the contours of its structure, ending either in the lower left or the right corner of the frame/window, revealing the street scenery. These shots are intercut with stationary shots of passersby, intertwined with the reflections of trams or cars in motion. In setting up her shots, Ivančić carefully chose either windows that contained multiple reflective surfaces, layering images in one single shot, or locations where one could see traffic moving in several different directions in order to intensify a sense of movement. The film is framed by the apperance of window cleaners. It opens with a shot of these diligent workers in action and ends with an acknowledgment of their labor. In several static shots, we see a reflection of the filmmaker herself, holding her small camera, calmly and confidently pressed against her eye. “I have a firm hand, and my films are characterized by a very steady image, as well as a very precise editing process, because, although I am an amateur, technical imperfection is something I can’t stand,” Ivančić commented (Figure 6.2).70 If Pansini, in his earlier mentioned film Scusa Signorina, fixated his efforts on liberating the camera and allowing it to record the city independently of the director’s gaze, in City in The Shop Window, Ivančić harnessed the camera and reasserted her fixation on the dynamism of the city itself, and 69 Undated synopsis of a radio conversation with Ivančić. 70 In Velimir Bojko, “Vratiti žanrove,” Sineast, no. 63–64 (1984–5): 274.

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Figure 6.2. Tatjana Ivančić, Grad u izlogu (City In The Shop Window), 1969. Film still from digitally restored S8 mm print. Courtesy Ciné-club Zagreb.

in particular on its reflections and reflective surfaces. In doing this, she appears to deploy these elements to self-reflexively frame and accentuate her own creative consciousness. By bringing together the city, cinema, and the shop window, Ivančić managed to encompass, describe, and rewrite a crucial cinematic topos. City symphonies, iconic forms of European cinematic experimentation during the early twentieth century, characterized via male flânerie an “urban conscsiousness, which […] was an essentially male consciousness.”71 According to Elizabeth Wilson, this consciousness evolved against the backdrop of the male–female dichotomy of the industrial city discourse, which not only saw women as a threat to the moral order, denying them “full and free access to the streets,”72 but even helped to shape the way cities developed. Ivančić self-confidently reworks the city symphony genre, altering its key characteristics. Instead of a documentarist, all-encompassing description of a day in the city, she choreographs urban space through her particular camera movement, formally encapsulating and constraining the fragmented openness and distracting energy of urbanity 71 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 5. 72 Ibid., 8.

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into a contemplative, focused experience. The shop windows, characterizing department stores once marked as quintessentially female public spaces,73 in this film no longer represent mere displays of commodity luring female attention and capitalizing on their desires. By focusing on the reflections of downtown Zagreb, Ivančić renders the exhibited material content of the stores irrelevant, and we repeatedly see the author’s silhouette reflected in the windows, blended with the modernity of the city. Ivančić clearly inscribes herself as the active observer, through the gesture of disclosing the means of reproduction—that is, the camera itself. In Travelogue, she continued her cinematic wanderings and textural explorations, returning to another foundational cinematic topos—the train in motion. “I was very excited one foggy winter dawn, visiting my son in the army for the first time,”74 Ivančić said about this beautifully shot travelogue filmed from a train. The journey begins in the dark as the meditative murmur of the train gliding rhythmically down the tracks underscores the play of moving lights. The passengers take their seats in silence, and another cycle of darkness begins. In this film, Ivančić once again plays with reflections and close-ups, establishing the film’s atmosphere through small details of her surroundings—someone’s hand, a waiter, the big yellow sun rising on the horizon. All of a sudden, a child catches her attention, and until the end, her camera shifts back and forth between the fleeting landscape, its abstract reflections in the windows, and the little girl inside the train sitting in an elderly women’s lap, framing her differently each time. The sound keeps its rhythmic pace of the turning wheels until—interrupted by two static shots of nature—Ivančić’s camera unveils the purpose of the journey: a tilt reveals her son in a Yugoslav army uniform (Figure 6.3). In his The Practice of Everyday Life, the French philosopher and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau reminds us of the paradox of train travel and the centrality of vision to this experience: “Immobile inside the train, seeing immobile things slip by.”75 To fixate the camera solely on the movable immobility of the inside and the outside of the train reveals a number of Antifilmic reductions, which ultimately bring to the fore some of the essential characteristics of this “primum mobile.”76 Ivančić is not engaged with 73 Cf. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 66–74; Anne Friedberg, “Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” PMLA vol. 106, no. 3 (May 1991): 421–2. 74 Undated synopsis of a radio conversation with Ivančić. 75 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 111. 76 Ibid., 113.

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Figure 6.3. Tatjana Ivančić, Putositnice (Travelogue), 1976. Film still from digitally restored S8mm print. Courtesy Ciné-club Zagreb.

narration or suspense, she is stripping bare this major cinematic trope, which is no longer rushing toward the viewers, and is decidedly void of robberies, murders, and disappearances. Instead, she engages with its elementary particles, a space where “rest and dreams reign supreme.”77 She focuses on the windowpanes, the sound of the rails, the shapes of the “rationalized cells,”78 that is, the passengers, moving slowly away from their everyday consciousness, and with each new turn of the wheel closer to their “memories […] [and] the dreams of [their] secrets.”79 For de Certau, the train, by its power of separation and isolation from the outside world in motion, spurs thoughts and an immersion in our own private worlds, and this is precisely what Ivančić manages to grasp with her Travelogue. Panning her small camera to ponder her journey, she creates a visual image to her own speculative interiority and manages to convey a feeling of this pleasurable “travelling incarceration.”80 “The so-called ‘ciné-amateurism’ can also be an acknowledged art made on a shoestring budget,” said Ivančić, dismissing her need for other 77 Ibid., 111. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 112. 80 Ibid., 111.

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stereotypical “women’s” expenses (shoes, dresses, or social outings): “I trade it all for these film memories of mine, which can be a part of anybody’s own, personal album.”81 She died of endometrial cancer in December 1987, leaving behind an oeuvre that remains largely unprocessed to this day. Besides films, Ivančić was also a passionate amateur photographer; both she and her husband created a rich collection of film slides, which were recently uncovered in her family home and are currently awaiting cataloging and systematization. However, apart from the fourteen Super 8 mm films that are kept in the Croatian Film Archive, and one physical folder containing several newspaper articles and primary documents from Ivančić’s amateur days, held at the Croatian Film Association, there are no other material traces of her work. She left no written accounts of her films, and beyond one article written by a Croatian documentarist Zoran Tadić,82 no one from the current Croatian film preservationist or scholarly community has thus far engaged in the study or promotion of her work.83

In Conclusion: A Story of One’s Own “Although it is impossible to really narrate history, the possibility of generating one’s own stories through images is highly intriguing and productive,” writes Christine Böhler in the introduction to Gender Check,84 a volume on women’s art in Eastern Europe edited by Bojana Pejić, primarily “concerned with the logic of interpretation” rather than a search for explicitly feminist art.85 The situation of women amateur experimentalists in Yugoslavia aligns with Böhler’s approach. Neither Đilas nor Ivančić created what we today understand as feminist art. Nevertheless, reading their work from this angle alongside that of Yugoslav amateur experimentalism, as this essay has done, uncovers new layers in the theories of the latter, while at 81 Hanzlovsky, “Velika prijateljica”. 82 Zoran Tadić, “Tatjana Ivančić—morski mini-dokumentarci,” in Zoran Tadić, Ogledi o hrvatskom dokumentarcu (Zagreb: Hrvatski Filmski Savez, 2009), 143–7. 83 In 2018, I approached the Ciné-club Zagreb with the proposal to restore Ivančić’s f ilms. With their administrative support and a grant received from the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, all fourteen remaining films have been digitally restored during 2019–20 by the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna) and the Digital Magic Studio (Zagreb). Since then, Ivančić’s films have been presented at Orphans 2020/Orphans Online and Film:ReStored 05 at the Deutsche Kinemathek, as well as screened at BAMPFA’s Alternative Visions and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. The digitally restored films are kept at the Ciné-club Zagreb. 84 Christine Böhler, “Gender Matters,” 13. 85 Pejić, “Proletarians of all countries”, 27.

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the same time grounding Đilas’s and Ivančić’s remarkable oeuvres within a distinct f ilm cultural and (f ilm) historical context. Fixation f ilm—a concept easily applicable to a variety of films, has from its inception been understood as possibly too wide a theoretical concept.86 However, it seems that it is precisely this openness—an openness nevertheless marked by rather concrete visual coordinates—in conjunction with the possibility of reading it in the key of what was traditionally perceived as women’s characteristics (intuition, emotion, and sensation) that drives the vitality and richness of this concept. Fixation film’s ability to effortlessly absorb the experimental work of Ivančić and Đilas at the same time confirms that their films rightfully belong to the tradition of Yugoslav experimental cinema, at times even surpassing some of its best-known examples in both formal and thematic complexity. But, beyond this, it is always exciting to encounter theories that not only support feminist readings, but invite us to (re)write stories of our own.

Bibliography Belc Krnjaić, Petra. “Some Remarks on the Position of Women in the History of Yugoslav Experimental Cinema: The Case of Tatjana Ivančić.” In Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future, edited by Silvana Carotenuto, Francesca Maria Gabrielli, and Renata Jambrešić Kirin, 249–70. Naples and Zagreb: Unior Press and Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 2019. Blaetz, Robin, ed. Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Bojko, Velimir. “Vratiti žanrove.” Sineast, 63–4 (1984–5): 274. Bonfiglioli, Chiara. “Belgrade, 1978. Remembering the Conference ‘Drugarica Žena. Žensko pitanje–novi pristup?’/ʽComrade Woman. The Women’s Question: A New Approach?’ Thirty Years After.” Master’s thesis, University of Utrecht, 2008. Böhler, Christine. “Gender Matters.” In Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, edited by Bojana Pejić, 13–14. Vienna: MUMOK and Cologne: Walter König, 2009. Brakhage, Stan. “Jonas Mekas.” In To Free The Cinema, Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, edited by David James, 266–7. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

86 Hrvoje Turković, “GEFF 67—teorijska polazišta GEFF-a” (“GEFF 67–Theoretical Origins of GEFF”), Studentski list, no. 3 (1968): 11.

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Butler, Alison. Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. Čolić, Milutin, ed. Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Đilas, Vukica. Napomene. Reč 72, no. 18 (2003): 111–209. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Friedberg, Anne. “Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition.” PMLA 106, no. 3 (1991): 421–2. Grčar, Miša. “Lik žene u posleratnom jugoslovenskom filmu.” In Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta, edited by Milutin Čolić, 95–98. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976. Hanzlovsky, Mladen. “Velika prijateljica male kamere,” interview with Tatjana Ivančić. Hoberman, J. “The Forest and The Trees.” In To Free The Cinema, Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, edited by David James, 101–20. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Ivančić, Tatjana. Undated synopsis of an unnamed radio conversation. Folder “Tatjana Ivančić,” Hrvatski Filmski Savez. James, David. “Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden.” In To Free The Cinema, Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, edited by David James, 145–79. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Janevski, Ana. “We Cannot Promise to Do More Than Experiment.” In Surfing the Black, edited by Gal Kirn, Dubravka Sekulić, and Žiga Testen, 46–77. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012. Jovanović, Nebojša. “Gender and Sexuality in the Classical Yugoslav Cinema, 1947–1962.” PhD dissertation, Central European University, 2014. Keller, Marjorie. “The Apron Strings of Jonas Mekas.” In To Free The Cinema, Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, edited by David James, 83–96. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kermauner, Taras. “Žena na filmu.” In Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta, edited by Milutin Čolić, 78–83. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976. Krelja, Petar. “Žensko pismo i hrvatski film.” In Kao na filmu: Ogledi 1965–2008, edited by Petar Krelja, 320–7. Zagreb: Hrvatski Filmski Savez, 2009. Lóránd, Zsóf ia. “‘Learning a Feminist Language’: The Intellectual History of Feminism in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s.” PhD diss., Central European University, 2014. Lóránd, Zsófia. The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. McCabe, Janet. Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2004.

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Mellencamp, Patricia. Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. Munitić, Ranko. “Kako nacrtati ženu” in Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta, edited by Milutin Čolić, 65–68. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976. Pejić, Bojana. “Proletarians of All Countries, Who Washes Your Socks? Equality, Dominance and Difference in Eastern European Art”. In Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, edited by Bojana Pejić, 19-29. Vienna: MUMOK and Cologne: Walter König, 2009. Petek, Vladimir, ed. Zagfida ‘74. Zagreb: KSH, 1974. Petrolle, Jean and Virginia Wright Wexman, eds. Women and Experimental Filmmaking. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Petrović, Miroslav Bata. “Debitanti u Ju filmu (Statistika).” Yu Film Danas, 17–18 (1990–1): 32–35. Prnjat, Branko. “Oslobodilačka dimenzija filma.” In Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta, edited by Milutin Čolić, 92–94. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976. Rabinovitz, Lauren. Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943–71. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Sitney, P. Adams. Eyes Upside Down. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Smelik, Anneke. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1998. Stojanović, Dušan. Velika avantura filma. Belgrade and Novi Sad: Institut za film and Prometej, 1998. Šijan, Slobodan. Filmus. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2015. Škulje, Rapa. “Žene kao stvaraoci filma.” In Žena na filmu: najbolji filmovi sveta, edited by Milutin Čolić, 26–32. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1976. Tadić, Zoran. “Tatjana Ivančić —morski mini-dokumentarci.” In Ogledi o hrvatskom dokumentarcu, edited by Zoran Tadić, 143–147. Zagreb: HFS, 2009. Thornham, Sue, ed. Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Ustav Federativne Narodne Republike Yugoslavije, Article 24. Accessed January 8, 2019. http://mojustav.rs/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Ustav1946.pdf. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. “Odsotnost sveta.” Ekran 53 (1967): 168.

Newspaper articles Aleksa, Ratko. “Kamera u našim rukama.” Vjesnik (March 1, 1977). “‘Dobrim starim veslom’—dvije nagrade.” SAM svoj majstor, no. 2 (February 1977).

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Hanzlovsky, Mladen. “Amaterizam naš nesvakidašnji.” Večernji list (June 19, 1976). “In Memoriam—Vukica Đilas, naša prijateljica.” Vreme (November 8, 2001). https:// www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=301083. Turković, Hrvoje. “GEFF 67—teorijska polazišta GEFF-a.” Studentski list 3 (January 9, 1968). 11.

Oral history Conversation with Vladimir Anđelković, Belgrade, March 2014. Interview with Aleksandar Ivančić, Zagreb, February 2018.

Television and Video Resources “I godine ove Tatjana Ivančić.” Archive box no. 24501. HRT and Croatian Radio Television. Mekas, Jonas. “Jonas Mekas – I Find a Kindred Spirit in Marie Menken (43/135).” Web of Stories – Life Stories of Remarkable People. Accessed April 28, 2019. https://youtu.be/n6hA5h4Mwq4. Purešević, Danijela. “Art zona: Vukica Đilas — Domaći filmovi 1970–199?” RTS. September 13, 2016. https://www.rts.rs/page/tv/ci/story/18/rts-2/2437963/artzona-vukica-djilas---domaci-filmovi-1970-199.html. “Portreti žena: Tatjana Ivančić, filmski snimatelj — amater.” Archive box no. 14099. HRT and Croatian Radio Television.

About the Author Dr. Petra Belc holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Zagreb; her dissertation explored ”The Poetics of Yugoslav Experimental Cinema from the 1960s and 1970s.” She also holds degrees in women’s studies, philosophy, and comparative religion. As an independent researcher, she explores the fields of feminisms and philosophy of image/making; she is interested in the archiving and preservation of small-gauge films.

Part III Viewing Contexts, Theories, and Reception

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Alone in the Cinemascope Aleksandar Bošković Abstract This chapter focuses on Yugoslav filmmaker Slobodan Šijan’s production of the Film Leaflet (1976–1979), a single-page, double-sided fanzine exemplifying paracinematic practices that expanded cinematic experimentation beyond the movie screen. While relatively marginal in Yugoslav experimental, amateur film culture, the work expresses key aspects of this creative milieu and Yugoslav culture more broadly, forged in a hybrid environment where official and alternative cultures coalesced, and where Socialist ideology coexisted with an appreciation of American popular media. Šijan’s cine-zine critically engaged these scenes and the practices of cinema-going and programming as a self-referential hypertext of radical amateurism, presenting a critical inquiry into cultural reproduction. This study considers both the period’s overall culture and the film cultural references that surface in the Film Leaflet. Keywords: Yugoslavia; paracinema; Slobodan Šijan; Film Leaflet; fanzine; cinephilia

Slobodan Šijan’s (b. 1946) single-page, double-sided fanzine Film Leaflet (Filmski letak), created and distributed monthly from 1976 to 1979, exemplifies a paracinematic form that transcends our habitual understanding of what constitutes a film. It is an amalgamation of fan writing, drawings, photography, critical analysis of f ilms and f ilmmakers, appropriated newspaper clippings, cine-poetry, storyboards, postcards, and the like. Compiled with a do-it-yourself aesthetic, Šijan’s fanzine was conceived as a project of serial “paper movies,” as influential film critic and scriptwriter Branko Vučićević terms such combinations of text and image, and which film scholar Pavle Levi calls “cinema by other means.”1 Film Leaflet occupied 1 Branko Vučičević, Paper Movies: poučne priče (Belgrade and Zagreb: B92 and Arkzin, 1998), 20–21; Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 28–29.

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a marginal position in the broader public consciousness and even in the world of Yugoslav experimental and amateur cinema. Šijan’s fanzine was produced in minute quantities and not referenced in other print media, making it impossible to assess the impact it might have had on the Yugoslav reception of the foreign and domestic films, in various genres and styles, it referenced. This chapter examines Film Leaflet as both a hypertext for thinking about cinema and a concrete, experiential embodiment of the Yugoslav cine-apparatus of the 1970s. Conceptualized as a platform for the free use of film history, mass media, and pop culture in critical practice, Šijan’s fanzine directly appropriated—resignified, recombined, and reproduced—diverging content across media to articulate a “new language” of film thought, along with a practice of critical inquiry into cultural reproduction. As a concrete paracinema form of the Yugoslav cine-apparatus, Šijan’s cine-zine was one of the key alternative forms for expressing the ideological symptoms and processes of cultural reproduction within 1970s Yugoslavia. As such, Film Leaflet both reflected upon and embodied the contradictions of the socialist and capitalist cultural hybridization specific to the Yugoslav experience during this period.

Inscription into the History of Cinema Conceived and printed in the late 1970s, Film Leaflet both reflects and embodies Šijan’s decade-long experience of living as an emerging artist in the increasingly Westernized cultural milieu of Socialist Yugoslavia. Šijan, who graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Belgrade, enrolled in Belgrade’s Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in 1970 to study with Živojin Pavlović, a well-known Black Wave film director. In 1972, Šijan witnessed the reactionary reversal of the political climate of the film school, triggered by the controversy surrounding Lazar Stojanović’s Plastic Jesus (Plastični Isus, 1971). By the time he graduated, several years after the persecution at the school had subsided, the artistic freedoms among filmmakers were drastically curtailed.2 As Daniel Goulding notes, the years 2 Šijan writes: “The purges at the Film School continued with undiminished intensity until Aleksandar Petrović was fired and Živojin Pavlović transferred to the post of teaching aides custodian. […] The witch hunt expanded beyond the School, forcing Dušan Makavejev to leave the country. Lazar Stojanović was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison, which he served almost in full, for a graduation f ilm that was never publicly shown.” Slobodan Šijan,

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1973 to 1977 “marked the lowest ebb of domestic feature film production” in Yugoslavia.3 Experimentation and formal innovation were replaced with trite genre films, such as light comedies and the well-known heroic Partisan films, which by then had started to tire the jaded public. In the period from 1970 to 1976, Šijan directed and assisted in the making of about twenty experimental and short films (about an equal number of 8 mm and 16 mm films as well as one on 35 mm). Against the background of shrinking freedom of expression, some of the works Šijan made during this period were examples of truly underground film, as they dealt with highly taboo topics and were screened for a small circle of close friends. 4 Šijan’s art practice at the time was inspired by diverse cultural phenomena, including the 1960s counterculture and psychedelic art.5 For example, his Invitation to Love (Poziv na ljubav, 1972) featured footage of a then well-known Belgrade junkie in the act of shooting heroin, the subsequent trip visualized by a trick of double exposure. Another major inspiration for Šijan at the time was the visual artist, writer, and founder of the Mediala group in Belgrade, Leonid Šejka, and his notion of the junkyard as a “purgatory of contemporary civilization.” Referencing Šejka’s idea, Šijan made Garbage Dump on Ada Huja in Belgrade (Gradsko djubrište na adi huji u Beogradu, 1970) and an unfinished short entitled Junkyard (Djubrište); Šijan would subsequently pay homage to Šejka’s ideas in Film Leaflet 26. But Šijan was even more influenced by his close friendship with Tomislav Gotovac and the latter’s Filmski letak: 1976–1979 (i komentari) (Film Leaflet(s): 1976–1979 (with comments)) (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2009), 150. 3 Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience 1945–2001 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 143. 4 “The second half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s were the golden era of 8 mm film in Yugoslavia. It was an art created for a narrow circle of friends and true admirers of cinema. […] [t]he intimacy of these projections, closeness in shared experience, which was very often even a direct communication between the author and one spectator—this is something unique and unlike other forms of cinema.” Slobodan Šijan, Filmus: priče o filmu (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2015), 183. 5 Šijan was exposed to hippie culture in Belgrade and during his hitchhiking travels throughout Western Europe in the 1960s. See Nebojša Milenković, Slobodan Šijan: Moraću da skrenem! (Novi Sad: MSU Vojvodine, 2013), 41. The Yugoslav public as a whole had an ambivalent relationship to the hippie movement and counterculture. Rock ‘n’ roll played a significant role in erasing class differences among Yugoslav youth during the 1960s. As in the West, it also shifted social conflict from a focus on class to a focus on generational differences, which culminated in the student protests of 1968. While initially the general public met the hippie movement with distrust, a series of public events, debates, and party investigations ultimately deemed them as suitable allies in the efforts to bring about “revolutionary transformation” in the West. See Aleksandar Raković, Rokenrol u Jugoslaviji 1956–1968 (Belgrade: Arhipelag, 2012), 554.

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infatuation with both American underground and Hollywood films, and his experimentation with time-based media—photography/slides, video, film, and performance.6 These practices developed within the conceptual paradigm of experimental art, established within the framework of the Yugoslav New Art Practices (Nove umetničke prakse) of the 1960s and 1970s and disseminated via the youth and student cultural centers in Novi Sad, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade.7 The other part of the Yugoslav cine-apparatus that formed the background to Šijan’s activities included the alternative state-funded cinematic venues and platforms that were crucial for the emergence and development of experimental film in Yugoslavia in the 1960s but were rapidly changing in the 1970s.8 These included a network of ciné-clubs, the GEFF festival in Zagreb (1963–70), the MAFAF festival in Pula (1965–90), and the Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival (1959–present). Šijan and Gotovac’s 8 mm films responded to the network of discourses, practices, and institutions comprised of ciné-clubs and festivals, as well as the personal efforts of individual filmmakers. The work that came out of the ciné-clubs and festivals 6 Family Film II (Obiteljski film II, 1973) featured Tomislav Gotovac and his female lover at the time naked and having sexual intercourse. For more on his friendship with Gotovac and his influence on Šijan, see Slobodan Šijan, Tomislav Gotovac: Life as a Film Experiment, trans. Greg de Cuir Jr. and Žarko Cvejić (Zagreb: MAMA, 2018). 7 Ješa Denegri, “Art in the Past Decade,” in The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966–1978, ed. Marijan Susovski (Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978), 11. 8 B. Piškur, A. Janevski, J. Meden, S. Vuković, “Preface,” in Vse To Je Film: Eksperimentalni Film v Jugoslaviji 1951–1991 / This Is All Film: Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951–1991 (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija and Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 12. Stevan Vuković proposes a periodization of Yugoslav experimental f ilm in which the “underground” paradigm in the early 1970s was followed by the “conceptual” paradigm of the mid-1970s, with the latter then superseded by the “meta-media” paradigm in the 1980s. The generation of filmmakers in Serbia that included Lazar Stojanović (Plastic Jesus, 1971) and Jovan Jovanović (KOLT 15 GAP, 1971), among others, grew out of the “underground” during the slow decline of ciné-clubs in the early 1970s. A group of young film critics immediately recognized them as a new generation during the talks in SKC (Student Cultural Center) Belgrade, at the newly established Filmforum. For these filmmakers, as well as for Šijan, the key local underground f ilmmaker to look up to was Gotovac, whose seminal structuralist trilogy is discussed in Greg de Cuir’s essay in this volume. On the other hand, experiments in the framework of the “conceptual” paradigm (e.g., works by visual artists Zoran Popović and Neša Paripović) used the heritage of historic avant-gardes to f ight the fossilized dogmas of modernism, including that of media specif icity, and deconstruct them by using so-called new media (slides, video, film, performance)—a choice that was partially conditioned by the lack of means for producing films. Finally, the experimental films made in the framework of “meta-media,” such as Miroslav Bata Petrović’s The Passion of John of Arc (1982), Miodrag Milošević’s The Lost Tango in Paris (1983), and Miloje Radaković’s Ray Charles in Cinema (1987), were conceived as remediations of existing cinematic “texts.” See Stevan Vuković, “Notes on Paradigms in Experimental Film in Socialist Yugoslavia,” in Vse to je film!, 49–63.

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of the 1960s is particularly relevant as a background to Šijan’s investigations into media, which parallel conceptual art’s contemporaneous questioning of the limits of media specificity and foreshadow the “meta-media” paradigm of the 1980s. All of the abovementioned artistic practices and concerns were reflected in Šijan’s Film Leaflet, which he started publishing after ending his prolific work in experimental film. Šijan started Film Leaflet in 1976—”out of frustration”—as an intermediary step between his work with experimental films and his first TV films, while trying to break into the professional Yugoslav film industry. He began his fanzine as a way to continue his painterly practice after he had stopped making paintings and drawings and started making Xerox copies of his graphic works. In the foreword to his 2009 book, he wrote: Film Leaflet is a sort of ‘fanzine’ or ‘do-it-yourself’ newsletter, halfway between poor graphic and samizdat, created with the idea of making, once a month, a visual and textual statement about film, or related to film (conceived in the broadest possible sense). It was printed using whatever technology was available to me, on one A4 sheet, and distributed to friends and other people interested in film.9

Despite its small scale (the print run of the original leaflets ranged from 50 to 250 copies), the zine was ambitious in the range of issues it covered. From the start, it addressed the social potential of cinema as both a countercultural form and a critical practice. The first three leaflets, for example, propose a critical rethinking of the history of both experimental and popular cinema in international as well as domestic contexts. Thus, the inaugural leaflet represents a reaction to George Maciunas’s December 1969 Diagram, in which the Fluxus artist offers his own classification of the newest trends in avantgarde cinema (Figure 7.1). Šijan adds to Maciunas’s classification the most important films made in 1963–4 by structural filmmakers Mihovil Pansini and Tomislav Gotovac, thus situating the Yugoslav “Antifilm” movement in the wider context of Western avant-garde cinema.10 The reproduction of a part of the reel of Gotovac’s film Straight Line (Pravac, 1964) as a vertical sequence of shots along the leaflet’s left margin functions not only as a 9 Slobodan Šijan, Filmski letak, 7. 10 For more on Yugoslav Antifilm, see Jovan Jovanović, “Anti-film kao istraživački film,” in Miroslav Bata Petrović, Alternativni film u Beogradu od 1950. do 1990. godine (Belgrade: Dom Kulture Studentski Grad, 2008), 30–37; Ana Janevski, ed., As Soon As I Open My Eyes, I See A Film: Experiments in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2010).

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Figure 7.1. Slobodan Šijan, English translation from Serbo-Croatian of Film Leaflet 1 “Diagram – Antifilm, Us & Them,” 1976. Xerox print. © by Slobodan Šijan.

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visual pun on Gotovac’s title (the film strip as a “straight line”), but it also performs visually what Šijan’s leaflet does conceptually: it inscribes the Yugoslav “Antifilm” into the international history of experimental cinema. Leaflets 2 and 3 respond to domestic issues and represent Šijan’s reaction to the so-called Communist witch hunt surrounding the Black Wave film movement.11 Leaflet 2 features the covers of two volumes of Filmography of the Yugoslav Cinema: the real volume covering the period 1945–65, bound in black and published by the Institute for Film in Belgrade in 1970,12 and a fake volume covering the years 1966–70, a period dominated by public debates on black cinema, bound in white. Šijan converts this visual discrepancy into an ironic statement exposing the repressive turn of events in recent Yugoslav cinema. With Leaflet 3, which features pages from a miniature pre-WWII booklet about the history of film, Šijan makes a similarly ironic comment on the state of Yugoslav cinema in the mid-1970s. The booklet’s pages, arranged like a collage, contain a technical explanation of the nature of film negative that, out of context, ironically evokes the formulaic ideological language used to dismiss the politically unacceptable “black films”: “This is a film negative, it shows the image reversed. That which is really white is here shown as black, and vice versa. That which is in reality on the left is on the right in the film negative, and vice versa.”13 Leaflets 2 and 3 remind us that official politics was particularly sensitive to the Black Wave as a cultural practice that thematizes the loss of revolutionary ideals and allows suppressed social antagonisms to resurface. Šijan also implied that the Yugoslav cine-apparatus consequently promoted popular genre films that offered entertainment without questioning official ideology. What Šijan did not spell out in the earliest leaflets, but eventually did in the subsequent ones, were the socioeconomic consequences of the gradual development of consumer culture that had pervaded Socialist Yugoslavia by the early 1970s. These consequences were a result of deeper and longer processes of economic and political change during the 1960s that exacerbated an already existing tendency toward inequality within

11 For more on the Yugoslav Black Wave, see Ekran 23, no. 3–4 (1998); Bogdan Tirnanić, Crni talas (Belgrade: Filmski centar Srbije, 2008); Greg de Cuir Jr., “The Yugoslav Black Wave: The History and Poetics of Polemical Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 403–24. 12 Momčilo Ilić, ed., Filmografija Jugoslovenskog filma 1945–1965 (Belgrade: Institut za film, 1970). 13 Šijan, Filmski letak, 22. My translation.

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the “self-management” model.14 As cultural historians have shown, the development of “consumer culture in socialism characterizes the transformation of the utopian impulse into a benevolent social consensus.”15 In the transition of Yugoslav utopian ideology in the 1960s and 1970s from a focus on labor to a focus on consumption, the figure of the worker lost iconic cultural status. Official Yugoslav ideology attempted to hide this change in the cultural imagination by reacting against cultural practices like the Black Wave films, with their “defetishization” of the worker. Even though Šijan’s first three leaflets could not capture the full complexity of these large-scale social shifts, they did point out the coalescing yet conflicting cultural practices (official and experimental, mainstream and alternative) of 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia and alluded to the larger social context that framed these practices.

Cultural Reproduction The youth counterculture that developed around the Youth and Student Cultural Centers during the 1970s in Yugoslavia transcended simple dichotomies between “dissident” art (critical, pro-Western, “modern”) and the “official” variety (dogmatically Socialist). It was characterized by the active recognition of the amalgamation of consumerist social tendencies and the party bureaucracy, and by the fight against the cultural establishment that nurtured this union. It thus clamped down on the social potential of the development of a “true” socialist culture. As it evolved, Šijan’s fanzine emerged as one such countercultural artistic position, embodying a specific and locally situated practice—an alternative cinematic form of thinking about the ideological symptoms and processes of cultural reproduction that maintain and perpetuate dominant values, norms, cultural forms, and power relations. As part of artistic practices emerging on the fringes of the cultural system, Šijan’s cine-zine illustrated a state of “soft agony” in which his generation, educated in the socialist spirit, found itself increasingly surrounded by consumer culture. 14 See Gal Kirn, Partisan Ruptures: Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 128–37. For an overview of the Yugoslav self-management system, see Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–1991 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 1–14. 15 Branislav Dimitrijević, Potrošeni socijalizam: Kultura, konzumerizam i društvena imaginacija u Jugoslaviji (1950–1974) (Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2016), 137.

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Reflections on Mass Culture as Kitsch, “Trash,” Camp, and the Bizarre Šijan’s fanzine displays and articulates a transition from understanding cinema as a subversive instrument for social change, characteristic of Black Wave filmmakers, to seeing it as an instrument for critical inquiry into cultural reproduction. In his thinking about “the filmic,” Šijan followed Gotovac, who was equally enthusiastic about films that, on the one hand, were extremely hermetic and radically experimental, and on the other, completely mainstream and formally accessible. This openness led them to reappropriations and resignifications of various kitsch, “trash,” camp, and bizzare themes across media, and in this way, both Gotovac and Šijan’s understanding of cinema differed significantly from that of the Black Wave generation.16 Šijan’s 1973 manifesto “Hollywood or Bust,” printed in 1976 as Leaflet 6, is emphatic in ascribing equal importance to both “experimental” or underground film and “commercial” Hollywood cinema, through an imagined discussion between Šijan and Andy Warhol that includes quotations from Jack Smith.17 “My taste at that time,” explained Šijan in 2009, “tended toward extremes like underground and ‘trash.’ I could not stand the middle ground; those films which were considered great works both here [in Yugoslavia] and all over the world. I loved esoteric, highly personal experiments or products of mass culture.”18 Šijan’s work with a series of kitsch postcards functions in the domain of the simultaneous avant-gardization of popular culture and popularization of the avant-garde. Brightly colored kitsch postcards, which Šijan collected to create collages he called “kitsch sequences,” perfectly illustrate his peculiar 16 See Šijan, Razgovori oko filma (Belgrade: Akademski filmski centar and Dom culture Studentski grad, 2010), 11–12. Gotovac “understood film as a unity” and shared the conviction that “the filmic” quality—a universal quality that makes a film a good artwork—exists independently of genre and “is located somewhere other than within that surface layer that attracts or repels the audience. […] The previous generation—[Dušan] Makavejev, [Žika] Pavlović, [Aleksandar] Petrović, etc.—held a different belief, that film changes the world in a way. Their films contained subversive elements; they wanted to destroy certain taboos; they were persistent in trying to go for the forbidden fruit. […] But Tom accepted everything in cinema as equally important.” Šijan, Razgovori oko filma, 81. 17 “Me: Hollywood is beautiful. Andy Warhol: Hollywood is beautiful. Me: Underground is beautiful. Andy Warhol: Underground is beautiful.” At the same time, Šijan quotes the following short comment by Jack Smith, from Smith’s text “The Perfect Film Appositeness of Maria Montez,” published in the journal Film Culture: “Eventually someone is going to make a so-called underground movie that will revive Hollywood.” Šijan, Filmski letak (2009): 38. Šijan’s professor at the Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade Dušan Stojanović accepted this unconventional essay, which would later become a leaflet, as a seminar paper for his course Theory of Film. See Šijan, Filmski letak (2009), 36. 18 Šijan, Filmski letak (2009), 7. My translation.

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taste at the time. Through them, he investigated the connection between the kitsch of the narratives that one could create from the postcards, on the one hand, and classical Technicolor Hollywood cinema, on the other. Thus, Leaflet 29, titled “Kitsch Biography,” features a straightforward narrative characterized by kitsch’s aesthetic of denial, which transforms disgust into universal approval and thus ignores all that is difficult about life.19 On the other hand, Leaflet 13, titled “Kitsch Story No. 1,” is one of these photocopied kitsch sequences that gave colorful postcards a black-and-white, dirty “underground” quality reminiscent of “trash” and “camp” aesthetics (Figure 7.2).20 In photocopying the original “Technicolor” postcards, Šijan managed to achieve the same effect as the domestic kitsch quality of Yugoslav pulp magazines and utilize an aesthetics of ugliness close to the one his professor, Živojin Pavlović, propagated in his films and books.21 With these examples, Šijan’s fanzine critically addressed two important processes within the everyday life of 1970s Yugoslav socialism. First, it demonstrated that the reproduction of consumer culture in Socialist Yugoslavia unfolded within a framework of “previously created experience” of everyday life aestheticized by popular culture.22 In other words, the Yugoslav middle class modeled its “lifestyles” on the status, behavior, and values of the middle class in capitalist countries. Second, Šijan critically addressed the formation of this “culture of imitation” among the Yugoslav middle class by pointing out that it was gradually becoming more or less a passive ally of transition to anti-Socialist consumer culture, distancing itself from the interests of the working class. In other words, the acculturation of consumption within Socialist Yugoslavia functioned as a mechanism for cultural differentiation and social stratification. Šijan’s zine revealed this “culture of imitation” as 19 The original collage was displayed in a group exhibition of twelve artists in the Happy New Gallery of the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade in 1978. As the gallery’s plan to print the leaflet in color fell through, it was not until several decades later, in 1999, that Šijan printed fifty copies in color. 20 The Leaflet was printed in the inaugural issue of the journal The Look (Izgled, June 1977), with a print run of six hundred copies. 21 Živojin Pavlović published an important collection of essays, On the Disgusting (O odvratnom) in 1972. For more on the aesthetics of ugliness in Pavlović’s f ilms and novels, see Dragoljub Stojadinović, “O odvratnom u delima Živojina Pavlovića,” Mons Aureus: časopis za književnost, umetnost i društvena pitanja 7, no. 25–26 (2009): 172–84. 22 The mass culture, popular culture, and consumer culture (regardless if they are the same or are three different articulations of one hegemon cultural influence)—which are, according to Fredric Jameson, crucial for the reproduction of capitalism—are also reproduced within the ideological framework of Socialist Yugoslavia. As Jameson aptly asserted, the culture is “the very element of consumer society itself.” Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 139.

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Figure 7.2. Slobodan Šijan, Film Leaflet 13 “Kitsch Story No. 1,” 1977. Collage, Xerox print. © by Slobodan Šijan.

a result of cultural reproduction based on the structural reproduction of societal disadvantages and inequalities. Šijan came out against the uncritical appropriation of Western commodity fetishism in an ostensibly socialist society, with the aesthetics of “trash,” camp, and the bizarre, serving a crucial role in exploring the flip side of the cultural reproduction of “normal” behavior—in other words, the media

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consumption and transgressive enjoyment ( jouissance) of such socially abject phenomena as pornography, disease, madness, and war. For example, Leaflet 17 features an unintentionally campy story published in the first Serbian erotic magazine, Adam i Eva (Adam and Eve); Leaflet 22 simply reproduces without alteration a newspaper article on a disease whose name is pronounced just like Šijan’s own; Leaflet 23 presents Šijan’s handwritten copy of the letter that the Serbian modernist painter Sava Šumanović wrote in a deranged state of mind to his close friend, the avant-garde poet Rastko Petrović; and Leaflet 27 presents verbatim the court appeal of Nguyen Van Ter, a thirty-five-year-old construction worker, originally published in Playboy magazine and republished in an issue of the Yugoslav magazine Izbor. Finally, one should acknowledge the position that Šijan and other artistically inclined Yugoslav youth occupied in the 1970s as unemployed, “unproductive segments of society”: they were much more exposed to a wide range of cultural influences, because they had so much free time, which is also what enabled them to develop a more critical approach to the ideological symptoms and practices of cultural reproduction. Šijan spent the majority of that free time at the cinema. “At that time,” writes Šijan referring to the 1970s, “I knew more about film than I ever will [again]. […] I think that I have never watched movies more intensely, the rhythm of film was pulsating in my every cell, film was everything to me.”23 Yugoslav Cinematheque Presents American Cinema Šijan’s experience as a moviegoer intensified significantly from the early 1970s onward, when he met Tom Gotovac and became a regular visitor of the Yugoslav Cinematheque, a film museum and archive in Belgrade.24 The Cinematheque, as Šijan recalls, was one of the most subversive educational centers in Yugoslavia: The audience was comprised of various unorthodox and dangerous characters: from students of film and fine art to various anarchists, leftists, 23 Šijan, Filmski letak, 7. 24 The Yugoslav Cinematheque (Jugoslovenska kinoteka) was established as an independent federal institution in 1949 with the goal of collecting, permanently preserving, and restoring f ilms and f ilm material; spreading f ilm culture and educating f ilm workers via screenings; studying film history; and collaborating with similar institutions at home and abroad. Its work was financed by the state until 1972 and then by the City of Belgrade and the Republic of Serbia. In 1951, the Cinematheque became the seventeenth member of the International Federation of Film Archives. Šijan was briefly the director of the Cinematheque in 1991.

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conservatives, fascists, Americanophiles, Germanophiles, Russophiles, as well as the clinically insane, alcoholics, geniuses, sex maniacs, accidentally lost hooligans, resigned pensioners, and lonely housewives. There were almost no film critics there. The energy that accumulated and was discharged in this movie theatre was incredibly powerful and unique because this was a place of direct and ongoing encounter with other civilizations.25

The Cinematheque’s evolving curatorial aesthetic had an impact on multiple generations in different ways. The generation of Black Wave filmmakers grew up on the Cinematheque’s programming aimed at presenting the great works of European cinema.26 By contrast, during the 1970s, that type of programming was replaced by American cinema and classic Hollywood directors, such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks. Watching these Hollywood auteurs, who had made their most important films decades earlier, crucially shaped Šijan’s generation. It was once again Gotovac who argued for the value of popular film and especially of classic Hollywood directors. His knowledge and appreciation of these subjects helped Šijan expand his taste in cinema, going from mostly appreciating European modernist cinema (i.e., the works of Antonioni, Buñuel, and Bergman) to becoming a genuine fan of Ford, Hitchcock, and Hawks. It is hard to overestimate the roles cinephilia and Americanophilia played in Šijan’s thinking about cinema. In Boško Tokin, an important figure of interwar Yugoslav film culture who established the foundations for critical thinking about film in the country, Šijan found a role model with whom he shared these two passions. As coauthor of “The Zenithist Manifesto” (1921), Tokin is an interesting precursor to Šijan, because he established the avant-garde genre of cine-poetry (in 1920)—Šijan’s Leaflet 5 features several of Tokin’s cine-poems—and was, at the same time, one of the first Yugoslav cinephiles to write about popular American film in the 1920s. For Šijan, Tokin is “the originator of the Serbian branch of an international fraternity

25 Šijan, Filmski letak, 70. 26 This was largely possible due to the first director of the Cinematheque, Milenko Karanović and his successor Vladimir Pogačić. The role Pogačić played as the director of Yugoslav Cinematheque (1955–1981)—improving its f ilm archive, library, and programming activities to the Western standards, thus enabling the Yugoslav audience to acquire an extraordinary insight into the history of world cinema—is simply astonishing. According to Šijan, “Pogačić laid the foundations of the birth of modern Yugoslav film of the 1960s—the so-called golden period of Yugoslav cinematography.” Šijan, Filmus, 171.

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of film initiates,” while the pseudonym with which Tokin signed his texts about cinema—Filmus—is “the appropriate name for such a fraternity.”27 A number of Film Leaflets make unambiguous statements about the importance of American cinema for Šijan and subsequent generations of Yugoslav moviegoers. Leaflet 9 features the famous list drawn up by the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, which served as a guide for Šijan through the jungle of American cinema.28 As an appendix to Melville’s list, which greatly informed French New Wave directors, Šijan added the names of Raoul Walsh and Cecil B. DeMille, thus highlighting the subjectivity of a canon and affirming his own conviction that these American directors deserved equal recognition. In October 1976, the Yugoslav Cinematheque implemented a new system of “thematic” programming “which replaced the retrospective,” and introduced an opportunity for “film historians, critics, aesthetes, sociologists, writers, and painters” to enter the competition and curate a program.29 Having won the competition, Šijan gained access to the “treasures” of the Cinematheque’s archive, which held copies of most of the films on Melville’s list, and organized a series of screenings that featured a number of titles from the list.30 He reproduced the program of the retrospective as Leaflet 16, titled “Hollywood ‘30s,” with Mae West at the center of the leaflet as she appears in a scene from Leo McCarey’s film Belle of the Nineties (1934). In a similar gesture of appreciation for American film, Leaflet 21 praises the “new sentimentality” of New American Cinema, providing a list of relevant American films made between 1967 and 1977, starting with Bonnie and Clyde (1967).31 In a recent commentary on his leaflets, Šijan discussed the active role cinephilia can take on in influencing film culture and production: the French New Wave, he points out, trusted Melville; the filmmakers of New American Cinema in turn trusted the French and thus became aware 27 Šijan, Filmus, 2015, 140–1. 28 Rui Nogueira, Melville on Melville (London: Secker and Warburg for the British Film Institute, 1971), 18. Melville’s list of 64 Pre-War American Directors in Cahiers du Cinema (no. 124 [October 1961]: 63) is legendary. 29 Vladimir Pogačić, “The New System of Scheduling of Exhibits of the Museum of the Yugoslav Cinematheque,” International Federation of Film Archives. Information Bulletin, Brussels 12 (April 1977): 27–28. 30 As he explained in his retrospective, “most of these [films] were shown in Yugoslavia for the first time since 1945.” Šijan, Film Leaflet, 86. 31 Arthur Penn’s f ilm, Bonnie and Clyde, was the most watched f ilm in 1968; it influenced different aspects of everyday life and popular culture there. See Radina Vučetić, Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2018), 55–56.

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of Hollywood cinema’s own value as an art form.32 In other words, the self-awareness of cinema brings on cinematic revolutions. Šijan went on to promote American commercial cinema out of his belief that significant ideas are often born in the domain of popular culture and that B movies are generators of fresh ideas that may re-emerge later in mainstream films. Hence the three leaflets endorsing American B movies: Leaflet 10 featured Šijan’s essay on the film Vanishing Point (1971), published in the brochure of the retrospective of the film’s director Richard Sarafian, which Šijan organized at the SKC Belgrade in March 1977; Leaflet 24 included Šijan’s essay about the Hollywood film director Richard Fleischer, printed in the brochure of the retrospective of Fleischer’s films at the SKC in April 1978; and Leaflet 42 promoted Šijan’s unpublished essay about Richard T. Heffron’s film Trackdown (1976), in which Šijan articulates that B movies offer something that Yugoslav socialism suppressed for fear of spreading violence among the youth. Reflections on Celebrity Culture, Film Festivals, and Awards Several leaflets addressed the movie-star phenomenon, starting with Leaflet 15, which was made in response to Elvis Presley’s death in 1977. Featuring a photocopied photo portrait of the young rock ‘n’ roll star with the sensationalistic title “Elvis is Dead!” in bold cursive letters, this leaflet highlights the idea of the movie star as a nonprofessional actor in its short, handwritten annotation. As his interest in Elvis demonstrates, Šijan was equally interested in celebrities and nonprofessional actors. He paid homage to the latter in Leaflet 25 with a collage of the mostly peasant “movie stars” who appeared in his 1978 feature film for television, Most Beautiful Room (Najlepša soba) (Figure 7.3). This leaflet functions as an ideologically charged counternarrative to the movie-star phenomenon, because it reintroduces the worker (peasants who move to the city) into the Yugoslav cultural imagination. Both Šijan’s leaflet and his TV film show that the worker was able to recuperate his lost symbolic currency in the everyday imaginary of Socialist Yugoslavia only as an ideal figure of the new commercial cultural industry, as a “movie star” (a singer or a fashion model being other options)—no longer “the hero of production,” but instead “the hero of consumption.” Infatuation with movie 32 According to Šijan, what actually happened with American film during the decade after the release of Bonnie and Clyde is that “a group of young people emerged and started digging through old f ilm genres, trying to do something new within those old formulas.” See Šijan, Filmski letak, 114.

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Figure 7.3. Slobodan Šijan, Film Leaflet 25 “The Most Beautiful Room,” 1978. Xerox print on A4 Thermal Paper. © by Slobodan Šijan.

stars also prompted Šijan to make a piece as a teenager in 1960, which he later published as Leaflet 40, ironically commenting on his initial enchantment with movie stars. On this leaflet featuring a postcard with a glamour shot of Tony Curtis, Šijan replaced the actor’s name with his own, the gesture resignifying the simple postcard of a movie star as a conceptual artwork. On the other hand, the November and December issues of Film Leaflet were conceived as “official selections of film festivals” and awards to the

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experimental film authors or journals participating in the “competition.” At the end of 1976, Šijan came up with the idea that each year’s December issue would present a top ten list of the best foreign films shown in Yugoslav movie theaters. The list would also include the best films in domestic cinema and, more importantly, announce that year’s Yugoslav winner of the Film Leaflet award. In the period from 1976 to 1979, there were four December issues and four winners of the “prestigious” award.33 At the same time, Šijan proposed that the Film Leaflet award winner would earn the right to publish their work in the next year’s November issue of the fanzine. The entire run of Film Leaflet includes only three November issues featuring the work of the awardees.34 The guiding concept behind the November and December issues resembles that of FEST, an annual film festival in Belgrade established in 1971 to assess the filmic output of the previous year. Nonetheless, these Film Leaflet issues focus exclusively on films distributed in movie theaters and highlight what official awards ignored. With the introduction of the Film Leaflet award, Šijan continued to recognize and promote Yugoslav experimental filmmakers and film critics while mimicking a mainstream practice of the Yugoslav cine-apparatus. Some issues of Film Leaflet examine the limits of the medium of film, such as Leaflet 4, titled “Project for a Family Film,” and Leaflet 11, titled “Media Suicide: Investigation No. 2, Photography.”35 Several issues embody the so-called graphic-visual statements about the characteristic rhythms of shot progression in the films of renowned Hollywood directors: John Ford (Leaflet 32), Howard Hawks (Leaflet 33), Alfred Hitchcock (Leaflet 34), Vincente Minnelli (Leaflet 35), and Robert Altman (Leaflet 36). Other leaflets were conceived as storyboards (Leaflet 8) or comic strips (Leaflets 12 and 37), while the most radical examples conceptualize the act of watching films as a latent, continuous process of filmic creation (Leaflets 26 and 28). These 33 In 1976, Ljubomir Šimunić from Belgrade, for his 8 mm film rolls (Leaflet 7); in 1977, Tom Gotovac, for his film Glenn Miller I (High School Playground I) (Leaflet 19); in 1978, the Zagreb magazine Film (Leaflet 31); and in 1979, Branko Vučičević and his screenplay for the feature film Medusa’s Raft, directed by Karpo Godina in 1980 (Leaflet 43). Leaflet 43 was also the last issue of Film Leaflet, which ceased to exist when Šijan’s professional career took off and he could no longer keep up with his fanzine production. 34 These are “The Work of Ljubomir Šimunić,” which comprises an advertisement for his imaginary film company “Moon” (Leaflet 18); the work of Tom Gotovac, titled “The Glenn Miller Chesterfield Shows” (Leaflet 30); and the “Zagreb magazine Film” published from 1975 to 1979 (Leaflet 42). 35 For more, see Aleksandar Bošković, “Thinking Film: Cinefied Materiality in Slobodan Šijan’s Fanzine Film Leaflet (1976–1979),” Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, no. 8 (2019).

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examples demonstrate that “the possibility of directly entering the filmic reality,” as Pavle Levi notes in his skillful analysis of Šijan’s Film Leaflet, is a key concern that has persistently motivated the filmmaker’s work.36

Conclusion Šijan’s Film Leaflet emerged as a “praxis of radical amateurism,” to use Aldo Milohnić’s definition, which established a “new language” of film thought and production outside the dominant models, using resources within state-funded institutions such as the Yugoslav Cinematheque, SKC, and the Studentski Grad Film Club.37 Forged in an environment of the hybridization of the arts, within a network in which official and alternative cultures coalesced, and through the practices of cinema-going and programming, Šijan’s cine-zine emerged as a self-referential hypertext of radical amateurism that articulated and performed a critical inquiry into the cultural reproduction of late 1970s Yugoslav socialism. Šijan’s inquiry was both critical of the cultural reproduction that results in social reproduction and affirmative of the practices of appropriation. As such, Šijan’s appropriation of diverse media across Film Leaflet had shown that both cinema and culture (whether socialist or not), function as elements of consumer society, which revolutionize themselves through processes of critical self-appropriation, that is, resignification, recombination, and reproduction. Šijan’s Film Leaflet demonstrated that, one, cinema’s self-referentiality fully serves its revitalization; two, the cross-pollination between avant-garde and commercial f ilm culture enhances cinema’s transformation; and three, media consumption and transgressive enjoyment of socially abject phenomena—pornography, disease, madness, and war—comprise the flip side of the cultural reproduction of “normal” behavior, and must be critically assessed in cinema. In this way, Film Leaflet warned us that the failure to culturally appropriate transgressive enjoyment within late Yugoslav socialism would render both Yugoslavia and its socialism abject while making way for jouissance of violence and engendering the destruction of values, norms, and cultural forms as the prevalent modes of cultural reproduction. 36 Levi, Cinema by Other Means, 127. 37 Aldo Milohnić, “Radikalni amaterizam,” in Raškolovano znanje//Priručnik (Belgrade: TKH, 2012), 4.

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Bibliography Bošković, Aleksandar. “Thinking Film: Cinefied Materiality in Slobodan Šijan’s Fanzine Film Leaflet (1976–1979).” Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, no. 8 (2019). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/ app.2019.0008.161 De Cuir Jr., Greg. “The Yugoslav Black Wave: The History and Poetics of Polemical Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia.” In A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre, 403–24. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Denegri, Ješa. “Art in the Past Decade.” In The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966–1978, edited by Marijan Susovski, 5–12. Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978. Dimitrijević, Branislav. Potrošeni socijalizam: Kultura, konzumerizam i društvena imaginacija u Jugoslaviji (1950–1974). Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2016. Ekran 23, no. 3–4 (1998). Features a supplement on the Yugoslav “Black Wave.” Goulding, Daniel J. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience 1945–2001. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Ilić, Momčilo, ed. Filmografija Jugoslovenskog filma 1945–1965. Belgrade: Institut za film, 1970. Jakovljević, Branislav. Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–1991. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 130–48. Janevski, Ana, ed. As Soon As I Open My Eyes, I See A Film: Experiments in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2010. Kirn, Gal. Partisan Ruptures: Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia. London: Pluto Press, 2019. Levi, Pavle. Cinema by Other Means. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Milenković, Nebojša. Slobodan Šijan: Moraću da skrenem! Novi Sad: MSU Vojvodine, 2013. Milohnić, Aldo. “Radikalni amaterizam.” In Raškolovano znanje//Priručnik, edited by Jelena Knežević, 103–8. Belgrade: TKH, 2012. Nogueira, Rui. Melville on Melville. London: Secker and Warburg for the British Film Institute, 1971. Pavlović, Živojin. O odvratnom: o umetnosti, o individui, o mnoštvu. Belgrade: Duga, 1972. Petrović, Miroslav Bata. Alternativni film u Beogradu od 1950. Do 1990. Godine. Belgrade: Dom Kulture Studentski Grad, 2008.

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Piškur, Bojana, Ana Janevski, Jurij Meden, and Stevan Vuković. Introduction to Vse To Je Film: Eksperimentalni Film v Jugoslaviji 1951–1991 (This Is All Film: Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951–1991), 9–12. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Pogačić, Vladimir. “The New System of Scheduling of Exhibits of the Museum of the Yugoslav Cinematheque.” International Federation of Film Archives. Information Bulletin, Brussels 12 (April 1977): 27–28. Raković, Aleksandar. Rokenrol u Jugoslaviji 1956–1968. Belgrade: Arhipelag, 2012. Stojadinović, Dragoljub. “O odvratnom u delima Živojina Pavlovića.” Mons Aureus: časopis za književnost, umetnost i društvena pitanja 7, no. 25/26 (2009): 172–84. Šijan, Slobodan. Filmski letak: 1976–1979 (i komentari) (Film Leaflet(s): 1976–1979 (with comments)). Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2009. Šijan, Slobodan. Filmus: priče o filmu. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2015. Šijan, Slobodan. Razgovori oko filma. Belgrade: Akademski filmski centar and Dom culture Studentski grad, 2010. Šijan, Slobodan. Tomislav Gotovac: Life as a Film Experiment. Translated by Greg de Cuir Jr. and Žarko Cvejić. Zagreb: MAMA, 2018. Tirnanić, Bogdan. Crni talas. Belgrade: Filmski centar Srbije, 2008. Vuković, Stevan. “Notes on Paradigms in Experimental Film in Socialist Yugoslavia.” In Vse To Je Film: Eksperimentalni Film v Jugoslaviji 1951–1991 (This Is All Film: Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951–1991), 49–63. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Vučetić, Radina. Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2018. Vučičević, Branko. Paper Movies: poučne price. Belgrade and Zagreb: B92 and Arkzin, 1998.

About the Author Dr. Aleksandar Bošković is a lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (in Serbian, 2008). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals in the United States and Europe (Apparatus, Cultural Critique, Digital Icons, Književna istorija, Slavic Review) as well as in various edited collections.

8. kinema ikon—Experiments in Motion (1970–89) Ileana L. Selejan

Abstract This chapter explores the activities of the Romanian experimental arts group kinema ikon between 1970 and 1989. What did experimental aesthetics mean in an institutional environment policed by the Communist state? And how did international avant-garde movements such as Dada and Fluxus inform the group’s artistic position and the local “scene”? In a context dominated by rigid definitions of art, was film a preferred support for kinema ikon’s ambitious theoretical and aesthetic program because of its material flexibility? This chapter demonstrates that the group’s contribution to the history of experimental art and film cannot be located exclusively in the local—Romanian, or even Eastern European—context, emphasizing how this idiosyncratic collective reached beyond its rather finite, preassigned universe. Keywords: Socialist Romania; kinema ikon; amateur film clubs; unofficial culture in the second public sphere; George Săbău; Ioan Pleș

This chapter sets out to explore the filmmaking activity of the Romanian experimental arts collective kinema ikon (ki) from its founding in 1970 until 1989, the year of the Romanian revolution after which the group moved towards the field of new media art. In what follows, I discuss ki’s output within the context of the Romanian Socialist Republic (1965–89), as well as in relation to the overall political and cultural dynamics of the Eastern Bloc during the last two decades of its existence.1 I argue that kinema 1 The Romanian People’s Republic (Republica Populară Română) came into being in 1947. The Communist Party assumed leadership, restructuring the country’s political administration

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch08

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ikon championed a kind of poetic freedom that was inexorably attached to the sociopolitical realities of the regime within which it functioned. The limitations imposed by the powers that be operated on a structural level, through bureaucratic measures and the state surveillance apparatus; ideologically, given the expectations placed upon cultural producers; and aesthetically, because cultural production was regulated by strict guidelines and conventions, which applied to form and content alike. ki’s diverse output thrived despite, and to some extent in direct response to, such constraints, operating on the margins, rather than entirely outside of state-funded cultural environments.

A (Parenthetic) Short History: The Beginnings2 kinema ikon, Atelier de Film Experimental (Experimental Film Workshop) was founded in 1970 by George Săbău, professor of aesthetics and art theory at the Şcoala de Artă (Art School) in Arad.3 First named “Atelier 16,” kinema ikon began as a ciné-club, hosting weekly film screenings and discussion sessions in a studio at the Şcoala Populară de Artă (Popular School for the Arts).4 Săbău recalls that the program included feature films by prominent directors such as Andrzej Wajda, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, along Stalinist lines, while a Soviet model for central planning was implemented across all economic sectors. Throughout the Cold War, Romania maintained a somewhat independent, nationalist course in international relations, with varying degrees of openness to Western powers, notwithstanding its allegiance to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) and the Warsaw Pact. In 1965, the official name of the country was changed to the Socialist Republic of Romania (Republica Socialistă România) as Nicolae Ceaușescu was elected secretary general of the party. Increasingly authoritarian, the leader and his party, by the early 1970s, monopolized all aspects of political, social, and cultural life in the country. Relying upon an infrastructure of repression kept in place by the pervasive Securitate (secret service) apparatus, Ceaușescu’s regime collapsed following the Revolution of December 1989, which was televised worldwide. 2 The most comprehensive source on the history of the group is George Săbău, “Istoria contextuală a grupului kinema ikon,” in kinema ikon (Bucharest: MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 4–66. 3 One of the largest cities in western Romania, Arad has been a regional center for manufacturing industries and economic exchange since the early modern period. 4 A countrywide model for the so-called Popular Schools of the Arts was implemented in Romania during the postwar period and was meant to encourage greater participation of students in arts-related after-school programs and activities. An excellent source on culture and the arts during this period is Caterina Preda, Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships: A Comparison of Chile and Romania (Palgrave MacMillan: 2017). Likewise, Magda Cârneci, Artele plastice în România 1945–1989, 2nd ed. (Bucharest: Polirom, 2013).

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Alain Resnais, and Francis Ford Coppola, among others. The organizers would have eagerly shown other types of films, especially 1920s experimental shorts or contemporaneous “underground” examples from Europe and the United States, but those films were the most difficult to come by.5 Enthusiasts could either travel to Bucharest on the rare occasions when films by the likes of Hans Richter, Luis Buñuel, and Fernand Léger were shown at the Cinemateca Română (Romanian Cinematheque, active since 1964) or try to catch Yugoslav TV broadcasts of experimental works that reached the cities of Arad and Timişoara from nearby Novi Sad across the border.6 Other possible sources were the French, British, and U.S. embassies, as well as the libraries of their cultural institutes, which would occasionally lend materials. In the postwar period, the production and distribution of films was closely regulated by the regime, and, despite great demand, supply was kept low.7 From 1970 onward, kinema ikon membership grew steadily, drawing on the informal networks of Art School students and their circles of friends and acquaintances. Over time, the focus shifted away from spectatorship into production, once Săbău started offering technical workshops at Atelier 16. Because film stock was difficult to procure outside of formal settings, the ciné-club provided the group with an appropriate alibi. Nationwide, students were encouraged to pursue extracurricular activities as part of clubs and popular schools. Such venues also presented opportunities for postgraduate amateurs to further develop their interests in the arts within state-sanctioned institutional contexts. Operating as a ciné-club ensured that the activity of kinema ikon could continue openly and uninterruptedly, even after some members began their university studies—given the pervasiveness of the Securitate during this period, it would have been virtually impossible to make experimental film “underground.” Thus the infrastructure for “cultural leisure” provided by the state was rerouted or even subverted by ki to less predictable ends. Under the guise of an extracurricular, amateur 5 Email correspondence with the author, December 6, 2012. 6 Since her first contact with George Săbău and Călin Man in 2005, the author has gained tremendous insight into the activities of the group through conversations and correspondence with its members. Oral histories collected over these years have greatly informed the perspectives put forth here and are referenced at length. Due to pervasive censorship in Romania during the 1970s and 1980s, the documentation of quasi-underground activities such as those described here was deliberately minimal and mostly kept in personal archives. Oral histories hence become essential tools for reconstructing unofficial histories. 7 During the 1980s, this led to a proliferation of black market VHS copies of dubbed foreign feature films. A range of genres was thus informally in circulation, including thrillers, martial arts movies, horror, and even pornography. See Chuck Norris vs. Communism, dir. Ilinca Călugareanu (Vernon Films, 2015).

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pastime, kinema ikon veered toward experimentation, producing its first completed films circa 1975. Through Săbău’s influence, theory and aesthetics remained central for the group, informing and shaping the members’ output. The “theoretical project” of kinema ikon began with a mission to investigate from an interdisciplinary perspective “the movement of images and images of movement, hence kinema ikon.”8 They considered their activities experimental by definition, while film only happened to be, according to Săbău, the medium chosen to express a shared set of formal concerns.9 Yet the choice was not accidental: cinematic technology allowed practitioners from a variety of fields, even those without a background in filmmaking, to reflect upon a great range of aesthetic problems. Furthermore, it lent itself well to collaborative endeavors. Indeed, Săbău’s original intention had been to assemble an interdisciplinary research group, with a focus on image theory.10 Fearing reprisals due to the ideological strictures of the regime, however, he decided to incorporate the idea of interdisciplinarity within the agenda of an extracurricular art education program.11 The creation of a ciné-club was thus a subterfuge, the only feasible solution at a time when the Securitate, charged with information control, surveilled all possibly disruptive or dissenting cultural activities.12 By the end of the seventies, kinema ikon had produced about thirty experimental films, having “indoctrinated” about forty individuals: the core 8 Săbău, Istoria contextuală, 13. 9 “I wanted to make experimental f ilm also, but the entire thing was experimental from the outset.” See Tomck@t, “Interviu experimental în capsula timpului cu ‘părintele spiritual’ Kinema Ikon, Gheorghe Săbău,” Special Arad (August 31, 2017). 10 Săbău was an avid reader of aesthetics and media theory and sought to stay abreast of contemporaneous debates surrounding art and technology, despite the difficulty in gaining access to such materials. Browsing through Săbău’s library can easily turn into an archeological exercise, because some of the books still carry the marks and traces of their unusual circulation histories. One such example is a copy of Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema (1970), which Săbău remembers was sent by Daniel Moţ from California and smuggled into the country. 11 The time line for the name change from Atelier 16 to kinema ikon is not entirely clear, although Săbău insists that the “theoretical project” was always referred to as such. In 1980, to celebrate a decade of activity, the group organized its first symposium, which included film screenings at Universitatea Populară Arad. “It was a decisive moment for the future of our group, and the moment when the name / logo kinema ikon became official.” Email correspondence with the author, December 6, 2012. 12 Cultural materials were closely monitored and scrutinized by the Securitate, scanned for potentially subversive content, the definitions of which were broad and changeable. Printed matter from Western Europe and the United States was highly restricted. The surveillance of cultural activity increased following Ceauşescu’s introduction of the notorious July Theses in 1971, which called for the censorship of film and music, the policing of “cosmopolitan” tastes and fashions, and the conscription of all arts in the service of the political-ideological state.

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group consisted of fifteen filmmakers, artists, writers, musicians, architects, and four computer scientists, all of whom contributed to the making of the films, even if their roles were limited to those of actors, technicians, or critics. In addition to providing space, equipment, and materials, the workshop at the Popular School for the Arts became a gathering place and a venue for exhibitions of photography and “alternative” art—a category particular to the context at hand, loosely attached to anything that went beyond the conventional use of traditional media such as painting, drawing, and sculpture, which were the most common media in the official art circles of the time. As attested by former members and the occasional passerby, the club was a refuge for students and art school graduates, but also for professionals working outside of the official status quo, where censorship and the regime’s “ready media” ruled.13 The workshop’s eclectic program centered on an interest in art theory and the philosophy of science and technology, and in their respective applications to new media—intermedia would become a preferred term.14 The work produced as a result of these interests ranged from film to photography, sound, theater, printmaking, and early experiments with computer art and cybernetics. Filmmaking, however, remained the focal point of their shared preoccupations until 1989.15 Given this brief history, I now turn to a discussion of filmic work produced by early members of kinema ikon, as a means of relating the theoretical and aesthetic interests of the group with its unique position within the field of culture in Communist Romania, navigating between regime restrictions and experimentation. The discussion is structured in three parts, and is guided by the notion that viewing these films is a necessary step, and should direct any analysis that wishes to provide an introduction to this extensive body of work. Study one departs from the group’s earliest experimental work, which tended toward formal abstraction. Study two seeks to contextualize the group’s output in relation to cinema practices and the institutional frameworks that were active in Romania between 1970 and 1989. Study three returns to the subject of experimentation and situates the work in relation 13 The term “ready-media” was first used as the title for a kinema ikon installation from 1995. It refers to the type of raw TV footage that group members appropriated as part of their video and multimedia installations during the nineties. 14 The use of the term was deliberate, and Săbău was familiar with its use and circulation. “Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media,” Dick Higgins claimed in 1965. See Higgins, Something Else Newsletter 1, no. 1 (1966). Although only marginally concerned with film, this statement and the related philosophy resonated deeply with ki’s practice. 15 All kinema ikon experimental films can be viewed on the group’s official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZNsDOmDHdjKZItViDziGFQ.

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to alternative art-making practices in Romania during the same period, because this is the lineage kinema ikon claimed to belong to, from 1980 onward when they distanced themselves from the official cinematographic field. The examples here included are not intended as representative of the group’s entire output, neither are they presented in a chronological manner. Rather, they are meant to convey a sense of the filmmakers’ diverse approaches and ensuing outcomes. Inspired by ki logic and, interchangeably, ki… nonlogic, the proposed readings constitute subjective responses rather than descriptive narratives. I use my own memories, experiences, and reactions to the films as a means to explore their fragmentary nature. If there is one overarching raison d’etre of ki, it is that there is no single grand narrative that can encompass the multiplicity of interpretations that these makers sought to provoke in their audiences. My approach seeks to highlight this condition, emphasizing synchronicity, relishing the pursuit of free form.

Study One: For Art’s Sake Ioan Pleş’s film Poluare (Pollution, 1977) (Figure 8.1) begins with a group of young men awaiting the vertiginous release of industrial exhaust. Despite the buildup, the episode registers as uneventful, the men’s attitude ostensibly blasé.16 Unexpectedly, the smoke turns into paint, spelling out abstract geometries, methodical incisions carved directly into the material surface of the frame (0:21). Change of scene. To the tunes of The Beatles, the men chase and are chased by the twisting shapes (2:36). “Tomorrow Never Knows” inspires accelerated speed onto the tracks, and as the train roars ahead, so do the peripatetic scratched-out squares, running along the city’s streets in perspectival motion (2:50). These ecstatic gestures, suggestive of psychedelic states, are reminiscent of the 1967 version of Bruce Conner’s “Looking For Mushrooms,” choreographed to the rhythms of the same song—although it is highly unlikely Pleș had any knowledge of the U.S. film. Interspersed throughout the 5:55 minutes of the f ilm is a subplot of burned frames, unraveling their plastic chemistry as if exposed to an unsparing plague. Birds rise and fall, transform into dry paint, while the movements of a horse 16 During the 1950s, Romania’s production economy shifted from agriculture to heavy industry, with extraction facilities greatly increased. The push for large-scale industrialization continued through to 1989, with disregard for environmental harm. As a side note, one might add that, throughout this entire period, fetishized images of industrial work and of workers and working bodies remained prevalent in socialist and Soviet visual culture.

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Figure 8.1. Ioan Pleş, Poluare (Pollution), 1977. 16 mm film still. © kinema ikon.

are broken down into elemental vectors—a nod, perhaps, to the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge or Étienne-Jules Marey. Between 1977 and 1982, Ioan Pleş (a.k.a. John Plesh) produced twelve experimental films, elegantly exploiting the full range of black-and-white tonality afforded by 16 mm technology. Two “signature” devices can be found in his work: stop-frame animations and direct interventions, painted over or carved into the surface of the film, scratched, or burned in. Frame by frame, recurring abstract motifs such as lines, circles, and squares cluster into ascendant (or descendant) movements and form biomorphic images, then scatter, broken up by streaks of color and light flashes created through overexposure. As the film picks up speed, light drawings collide with straight documentary sequences setting them alight—Iluminări (Illuminations) from 1981 is a stunning example of this distinctive style. Delirious states, paranoid images shimmering near and far, dissolve into the moody, sleepy atmosphere of a long night. It feels as though events of cosmic significance are about to pass, erupting from within the solitude of the domestic realm where all these playful experiments are staged.17 17 These gestures are reminiscent of Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, first made in the artist’s studio in 1984. A shared sensibility is at play, notwithstanding

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The elemental pursuit of antinarrative will initially point toward a strictly structural reading of this work. Notice, for instance, the use of stop-motion in Efecte de împrimăvărare (Effects of Spring) from 1978. The term plié denotes a ballet movement that involves the sequential bending and straightening of a dancer’s knees. Here, it becomes synonymous with montage technique, as the film draws a parallel between the production process (the splicing of frames in stop-motion) and the abrupt, broken-down movements of the paper doll characters (for example, at minute 2:10). Mise en abyme sequences were favored by the group, and the viewer will notice the insertion of various off-screen shots into streetscapes, as projected onto the surfaces of walls, disrupting the narrative flow once more. Solarization emphasizes the eeriness and spectrality of these scenes. Any connection to lived experience is hence made irrelevant by the technique. Eventually, all of these structural interruptions will begin to signal a layering of meaning, both literal and figurative, consistent with Săbău’s theoretical interests at the time.18 The pressure of a cumulative effect begins to be felt, an acknowledgement that something will fall out of the frame. The soundtrack could provide additional cues, because it includes recognizable fragments from David Bowie’s “Weeping Wall” released the year before. The choice is suggestive although undeclaredly political. Pleş’s film ends, nonetheless, on an optimistic note; as snow melts with the sun crossing the horizon, spring erupts. Pleş was one of the earliest members of the group. Enrolled in the painting class at the Art School in Arad, he spent much of his free time at the cinema in his hometown Pâncota, nearby. As the story goes, at some point during the early seventies, he “made a deal” with the projectionist and negotiated a steady supply of film stock in exchange for homemade moonshine, coffee, and cigarettes—the latter were high-end contraband at the time. He set up a studio in the attic of his house, where, by the time he crossed paths with the young filmmakers from Atelier 16, he was already busily working on a 35 mm animation film, painting over the frames and scratching the emulsion with needles. He even figured out how to insert noise within the the lack of contact between the two cultural spheres (Socialist Romania and the Soviet Union), outside of “official art” circles. 18 Săbău had some, even if limited, access to the writings of Dominique Noguez, Jean Mitry, Peter Kubelka, P. Adams Sitney, and Gene Youngblood through monographs and magazines such as Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, and Communicacion, and the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound and Film Culture. He has cited semiotics and narratology, through the work of Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, and Christian Metz, as influential, consistent with the “trend” at the time. Email correspondence with the author, December 6, 2012 and October 12, 2017.

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soundtrack on the margins of strip. As Săbău elatedly recalls, Pleş made these discoveries without any familiarity with animation techniques or contemporary experimental film (Norman McLaren immediately comes to mind). The film is regrettably lost, although Săbău remembers it as a montage of “hundreds of films, action movies, Westerns […] all of Hollywood was there.”19 Having joined the group, Pleş brought along his friend, Emanuel Țeț, also a painter, who was experimenting with similar do-it-yourself techniques in the city of Alba Iulia. Following his move to Arad, Țeț made six or seven films with kinema ikon. Poem Dinamic (Dynamic Poem) from 1978 builds its lyrical plot around an embracing couple on the jovial rhythms of Chick Corea’s “Love Castle.” The film, alongside Vînătoarea de păsări (Bird Hunt) from 1980 is stunningly composed, with masterful sequences that integrate recorded footage and drawn-on film animation in evocative color. Of all the members of ki, Pleş and Țeț experimented with abstractions and toyed with the idea of modifying the frame most extensively. A hybrid instance can be seen in Iosif Stroia’s Autoportret (Self-Portrait) of 1984, in which the author superimposed geometric variations of his signature line onto the textures and happenings of real life by placing a glass sheet in between the camera and the recorded scene. The soundtracks of ki films are also noteworthy. The same restrictions that impacted the distribution of movies and printed matter affected the dissemination of foreign music, which came under intense scrutiny from Party censors and was in short supply—the subversive potential of countercultural movements was of particular concern.20 During the 1970s and 1980s, as the regime became increasingly restrictive, Romanians would trade in smuggled LPs and listen clandestinely to music shows such as “Metronom” on Radio Free Europe, hosted by exiled DJ Cornel Chiriac. Extracted from the soundtrack of their experimental films, kinema ikon’s unintentional playlist provides an access point into the musical subculture of the time. Thus, Pleş and Țeț set their abstract improvisations to the tunes of electronica such as Vangelis’s “Pulsar” or the riffs of Edmond Hall. Other filmmakers’ preferences ranged from the melancholy refrains of Chet Baker to the orchestral 19 George Săbău and Călin Man, interview with the author, Arad, April 11, 2016. 20 The relationship between Romanian cultural institutions and censorship has yet to be investigated in depth, although references can be found in most studies on art and visual culture during this period. See, for instance, Caterina Preda, “Sub supraveghere (artistică). Relaţia artiştilor cu Securitatea,” Studia Politica Romanian Political Science Review 13, no. 1 (2013): 159–72. In relation to print media, see Emilia Șercan, Cultul secretului. Mecanismele cenzurii în presa comunistă (Bucharest: Polirom, 2015).

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sonority of Pink Floyd, or the anthem-like rhythms of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” Though they were not intended as political commentary in any sense, the “Western” songs found in ki films were, nonetheless, politicized by the larger context of the films’ creation.

Study Two: Unmaking Documentary We need a type of art, cinematography and theatre that portrays the essence of the model human we wish to create! Even when it might be necessary to idealize the hero, let him set an example, so that young people understand that this is how they should be!21

Film production and distribution in Romania were nationalized in 1948 alongside all other industries. Incorporated as informational material or ideologically sanitized entertainment, films (both documentaries and fiction films) were instrumentalized by the state propaganda apparatus and regimented through the activity of various institutions of control. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party encouraged amateur filmmaking in the context of worker and student unions and within formal cultural institutions (such as the Popular School of the Arts), establishing local ciné-clubs and supplying them with equipment and materials. Cameras, film stock, and developers were hard to come by and prohibitively expensive otherwise, making this “hobby” inaccessible outside of state-managed production venues.22 For the state, amateur work was valuable as a means to generate new content aligned with its professed ideals of mass emancipation through culture.23 21 Speech by Nicolae Ceauşescu. “Cuvîntare la Consfătuirea de lucru pe problemele muncii organizatorice și politico-educative din 2–3 august 1983,” in Nicolae Ceauşescu, România pe drumul construirii societăţii socialiste multilateral dezvoltate, vol. 27 (Bucharest: Editura Politică, 1984), 185. 22 On the subject of amateur filmmaking and ciné-clubs in Romania, see Camera Obscura, dir. Gheorghe Preda (Scharf Film, 2016) 23 To date, the history of postwar cinema in Romania has been relatively unexplored in academic literature—the post-1989 “New Wave” phenomenon is an exception, and some recent publications have sought to contextualize these developments. See, for instance, Dominique Nasta, Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Film critics Alex Leo Șerban and Andrei Gorzo have published numerous articles in the local press, reflecting on this oft-conflicted legacy. Archived versions of many of these texts can be found at: https://www.liternet.ro/autor/90/Alex-Leo-Serban.html and https://www.liternet.ro/autor/64/Andrei-Gorzo.html.

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Most amateur filmmakers were anything but “subversives”; rather, they were primarily drawn to learning a new skill on the side of tedious factory work. They used the tools of cinema to record aspects of their daily life or create conventional narrative films that steered away from potentially problematic content.24 Atelier 16/kinema ikon was mostly active outside of the amateur circuit. Formally, it operated as a ciné-club; informally, as an experimental film workshop. The group’s activities unfolded within a closed circle of friends and trusted associates, which ensured some independence, outside of state-sponsored networks of circulation. Nonetheless, certain “concessions” had to be made. The workshop performed a balancing act in between the official and unofficial realms. To secure its status as ciné-club, kinema ikon had to prove its usefulness to the regime. An agreement was made with the propaganda division of the Communist Party and the local cultural committee in Arad to deliver a number of documentary films annually on topics ranging from local history and folklore to ethnography. A so-called “sacrifice team,” which included Săbău, Florin Hornoiu, and Adrian Ostafi volunteered for the task.25 They worked with the 16 mm format, on some occasions in color. Filming frugally, they saved sections of unused film from these projects for later experimentation. It was thus that an experimental aesthetic could appear on the margins of an accepted practice, and by 1989, an equal number of experimental films and documentaries were produced. The group was officially tolerated not least due to its visibility. Regular participation at film festivals and symposia, as well as professional connections with prominent institutions such as the Film and Theater Institute (Institutul de Artă Teatrală şi Cinematografică “I.L.Caragiale”) in Bucharest and the national studios of Sahia Film and Anima Film, further reassured the authorities. This was the subterfuge used by Săbău to bypass state-imposed limitations on “artistic creation” and focus on experimentation without fearing reprisal in the intimacy of their studio.26 After 1980, as Săbău noted, ki withdrew from the cinematographic system—with the exception of its obligatory participation in a national 24 For an overview of experimental approaches in postwar Romanian film, see Ion Indolean, “Modele Experimentale în filmul românesc postbelic,” Observator Cultural 881 (July 21, 2017). See also: Alex Leo Șerban, “Experimentând în sânul Establishment-ului: un raport rareori consumat,” in Experiment în Artă Românească după 1960, ed. Alexandra Titu (Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997), 439–41. 25 George Săbău and Călin Man, interview with the author, Arad, April 11, 2016. 26 “[It] was a strategy to elude a closed-off, oppressive system, one that had no interest in subsidizing aesthetic experiments, which were considered elitist.” George Săbău, Istoria proiectului kinema ikon (Arad: kinema ikon, 2021), 12.

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culture festival ‘Cântarea României’ that its members remember with embarrassment—and was integrated into a system of alternative art and literature, as practiced by artists and writers from the so-called 80s generation.27 The experimental work was known in film circles, or at least it was familiar to professionals in the field and cited in the cultural press of the time. However, until 1989, these films were never distributed and were only shown sporadically to a restricted professional audience. The work traveled abroad on few occasions and exclusively within the Eastern Bloc.28 At the Cântarea României festival in 1984, kinema ikon was invited by the magazine Contemporanul for a screening in Bucharest.29 Săbău remembers they projected some of the experimental films with the documentary work mixed in, in order to not upset or worry the censors with formal experiments that could have been deemed provocative.30 Writing about ki films on that occasion, one critic exclaimed, “Once more I am convinced that there are authentic cinematographers among the amateurs. A shame their films are so little known!”31 His euphoric tone exemplified the generally positive assessment of the press, praising the group’s investigations into the “essence” of cinematography and the formal language of film.32 Săbău believes that these responses were essential to strengthening the group’s legitimacy and in deflecting censorship. For many years, ki’s completed documentary films, as well as additional documentary footage, lay forgotten in storage. These were not discarded, but the group was reluctant to revisit them after 1989. Perhaps what bothered the filmmakers was the compromise with the authorities, however necessary, that these f ilms represented. Recently, however, several of these f ilms 27 Săbău, Istoria contextuală, 11. Members of “generaţia ‘80” (the ‘80s generation) deployed tactics similar to ki and often maintained a dual status in relation to official institutions. See Adrian Guță, Generația ‘80 in artele vizuale (Pitești: Paralela 45, 2008). 28 George Săbău and Demian Sandru’s film Scaunul (The Chair) from 1971 (16 mm cinemascope on multiple screens) received an award at the 1973 International Fiction Film Festival in Brno. A selection of f ilms was shown at the 1977 International Festival for Abstract Animation in Krakow. 29 Cântarea României was a large-scale “national festival,” an annual cultural event organized by the Council for Culture and Socialist Education (Consiliul Culturii și Educației Socialiste), starting in 1976. It was a part of Ceaușescu’s push for a Romanian cultural revolution, with a stated goal to educate the masses and to reaffirm citizens’ enthusiastic participation in the political-ideological program of the Party. 30 George Săbău and Călin Man, interview with the author, Arad, April 11, 2016. 31 Cristina Corciovescu, “Tentația experimentului; O dorința subiectivă și o necesitate obiectivă: filmele cineamatorilor să fie văzute!” Cinema 9 (1984): 4. 32 One of the most important texts on kinema ikon from this period is Calin Dan, “Filmul experimental, scriere și lectură,” Revista Arta 6 (1985): 35–36.

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Figure 8.2. Nicolae Ceauşescu’s official visit to Arad, 1979. 16 mm film still. © kinema ikon.

were dusted off as part of a major digitization effort. A time capsule was opened, and some unexpected materials have come to light from among the seemingly banal recordings: endless processions and public events, choreographed marches and festivals, concerts and competitions, shots of factories and factory work, of the city of Arad and its surroundings, alongside many discarded bits of filler footage. The execution of the films, even the finished ones, is far from polished. In watching them, one notices a certain randomness—the camera operator, often anonymous, might be working on their experimental technique (the ridiculousness of a trash can repeatedly shot at extreme, Rodchenko-like angles) or simply collecting footage, which might be later reworked in an experimental film. Among the greatest finds is a recording of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s 1979 official visit to Arad and of the speech he gave from the grand balcony of the national theater as a large cheering crowd gathered below (Figure 8.2). It becomes immediately evident that the cameraman was offered a most unfortunate placement, with large pieces of scaffolding from the TV crew obstructing his view. The camera repeatedly switches from one section of the facade to the other, insistent on finding a better angle to shoot the president, yet the filmmaker is failing miserably at this job. His camera moves too much, too quickly, and when it stops, it fixates off-center on a blocked view. He

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pans nauseatingly in and out of focus and zooms in on nothing, letting the protagonist fall out of the frame. The event becomes nothing short of absurd. Even worse, it all starts looking like a parody, a farce, reminiscent of John Baldessari’s 1967 series Wrong, in which the American artist stages a series of photographic compositions that deliberately “fail” to follow the conventions of proper photographic practice. George Săbău, the uncredited creator of the footage, knew exactly what he was doing, although he has remained cryptic about the implied attitudes this specific case represents. Outside of the officially commissioned documentaries, members of ki had little interest in engaging with this filmic form. The “only attempted ciné vérité documentary,” according to Săbău, was Florin Hornoiu’s film Navetiştii (Commuters) from 1976, although even that f ilm, despite the more straightforward content, takes a rather unusual approach—the film would have never passed public distribution norms. The film, according to Hornoiu, shows “the commuter phenomenon […] the numerous inhabitants of suburban villages, forced to work in the plants of the big cities.”33 The critical message (“forced to work”) is at best inferred from the content. The film documents a routine commute familiar to many and not even necessarily specific to the context of Socialist Romania. Most of the travelers are asleep, others play cards or look outside the window, bored and fatigued. Interactions between the anonymous cast proceed with the naturalness of those unaware of the recording device. The train stops, and its passengers pour into the streets. Yet disobedience underlies the very circumstances of the film’s making. The cameraperson had to shoot clandestinely, disguising their camera, due to the prohibition against filming on trains and in train stations. Furthermore, this act turned the commuters who did notice the camera into accomplices. Commuters remains an exceptional work, and the group’s resistance to documentary was certainly related to the willed separation of their “artistic” work from the official films they helped produce. Nonetheless, documentary elements from ki’s expanding “image bank,” to quote Săbău once more, were frequently incorporated into the experimental films, though rarely without further manipulation. The integrity of the image and especially that of the narrative flow was insistently disrupted. In addition to the completed documentary films, numerous fragments of recorded footage have surfaced from within the recently excavated archive. An uninitiated viewer might observe such sequences of scrambled actions with bewilderment, as 33 kinema ikon, exh. cat. (Bucharest: MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 80.

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Figure 8.3. George Săbău, Decupaje (Cuts), 1980-1985. 16 mm film still. © kinema ikon.

belonging to the “real” history of a place (Arad, during the seventies and eighties) left unvisited for decades, except in memory. However, upon viewing their experimental counterparts, artifice is revealed once more, because repeated sequences and fragments create astounding, although unintended, overlaps between the two filmic sets—films made by Pleş and Țeț contain many examples, while Săbău’s film Decupaje (Cuts) is made entirely of such fragments agglutinated through antinarrative montage (Figure 8.3). While state media demanded the production of moving images that reinforced official truth claims, in the filmmakers’ workshop, the only awareness possible was that of the maker or fabricator. The moment sequences from the documentaries were inserted into experimental films, the meaning of these recontextualized fragments was subverted.

Study Three: Cuts Film critic Alex Leo Şerban has written about the emergence in ki’s work of “highly personal mythologies [to] replace the public, impersonal ones which have proved their limits through continuous manipulation.” In the group’s work, he notes: “Subversive commentaries on Reality interconnect [with]

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a subversive treatment of form.”34 The subject of political commentary— whether intentionally subversive or merely implied (subliminally)—comes up frequently in discussions about the films. In most cases, the viewer can at best notice a suggestive tone. Nonetheless, that “tone” lingers on. As I have shown in this chapter, the surface of the image can be excavated and interrogated further, its rich textures traced back to the context at hand.35 By contrast with Commuters, a film like Ioan T. Morar, Autopsia Uitării (Autopsy of Oblivion) from 1977, incorporated everyday details within an otherwise absurdist account, through sudden, upending cuts. The plot of the film remains unclear until the end. At best, viewers may discern a lineup of disoriented characters that pass erratically through the picture frame, their actions manifestly staged. Unrelated events line up in search of coherence, caught in what feels like a labyrinthine memoryscape. Indeed, any subjective ordering of events seems reasonable in a world where actions are reversed, candles are blown back on, and things move against the gravitational pull, jumping back into one’s hand. In one sequence, a stranger walks around with empty birdcages. At the bottom of each rests an egg. In the following scene, perhaps the most suggestive one, a character smashes the eggs with a sickle, then kills a pigeon as if by ritual sacrifice. In another episode, a reader tears apart pages from a book and ends up maniacally nailing down the remaining pages—the actor happens to be the literary critic Mircea Mihăieş. A literary sacrifice? Perhaps. The key to solve this uncanny, deteriorating turn of events remains untold. Most of the action unfolds in nondescript, anonymous locations. All contingent details are removed, despite how realistic they may feel—with the exception of a street scene where the camera follows two individuals away from the crowd, zooming in as they pass the easily recognizable post office building. The emblem of the Socialist Republic of Romania, painted on the store windows, comes briefly into view. Repeated footage gives the impression of a permanent déjà vu. The sense of unease saturates the picture and lingers on. According to Săbău, Morar employed techniques derived from surrealist films, which the group had studied attentively 34 Alex Leo Şerban, “Experimentând,” 440. 35 Janina Falkowska usefully discusses terminology on this subject, noting that being “political” generally has a different meaning here than in Western parlance. “Especially in Eastern Europe, where the ideological positions, political situations, and a whole sociohistorical position of viewing changes every five or six years with new historical developments, the evaluation of any film as politically important depends greatly on the context of viewing.” See Janina Falkowska, “‘The Political’ in the Films of Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski,” Cinema Journal 34, no. 2 (1995): 37–50.

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(Luis Buñuel was an important reference), “with the purpose of revealing a sequence of states resembling dreams, indirectly referencing the conflictual individual–society situation in a totalitarian regime.”36 Autopsy of Oblivion was the most directly political of all ki films, though saying this should not detract from its aesthetic significance as yet another pertinent example of the type of subjective play with content and media that would come to characterize this phase in the life of kinema ikon: “the artistic recuperation of the real, by means of strategies that combine its fragments,” as Săbău noted.37 In his own work, Săbău also made extensive use of fragments from the “image bank,” peering closer and closer into the frame, starting with Decupaje (Cuts) (1980-85) and ending with the even more esoteric Fragmentarium (1985-1990).38 Both films were assembled from existing footage collected over long stretches of time. In Cuts, the camera follows the rhythms of the street, narrowing in on people, cars, traffic, noise, at times running parallel or counter to the flow. Reflected in a window, we catch a glimpse of the camera operator—the silent witness turned voyeur—by which the audience is implicated as well. “I was wandering the city with my camera recording ‘everything’ I could,” Săbău remembers, “so that later during editing I could develop my theoretical project which was based on a (personal) theory of the rapport between the fragments of the material world and the fragmentation of captured images.”39 As exemplified in Săbău’s work, the interplay between fragments of “the real” and their deconstruction, whether through formal disruption or counternarratives, would come to characterize kinema ikon’s heterogeneous style. The provocation was met by like-minded artists and critics, yet not without anxiety, given the context, and the immediate dangers it posed once such tactics were called into action. A recipe for mischievous deviance lay in wait. 40 36 kinema ikon, exh. cat., 72. 37 For a recent analysis of kinema ikon’s experimental films by relation to a “politics of fragmentation,” see Cristian Nae, “Reality Unbound. The Politics of Fragmentation in the Experimental Productions of kinema ikon,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7, no. 1 (2016): 25–38. 38 Săbău’s first experimental film, Simultaneous Hypostases (Ipostaze Simultane, 1970), already combined sections from about ten films that would have otherwise been destroyed. It was a test piece for various techniques and significant in its own right. 39 Email correspondence with the author, December 6, 2012. 40 Artist and art critic Călin Dan sees the complexity of kinema ikon’s approach as an anomaly, in a context in which art, especially experimental art, was made in precarious conditions and an “aesthetics of poverty was not just mimed, but dramatically genuine, due to the scarcity of materials.” See Călin Dan “Estetica Sărăciei. The Aesthetics of Poverty,” in Experiment în Artă Românească după 1960, ed. Alexandra Titu (Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997), 103.

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Săbău has fluctuated somewhat in his reflections on this topic, yet has been f irm in stating that kinema ikon purposefully rejected direct political commentary in their work. 41 Despite all the associations, connotations, and evocations that their f ilms contained, the group never identif ied as dissident and had no interest in producing antiregime or protest work—doing so would have doubtlessly led to the cessation of their activities. 42 As a possible path out of this conundrum, one might consider the case of kinema ikon as an instance in which making political—in other words, antiregime art—was neither a choice nor a possibility. Yet the very context in which they lived made “being political” (as the phrase is understood in Western criticism) a necessity; they had to f ind means to subvert the system to continue experimenting with aesthetics. Even so, with all precautions taken, relationships with the regime were never straightforward, and the parameters along which the group operated officially and unofficially—which had an impact on which work it showed, when, and in what context—seem to have been in constant flux, depending on the rapport with local administrative bodies and the Securitate. The most drastic measure was taken after the repeatedly attempted and in some cases successful escapes to the West of eighteen out of the thirty group members, which led to the group being prohibited from traveling internationally. 43 Yet perhaps the most closely monitored and potentially most threatening aspect of the group was the crowd it occasionally attracted. During the 1980s, the events, exhibitions, and symposia planned by kinema ikon became important meeting places for the notoriously antiestablishment generation of the ’80s. 44 kinema ikon was eager to engage their counterparts from the worlds of art, theater, and literature; by contrast, they were uninterested in affirming 41 We “never were what one would call a dissident group, especially now that it’s fashionable [to deem oneself as such]. We did what most intellectuals and cultural producers also did in Romania—a type of art that was parallel to the official one. There’s nothing original in that.” Mihai Popovici, “De vorbă cu Gheorghe Săbău, despre Trenuri pierdute, video-art și manipulări,” Realitatea culturala, 3. 42 “The group’s activities were consistently surveilled by the Securitate, as experimental films were considered just as subversive as Sci-Fi, Jazz or alternative visual arts.” Săbău, Istoria contextuală, 17. 43 In 1985, kinema ikon received an invitation to screen a selection of its films at the Centre Pompidou—then known as the Beaubourg. The program remained unrealized until 1995 because of the travel ban. The various brushings with the Securitate have been detailed by Săbău in several texts, most extensively in “Kinema Ikon, nostalgii temperate,” TATAIA 2 (2010) and Istoria proiectului kinema ikon (Arad: kinema ikon, Museum Arad, 2021). 44 The most important events were two interdisciplinary symposia: Intermedia 1: The Image in Art Discourse (May 1984) and Intermedia 2: The Interval in Artistic Discourse (May 1988).

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themselves in the strictly regulated field of cinema, whether professional or amateur, which would have greatly restricted their experimental efforts. After 1980, kinema ikon withdrew from most formal activities related to cinematography (“we stopped being Sunday filmmakers”), branching out instead into art and literary networks. 45 Their main interest was in making experimental film as a form of experimental art. Thus, working in “parallel” to the official cultural field was more feasible, permissible in contemporary art, and especially on its margins through film and video. 46 As a point of comparison to the output of ki, one might consider experiments on or with film such as those by Ion Grigorescu and Geta Brătescu, exemplary of closed practices whereby the artists’ studio or home was treated as a place of refuge even when it became a stage. Similar to kinema ikon, the screening and distribution of their films was tightly controlled by the artists before 1989—a form of self-censorship. They were mostly seen, if at all, in small informal exhibitions and in friends’ apartments. 47 Yet even “in Romanian art circles,” Săbău would comment, “kinema ikon was perceived as an atypical, nonconventional, underground group, which made it vulnerable to the ideological pressure of the regime.”48 Nonetheless, throughout the 1980s, they participated in important exhibitions held in Romania while continuing their work in Arad. 49 During this period, around eighteen exhibitions of painting, drawing, graphic design, photography, and mail art were installed in the hallways of the ciné-club—in addition to a few public exhibitions and events.50 kinema ikon’s contribution to the history of experimental film, art, and related practices cannot be located (or understood) exclusively in the local Romanian, or even Eastern European, context. Rather, this idiosyncratic collective has sought to expand and reach beyond the margins of a rather confined universe. The group positioned itself in continuity with the historic 45 Email correspondence with the author, December 6, 2012. 46 “the group practiced a type of art that was ‘parallel’ to official ideology, a kind of cultural underground, that revealed through film the suffocating climate [due to] the Romanian political regime.” Săbău, atelier kinema-ikon retrospectiva 1970-1989, 22 filme experimentale 16 mm (Arad: Museum Arad, 1990), n.p. 47 On the apartment exhibition “phenomenon” in Romanian art, see, for instance, Gibescu et al. house pARTy 1987, 1988. Cluj: IDEA Design & Print, 2017. 48 Săbău, Istoria contextuală, 9. 49 Most significant were Medium (Sfîntu Gheorghe, 1981) and Spațiul-oglindă (Bucharest, 1986) due to the privileging of interdisciplinary approaches and the presentation on work in multiple media. 50 Due to the scope of this volume, my discussion focuses exclusively on the production of experimental film. The entire ki bibliography, documenting almost four decades of uninterrupted activities is accessible online: http://kinema-ikon.net/.

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avant-garde, Dada and Surrealism especially, and to international movements such as Fluxus. Nonetheless, with a certain lag. As Săbău and Călin Man have noted, when the regime collapsed in 1989, they realized that most of the experiments they were working with at the time had “already been done in the West” much earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s. The postwar experimental art movements in Romania and the subversive or resistant cultural scene of the 1980s have been the subject of foundational studies by Magda Cârneci (the interstices between the official and unofficial art worlds), Alexandra Titu (experimental practice as a form of resistance in and of itself), Ileana Pintilie (experimental art as outlet), Adrian Guță, or the criticism of Călin Dan.51 Similar issues have been addressed in numerous exhibitions of pre-1989 and 1990s art from Eastern Europe, hosted by prominent institutions primarily in Western Europe and the United States.52 Yet the question of politics—whether partisan, complacent, subversive, or resistant—remains problematic for a broader range of cultural production that sits uneasily within compartmentalized typologies and definitions. More often than not, the few avant-garde movements or isolated (and thus glorified) instances of dissident art from the 1960s to the 1980s are too easily tailored to the by now orthodox narratives of divisions between East and West, centers and peripheries, partisanship and dissent.53 *** Working under the prohibitive sanctions of the Communist regime, kinema ikon put forth a project that was primarily aesthetic, yet unavoidably political, because, within this context, the choice of medium and the type of work constituted a political statement in itself. Neither explicitly oppositional nor 51 Magda Cârneci, Artele plastice în România 1945–1989, 2nd ed. (Bucharest: Polirom, 2013); Alexandra Titu, ed., Experiment în Artă Românească după 1960 (Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997); Ileana Pintilie, Actionismul în România în timpul comunismului (Cluj: Idea Design & Print, 2000); and Adrian Guță, Generația ‘80 in artele vizuale (Pitești: Paralela 45, 2008). 52 See, for instance, Blood and Honey: The Future’s in the Balkans, curated by Harald Szeemann and organized by the Essl Collection, Vienna, Austria, in 2003; Les promesses du passé – Une histoire discontinue de l’art dans l’ex-Europe de l’Est, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010; and Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016. 53 More recent publications have sought to bridge this gap. See, for instance, Daria Ghiu. În acest pavilion se vede artă România la Bienala de Artă de la Veneţia (Cluj: IDEA Design & Print, 2016). Or, not exclusive to the Romanian context: Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014).

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aligned with the regime’s ideology, kinema ikon remains a prime example of the resistance of late avant-garde, experimental art movements within the confines of the totalitarian state. The group’s multimedia, interdisciplinary approach to art and technology was a counterpoint to the linear, reductive modus operandi of the censorship, surveillance, and repression apparatus of the state. Today, kinema ikon is the rare survivor of the few experimental art movements that emerged in Romania under authoritarian rule during the postwar period. After fifty years of activity, the group continues to reinvent itself while maintaining its original objectives: to engage and promote experimentation across multiple media and to tap into contemporary technologies, mining their present and future applications in art and in life.

Bibliography Călugareanu, Ilinca. Chuck Norris vs. Communism. Vernon Films, 2015. Cârneci, Magda. Artele plastice în România 1945–1989. 2nd ed. Bucharest: Polirom, 2013. Ceauşescu, Nicolae. “Cuvîntare la Consfătuirea de lucru pe problemele muncii organizatorice și politico-educative din 2–3 august 1983.” In România pe drumul construirii societăţii socialiste multilateral dezvoltate, vol. 27. Bucharest: Editura Politică, 1984. Corciovescu, Cristina. “Tentația experimentului; O dorința subiectivă și o necesitate obiectivă: filmele cineamatorilor să fie văzute!” Cinema 9 (1984): 4. Dan, Călin. “Estetica Sărăciei. The Aesthetics of Poverty.” In Experiment în Artă Românească după 1960 (Experiment in Romanian art since 1960), edited by Alexandra Titu, 100–107. Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997. Dan, Călin. “Filmul experimental, scriere și lectură.” Revista Arta 6 (1985): 35–36. Falkowska, Janina. “‘The Political’ in the Films of Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski.” Cinema Journal 34, no. 2 (1995): 37–50. Ghiu, Daria. În acest pavilion se vede artă România la Bienala de Artă de la Veneţia. Cluj: IDEA Design & Print, 2016. Guță, Adrian. Generația ‘80 in artele vizuale. Pitești: Paralela 45, 2008. Higgins, Dick. Something Else Newsletter 1, no. 1 (1966). Gibescu, Roxana, Dan Mihălțianu, Decebal Scriba, and Raluca Voinea. house pARTy 1987, 1988. Cluj: IDEA Design & Print, 2017. Indolean, Ion. “Modele Experimentale în filmul românesc postbelic.” Observator Cultural 881, July 21, 2017. https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/ modele-experimentale-filmul-romanesc-postbelic/.

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Kemp-Welch, Klara. Antipolitics in Central European Art. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014. kinema ikon. Bucharest: MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005. Nae, Cristian. “Reality Unbound. The Politics of Fragmentation in the Experimental Productions of kinema ikon.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7, no. 1 (2016): 25–38. Nasta, Dominique. Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pintilie, Ileana. Actionismul în România în timpul comunismului. Cluj: Idea Design & Print, 2000. Popovici, Mihai. “De vorbă cu Gheorghe Săbău, despre Trenuri pierdute, video-art și manipulări.” Realitatea culturala, 3. Preda, Caterina. Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships: A Comparison of Chile and Romania. London: Palgrave MacMillan: 2017. Preda, Caterina. “Sub supraveghere (artistică). Relaţia artiştilor cu Securitatea.” Studia Politica Romanian Political Science Review 13, no. 1 (2013): 159–72. Preda, Gheorghe. Camera Obscura. Scharf Film, 2016. Săbău, George. atelier kinema-ikon retrospectiva 1970-1989, 22 filme experimentale 16 mm. Arad: Museum Arad, 1990. Unpaginated. Săbău, George. Email correspondence with the author. December 6, 2012. Săbău, George. Email correspondence with the author. October 12, 2017. Săbău, George and Călin Man. Interview with the author. Arad, April 11, 2016. Săbău, George. Istoria proiectului kinema ikon. Arad: kinema ikon, Museum Arad, 2021. Săbău, George. “Istoria contextuală a grupului kinema ikon.” In kinema ikon, 4–66. Bucharest: MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005. Săbău, George. “Kinema Ikon, nostalgii temperate.” TATAIA 2 (2010): 50–54. Șerban, Alex Leo. “Experimentând în sânul Establishment-ului: un raport rareori consumat.” In Experiment în Artă Românească după 1960 (Experiment in Romanian art since 1960), edited by Alexandra Titu, 439–41. Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997. Șercan, Emilia. Cultul secretului. Mecanismele cenzurii în presa comunistă. Bucharest: Polirom, 2015. Titu, Alexandra, ed. Experiment în Artă Românească după 1960 (Experiment in Romanian art since 1960). Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997. Tomck@t. “Interviu experimental în capsula timpului cu ‘părintele spiritual’ Kinema Ikon, Gheorghe Săbău.” Special Arad, August 31, 2017. https://specialarad. ro/interviu-experimental-in-capsula-timpului-cu-parintele-spiritual-kinemaikon-gheorghe-sabau/.

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About the Author Dr. Ileana L. Selejan is a research fellow with the Decolonising Arts Institute and an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London. As honorary research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, she participates in the European Research Council–funded project, Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination. She received her PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

9. AudioVision: Sound, Music, and Noise in East German Experimental Films Seth Howes

Abstract With 16 mm and 35 mm stock reserved for professional film, most East German artists in the early 1980s experimented on 8 mm. Because this format often lacked an audio track, one might surmise that sound played no role in this process, yet as this chapter explores, the aural dimension was often essential. Live sound programs performed at screenings could both corroborate and contradict the experimental films’ editing rhythms and thematic concerns. Influenced by contemporary jazz and combining media art, minimalist composition, and popular genres such as punk, GDR experimental filmmakers blended images and sound, noise and music. Analyzing works by Jürgen Böttcher, Thom di Roes, A.G. Geige, and Matthias BAADER Holst, the chapter tracks how sound and image coincided in East German experimental films. Keywords: East Germany (GDR); intermedia; 8 mm film; Jürgen Böttcher; Thom di Roes: A.G. Geige; Matthias BAADER Holst

Introduction: New Films On December 2, 1987, the Galerie Oben in central Karl-Marx-Stadt—now Chemnitz—hosted a screening of what it advertised as New Films by Wolfgang Hartzsch, Volker Lewandowsky, Mario A., and Claus Löser. Independently produced, non-narrative films like these were hardly atypical fare for Galerie Oben, an artist-run “producers’ gallery” founded in 1973, which exhibited paintings, sculptures, and boundary-blurring pieces that expanded and

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch09

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rethought traditional distinctions between genres.1 Yet none of these New Films could have been viewed in standard East German cinemas, whether as part of a full program of independent or experimental shorts, or as accompaniments to a conventional feature. For one thing, the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) state-owned film studio system, the Deutsche Film AG (DEFA), had never prioritized the production of experimental films, by that name or any other.2 And for another, even as late as 1987, such films’ legality (and lack thereof) was governed by an order on so-called approval and licensure, last updated in 1976, which expressly prohibited the production or exhibition of films that had not been submitted to, and approved by, governance bodies existing solely for this purpose. Tasked with determining whether these unlicensed films merited criminal investigation, agents of the Ministry for State Security (MfS, or Stasi) attended the Galerie Oben event.3 In his report, the caseworker noted that “negative statements” emerged from the interactions the filmmakers staged between sound, music, and image: Through shots of the back lots of Berlin tenements, the f ilm Kino by [Achsnick] conveys a ‘slum atmosphere.’ Accompanied by punk music, the film shows the arrest of a young man by a ‘man in a long wool coat’ in the company of a police officer with a drawn weapon. As this happens, we hear a recording of [a] text influenced by the ideological material of the punk movement. […] In Löser’s film Movement Study, two people crawl on the floor toward a man clad in a suit, reading a newspaper, who turns away from the crawling individuals once they reach him. Throughout, the ‘Solidarity Song’ by [Hans] Eisler is played. The Herald by Werner shows sculptures from the Nazi period that depict ‘epic hero-figures.’ Repeatedly interpolated are shots of a large sculpture standing in Eberswalde near a property belonging to the National People’s Army. This was purportedly completed by the Nazi sculptor Breker and is understood today as an articulation of the Olympian ideal. The film ends with footage from the 1 Bernd Lindner, “Eingeschränkte Öffentlichkeit? Die alternative Galerieszene in der DDR und ihr Publikum,” in Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit Bd. 1: Blick zurück — im Zorn?, ed. Jürgen Schweinebraden von Wichmann-Eichhorn (Berlin: Edition EP, 1998), 224–33; esp. 228–9. 2 Thomas Beutelschmidt, Sozialistische Audiovision: Zur Geschichte der Medienkultur in der DDR (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1995), 189–244; 189. 3 See “Verordnung über die Lizenz- und Zulassungspflicht im Filmwesen,” Gesetzesblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republic I, no. 6 (1976): 102–6; and Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politisch-ästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulationen in der Spätphase der DDR (Potsdam: DEFA-Stiftung, 2013), 68–71.

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year 1942, shot in the ‘German Museum’ in Munich. As accompanying music, the title music of the erstwhile fascist Wochenschau [newsreel] is used. 4

At first, the interaction of audible and visible aspects might seem unremarkable, because synchronous sound had been available by then to European filmmakers for over five decades. But the lack of studio support for experimental film, and the unavailability of 35 mm and even 16 mm stock to nonprofessionals, meant that the films screened in Karl-Marx-Stadt in late 1987 were mostly shot on Super 8, a format that, in the GDR, as elsewhere, largely lacked the magnetic audio track required for synchronous sound recording.5 And while the Stasi report reveals that this technical limitation was easily overcome, because prerecorded sound programs could accompany the films, it also captures the filmmakers’ varied uses of music and the range of styles they drew upon—from punk rock and melodies from Nazi newsreels to a Weimar-era work by the canonized Communist composer Hanns Eisler. Given the technical limitations of Super 8, the relative scarcity in the GDR of video-recording technology and the vagaries of digital preservation, the sound of GDR experimental films is a difficult thing to hear with one’s own ears; what reached GDR audiences’ ears must frequently be retrospectively reconstructed, pieced together from archival traces and contemporary accounts. And yet GDR experimental films were audible just as much as they were visible. Indeed, as this chapter explores, aural experimentation was as important to GDR experimental filmmaking as was its imbrication of different visual media or remediation of other artistic forms. In addition to using recorded sound and music as soundtracks, independent experimental filmmakers also reincorporated their films into live performances, musical and otherwise, thus ensuring that their films were shaped by, and then used to shape, broader practices of making and exhibiting art. To think of these Super 8 materials as “silent” films is therefore both to miss the social aspect of their production and circulation and to ignore an essential element of their constitution as time-based, multimedia works of art. 4 “Eröffnungsbericht zur Anlage des OV ‘Amateur.’” BStU, MfS, BV Potsdam, KD Pritzwalk no. 211 (1988), 33. The translation into English is my own. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of German are my own. 5 See Reinhild Steingröver, “Blackbox GDR: DEFA’s Untimely Avant-Garde,” in After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, ed. Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingröver (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 109–30; esp. 110.

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This imbrication of experimental filmmaking with other creative modalities was not unique to East Germany, but conditions there differed from those in the better-resourced socialist and the non-socialist neighboring states. On the one hand, GDR experimental filmmakers received less studio support than those in other socialist settings, which meant that rather than moving from soundstage to the cinema in an industrially organized process, their films emerged from—and moved between—smaller-scale, collective practices rooted in art academies, small galleries, and private apartments. Additionally, the GDR shared a language with the Federal Republic of Germany, and West German radio and television signals reached most parts of the GDR. In this divided yet shared media space, interested East German artists viewed Western television broadcasts on experimental film and video and could communicate with West German journalists and artists, leading to border-crossing collaborations between East and West Germans, such as the 1980 action Achtung! Aufnahme (Attention! Recording in Process).6 I will begin my discussion with Jürgen Böttcher’s Transformations (1981), the only experimental work produced by the DEFA studio for documentary film. I will then turn to the broader cultural constellation in which independent experimental filmmakers developed their theories and practices of intermedial art—a constellation shaped in part by Böttcher’s work as a filmmaker, painter, and mentor. I will end by examining a film by musician, performer, and poet Tohm di Roes, a key presence in experimental art and film circles before his emigration to the West in 1986.

The Sound of Overpainting: Jürgen Böttcher’s Transformations Jürgen Böttcher’s Transformations (1981), a triptych of short films, was the greatest departure from narrative cinema or conventional documentary ever to emerge from within the DEFA studio system.7 Arriving some two decades into Böttcher’s f ilmmaking career, this radical f ilm advanced 6 See Klaus Michael, “Das Ende des Untergrunds. Deutsch-deutsche Kulturkontakt in der Subkultur,” in Klopfzeichen: Mauersprünge, ed. Bernd Lindner and Rainer Eckert (Leipzig: Faber & Faber, 2002), 161–82. On Achtung Aufnahme, see Jürgen Schweinebraden von WichhmannEichhorn, “Malen über der Mattscheibe: eine frühe Videoperformance in Ostberlin,” in Record Again! 40jahrevideokunst.de, Teil 2, ed. Christoph Blasé and Peter Weibel (Ostf ildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 166–9. 7 Christoph Tannert, “Die Filme der Bildermacher,” in Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversion in der DDR, 1976–1989, ed. Karin Fritzsche and Claus Löser (Berlin: Janus, 1996), 25–60, here 29.

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possibilities that had long preoccupied him as a painter, and which he had provisionally explored in films produced (and banned) many years before. Born in 1931, Böttcher attended the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1949 to 1953. There, he developed the skills he employed for decades as an uncredentialed (and thus rarely exhibited) painter known by the pseudonym Strawalde—importantly, the name that appears in the credits of Transformations. After graduating, Böttcher began mentoring a circle of aspiring amateur painters that included Peter Graf, Peter Hermann, Peter Makolies, and Ralf Winkler. (Winkler would achieve international renown, both before and after his emigration from the GDR in 1980, as A. R. Penck.) Böttcher sustained his relationship with these younger painters even after he began studying at the GDR’s only f ilm academy, in Babelsberg, in 1955; indeed, his earliest surviving cinematic work, the documentary short Drei von Vielen (Three of Many, 1961), follows Graf’s, Makolies’s, and Hermann’s routines of work and leisure as laborers, artists, and socialist family men.8 Crucial to that film’s casual verve was its varied and inventive soundtrack, featuring—in addition to harpsichord and whistling—original compositions by Gerhard Rosenfeld, a student of Hanns Eisler’s, performed by the Berlin combo Die Jazz-Optimisten. Scenes at a circus blend hot jazz with ambient shouts, whip cracks, and the washed-out patter of a carnival barker whose words we cannot understand. This mixture of diegetic and extradiegetic sounds adds energy to the lively, ludic sequences of performers and crowds, but once the action leaves the midway, and we see Peter Graf—unmarried, unlike his compatriots, whose family lives the f ilm has already studied—gazing at a young woman on a rapidly spinning amusement ride. The movement on-screen accelerates: shot now from one of the ride’s compartments, now from the ground, with these views linked to the observing Graf via reverse shots. The increasingly dizzying sequence is matched with a soundtrack of a crackling, distorted Schlager song, sung by a woman, blended with ambient noise of machines and shouting. For the length of Graf’s brief reverie, the fun of the carnival has curdled into disorienting images and a soundscape both saccharine and jagged. In this way, subtle transitions within the score—especially at the level of the soundtrack’s texturing and layering—corroborate shifts in Böttcher’s camerawork and editing, yielding distinct tonalities for two segments of a single fairground scene. 8 On the representation of art (and artists) in this film, see Seán Allan, Screening Art. Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019).

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Böttcher did not pitch Three of Many as an experimental film or as a social problem film meant to prod audiences into reflecting critically on socialist society. Nick Hodgin suspects that Three of Many failed the DEFA censors’ evaluation, because it was “less about the work than the worker—and not just the paid work, the work that should define them as members of the proletariat and as citizens of the socialist state.”9 The varied score helps to distinguish workers from their work, presenting both sights and sounds of creative labor in sharp contrast to those of the industrial jobsite, and lending affective force—galvanizing, disorienting, nauseating—to its visual traffic. Three of Many’s fate—suppression—was shared by two of Böttcher’s subsequent works from the f irst half of the 1960s. These were the 1964 documentary short Barfuß und ohne Hut (Barefoot and without a Hat) and Jahrgang 45 (Born in ‘45), his only feature, which was banned along with a raft of other films at the infamous 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party in late 1965. Following these serious setbacks, Böttcher produced studies of conventional worksites he has referred to as “penance films” to regain the trust of studio authorities. In the second half of the 1970s, he forged contacts with younger GDR artists and poets, including the experimental filmmaker and visual artist Lutz Dammbeck, and even had a chance encounter at a film festival in the Netherlands in the late 1970s with the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage.10 His return to innovation culminated in Transformations, produced for the DEFA Studio for Documentary Film in 1981. Each of this film’s three constituent parts—Potter’s Bull, Venus after Giorgione, and Woman at the Clavichord—lasts less than twenty minutes. Thematically and procedurally similar, they were screened together under the single title Transformations at the smaller GDR cinemas where university ciné-clubs could schedule programs. Löser describes the project’s overall dynamic thus: Forgoing plot, music, and narration, [Böttcher] selected art postcards with reproductions of works by his favorite painters, Paulus Pieterszoon Potter (1625–1654), Castelfranco da Giorgione (1478), Emanuel de Witte (1617–1692) in addition to other artists, and subjected these to artistic manipulation. He and cameraman Thomas Plenert overlay the paintings 9 Nick Hodgin, “‘Only One Noble Topic Remained: The Workers.’ Sympathy, Subtlety, and Subversion in East German Documentary Film,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 6, no. 1 (2015): 49–63, here 55. 10 Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung, 104; 106 f276.

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with structures and arabesques, adding figures and objects, playing with simple stop-motion effects or double exposures. […] On the soundtrack, scratching and scraping noises are audible, seemingly recorded directly from the implements [used for the overpainting], accompanied by muttered fragments of words and strains of music.11

At f irst blush, such a f ilm would seem to be a radical departure from Böttcher’s earlier films, which were resolutely grounded in social reality and material conditions in the GDR. If, however, we remind ourselves of his insistent emphasis on ensconcing workers in their reality, we can align his earlier films with Transformations’ adumbration of canonical paintings as fundamentally open works—an approach, as Sara Blaylock observes, that “illustrates the artistic process as an exercise in fantasy, augmentation, and regeneration.”12 This process is work: labor that requires intentionality, process, and the presence of a material to be transformed. Given the film’s clear privileging of the visual—its emphasis on light, motion, and superimposition—how does the soundtrack fare? By emphasizing that Transformations forgoes both “music and commentary,” and by describing the soundtrack as a repository of incidental noises, Löser treats the audible dimension as of secondary importance. Blaylock concurs, stating that, in these three short films, “soundtracks that range from classical to free jazz to diegetic sound often seem spontaneously paired to the images.”13 And yet, though Böttcher avoids “Mickey-Mousing”—synchronizing the movement of his brushstrokes or of cuts between images to musical tempos or melodic signatures—Böttcher’s restless re-envisioning and reversioning of established works forges strong conceptual links between the film’s visual and aural traffic. The film’s first overpainting transforms a postcard of The Bather by Théodore Chassériau (1850). This Romantic painting’s depiction of a recumbent nude echoes the posture and composition of the Italian Renaissance work, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510), which gives the second film in Böttcher’s triptych its name. Böttcher’s scrawls a wavering line of grayish blue on the postcard, altering the image’s palette and complicating its composition, even as its dozing subject remains clear (Figure 9.1). As he does so, the breathy whistling we have heard since the film’s opening frames, which establish the setting 11 Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung, 105–6. 12 Sara Blaylock, “Transformations (Strawalde),” in The Handbook of East German Cinema: The DEFA Legacy, ed. Henning Wrage and Evan Torner (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter Press, forthcoming). 13 Ibid.

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Figure 9.1. Jürgen Böttcher, Potter’s Bull, 1981. 35 mm film still. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert.

as Böttcher’s urban apartment, attenuates. Now we hear birds chirping and the sounds of children playing, along with the first notes of a Chopin waltz. This mixture of seemingly incidental sound and contemplative piano continues, with neither element dominating, as the first overpainted reproduction gives way to a second and then a third, which outfits the female diner in Edouard Manet’s At Père Lathuille’s (1879) with a long-beaked head covering, reminiscent of a plague doctor’s antimiasmatic mask (Figure 9.2). No plot progression informs the forty-five-minute running time of these three procedurally similar films. Seriality and repetition—the overpainting of one postcard after another—provide the triptych’s temporal structure. If the opening moments of Potter’s Bull preview this visual procedure, then the Chopin waltz inflected by ambient sound provides a sonic overture, presaging the method by which the film’s audible dimension has been assembled—even if the quiet elegance of this opening sequence later gives way to more challenging passages. In the second film, Venus after Giorgione, rolls of thunder and irregular heartbeat-like pulsations are intercut with snatches of a soprano performing an Italian aria. A din of piano strikes and plucked strings assaults our ears as our eyes struggle to discern the musicians at the center of Titian’s Pastoral Concert (1510) through three or more layers of projection, overpainting, and overdrawing (Figure 9.3).

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Figure 9.2. Jürgen Böttcher, Potter’s Bull, 1981. 35 mm film still. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert.

The visual aspect of Böttcher’s Transformations clearly takes priority. Yet the film’s sound design is not merely an atmospheric correlate to the moving, changing images, but in fact repeats the procedure, subjecting Chopin and Italian opera to the same reconsiderations, recombinations, and manipulations as the old masters. Incidental, ambient noise. Improvised jazz. The clattering anomie of new, experimental composition. All these sonic elements, layered atop canonical works of the European repertoire. These sonic overpaintings are as essential to Böttcher’s project as the literal overpaintings dancing across the walls of his apartment. Indeed, in Transformations, Böttcher gravitates toward a complex, challenging mixture of music and noise whose startling transitions, reliance on citation, and ludic heterogeneity extend his radical formal play from the visual into the aural field. Transformations is, therefore, an intermedial artwork in several senses. It remediates canonical easel paintings by manipulating their postcard reproductions and reprojecting the results into domestic space and onto bodies in the contemporary GDR. And through citation and reimagination, Transformations also forges a complex conceptual link between what we see and hear. Extending beyond Böttcher’s own body of work, this intermedial impulse would enjoy its theoretical and practical apotheosis in the GDR’s last decade, and especially during the mid-1980s.

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Figure 9.3. Jürgen Böttcher, Venus after Giorgione, 1981. 35 mm film still. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert.

Between Media: East German Art and Music in the 1980s In July 1984, the art historian and critic Christoph Tannert published the essay “Intermedia: Attempts at Collective Art Production” in Musik und Gesellschaft, the GDR’s principal journal of musicology. Linking East German art of the 1970s and 1980s to avant-garde impulses of the early twentieth century, Tannert praised the rediscovered importance of what he called intermedial work: “border-crossing projects” that blurred and transgressed the established boundaries between creative disciplines such as painting, writing, and musical performance. “Instead of asking how visual art or music can be incorporated into everyday life processes,” Tannert declared, “young people have simply synchronized aspects of their life process with the audience by painterly or musical means.”14 Here, Tannert attempts to avoid reproducing the standard formula by which GDR art critics praised artworks’ ability to reach everyday audiences, promote social progress, and foster an enlightened (Socialist) political 14 Tannert, “Intermedia: Versuche kollektiver Kunstproduktion,” in Musik und Gesellschaft 34 (1984): 349–53, here 349.

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consciousness. Instead, Tannert implies that with the new, intermedial art, the connection between artist and audience, emerged as a function of live practice in a shared space. What was customarily taken to be the completed work “itself” (e.g., the painted canvas, the molded clay) in fact represented a derivate or correlate of a more broadly conceived creative process in which life and art, production and reception, become indistinguishable from one another as mutually imbricated and continuously evolving practices.15 Music played a formative role in this intermedial practice. It was the “openness of jazz musicians to other arts,” Tannert reminded his readers, that had first “led to the inclusion of dancers, painters, poets, and filmmakers in jazz festivals,” which, in turn, led to “the targeted appropriation of sound by young visual artists, in particular by painters.”16 Jazz, moreover, was not the only musical genre underwriting artists’ “continuation of visual-artistic intentions by other means.”17 As Claus Löser observed, many “musicians, poets, painters, and finally also filmmakers” were “grateful for the new impulses” offered by punk, with its “rebellious, archaic, multidisciplinary attitude.”18 (Post-punk and industrial music played key roles, as well.) As Tannert suggested in the “Intermedia” article, artist-cum-musicians such as Cornelia Schleime and Ralf Kerbach, cofounders of the Dresden art-punk band Vierte Wurzel aus Zwitschermaschine (Fourth Root of the Twittering Machine), felt no responsibility to prove their musical proficiency to their audience. Instead, he suggested, they “spontaneously undertook the translation of their ideas into action […] without waiting for public legitimation.”19 High-ranking off icials within the Union of Visual Artists and the Ministry of Culture did not share Tannert’s enthusiasm for improvisatory, antiprofessional approaches to making and displaying creative work. This disapproval came in part because such approaches challenged the hierarchical disciplinary structure that governed education in music, filmmaking, dance, or art at East German academies, which also supplied the rationale 15 This notion of the artwork’s dematerialization, a recurring theme in post-1945 art criticism and theory in both East and West Germany, had been hotly debated in the East German journal Bildende Kunst during the first half of 1981. 16 Tannert, “Intermedia: Versuche kollektiver Kunstproduktion,” in Musik und Gesellschaft 34 (1984): 349. 17 Tannert, “Intermedia,” 349. 18 Claus Löser, “Media in the Interim: Independent Film in East Germany Before and After 1989,” in After the Avant-Garde, 95–108, here101. 19 Tannert, “Intermedia,” 352. Schleime also made experimental films on Super 8.

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for creating distinct professional unions with mandatory membership in order to discipline activities in each field.20 As punishment for publishing this impolitic article, Tannert was dismissed from his position as a functionary in the Berlin offices of the artists’ union. He was, however, “allowed to continue to work as a freelance art historian with full union accreditation,” and it was in this capacity that in 1985 he co-organized a two-day event entitled Intermedia I in the town of Coswig, near Dresden.21 The event combined music, visual art, performance, and experimental film in precisely the ways his article had described. Neither the first of its kind nor the last, this event was, however, the most ambitious, largest-scale attempt to put the theory of intermedial art making into practice. And given the media-critical ambit of experimental filmmaking that had developed in the GDR, experimental film played a key role at Intermedia I. More than eight hundred attendees from throughout the GDR encountered the graphic artist, painter, and filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck’s Heracles media collage, a live performance incorporating action painting, experimental film, sculpture, and expressive dance into a forty-minute exploration of German history and its evolving mediations.22 The attendees also took in work by the dancer Fine Kwiatkowski and painter and experimental filmmaker Christine Schlegel, collaborators on two undertakings entitled Strukturen (Structures), which blended both film and live performance.23 Kwiatkowski interacted with Super 8 footage of her own moving figure shot by Schlegel and projected back onto her body—a technique also employed in Kwiatkowski’s work as a performer in Dammbeck’s media collage. In Structures, blank film and segments of hand-painted film were mixed in with the footage of Kwiatkowski dancing. Portions of the performance saw

20 In addition to the Writers’ Union, these included the Union of Composers and Musicologists (which also included musical performers), the Union of Visual Artists, the Union of Film and Television Producers, and the Union of Performing Artists (which governed theater and dance). 21 On the punitive measure, see Sara Blaylock, “Inf iltration and Excess: Experimental Art and the East German State, 1980–1989” (PhD diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 2014), 182–95. 22 For more about the Heracles media collages, see Howes, Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (Rochester: Camden House, 2019), 36-73;and Lutz Dammbeck, Herakles (Amsterdam: Verlag der Kunst, 1997). Estimates regarding the number of attendees are the Stasi’s; see BStU, MfS, BVfS Leipzig, Abt. XX Nr. 0021/08, 2.. 23 On these works’ development, see Blaylock, “Performing the Subject, Claiming Space: Performance Art in 1980s East Germany,” Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, August 1, 2017, http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1035-performing-the-subjectclaiming-space-performance-art-in-1980s-east-germany.

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the live dancer surrounded by abstract patterns of the shifting geometry of carefully degraded film. Kwiatkowski’s body therefore simultaneously reproduced and countermanded the predetermined “movement” of the projected images, adding an aleatory element to the fated, serial sequentiality of film. In addition, the undulations of the manipulated f ilm threw moving shadows across Kwiatkowski’s f igure, exaggerating and obscuring her movements in turn. Heterogeneous soundtracks provided rhythmic grounding for both of Kwiatkowski’s performances. In Heracles, recorded industrial music by Throbbing Gristle and tape loops by the experimental GDR composer Thomas Hertel were combined with free jazz played live by the GDR musicians Lothar Fiedler, Hans Noack, and Gunter Rößler. 24 Neither the black box of laboratory theater nor the Western contemporary art museum’s white cube, the Youth Clubhouse of Coswig and the intermedial practices and artistic sociabilities conjured up at Intermedia provided ample room for Dammbeck, Schlegel, and Kwiatkowski to experiment with f ilm. Returning to the Federal Republic after attending the festival, the West German critic Bernd Noglik told readers of Jazz Podium that Kwiatkowski’s performance had evoked associations with the demonic screen of early German film, and with rap dancing, the Bauhaus stage, and who knows what else. Confinement is felt as much as liberation, and then the fascination with the casting of shadows in harmony with the projection of artist’s films.25

For their part, Stasi observers at Intermedia I identified varying degrees of political brisance in the two experimental arrangements of dance, music, and film. While the Kwiatkowski-Schlegel collaboration appears in the report as “a performance of films in combination with dance, which contained no politically negative statement,” the Dammbeck-Kwiatkowski collaboration Heracles “in no way made visible a progressive stance toward 24 On the sound accompaniment to the Dammbeck media collage, see Inka Schube, ed. Re_Re-Education: Lutz Dammbeck, Filme, 1979–2003 (Bonn: VG-Kunst, 2010), 102. On Kwiatkowski’s jazz work, see Barbara Lubich, Das Kreativsubjekt in der DDR: Performative Kunst im Kontext (Göttingen: V+R unipress, 2014), 267–73. 25 Quoted in Barbara Lubich, “FINE: Gruppe und Kunstfigur,” in Ohne uns! Kunst und alternative Kultur in Dresden vor und nach 1989, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Paul Kaiser (Dresden: efau, 2009), 320–31, here 329. The original article is Bernd Nogik, “Jazz-In: Improvisierte Musik und Feuerschlucker,” Jazz Podium (1984): 30–31.

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conditions in the GDR.”26 This assessment stemmed from the fact that, while Dammbeck’s media collages of the period critiqued fascist subjectivity as an emergent property of mediated experience, they refused to put clear distance between the standpoint of their author—Dammbeck, himself a part of the live action—or their audience and the fascist past. Indeed, Dammbeck insisted upon intermingling history and biography, fascist past and antifascist present, to reflect on the former’s persistence in the latter. The simultaneous and overlapping projection of Nazi newsreels, his own 1979 experimental film Hommage à la Sarraz, and slides of family photographs draws his autobiography and artistic oeuvre into uncomfortable proximity with the Nazis’ world: a world vanished, but still visible. More abstract, and therefore less tangibly anchored in the German past, Kwiatkowski’s and Schlegel’s project did not make the Stasi’s analysts nearly as uncomfortable. In part because GDR-made experimental films were rarely screened in conventional East German cinemas, and in part because GDR artists who made use of experimental film nearly always took moving images off the projection screen and into three-dimensional space, provisional, intermedial happenings like the one in Coswig were ideal venues for filmmakers such as Dammbeck or Schlegel, who were not interested in simply screening their work, but, rather, in incorporating their films into live creative labor with a processual, intermedial character. Smaller-scale, informal screenings in private apartments or at private parties certainly took place, but experimental films reached their largest audiences at multidisciplinary events similar to Intermedia I, occurring with increasing frequency over the decade in churches, galleries, art academies, and cultural houses. At such events, the crucial sonic component was performed live—itself often interactive, collaborative work by musicians and musicking artists alike.27 In this way, the Klangbilder and Farbklänge—sound-images and color tones—promised by a postcard advertising Intermedia I came into being before the eyes and ears of their audiences. In this sense, undertakings such as Intermedia I were both occasions for exhibiting completed work and opportunities for creating new works on the basis of the old. Art historian and media theorist Barbara Büscher has further noted that Intermedia I is remembered as an event that made momentarily apprehensible a “network that was neither able nor willing to build visible institutions,” in which “temporary events, meetings, exhibitions in non- or 26 BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig Abt. XX no. 00271 Bd. 8, 4, 6. 27 Cities with especially developed free jazz scenes, such as Dresden and Berlin, had been home to such integrative performance practices since the 1970s. On Dresden, see Lubich, Das Kreativsubjekt in der DDR, 282–312.

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semi-official spaces become nodes that not only intensify processes of exchange, but indeed allow these processes to become visible in the first place, albeit for a limited circle of activists.”28 Intermedia I made something audible, as well: the results of an open-ended encounter between punk bands and jazz ensembles, experimental composers, and performance poets. In Coswig, these artists not only performed consecutively for the same audience but also collaborated live and in real time, blending genres and rhythms in musical experiments that gave the festival its sound. The music’s importance was immediately recognizable to one Stasi officer in attendance, who lamented in his report that the performance [of Klick & Aus] involved ‘free jazz,’ undergirded by passages of text whose only comprehensible words were ‘insect-killer’ and ‘hate thy brother as thyself,’ which essentially caused an excitation of the audience, particularly of the punks in attendance.29

Tohm di Roes: Voicing Ennui in Poetry and Performance Klick & Aus (Click and Out), the band at issue in the Stasi officer’s description, was a punk- and jazz-influenced group fronted by the poet, filmmaker, and performer Thomas Roesler, who called himself Tohm di Roes. Born in the Thuringian city of Gera in 1960, Roesler moved to Berlin in the late 1970s. There, he apprenticed as a puppeteer, wrote poetry and radio plays, gave incantatory spoken word performances, and performed music—with Klick & Aus, by himself, and in collaborative settings. Some of his most frequent collaborators were Fine Kwiatkowski and her jazz ensemble Gruppe FINE; the action painter Hartwig Ebersbach, leader of the experimental seminar “Gruppe 37.2” at the Leipzig Art Academy; and Wolfgang Adalbert Scheffler, a free-jazz improviser and performer who also designed the Intermedia I flyer reproduced above.30 Here is Paul Kaiser’s account of a 1983 Roesler event: The performance of the monologue ‘ICHs Apokalyptus’ during an appearance in the Leipzig NATO [Clubhouse of the National Front] took on 28 Barbara Büscher, “Intermedia DDR 1985 — Ereignis und Netzwerk,” map: media archive performance 2 (2009), n.p., http://www.perfomap.de/map2/geschichte/intermedia-ddr. 29 See the Stasi’s report on the “Veranstaltung ‘Intermedia I.’” Archival signature: BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, Abt. XX Nr. 00271, Bd. 8, 2-7; here 4. 30 See Grundmann, Michael, and Seufert-Leupold, eds., Revolution im geschlossenen Raum 40–59.

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the reputation of a legendary event. Suddenly, his speech transformed itself into a dam-bursting Happening in which (according to Roesler’s estimates) 15 jazz musicians, two opera singers, a clucking chicken, a running outboard motor, a machinist, two paintings, and the jazz dancer Fine Kwiatkowski all took part.31

An autobiography of sorts, couched in columnar poetry, “ICHs Apokalyptus” (“I’s Apocalypsis”) is arranged in three columns of verbal detritus.32 The center column presents a narrative or chronological strand; the left and right columns offer material that enterprising readers can connect to the principal “plotted” strand as a supplement or additional reagent. Roesler forced the reader to experiment—to make arrangements out of fragments and to forge associations between words unbound by the sutures of grammar. The subject and object of “ICHs Apokalyptus,” the poet Tohm di Roes, emerges from the text as the exact opposite of what GDR social and pedagogical theory, even as late as the mid-1970s, was still calling an allseitig gebildete Persönlichkeit, a unified and well-rounded personality cultivated in all facets; the ICH (I) produced by the text is, instead, a provisional, thrown-together heap of affects, associations, and aggressions.33 Another di Roes text from this period, “Gegenwertig” (ca. 1980), picks up on this theme of unsettledness. Evoking the Deconstruction-influenced language poetry of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg scene, which played with the capacity of both written and spoken words to produce multiple meanings at once, “Gegenwertig” is spelled with an “e” (rather than an “a” as in “Gegenwart,” German for “present”), so it can scan both as “presently” and as “contrary to values”: Presently I am a guest here—what one describes to me as home I am only a guest when I am at your place or in her Though skintight, merely a guest, I am a guest in all My questions or answers and related conversations34 31 Paul Kaiser, Bohéme und Diktatur in der DDR: Gruppen, Konflikte, Quartiere (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1997), 364–9, here 365. 32 This key di Roes text is subtitled “an autobiographical world history.” Its titular “I,” outfitted with the possessive “s,” takes ownership of an Apokalyptus, an indecisive amalgam of di Roes’s coinage within which the words apokalyptisch, Apokalypse, Apokalyptik, and Apokalyptiker (apocalyptic, apocalypse, apocalypticism, and apocalyptician) all simultaneously echo. 33 Quoted in Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 115. 34 Tohm di Roes, Lidschlag des Voyeurs (Berlin: Uwe Warnke, 1997), 32.

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This rendering of provisional occupancy—of displacement “at home” in language as such (the German word for language, die Sprache, is a feminine noun) and in the language of moral decision (“all my questions or answers”)—sheds light on the word local in the title of 7 x 7 Facts from the Local Life of the Poet Tohm di Roes (1983), di Roes’s most important film work. 7 x 7 Facts was shot on silent Super 8 film by di Roes’s collaborator and acquaintance Mario Achsnick—himself a filmmaker, whose work was featured at the Galerie Oben event described in this chapter’s introduction. Achsnick’s camerawork places di Roes in the literal center of many of the film’s shots, as he assumes postures defined by extreme affects, engages in spasmodic dancing, leeringly produces homemade pornography, tries to avoid a stalker, and urinates onto a piece of cake. Interpreted with reference to “Gegenwertig,” the locality of the documented life is haunted by displacement, provisionality, and nonbelonging—both in language and in the subject’s physical environment. The film brings starkly into view the exploration of displacement within the spaces of socialism, both narrative and urban, which preoccupied di Roes and his generation.35 Indeed, the unpleasant, uncertain sensations of nonbelonging and failed social integration that were rendered delicately in di Roes’s fractured verse register in 7 x 7 as a caricature of a macho hooligan who acts decisively, ritualistically, and self-indulgently. And yet, unaffected by this emotional shift from vulnerability to brittle indifference when characterizing “Tohm di Roes,” the shattered syntax and alternative spatial arrangements of di Roes’s written texts survive the leap from page to film. For some sequences, the camera is upside down or on its side. In some places, hand-degraded frames inserted into the normally exposed film interrupt the action. A match cut links groping, grasping fingers squeezing breasts to a broken-off femur, denuded of flesh. Exact repetitions of previous sequences, such as di Roes disappearing into a thicket of weeds, disrupt whatever narrative momentum has gathered. Knee shots, extreme close-ups, and tableaux all contribute to the film’s assembly of an East Berlin space at once closely observed—clocks, ovens, installed shelving in his apartment; garage doors, display windows, and brickwork in the street—and utterly incoherent, unmoored from establishing shots that might offer some orientation, and unintegrated into any sensible, goal-oriented practice of working life or leisure that could offer narrative satisfaction.

35 Karen Leeder, Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 55–70.

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With the notable exception of Tohm di Roes himself, East Berlin’s citizens are themselves chopped into pieces by the manipulation of frame speeds and a profligate use of jump cuts and odd angles. The film 7 x 7 offers an East Berlin diced by di Roes’s whims and private rituals, which take place within interior spaces, where one finds manic thrashing, leering fetishism, or the hesitating contemplation of suicide, as well as exterior spaces, which seem to spontaneously give rise to pursuit. In an attempt to underwrite these visual evocations of nonbelonging, the 2008 DVD compilation GegenBilder: DDR-Film im Untergrund (Counterimages: GDR Film in the Underground) links Di Roes’s silent film to an extended performance by Klick & Aus of “Das Vergnügungsdampfer sinkt” (The Pleasure Cruiser Sinks), a song that appeared on their self-released 1984 cassette AIDS Delikat. This is not an unreasonable choice, because, when the film was shown in East Germany, di Roes and his band performed live, accompanying the film’s disorienting visuals with improvised, discordant audible material. At such screening performances, the film 7 x 7 became only one texture within a broader, intermedial ensemble—live words and sound, projected images—that together presented the vacuity and dissolution of Roesler’s persona, “the Poet Tohm di Roes,” at or as an absent center.

Conclusion In addition to the films discussed here, many other worthy projects—Gabriele Stötzer’s integration of film, performance, and political debate in Erfurt with the Women Artists’ Group Exterra XX or the avant-garde rock group A.G. Geige’s production of “music videos” on Super 8 for screening at their late ‘80s concerts—deserve similarly close examination. Partially because of the technical limitations of Super 8 stock, the history of East German experimental film cannot be isolated from that of its sound. If Böttcher’s experimental departure remained a unique event in the history of the DEFA documentary studio, the circumstances outside the state-owned studio system changed dramatically throughout the 1980s, as an ever-increasing number of professionally trained artists and art students joined aspiring filmmakers in turning to Super 8. As what Claus Löser has called the GDR’s “ciné boom after the mid-1980s” took shape, experimental film screenings gained increased visibility and institutional purchase within the state-funded art system, culminating in three annual meetings of autogene Schmalfilmer (roughly: autogenous independent ciné artists) at the Dresden Academy of

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Visual Arts between 1987 and 1989.36 This gathering of momentum can be attributed to a number of factors, including the establishment over time of correspondence networks between cities in the GDR; the sustained efforts of individual artists and organizers like the Dresden Academy’s Claudia “Wanda” Reichardt, Leipzig’s Gerd Harry “Judy” Lybke, or the Berlin gallerist Jürgen Schweinebraden; and the work of critics and art historians such as Tannert, Eugen Blume, Klaus Werner, and Gabriele Muschter—to name just a few—who provided positive, serious commentary on the experimental arts in the GDR’s newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Over the course of the 1980s, the GDR witnessed a claiming of space—to cite the title of a 2009 documentary by Claus Löser and Jakobine Motz on the abovementioned Lybke’s independent gallery Eigen+Art—by artists, musicians, performers, and experimental filmmakers who sought to showcase their work both within and outside of existing, government-run institutions.37 This essay has examined artists and works that can be thought of as precursors to this boom, studying early practitioners of a collaborative, experimental kind of work whose true florescence would only follow later, in the second half of the GDR’s final decade. But Böttcher, Schlegel, Kwiatkowski, Dammbeck, and di Roes can also be understood as the catalysts of that same florescence. They were pioneers whose interventions into both the aesthetic landscape and organizational culture of the GDR art system prompted critics and censors—and the secret police—to take notice of new priorities shared by dozens of artists working throughout the GDR and to find ways to adapt to these innovations while avoiding embarrassing public confrontations that might draw comment from the increasingly observant foreign press. By integrating recorded or performed sound into screenings of necessarily silent Super 8, experimental films and intermedial performances demonstrated how film could be imbricated with projects undertaken in a shifting constellation of different media. To be sure, the reliance on live audio accompaniment was in part a function of the experimental film scene’s institutional marginality: the lack of state funding for experimental film projects on the one hand and the precarious legal and political position of independent filmmakers on the other. In a sense, necessity proved to be the mother of invention when it came to the East German experimental filmmakers’ development of provisional, protean forms for creating and exhibiting their works. More than this, though, East German experimental 36 Löser, “Das Phänomen des Schmalfilmbooms ab Mitte der 80er Jahre,” in Gegenbilder, 81–100. 37 Die Behauptung des Raums—Wege unabhängiger Ausstellungskultur in der DDR, dir. Claus Löser and Jakobine Motz (Berlin: Absolut Medien, 2009).

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film’s thoroughgoing intermediality—its positioning among, and between, artistic projects in other modalities and media—is also a testament to the vibrancy of the experimental arts and music scenes in the late GDR and to the close physical and intellectual proximity of their protagonists. In the process, and especially at events such as the watershed Intermedia I festival, they also called attention to the growing stature of experimental work in state-funded institutional spaces, transforming these spaces into arenas where the terms of public art making could be renegotiated. Returning to their work, we can see—and hear—the institutional and methodological situation of art and film being transformed in East German socialism’s final years.

Bibliography Allan, Seán. Screening Art. Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Beutelschmidt, Thomas. Sozialistische Audiovision: Zur Geschichte der Medienkultur in der DDR. Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1995. Blaylock, Sara. “Infiltration and Excess: Experimental Art and the East German State, 1980–1989.” PhD diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 2014. Blaylock, Sara. “Performing the Subject, Claiming Space: Performance Art in 1980s East Germany.” In Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe. August 1, 2017. http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1035-performing-thesubject-claiming-space-performance-art-in-1980s-east-germany. Blaylock, Sara. “Transformations (Strawalde).” In The Handbook of East German Cinema: The DEFA Legacy, edited by Henning Wrage and Evan Torner. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter Press, forthcoming. Büscher, Barbara. “Intermedia DDR 1985 – Ereignis und Netzwerk.” map: media archive performance 2 (2009): n.p. http://www.perfomap.de/map2/geschichte/ intermedia-ddr. Dammbeck, Lutz. Herakles. Amsterdam: Verlag der Kunst, 1997. Die Behauptung des Raums—Wege unabhängiger Ausstellungskultur in der DDR. Dirs. Claus Löser and Jakobine Motz. Berlin: Absolut Medien, 2009. DVD. “Eröffnungsbericht zur Anlage des OV ‘Amateur.’” Archival signature: BStU, MfS, BV Potsdam, KD Pritzwalk No. 211 (1988), 16-46; here 33. Archive of the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Accessed at Außenstelle Leipzig. Fulbrook, Mary. The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

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Hodgin, Nick. “‘Only One Noble Topic Remained: The Workers’: Sympathy, Subtlety, and Subversion in East German Documentary Film.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 6, no. 1 (2015): 49–63. Howes, Seth. Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany Rochester: Camden House, 2019. Kaiser, Paul. Bohéme und Diktatur in der DDR: Gruppen, Konflikte, Quartiere. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1997. Leeder, Karen. Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Lindner, Bernd. “Eingeschränkte Öffentlichkeit? Die alternative Galerieszene in der DDR und ihr Publikum.” In Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit Bd. 1: Blick zurück – im Zorn?, edited by Jürgen Schweinebraden von Wichmann-Eichhorn, 224–33. Berlin: Edition EP, 1998. Löser, Claus. “Das Phänomen des Schmalfilmbooms ab Mitte der 80er Jahre.” In Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversion in der DDR, 1976–1989, edited by Karin Fritzsche and Claus Löser, 81–100. Berlin: Janus, 1996. Löser, Claus. “Media in the Interim: Independent Film in East Germany before and after 1989.” In After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, edited by Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingröver, 95–108. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Löser, Claus. Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politisch-ästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulationen in der Spätphase der DDR. Potsdam: DEFA-Stiftung, 2013. Löser, Claus and Jakobine Motz, dirs. Die Behauptung des Raums—Wege unabhängiger Ausstellungskultur in der DDR. Dirs. Claus Löser and Jakobine Motz. Berlin: Absolut Medien, 2009. DVD. Lubich, Barbara. Das Kreativsubjekt in der DDR: Performative Kunst im Kontext. Göttingen: V+R unipress, 2014. Lubich, Barbara. “FINE: Gruppe und Kunstfigur.” In Ohne uns! Kunst und alternative Kultur in Dresden vor und nach 1989, edited by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Paul Kaiser, 320–31. Dresden: efau, 2009. Michael, Klaus. “Das Ende des Untergrunds. Deutsch-deutsche Kulturkontakt in der Subkultur.” In Klopfzeichen: Mauersprünge, edited by Bernd Lindner and Rainer Eckert, 161–82. Leipzig: Faber & Faber, 2002. Report on “Veranstaltung ‘Intermedia I.’” Archival signature: BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig Abt. XX Nr. 00271 (1985), Bd. 8, 2-7. Archive of the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Accessed at Außenstelle Leipzig. Di Roes, Tohm (Thomas Roesler). Lidschlag des Voyeurs. Berlin: Uwe Warnke, 1997.

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Schube, Inka. ed. Re_Re-Education: Lutz Dammbeck, Filme, 1979–2003. Bonn: VGKunst, 2010. Schweinebraden von Wichhmann-Eichhorn, Jürgen. “Malen über der Mattscheibe: eine frühe Videoperformance in Ostberlin.” In Record Again! 40jahrevideokunst. de, Teil 2, edited by Christoph Blasé and Peter Weibel, 166–9. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. Steingröver, Reinhild. “Blackbox GDR: DEFA’s Untimely Avant-Garde.” In After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, edited by Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingröver, 109–130. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Tannert, Christoph. “Die Filme der Bildermacher.” In Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversion in der DDR, 1976–1989, edited by Karin Fritzsche and Claus Löser, 25–60. Berlin: Janus, 1996. Tannert, Christoph. “Intermedia: Versuche kollektiver Kunstproduktion.” Musik und Gesellschaft 34 (1984): 349–53. “Verordnung über die Lizenz- und Zulassungspflicht im Filmwesen.” In Gesetzesblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republic I, no. 6 (1976): 102–6.

About the Author Dr. Seth Howes is an associate professor of German at the University of Missouri. His research deals with twentieth-century literature and culture, focusing in particular on German cultures of the Cold War. He is the coeditor, with Mirko Hall and Cyrus Shahan, of Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk (2016) and author of Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (2019).

Part IV Intersection of the Arts

10. Intersections of Art and Film on the Wrocław Art Scene, 1970–80 Marika Kuźmicz

Abstract Visual artists in Poland from the 1970s onward explored film as a new medium, but little is known about the intersection of visual art practice and filmmaking beyond Warsaw and Łódź. This essay fills that gap by focusing on the conceptualist neo-avant-garde art scene in Wrocław. It analyzes projects by the artistic groups Permafo and Galeria Sztuki Aktualnej (GSA), whose members embraced film to broaden the spectrum of creative expression and to adjust their artistic language to their changing reality. Permafo’s analytical approach to film as a tool to potentially expand human perception of visual reality is contrasted with film projects by GSA’s members that re-evaluated their own roles as artists, releasing themselves from the obligation to generate “artistically” loaded content. Keywords: Wrocław; Poland; socialist cultural policy; Permafo; Galeria Sztuki Aktualne (Gallery of Current Art); visual art and film

In the 1970s, Wrocław and Łódź became the major centers of Polish experimental filmmaking. In Łódź, the progressive film movement originated from the city’s film school (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna im. Leona Schillera w Łodzi), which had trained film and television professionals since its foundation in 1948. Although the school nurtured talented individuals such as Roman Polański and Andrzej Wajda from the very beginning, it was only in 1956, following the death of Poland’s Stalinist hard-line leader Bolesław Bierut, that the period of political and cultural thaw supplanted the era of socialist realism in all arts, including film. The film school faced another challenge in 1968, following a campaign of anti-Semitic persecution across Poland that forced the rector of the school and numerous

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faculty members to step down, leading to a decline in the quality of the school’s education. The goal of the school was always to provide classical film training for artists interested in making traditional—narrative—films for broad theatrical distribution. This applied both to the productions that followed socialist realist conventions and to the works of the Polish Film School, which attempted to break ties with this doctrine and to set film free, at least to a certain degree, from state supervision and censorship. The Workshop of the Film Form (WFF) was established in 1970 in response to the post-1968 mediocrity of the school’s educational offerings and as a critical voice against the dominant focus on narrative film. It is by far the best-known, but not the only, site of avant-garde film production in Poland during this period. This essay contributes to scholarship on film that expanded the possibilities of cinematic meaning making in the country in the 1970s by discussing Wrocław, the second (and much lesser-known) center of experimental film in Poland. The artists who worked there with film in conjunction with other media, especially photography, formed three groups: Permafo (1970–1981), Galeria Sztuki Aktualnej (Gallery of Current Art, 1971–1975),1 and Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej (Gallery of Most Recent Art, 1975–1980). The members of these groups were graduates of the State Higher School of Visual Arts (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych) in Wrocław. Their texts, which we can recognize in hindsight as the manifestos of these groups, do not contain direct questions about the condition of cinema nor declarations of its “renewal,” as was the case with the WFF.2 Instead, they deployed film to examine the relationship between art, the viewer, and the conditions within which art was produced. The artists behind the works discussed in this text reveal through their works subtle differences in their understanding and use of film. Yet the common denominator resides in their tethering of art to everyday experiences, as well as to exploring the different ways in which the viewer absorbs or consumes moving images as mass-media forms. As this essay argues, these young artists provided a counterreaction to Polish conceptual art, which was defined by a sense of alienation of contemporary art from society at 1 The Polish term aktualnej means current or contemporary in the sense of something happening now. Yet it also means “something very relevant right now.” The English translations of the term do not fully capture this nuance. 2 See Anna Markowska, ed., Permafo 1970–1981, exh. cat. (Wrocław: Wrocław Contemporary Museum, 2013), 206–207. The GSN leaflet “Wrocław 1970” from the archive of Anna аnd Romuald Kutera is reproduced in The Avant-Garde Did Not Applaud, ed. Anna Markowska, exh. cat. (Wrocław: Wrocław Contemporary Museum, 2014), 29. http://repozytorium.fundacjaarton.pl/ index.php?action=view/object&objid=3257&colid=76&catid=5&lang=pl.

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large. The egalitarian language of film was perceived by the artists as the most appropriate tool to reject that alienation. It was the medium that was particularly appropriate for communication in the process of negotiating the new roles that artists and viewers came to adopt in the 1970s in the field of art; it was also the medium best suited for critiquing the reductive understanding of the world that mainstream media, including popular film and television, activated in audiences.

Why Wrocław? In her 1975 text Permafo i inni (Permafo and Others), Natalia Lach-Lachowicz (Natalia LL) wrote: In the history of the avant-garde, the year 1970 marks a caesura that separates the traditional avant-garde from the new avant-garde. The center of art in Poland moves to Wrocław, the location of collective artistic manifestations associated with Wrocław 70, a symposium that anticipated art that moved beyond objects, and of the exhibition SP—Sztuka Pojęciowa [SP—Conceptual Art, December 1970], animated by the Mona Lisa Gallery, an exhibition that revealed new forms of art, for instance the text record.3

Lach-Lachowicz was one of the key figures of the Wrocław neo-avant-garde scene, cofounding the Permafo group in 1970. Her essay about the group reveals, among other things, an artistic strategy of continuously positioning oneself within the larger geographic and cultural context of Poland, and the text offers perceptive observations on the situation of Polish contemporary art in the year 1970. Although Wrocław did not become the only center of artistic life in Poland that year, the city was, indeed, one of three main centers of avant-garde art, along with Warsaw and Łódź, emerging as such during a period of cultural decentralization. Before taking a closer look at the filmic output of the different artistic groups that emerged there, it is useful to briefly sketch the sociohistorical context that allowed Wrocław to emerge as a center of contemporary art in Socialist Poland. The complicated processes that shaped Wrocław’s dynamic environment by 1970 are related to its convoluted postwar history. In 1945, it became part of the so-called Recovered Territories, that is, areas formerly belonging to 3 Markowska, Permafo 1970–1981, 236.

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Germany and reattached to Poland in the aftermath of WWII, resulting in the expulsion of German inhabitants and the mass relocation of Polish citizens to the area. Given this history, the Recovered Territories, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in particular, played an important role in the political and cultural imaginary of the new socialist nation. As the city enjoyed a prominent position in the cultural policies of the Communist authorities, at the local level, administrators were aiming to turn the city into a major center for the arts to enhance the image of a progressive socialist Polish society. Local artists expertly manipulated these state structures for their own benefit, entangled in a complex give-and-take with officials that ultimately yielded Wrocław’s emergence as a major site of artistic production. The desire to shake up the existing order of things came about at the intersection of the larger historical circumstances described above and the actions of specific charismatic individuals who found themselves in that particular time and place. In Wrocław at the beginning of the 1970s, curator and critic Jerzy Ludwiński and several teachers at the State Higher School of Visual Arts, among them Alfons Mazurkiewicz, took on such roles. Among his key achievements, Ludwiński redefined the artists’ shifting priorities away from the final work of art toward the creative process and the ideas that lay at its origin, thereby contributing the theoretical groundwork and institutional encouragement for Polish artists’ investigations of new media.4 As opposed to the traditional techniques of painting and sculpture, new media were widely seen as carriers of artistic ideas that minimized the artisanal nature of the creative process and the manual aspect of art making. For many artists from Wrocław avant-garde circles, f ilm thus became a “neutral” carrier of a given idea. In contrast to the WFF, they were less preoccupied with the material aspects of film or its structure. While conceptual artists of the 1960s produced art as a self-referential phenomenon that inevitably occurred in discursive isolation, the Permafo group rejected this approach, emphasizing art as a phenomenon fundamentally open to societal influences and interactions. During the next decade, these younger artists sought to reconnect art to daily life as part of this transformation. The use of film was implemented in their artistic practice to reflect on everyday life, as well as to examine the ways in which new media and mass communication informed audiences’ perception of quotidian experiences. These were key aspects of the artistic explorations of the Permafo group. 4 English translations of his theoretical writings can be found in Magdalena Ziółkowska, ed., Notes From the Future of Art: Selected Writings by Jerzy Ludwiński (Eindhoven and Rotterdam: Van Abbemuseum and Veenman, 2007).

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Permafo The Permafo group (1970–81) consisted of four artists: Zbigniew Dłubak and Antoni Dzieduszycki, and their spouses, Natalia LL and Andrzej Lachowicz. The group, whose name was an abbreviation of the words “fotografia permanentna” (permanent photography), had at its disposal a small exhibition space at Wrocław’s Klub Związków Twórczych (Creative Associations’ Club), yet the majority of its activities were pursued outside of the confines of that space. Those activities included discussions, meetings, and ephemeral exhibitions. Permafo’s goal was to break the rigid schema necessary for organizing art exhibitions, complete with the compulsory ritual of an exhibition opening; another goal was to abolish the distance between works and viewers. Exhibition catalogs were texts that concentrated on different topics that interested the artists at that moment. One of those texts can be seen as an informal founding manifesto of the group: The Permafo Gallery does not recognize the division into “professionals” and “amateurs” in creative practice. […] The Permafo Gallery does not propose any specific ‘artistic program,’ but considers it important to draw attention to a number of facts: The photo or film camera lens can become a witness of events that escape our attention from one second to the next. […] In the nearest future, the Permafo Gallery intends to maintain an interest in such phenomena as: Intimate facts from personal life whose disclosure could provide an impulse to stimulate and strengthen a group of signals that were hitherto too weak to be received; a record of time, especially a record of moments previously lost between consecutive film frames; attempts to record those processes embedded between consecutive artistic facts; amplification of signals from reality in a way which allows everything that seems known and banal to reveal its uniqueness, complexity, novelty and strangeness. Reality is our only interest. We leave art to connoisseurs whose tastes are shaped by paintings of Raphael, Rembrandt, Ingres, Picasso, and bra advertisements.5

The text marks the shift in focus outlined above from art as a self-referential field of creation and inquiry tuned inward to reality, understood as the sum total of a given person’s everyday experiences. Natalia LL, Lachowicz, Dłubak, and Dzieduszycki were preoccupied with tracing the links between an active perceiving subject and the entire scope of everyday reality in which 5 Markowska, Permafo 1970–1981, 207.

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the subject is immersed but which they can discover only in a fragmentary way due to their own limited personal perspective. The artists believed that, to oppose this and make an attempt at the “complete” cognition of reality, it was necessary to eliminate schematic, routine behavior from human perception. Instead, perception was to be confronted with a complex image of (mediated) reality. Permafo implemented the concept of “permanent art” to stimulate the viewers’ imaginations and intellects in a way that would activate an image of reality’s infinity independently from the instrumentalization of images in different sociocultural and political areas and for the viewers’ own purposes, like subjectivity.6 Film and its potential as a permanent record of the world appeared to be the best tool for Permafo’s purposes. Yet from a practical point of view, reality was most often “witnessed” by the group’s photo, rather than film, camera. There were several reasons for this, including the prosaic one of limited availability of film equipment and stock. The members of the group, however, did try to work with film (mostly 16 mm) whenever possible. Natalia LL made the most frequent use of this medium, implementing the theoretical components of permanent art in a creative and intriguing way. The artist often made films and took photographs in a nearly simultaneous way, frequently presenting her photographic cycle works in her signature sequences, thus also prompting a reflection on the relationship between moving and still images (Figure 10.1). That was the case in the work 17 listopada 1970—24 godziny (17th of November 1970—24 Hours, 1970) and Otoczenie naturalne 250 km drogi (Natural Surroundings of 250 km of a Road, 1971).7 The former is a photographic record of the face of a timepiece with moving hands. The latter is a series of photographs that show the view of a road and were taken one kilometer apart from the window of a driving car. Two films by Natalia LL, Rejestracja permanentna czasu (Permanent Time Record, 1970) and Rejestracja permanentna autostrady E 22 co 1 km (Permanent Record of E 22 Highway Every 1 Km, 1970) were created earlier, before the making of the corresponding photographic cycles.8 Probably for this reason, and in the light of the aforementioned manner of presenting photographs, the moving images have been interpreted merely as preliminary “sketches” for photographic cycles.9 Yet, when considering the theoretical reflections 6 Łukasz Ronduda, Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda (Warsaw: Center of Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski, 2008), 82. 7 Ibid. 8 Excerpts from both films can be found online at https://nataliall.com/en/the-70s/. 9 Alicja Kępińska, “Sztuka,” Fotografia i film—nowy język sztuki, no. 1 (1977).

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Figure 10.1. Natalia LL, Permanent Record of E 22 Highway Every 1 km, 1970. Courtesy Natalia LL and local_30.

of the group outlined above, they appear instead as autonomous projects that can be treated as laboratory experiments. Working with similar themes derived from the everyday (a road seen from the window of a driving car, the passage of time visible on a clockface), Natalia LL seems to have been exploring both film and photography to find out how the concept of “permanent art” resonates in each medium. As these works demonstrate, for Natalia LL and Andrzej Lachowicz, such categories as “reality” and “the everyday” concerned primarily the space of “ordinary” human activities—eating, sleeping, breathing, speaking, copulation, and similar functions—which interested these artists already in the 1960s.10 Daily life in its trivial manifestations provided a stimulus and inspiration for artistic action. In their works and texts, Natalia LL and Lachowicz often highlighted the uniqueness of each moment of ordinary human life in all its dimensions. The artists strove to make their case by focusing on prosaic activities as their works’ subject matter, as if they wanted the viewers to realize the uniqueness of their own existence, finding its trace in the work of art. 10 Ronduda, Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda, 94.

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Lach-Lachowicz’s films appropriate and thus reframe the purpose of the film shot, which in classical fiction film is almost always informative and subsumed into the overall narrative, serving a dramatic plotline. Thus, a close-up of a ticking clock (as in Permanent Time Record) might suggest a countdown towards a dramatic resolution,11 while shots of a road captured from within a car (as in Permanent Record of E 22 Highway Every 1 Km) evoke mobility and dynamism in the scenography of escape or pursuit. Natalia LL’s films, however, choose to drastically disavow the narrative purpose of everyday scenes and objects. By isolating and decontextualizing them, they invite a refocusing of the viewer’s perception, away from the dramatic thrills of narrative fiction cinema and toward an exercise in the perception of the everyday. Another member of the group, Antoni Dzieduszycki, also contributed to the film work of Permafo through a range of paracinematic works. When the group came into being, Dzieduszycki was an art critic and theorist. During the initial period, he penned numerous texts that completed projects by Dłubak, Natalia LL, and Andrzej Lachowicz from a theoretical perspective. Yet Dzieduszycki soon embarked on creating his own filmic works, among them the cycle Filmy, które każdy może wykonać (Films That Anyone Can Make, 1970). This project was a collection of short scripts on paper, which the author never actually filmed, but which had the potential to be used by readers willing to become virtual filmmakers. III Total Documentation, for instance reads: Make 14,600 one-frame takes of all the facts we consider worthy of our attention, including accidental ones, which happen to be in front of the lens. The frames should be edited to make one whole. The documentation should never be stopped—new frames should be added to the already existing film. Frames from tapes shot by other people, found etc., can be added. Soundtrack to be made analogously.12

In Dzieduszycki’s project, the evocation of cinematic structures served to democratize the creative process and legitimate every possible approach to 11 More recently, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) expanded the idea of isolating shots that contain timepieces into a 24-hour supercut in which all the frames were divorced from serving a narrative function in their respective films and instead turned into a device for keeping track of the viewers’ real-time experience of watching the screen. For recent scholarship on time in the art of the 1960s in the West and contemporary art more broadly, see Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004) and Kate Bretkelly-Chalmers, Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art: Beyond the Clock (Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2018). 12 Markowska, Permafo 1970–1981, 56.

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the perception of the work. Dzieduszycki, Natalia LL, and Lachowicz thus deployed cinematic elements in their artistic process to engage a mediated perception of the everyday, and in doing this, they enhanced the audience’s understanding of the world around them.

Galeria Sztuki Aktualnej In 1971, shortly after Permafo was formed, Jolanta Marcolla, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Dobrosław Bagiński, and Janusz Haka, all students of the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Wrocław, formed the Gallery of Current Art. They soon began to question traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture. Due to the increasing cultural, socioeconomic, and political influence of television and other forms of mass media in people’s lives, the artists tapped into these forms to engage the viewer’s perception more actively. A significant change in their art and their self-image as artists already occurred during the first year of their studies. Marcolla’s recollections confirm the general shift away from the isolated nature of art introduced earlier: I was mastering the secrets of the painting workshop, studio drawing, the rules of composition, and the choice of colors, and it slowly started to occur to me that I was stuck in a hermetic and petrified world of values, because when you stand in front of a canvas with your paintbrush, you can only repeat someone else’s achievements and make use of someone else’s experiences.13

Like the Permafo artists, members of the GSA explored the potential of photography and film, the popular media that afforded the possibility of quick and relatively easy recording, as well as the elimination of traces of individual artistic gestures in the creative process. Again, as with Permafo, film and photography was not an end in and of itself. But for the GSA, it did not even function as a tool serving the perception of reality. Instead, members of this group sought primarily to establish a dialogue with their viewers and encourage them to become active and critical consumers of media images. GSA artists confronted the viewer with signs deprived of an a priori meaning and devoid of metaphorical content that could become a departure point for extra-artistic speculations. In this way, the reduction of the artistic gesture, a procedure used by many artists at the time, had a 13 Email correspondence between Jolanta Marcolla and the author, February 19, 2015.

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special function for the GSA, becoming a distinguishing quality of the group’s work. It changed the status of the artist from the one who materializes ideas through the work of art to “merely” generating a platform for reflection on the relations that occur in reality, building a space of discourse and thereby activating the viewer’s role from a more passive to a more actively creative one. Circumstances in which the viewer was not offered signs with readily attached mental links or metaphors crucially enabled this process. Marcolla elaborated on this issue in her master’s thesis written in 1975: The dynamics of constantly changeable phenomena obviously require a new apparatus of perception, new cognitive tools, and different, more useful languages to function in the new reality. The everyday bombardment with manipulated or syncretized mass media causes a corresponding change in the character of perception from contemplation to distraction (reception in distraction). Therefore, it is obvious that the need for art in which a work is submitted for contemplation (a work that results from intuitive investigations) is diminishing. The anonymity of mass phenomena, the collapse of static values determined once and for all, as well as the dialectic of development do not encourage us to tolerate the figures of bards and prophets, which enjoy high popularity in art—loners who go against the grain of civilization.

The group’s iconic statement project was their 1973 Opis przesiadania (Account of Changing Places). The work functions as a stand-alone film, but it originally included footage recorded on four reels of 8 mm film, as well as a performance. The performance re-enacted the film recording during which the artists (Bagiński, Sosnowski, Marcolla) sat on three separate chairs and then changed places in a predetermined sequence, with near-choreographic precision. During this period, the GSA artists pursued investigations into the reduction of authorial, formal, literary, and thematic expression. They were trying to introduce a range of subtle or unnoticeable disturbances to the linearity, continuity, and consistency of the content being communicated in order to make the viewer’s perception more sensitive and active. According to the artists’ concept, by tracing those disturbances and locating the underlying principle of a given conf iguration, the viewer became active, and their perception of a given work gave them the status of a cocreator. In the original version of the piece, the artists were sitting in person on chairs next to four screens onto which the prerecorded film showing three people changing places was projected. The projections were not simultaneous, but featured a delay of one change of place from one

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screen to the next. Once the projections were put in motion, the artists began changing places in real time. As Zdzisław Sosnowski recalls, the viewers of Account of Changing Places were invariably perplexed (the complete version with four projectors was presented just once—during the Artistic School Students’ Festival in Nowa Ruda in 1973).14 The activity unfolded in the sphere of relations between the participants of the action and the prerecorded image of the action—intermedial relations that remained in a constant state of flux. The involved transformations seemed trivial, yet they required the viewers to focus their attention and try to discern a pattern that governed the motion. The viewer’s thought process may have, indeed, followed the intention of the artists, but may have just as easily become a structure independent of the artists’ will, and therefore a distinct artistic activity. Releasing themselves from the obligation to generate a stable artistic message, the GSA artists adopted the position of observers of the process of perceiving the sign—observers who analyzed the viewers’ habits related to thinking and seeing. Artists started to use film as the most appropriate language to communicate with their audience, because film, television, and photography became increasingly part of mass culture during this time. Films by individual GSA artists serve as continuations of this approach. Sosnowski’s films Zdjęcie czapki (Taking Off the Cap) and Czyszczenie ryb (Cleaning Fish), both from 1971, consist of recordings of the actions described in the titles. A visual impulse originating from reality stimulates the meaning of the films, but aesthetic factors are consciously reduced to deprive the film of visual attractiveness and to stimulate the viewer’s own creativity. A similar principle underpinned other films by Sosnowski created around 1972: Machanie (Waving), Uścisk ręki (Handshake), Podawanie szczotki (Passing the Broom), and But (Shoe). Marcolla’s individual film productions engage a similar approach. For instance, Zakręt (Turn, 1972) was made by driving, turning the camera off whenever the road was straight, and turning it on again just before a curve began. It lasts for three minutes and thus consists solely of recorded images of road curves. The effect of this in-camera editing is as expressive as it is disorienting, meant to trigger an active engagement of the viewer’s perception like the earlier Changing Places. A similar formal structure underpins Marcolla’s film Kiss (1975), which consists entirely of 14 Małgorzata Jankowska, Film artystów. Szkice z historii filmu plastycznego i ruchu fotomedialnego w latach 1957–1981 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2002), 66–69, and email correspondence between Zdzisław Sosnowski and the author, April 26, 2016.

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brief shots of the artist as she faces the camera and repeatedly blows a kiss in its direction, a gesture she executes with a radiant and unchanging smile. The “loops” that repeatedly occur in the works of the GSA artists—for instance, Marcolla’s Kiss (1975)—bring to mind the contemporary GIF graphic format, which enjoys massive popularity today—a moving image suspended halfway between photography and film. This quality acquires special significance in the works of Marcolla, who uses her own face as an attractive young woman as the focal point of the images. In Kiss, the artist is shown in medium close-up against a brick wall, dressed in casual clothes and with little makeup. Though hardly titillating, the film marks a premonition of a culture that was absent from Poland under the Communist regime forty years ago but has now become so pervasive that it is largely taken for granted. This culture relies on the exploitation of images of people (through their repurposing on the internet), a process so powerful that the images become “detached” from their owners. One consequence of this is the global emergence of a reality in which every gesture can become public, can be duplicated, and, sooner or later, loses its importance or original significance in the process. Marcolla’s film presages this mechanism, which features a single gesture—originally intimate and sensual—that, with time and repetition, becomes absurd and unreal. Kiss, a three-minute film made forty years ago with numerous repeated takes, appears to anticipate the future of what we will look at and what we will participate in.15 Kaprys 2 (Caprice 2) (1975) uses the artist’s presence to offer an implicit sociocultural critique. Marcolla stands almost still, facing the camera and allowing it to record her image. By taking the place of a decorative prop against which other participants perform different actions, she appears to channel and silently critique the passive position often given to women in visual art and cinema, inviting, in the process, questions of agency and interpersonal power dynamics in front, and perhaps even behind, the camera. Some of the people featured in the film (mostly men—members of the TV production team, as the artist revealed later)16 approach Marcolla and “pose” with her for the camera; others throw their arms around her or give her a hug. The artist maintains her smile and stays almost motionless through these scenes, as if incapacitated and reduced to a mere film prop, which adds a disturbing aura to these interactions (Figure 10.2). 15 For theoretical writings on GIFs, see Anna McCarthy, “Visual Pleasure and GIFs,” in Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media, ed. Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 113–22. 16 Interview of Jolanata Marcolla by Marika Kuźmicz, May 2015.

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Figure 10.2. Jolanta Marcolla, Making of the film Cap, 1975. Courtesy Jolanta Marcolla.

When the activity of the GSA came to an end, the members of the group left Wrocław and pursued their work individually. Zdzisław Sosnowski invented the figure of the Goalkeeper, who appeared in and gave the name to many of Sosnowski’s films and photographic cycles from 1974. Sosnowski’s attention shifted from the field of art and relations between the artist and the viewer to the sphere of popular culture in order to concentrate more fully on the media construction of idols and celebrity figures. Creating the eponymous Goalkeeper of his films, Sosnowski referred to the mass fascination of Poles with football, which was stoked at the time by the successes of the Polish national team.17 The artist created a protagonist and played that role himself: a handsome goalkeeper ready to save every goal, loved and surrounded by beautiful women. The artist published photos from the making of films with the Goalkeeper in high-circulation sports magazines; simultaneously, art magazines featured fictitious interviews with the artist as the Goalkeeper. Sosnowski became an artist who made the most expansive and active attempts to “abolish” the borders between art and everyday life, in a pursuit to break the isolation of art in Poland under the Communist regime. 17 In 1974, Poland won third place at the World Cup in Munich, beating Brazil.

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Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej The end of the GSA left a void in Wrocław artistic circles that was filled by the Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej or GSN (Gallery of Most Recent Art), a group that included the artists Anna and Romuald Kutera, Lech Mrożek, and Piotr Olszański, as well as Katarzyna Chierowska and Stanisław Antosz, known as the duo Antosz&Andzia.18 Similarly to Permafo and the GSA, GSN pursued institutional critique, although they also remained interested in potential confrontations and information exchange beyond the gallery walls. The artists declared the need to tap into new media in art, yet this question gave rise to a division within the group, which led to the formation of “two factions within the GSN,” as the researcher Anna Markowska writes, leading to the ultimate collapse of the collective.19 Divergences between the practice of Kutera and Mrożek on the one hand and Antosz, Chierowska, and Olszański on the other were more profound than just divergent views on the use of media; they differed fundamentally in their respective understandings of the relations between art and reality, as well as between reality and the medium of film. For the former group, indexical media were a means to capture an accurate record of a baseline “authentic” reality that the viewer was not meant to question; for the latter group, photography and film were means to construct and present an explicitly artificial realm that did not represent the artists’ everyday identities but redrew them within a fictional realm. Anna Kutera’s Najkrótszy film świata (The Shortest Film in the World, 1975) is a clear example of a quasi-film project by a GSN artist (Figure 10.3). The work approaches, with a certain irony, conceptual art’s attempts to expose the boundaries of film. It is seemingly a simple a photograph, but one that is in fact also a “double portrait” of the artist, who is holding in her hand a single film frame with her own image. Kutera thus evokes in a humorous way discussions concerning the nature of the moving image. This work notably references experimental films based on short loops, which were popular at the time among conceptual artists, and particularly in Wrocław’s experimental artistic circles. By contrast, Antosz&Andzia’s artistic process focused primarily on the construction of one’s own (fictional and mediated) image and the appropriation of narrative film tropes as a way to comment on popular mass 18 This circle of artists was researched and described by Anna Markowska in an essay titled “Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej,” in Markowska, The Avant-Garde Did Not Applaud, 56. 19 Ibid., 111.

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Figure 10.3. Anna Kutera, The Shortest Film in the World, 1975. Courtesy Anna Kutera.

media beyond structural questions. Akin to the strategies used previously by Natalia LL and Zdzisław Sosnowski, who appropriated and critiqued narrative and formal aspects of mainstream cinema and popular f ilm culture, Chierowska and Antosz adopted pseudonyms and built their identity through overidentification with cinematic stereotypes within the artificially constructed spaces of filmic fiction.20 In 1970, Antosz&Andzia penned the text Photelart, a manifesto of sorts, writing, “Photelart is a photo-film-tv art based on the morphological and transmission-related flexibility of mechanical means.”21 Their film projects were strikingly different from the previously discussed works that originated from other Wrocław circles. According 20 Ibid., 131. 21 Antosz&Andzia, Photelart, Wrocław 1976 (leaflet), quoted in Markowska, Permafo 1970–1981, 116–7.

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to Florian Zeyfang, Antosz&Andzia refer in their practice to the sphere of popular culture and more specifically to the convention of Hollywood movie production (and its genre conventions) and to mainstream American television series. Like elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc, popular film and television in Poland drew extensively on various genres, from melodramas to Westerns and crime films, that paralleled mainstream American cinema despite the significantly different ideological context of these productions. Antosz&Andzia’s response to such popular f ilm and media and the generic, repetitive, and consumption-oriented “assembly line” practices they represented was to incorporate elements of “slapstick comedy with its characteristically exaggerated portrayal of acts of violence.”22 Recognizable as a mode of storytelling familiar from silent cinema, such slapstick made perfect sense in Antosz&Andzia’s silent 16 mm productions. The most recognizable and frequently recurring prop of the A&A duo became a Colt pistol (while Antosz used a toy gun from his childhood, Andzia had an actual blank revolver). Obviously referencing popular gangster and Western B movies, these objects became metonymic shorthands for the mass-media forms and popular genres that the artists subverted. A recurrent motif of their work showed Andzia running away from Antosz, who chases her. Yet the artists at the same time consciously marked their distance from the pop cultural forms they channeled, for example by appearing in attire (e.g., tracksuits) that was absurd in a given fictional situation. In doing this, they also highlighted the tension between genre conventions and their presence within these constructed fictional milieus. A&A made their films look deliberately amateurish—like people haphazardly restaging at home what they see on TV, distorting once again the tight codes of traditional genre production in the process. The film Murderer (1975) exemplifies the structure (comprised of a series of short vignettes) and premise (simple generic tropes) used in several other films by A&A. Murderer is set on an unspecified, nondescript beach in the summer. Andzia, shown in a swimsuit, is shot by Antosz with his trademark toy pistol. Despite at first appearing to die dramatically, she escapes into the sea and later gets shot while sitting on the beach, where Antosz shoots at her from the behind. In the following scene, she makes a futile attempt to escape up a lifeguard tower. Individual scenes are intercut with an intertitle that reads “MURDERER” and a shot of a Dodoni juice can, a popular beverage in Socialist Poland. In the final scene, Antosz shoots at Andzia while she is hiding in a sandy ditch, clutching 22 Ibid, 116.

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a can of juice in her hand that, throughout the film, appears to reify the consumerist impulses of movie culture as a whole. Interestingly, the gender roles sometimes become reversed; as Markowska underlines, it was Andzia who acted as the ruthless Bonnie in Assault on the Snowman (1975), in which the eponymous snowman becomes a victim of a murderess. In making their films, Chierowska and Antosz referenced not only the context of popular culture but also their own Polish avant-garde milieu. Their mocking and exaggerated films ridicule not only the conventions of mainstream commercial narrative cinema but also the conventions of avant-garde film. A structure composed of repeated takes brings their works close to those from Permafo and the GSA. As Zeyfang remarks: their films or cycles of photographs pretend to adhere to (mimic) the stylistics of the dominant tendencies of Polish art in the seventies (focusing on cognitive objectivity, examining reality, or creating models to explain it, etc.) with the sole aim of ridiculing them. Antosz&Andzia pretend to be scientific by using modular structure in their films, where subsequent parts show variations of the same situation […] [but t]heir theoretical manifestos and programmatic texts have an ironic and absurd side to them.23

Conclusion A question that remains unanswered is that of the effectiveness and reach of the new mediated language that was adopted by young experimental artists in Wrocław. Akin to the members of the WFF, they did not intend to make movies for the sake of attracting their audiences to theaters to contemplate refined cinematic content and form. Instead, by turning their cameras to the everyday, they wanted to invite viewers to return to ordinary reality and perceive it in a more complete way, as more active participants in quotidian life. While some focused on the formal potentialities of mediating that everyday reality on film, others sought to critically appropriate the fictional and narrative tropes of mainstream cinema that they considered reductive and incomplete. The artists remained, however, on their culture’s margins and were never able to overcome viewers’ strong attachment to escapist films that showed a better and more colorful life, which, in this particular 23 Łukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang, eds., 1, 2, 3…Avant-Gardes. Film / Art between Experiment and Archive (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007), 156.

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historical time and place, was unattainable in practice for people living in a totalitarian state and struggling with the availability of basic goods. Should we, therefore, consider their attempt to integrate the fields of “life” and “art” through film as failed? Not necessarily. The artists discussed in this text significantly broadened the field of artistic investigations and inspirations. Whereas Polish art of the 1960s brought a self-aware conceptual reflection on the nature of art, the art of the 1970s made use of that experience and opened it up to the everyday reality that inspired the artists, leading them to analyze the relations between people and the world, as well as comment on the increasing presence and influence of media in daily life. The artists discussed here thus employed the medium of film because they saw in it an appropriate language of communication with increasingly media-oriented audiences. In some instances, the works discussed above can even be treated at the formal level as harbingers of our times, in which image bursts are increasingly supplanting our everyday surroundings. As noted above, for example, the short, looped films that hinged on repetition and existed halfway between photography and film presaged today’s GIFs, which did not appear in digital media until 1987. Even more importantly, the works discussed here offer templates for how one might respond to a changing political and technological situation. The non-narrative projects of the GSA demonstrate that we can always try to adopt a critical approach to messages conveyed by the media and to become sensitive to potential manipulations. The works from the circle of Permafo teach us openness to the everyday, highlighting the uniqueness of each moment that humans experience. The narrative and ironic films by the GSN artists directly address the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema and its influence on mass culture. All of the artists discussed here moved away from isolated, self-reflective discussions concerning the nature of the work of art or art itself, which was characteristic of Polish conceptual artists in the 1960s, and offered another path by turning their attention instead to new media, mass culture, and the way these condition everyday life, laying the ground for socially engaged critical art in Poland.

Bibliography Jankowska, Małgorzata. Film artystów. Szkice z historii filmu plastycznego i ruchu fotomedialnego w latach 1957–1981. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2002. Jankowska, Małgorzata. Wideo, wideo instalacja, wideo performance w Polsce w latach 1974–1994, Warsaw: Neriton, 2004.

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Kępińska, Alicja. “Sztuka.” Fotografia i film – nowy język sztuki, no. 1 (1977). Kluczyński, Ryszard. Film – sztuka Wielkiej Awangardy. Warsaw and Łódź: Państwowe Wydawnictwa Naukowe, 1990. Markowska, Anna, ed. Permafo 1970–1981, exh. cat. Wrocław: Wrocław Contemporary Museum, 2013. Markowska, Anna, ed. The Avant-Garde Did Not Applaud, exh. cat. Wrocław: Wrocław Contemporary Museum, 2014. Ronduda, Łukasz and Florian Zeyfang, eds. 1, 2, 3…Avant-Gardes. Film / Art between Experiment and Archive. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007. Ronduda, Łukasz. Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda. Warsaw: Center of Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski, 2008. Ziółkowska, Magdalena, ed. Notes From the Future of Art: Selected Writings by Jerzy Ludwiński. Eindhoven and Rotterdam: Van Abbemuseum and Veenman, 2007.

About the Author Dr. Marika Kuźmicz holds a PhD in art history and researches Polish art of the 1970s. She is a dean of the Visual Culture Faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, curator, and author and editor of several books, most recently Workshop of the Film Form (2017), coedited with Łukasz Ronduda, and Historia Performance w Polsce (2019). She is also the head of the Arton Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on researching, exhibiting, and archiving Polish art of the 1970s.

11. Conceptual Artist, Cognitive Film: Miklós Erdély at the Balázs Béla Studio1 Ksenya Gurshtein

Abstract The Hungarian Balázs Béla Studio (BBS), established in 1959 to create opportunities for young filmmakers, was unique in former Eastern Europe in the way it gave nonprofessional filmmakers access to the medium from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Its history complicates our understanding of the relationship between official and unofficial culture in the Eastern Bloc as an officially supported studio that gave unofficial artists opportunities 1 I would like to express my thanks to those whose support has made the writing of this chapter possible. I first became interested in this topic as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. My thanks there go to Joanna Raczynska for her collaboration on the Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces film series; Peggy Parsons and Sarah Greenough for their support of that film series; and Faya Causey for making my 2014 research trip to Budapest possible. In Budapest, I am deeply grateful to Sebestyén Kodolányi, who then single-handedly ran the BBS Archive and was an amazing guide to its materials; Dorottya Szörényi and Eszter Fazekas at what was then the MaNDA Archive; Julia Klaniczay at Artpool; and Tamás Szentjóby and János Sugár for allowing me to interview them. In 2015-2016, I was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, and I am very grateful to the NEH for its support of my scholarship. I am grateful to Maria Taroutina and Galina Mardilovich for inviting me to participate in a College Art Association panel in 2015, where I first presented this material, and to Anu Allas at the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn for inviting me participate with a talk on this topic in the 2015 conference Shared Practices: The Intertwinement of the Arts in the Culture of Socialist Eastern Europe. It was a privilege for me to meet László Beke at that conference, and I am grateful for his feedback. In 2018, I appreciated the opportunity to participate in programming that accompanied the exhibition Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary, co-organized by the Wende Museum and Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and curated by Isotta Poggi and Cristina Cuevas-Wolf. A special thanks in Los Angeles goes to Adam Hyman of the LA FilmForum for hosting a screening of Miklós Erdély’s Dream Reconstructions and inviting me to introduce the film. Throughout the process of my immersion in Hungarian history, my friend and coeditor Sonja Simonyi has been a most insightful interlocutor.

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch11

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to co-opt state resources to produce innovative and subversive work. This chapter gives an overview of how nonprofessional filmmakers, particularly visual artists, came to create important work that applied the insights and methods of conceptual art to film—with a focus on the work and theories of Miklós Erdély as a particularly paradigmatic example. Keywords: Miklós Erdély; Balázs Béla Studio (BBS); conceptual art; neoavant-garde; Hungary

A strong case can be made for the contribution that works on film made to the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of both performance-based and broadly “neo-avant-garde” and “conceptual” intermedia practices across Eastern Europe that eventually came to define the histories of contemporary visual art in their respective countries. A particularly large and notable group of films made by visual artists with a conceptual bend was produced at the Balázs Béla Studio (BBS) in Budapest throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. The artists who made films there included Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer, who created the two largest bodies of such work at BBS, as well as Peter Donath, György Galántai, Tibor Hajas, Agnes Hay, Tamás Szentjóby, Gábor Toth, and, in the generation of artists who began to be active in the 1980s, László László Révész, János Sugár, János Szirtes, and János Vető.2 In what follows, I will give an introduction to the history of the BBS and the conditions that made it possible for it to open its doors to a number of Hungary’s most influential neo-avant-garde visual artists and offer them an unparalleled degree of independence in producing experimental films. I will then go on to discuss why conceptual artists felt a particular affinity for the medium of film, focusing in particular on Miklós Erdély’s oeuvre and his 1977 film Dream Reconstructions (Álommásolatok) as a paradigmatic example that crystallizes the emphasis that BBS fostered in its experimental output of the 1970s on unveiling the creative process, seriality, and cinematic technology as a tool of self-analysis on both the individual and social levels. I will conclude with a shorter discussion of János Sugár’s 1985 film Persian Walk (Perzsa séta) as a coda that demonstrates the transmission of Erdély’s 2 The filmography of each of these artists at BBS can be found in the online database of the BBS Archive at http://bbsarchiv.hu/en. In the same period in the 1970s, the studio also gave filmmaking opportunities to experimental musicians László Vidovszky and Zoltán Jeney, both members of the Budapest New Music Studio, and László Najmányi, an all-around experimentalist in the fields of visual art, theater, video, film, writing, and music.

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ideas about film to the next generation of Hungarian artists. Throughout the essay, I will argue that the creation of such films at an official film studio complicates our understanding of the relationship between official and unofficial art worlds of Cold War–era Eastern Europe and points to cases in which the relationship between the state and the second public sphere was one of intertwinement and a constant negotiation of terms, as the growing body of recent scholarship reviewed in this book’s introduction suggests.

Part I: Artists Enter the BBS The Balázs Béla Studio (BBS) was established in Budapest in 1959 “as a grassroot initiative of young filmmakers” and became an official entity in 1961, named after the leading Hungarian film theorist and critic of the interwar period.3 It was conceived as the studio that would provide recent film school graduates with opportunities to make their first films and shape their artistic identities before they would move on to careers in larger film studios. Given this explicit orientation toward young filmmakers, the studio produced from its inception short, lower-budget, and more experimental films whose makers wanted to establish new distinctive voices within Hungarian cinema.4 Experimental cinema— i.e., films that rejected the commonly understood conventions of both narrative and documentary cinema as part of a search for new modes of cinematic representation and that often looked to aesthetic ideas found in visual art, music, science, and other disciplines for inspiration—made up only a fraction of all the films made at the studio. This fraction, however, represents some of BBS’s most original and significant output. The earliest experimental film made at BBS was director István Lauró Bácskai’s Fascination (Igézet) of 1963.5 The film marks the point from which 3 A brief English-language description of the studio’s history can be found on the webpage of the BBS Archive http://www.bbsarchiv.hu/. For another general introduction to the history of the studio, see Ksenya Gurshtein, “Balázs Béla Studio (BBS),” https://www.nga.gov/features/ experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/balazs-bela-studio.html; longer scholarly texts on the BBS in English include BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1985); and András Bálint Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State: The Balázs Béla Studio,” in Experimental Film: The Missing Frames, ed. Benjamin Meade (Kansas City: Avila University Press, 2010), 65–88. The most thorough account of the studio’s overall functioning and admission of nonprofessionals can be found in Sonja Simonyi, “Artists as Amateurs: Intersections of Nonprofessional Film Production and Neo-Avant-Garde Experimentation at the Balázs Béla Stúdió in the Early 1970s,” in Film History vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 114–37. 4 András Bálint Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 67–68. 5 In a series of sequences that are edited together without narration and verge on visual abstraction, the film juxtaposes images of industrial production with a lone pianist performing

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one can trace a lineage of poetic montage films made at BBS by filmmakers Zoltán Huszárik in the 1960s, János Tóth in the 1970s, and András Szirtes in the 1980s.6 In even the earliest of these films, one can see the features that would recur in BBS’s experimental works more broadly—the use of found footage, including historical prewar footage that opened up thorny questions of historical memory—and the medium self-awareness that disrupts the visual continuity for which conventional cinema strives. Also from the founding of the studio, an important pioneering tradition of documentary filmmaking began to be established at BBS. These films offered empathetic portraits of ordinary people and, by the end of the 1960s, increasingly called attention to social problems, despite the threat of possible censorship that such f ilms could face.7 Although tensions would ultimately develop at BBS by the mid-1970s between more traditional, documentary-oriented filmmakers and the nonprofessional filmmakers who had come in just a few years earlier, the studio’s history of making important documentaries and its openness to experimentation with the documentary mode was an important influence on the work of nonprofessional filmmakers, as well.8 The studio could foster and support various kinds of experimentation due to the unique way in which it was managed. Established soon after the suppressed Hungarian Uprising of 1956, its governance was a concession to the demands for greater ideological openness and pluralism. As Kovács writes, BBS was an exception to the procedures by which all other Hungarian studios were run, because its products were “not meant to be released automatically for public distribution. The studio was fully self-governed without exterior political control…and the production process was not closely watched by any agents not having to do directly with the production itself.”9 When BBS films were released, filmmakers could not control their the film’s experimental score, thus equating and uniting manual and artistic labor as creative feats. 6 The films that are part of this lineage include director Zoltán Huszárik’s Elegy (Elégia) (1965) and Capriccio (1969). For more on Huszárik and his films of “poetic montage with heightened emotional charge,” see Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 70–71. János Tóth was the cinematographer on both Huszárik f ilms, as well as Fascination. His own experimental films include Arena (Aréna) (1970), Study I and II (1974 and 1975), and Shine (1982). The films of András Szirtes are similar in spirit and construction to Jonas Mekas’s diary films and are too numerous to list here, but can be found in the online BBS database. 7 For example, Gyula Gazdag and Judit Ember’s 1972 documentary The Election (A határozat) was suppressed until 1983 but also led to the removals of the party officials it depicted. Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 68–69. 8 Simonyi, “Artists as Amateurs,” 131. 9 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 67.

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distribution, which was limited both in Hungary and abroad, where the films received attention only at specialized festivals.10 At the same time, BBS could bring films to completion before they might potentially get censored at the end of the production process. This is why the “banning rate” at BBS was much higher than elsewhere in the Hungarian film industry.11 Kovács also points out that “Formal political censorship, like the Hayes-code [sic] […] never existed in Hungary […] Censorship was built into the production and distribution system informally, and into the artists themselves mentally.”12 The studio was thus a space that constantly balanced the trade-off between public (in)visibility and creative freedom—a condition familiar to artists inhabiting the overall state cultural policy of the three Ts—Hungarian words for “promote,” “tolerate,” and “ban,”—which described the often unpredictable position officials could take in relation to any cultural product or event.13 The second organizational strength that led to the flourishing of experimentation at BBS was that the studio was set up to continuously bring in younger members. The late 1960s saw the first big generational turnover; by 1971, one of the studio’s new members, film student and future director Gábor Bódy, became a leading force, along with art critic and curator László Beke, in the establishment of the Film Language Series at the studio between 1971 and 1973. This program of discussions and film productions focused attention on linguistic, semiotic, and structuralist concerns, as well as on the idea that Hungarian avant-garde film should be revived on the basis of a connection to art, especially conceptual art.14 By 1974, the studio’s membership requirements were amended to allow people without an affiliation 10 BBS films won a number of prizes at those festivals. László Beke, ”Hungarian Experimental Film and the Béla Balázs Studio,” in BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1985), 7, 10–11. 11 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 67. There are two notable examples of films made by artists at BBS being banned and destroyed in the 1970s: Endre Tót’s One Step (1972) was seized and did not survive; Tamás Szentjóby’s Centaur (Kentaur) (1973–1975) survived after being banned, but was not released until 2009. See Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 154, 294. 12 Ibid., 66. 13 The application of official rules in relation to avant-garde artistic practices was particularly inconsistent in Hungary as compared to other Eastern bloc countries. See Maja and Reuben Fowkes, “Liberty Controlled: Institutional Settings of the East European Neo-avant-garde,” in Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, ed. Edit Sasvári, Sándor Hornyik, and Hedvig Turai (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 77–95. 14 Beke, ”Hungarian Experimental Film and the Béla Balázs Studio,” 8. Simonyi, “Artists as Amateurs,” 128–30.

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with the national film school to work there.15 In 1976, Bódy again led the effort to organize the K/3 section within BBS, the studio’s experimental wing, whose abbreviated name can mean “complex researches in public culture” or “center for cinematographic experiments.”16 Kovács reproduces an outline of the research goals on which the K/3 Experimental Section planned to focus and which connect the influx of new ideas to the studio’s earlier experiments and focus on documentary filmmaking: 1. Analysis of images a. Recycling of existing documents b. The meaning of documentary image c. Documentary description of reality 2. Experimenting with film language a. Problems of segmentation b. Problems of syntax 3. Genres based on experimental effects a. Soviet avant-garde b. Early BBS film-posters c. New themes for advertisement films (Cognition, Moral, Respect of values, Democratic rights, Courageous life, etc.)17 The films Miklós Erdély directed at BBS in the 1970s responded to most of the concerns on this list and, along with Bódy’s films, are the most complex body of cinematic work to come out of the studio, notable for its ability to balance formal sophistication with social relevance.

Part II: Miklós Erdély and “Cognitive Film” Though still little known outside Hungary, Miklós Erdély (1928–86) was a figure of monumental importance for the Hungarian unofficial art scene from the 1960s until his death. The art historian Sven Spieker describes him as “the 15 Simonyi, “Artists as Amateurs,” 132. According to Kovács, it was in 1977 that the studio’s mission statement officially removed formal filmmaking education as a prerequisite to studio membership. Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 69. 16 Katalin Székely, “The Influx of Images: Photo, Experimental Film and Video Art in the Hungarian Neo-avant-garde,” in Art in Hungary 1956–1980, 347. 17 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 77; Kovács points out that “One of Bódy’s most important theoretical works was a detailed analysis of Huszárik Elegy,” thus directly linking the later and earlier experimental filmmakers at BBS. Ibid., 73.

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most influential yet also the most enigmatic figure among the members of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde.”18 Éva Forgács elaborates on his role: “[Erdély’s] rise [as the new leader of the neo-avant-garde] was necessitated by [Lajos] Kassák’s death in 1967, which left the […] role of a father-like ‘anti-authoritarian authority’ to be filled. Erdély was the obvious choice.”19 Forgács also sets the intellectual scene onto which Erdély emerged as a natural leader: “[A] new, all-encompassing theoretical orientation was embraced that comprised linguistics, sociology, and the history of sciences and technology, as well as long banned psychoanalysis.”20 Trained as an architect, Erdély combined curiosity about all these topics with great erudition, transmitting and popularizing new ideas about art in his community.21 He was active outside his official profession in a myriad undertakings, making “poems, studies, lectures, radio plays, musical compositions, actions, films, concepts, drawings, paintings, statues, objects, montages/collages, photographs, environments, stage projects, interior furniture, photo mosaic walls, architectural works, art courses, etc.”22 Having invented, around 1966, a technique for producing naturalistic photo mosaics for public spaces, he also had stable income and a place in the cultural infrastructure that gave him greater leeway to pursue his interests.23 At BBS, Erdély directed five films between 1974 and 1985; of the five, Dream Reconstructions, at ninety-three minutes, is the longest finished one. The films are Partita (1974), Dream Reconstructions (1977), Version (Verzió) (1979–81), Train Trip (Vonatút) (1981), and Spring Execution (Tavaszi kivégzés) (1985).24 According to Annamária Szőke, Erdély began to visit BBS regularly from the early 1970s, having previously, in the 1960s, twice applied and failed to get into 18 Sven Spieker, “Texts by Conceptual Artists from Eastern Europe: Hungary,” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe, Museum of Modern Art, https://post.at.moma. org/content_items/1059-texts-by-conceptual-artists-from-eastern-europe-hungary. 19 Éva Forgács, Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement (Los Angeles: Doppelhouse Press, 2016), 172. 20 Forgács, Hungarian Art, 171. 21 A recently translated interview with Erdély offers explanations as to why he was not content to practice as an architect in Hungary. See “Zoltán Sebők: Towards a New Mysticism: In Conversation with Miklós Erdély,” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe, Museum of Modern Art, https://post.at.moma.org/sources/32/publications/294. 22 László Beke, “The Work of Miklós Erdély, a Chronological Sketch with Pictures up to 1985,” in Miklós Erdély, ed. Annamária Szőke, exh. cat. (Vienna, Budapest, and Kisterem: Georg Kargl Fine Arts, tranzit.hu, and Miklós Erdély Foundation, 2008), 7. 23 Ibid., 8 and Annamária Szőke, “Miklós Erdély,” Vivid [Radical] Memory: Radical Conceptual Art Revisited: A Social and Political Perspective from the East and the South, http://www. vividradicalmemory.org/php/author.php?pagina=1&id=42&id_tipologia=-1. 24 Basic information on each film can be found online in the BBS archive database. For a brief description of all the films, see Beke, “The Work of Miklós Erdély.”

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the Academy of Dramatic and Cinematic Arts. Szőke writes that “Of the three films he shot in the seventies, two [Partita and Version] were banned, and on the whole his films became accessible to the wider public only after his death.”25 Today, they remain largely inaccessible, not having been anthologized on the DVDs produced by the BBS Archive between 2006 and 2012, and only available for viewing in person through Hungary’s state film archive. Erdély began to theorize film as a medium well before he came to BBS. His work in the 1960s, according to Gábor Bódy’s recollections, established “the prototype of experimental film” that later led to the existence of the Film Language Series and K/3 section.26 In 1966, Erdély published “Montage Hunger,” an essay that identified “the montage hunger that has arisen across the arts.” “Displaced from its process into a possibly contrastive environment,” Erdély wrote, “a phenomenon-fragment receives symbolic meaning, and its suggestiveness increases by repetition.”27 Later he wrote, “With its scissors, montage cuts into the image of status quo consecrated by customs and social norms. And when reassembling it in other relations, it creates an anarchic hodgepodge that is outraging to the traditional approach.”28 Montage was a core concept for Erdély’s aesthetics, one he applied as much to his installations, performance lectures, and texts as to his films. In 1975, he produced a diagram that captures just how far-reaching he felt the technique’s connections were to everything from psychology and language to science, mysticism, revolution, and sex (Figure 11.1). Katalin Székely writes: Erdély constructed his art theory also as a kind of montage, combining current topics and discoveries of science and the humanities with pseudoscientific theories, while he aimed to narrow or even to close 25 Szőke, “Miklós Erdély.” 26 Gábor Bódy, “Introduction to the Work Schedule of Group K/3,” in Gábor Bódy 1946–1985. A Presentation of His Work, ed. László Beke and Miklós Peternák (Budapest: Műcsarnok, 1987), 253. I am drawing this information from an unpublished English translation by Dániel Sípos of András Müllner, “Politics of Montage: Neo-Avant-Garde Traits in Hungarian Experimental Films,” published in Hungarian in Gábor Gelencsér, ed., BBS 50: A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve (Budapest: Műcsarnok, 2009). I am grateful to Sebestyén Kodolányi for sharing with me this translation, intended to be part of a published English translation of the exhibition catalog on BBS history. 27 Miklós Erdély, “Montázs-éhség” (“Montage hunger”) in A filmről (On Film) (Budapest: Balassi, 1995), 100. Translation and citation found in Müllner, “Politics of Montage: Neo-Avant-Garde Traits in Hungarian Experimental Films.” 28 Miklós Erdély, “Montázsgesztus és effektus” (“Montage Gesture and Effect”), originally published in 1975, in Miklós Erdély, A filmről (On Film) (Budapest: Balassi, 1995), 143. Translation and citation found in Müllner, “Politics of Montage: Neo-Avant-Garde Traits in Hungarian Experimental Films.”

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  Figure 11.1. Miklós Erdély, English translation of a diagram for a lecture “The Theory of Montage,” 1975. This English translation appears in Annamária Szőke, ed., Miklós Erdély, exh. cat., (Vienna: Georg Kargl Fine Arts; Budapest: Kisterem; Budapest: tranzit.hu; Budapest: Miklós Erdély Foundation, 2008), p. 26. Copyright György & Daniel Erdély.

the gap between scientific and artistic thought. Thanks to montage […] art was capable of showing the complexity and inner contradictions of human thought.29

Bringing together theory and practice, in the late 1960s, Erdély also started to make films that were influential for young BBS filmmakers. He montaged 29 Székely, “The Influx of Images,” 333.

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together found-footage fragments, the first ones coming from the waste basket of the TV studio where he worked as an editor.30 Those young filmmakers, especially Bódy, in turn, offered Erdély resources in the 1970s to make longer films of greater complexity, sophistication, and depth. As Székely documents, Erdély and his fellow artists came to BBS already engaged with photography as the international “conceptual” medium par excellence. The artists’ relationship to photography was characterized by both extensive use and cheeky mistrust, as conveyed in Erdély’s 1974 No Photographs!— a photograph of a sign that states that photography is prohibited.31 The conceptual artists’ engagement with photography found a natural extension on film and amplified the interest in deconstructing the documentary mode fostered by the Film Language Series and already explored by some professional filmmakers.32 The visual artists pushed that experimentation further, and many of the best-known films they produced explored the intertwining of fiction and documentary modes, seeking to undermine the very distinction. This is true of Tamás Szentjóby’s Centaur (Kentaur, 1973–5),33 Péter Donáth’s Lifestyles (Életformák, 1975),34 and Tibor Hajas’s Self-Fashion Show (Öndivatbemutató, 1976).35 This was also true of Gábor Bódy’s first feature narrative film, American Postcard (Amerikai Anzix), which he made in 1975 as his film school graduation project.36 30 Szőke, “Miklós Erdély.” A listing of these early films can be found online on the website of the C3 Foundation: http://www.c3.hu/collection/erdely_miklos/indexen.html. 31 Székely, “The Influx of Images,” 331–43. 32 Elemér Ragályi’s 1974 New Year’s Eve (Szilveszter) is an example of experimentation with the documentary mode by a prolific BBS cinematographer. See Sonja Simonyi, “New Year’s Eve (Szilveszter),” in Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces, National Gallery of Art, 2014, https://www. nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/balazs-bela-studio/long-distancerunner-new-years-eve.html. 33 For more on this film, see footnote 11 above and Ksenya Gurshtein, “Centaur (Kentaur),” in Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces, National Gallery of Art, 2014, https://www.nga.gov/ features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/censored-and-salvaged/centaur.html. 34 Lifestyles showcased four examples of alternative lifestyle choices and belief systems marginalized in Hungary at the time. In long takes, Donáth filmed an all-women soccer team; a gathering of alumni of a religious school; a group discussion at a free-love hippie commune; and the activities of Budapest’s unofficial Room Theater. 35 See Ksenya Gurshtein, “Self-Fashion Show (Öndivatbemutató),” in Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces, National Gallery of Art, 2014, https://www.nga.gov/features/experimentalcinema-in-eastern-europe/city-scene-country-scene/self-fashion-show.html; Katalin Székely notes that Self-Fashion Show was prevented by the authorities from being shown abroad. Székely, “The Influx of Images,” 350. 36 See Sonja Simonyi, “Second Looks: Archival Aesthetics and Historical Representation in American Postcard (1975),” in Studies in Eastern European Cinema vol. 7, no. 1 (2016), 68–81 and Gábor Gelencsér’s essay in this volume.

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With the exception of Spring Execution, all of Erdély’s BBS films were defined by the two central foci identified above: montage as the primary formal device put in service of systematically undermining the expectations that separate documentary and narrative cinema. Erdély’s two most remarkable films, Dream Reconstructions and Version, most fully embody the f ilmmaker’s alternative vision of what he called “cognitive f ilm,” which decouples the medium from expectations of narrative resolution or indexically guaranteed truth, but, at the same time, attempts to capture as accurately as possible the workings of consciousness and the processes of individual and social identity and memory formation.37 The access he had at BBS to professional production and postproduction resources allowed him and others to work out sophisticated conceptions of film as a medium that coincided with the contemporaneous international concerns of conceptualism and structuralist cinema.38 As the name “cognitive film” suggests, Erdély was interested in using film to capture and understand the structure of human consciousness—an idea that existed on the margins of American cinema, as well, where Hollis Frampton argued that “film is the first of the arts that has its roots in consciousness as we know it.”39 In his proposal for Dream Reconstructions, Erdély described it as follows: Dream is nothing else than a form of talking to ourselves in a dramatic, cryptic and shy form […] In the dream, the part of the Self that remains outside of the exterior world talks to the part of the Self which is embedded in the exterior world. Should we become entirely conversation, dreams would vanish. […] However, all communication is a copy, in which the original becomes blurred and fragmented. Filmic representation of dream is a multiple-degree copy, and the original state fades out step by step. […] Naturally the biggest loss happens with the dream when the dream is verbalized. It is as if the memory emulsion turned black at the impact 37 Erdély distinguished “cognitive” film from five other categories of noncommercial fiction cinema in an 1982 essay in which the term “experimental” was applied to films rooted in musical or painterly forms, while “cognitive” denotes films that “systematically experiment with the manipulation of the cognitive process of the viewer.” Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 78. 38 For reference, P. Adams Sitney’s germinal study Visionary Film was first published in 1974. 39 Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia) (London: Afterall Books, 2006), 5. The parallels between Erdély’s films and some of Frampton’s, e.g., (nostalgia) and Critical Mass (1971), as well as their shared interest in science, warrant further analysis. Erdély knew the work of mainstream Western filmmakers: “It is only with Godard that I have felt that he truly deals with film itself,” he said in one interview. “Zoltán Sebők: Towards a New Mysticism,” https://post.at.moma.org/ sources/32/publications/294.

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of light, and the only was to save some spots on it would be if one pulled it out of the developer fluid and would [fix] it conceptually. The hopeless work of restoration and documentation of reconstruction experiments creates yet new copies. A not completely sane psyche gets lost in this labyrinth of copies and cannot make a difference between reality and illusion, and cannot help taking every phenomenon as equally real […] He cannot stand the blurredness and the ambiguity of dreams, so he reduces the dream as an experience to the state of data. […] The situation of the viewer is similar to that of the mentally disturbed. The task of the filmmakers is to point out this disturbance and treat it. He also makes copies, but he interprets the shapes of the abrasions differently, whereby he recuperates in a more extended signification what was lost. 40

The film opens with two quotations. The first is from Heraclitus’s fragment 89: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” The second is from an unfinished poem by Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘Much has man experienced. Named many of the heavenly ones, Since we have been a conversation And able to hear from one another.’ (IV, 343)

Notably, this passage is discussed at length by Martin Heidegger in his 1959 essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry.”41 Though no primary source attests to this, Erdély’s quoting of Hölderlin might have been a way of entering into dialogue with Heidegger, given the emphasis both place on the idea of “conversation.” Erdély, however, appears to be much more skeptical than Heidegger about the communicational potential of linguistic exchange. Notably, both quotes opening the film are fragments from texts that were either left unfinished or survive only partially. The sense of incompleteness and open-ended meaning that this entails accords perfectly with Erdély’s approach to making his own film. Dream Reconstructions consists of four distinct parts. In the first three, two women and one man try to reconstruct a scenario from a dream each had had. The dreams are modest—they do not evoke the sex, violence, 40 Reproduced and translated in Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 81–82. 41 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in The Heidegger Reader (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 122.

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or phantasmagoria that popular culture often attributes to dream states. Instead, these are small, poignant, sometimes traumatic moments; the first and second parts of the film build up to climaxes of one woman feeling inexplicable shame at the sight of a strolling elderly couple, while the second is drowned out and silenced by the derisive laughter of her family. The moment presumably closest to each dreamer’s experience of the dream lasts only a few minutes. What takes up most effort is the slow buildup during which each dreamer painstakingly recollects and obsessively analyzes their memories, directing those assisting in the reconstruction so as to get as close as possible to the dream. In each of these three sequences, Erdély’s style of editing and use of technologies visible on camera seems to shift to accommodate an individual dreamer’s personality. In the f irst sequence, a woman who vacillates constantly in her account of her dream holds a microphone as the tool for recording her doubts. Here, the editing of the footage is most heavily manipulated in postproduction through freeze-framing, rewinding, replay, slowing down, or speeding up of the frame rate, and the unsynching of sound and image. The viewer is insistently forced into an awareness both of the woman’s struggle to accurately represent the ineffable and of the fact that, given appropriate attention, every new moment can feel weighty with signif icance. The editing also obviously highlights the director’s control over the process of representation, but leaves viewers time to consider the many ways in which those choices could have been made differently. In other sequences, other audiovisual technologies are also foregrounded, stressing again their centrality to the process of mechanically assisted re-cognition. The second sequence prominently features a cassette recorder as a tool of recollection; radios appear as significant objects within the dreams in the second and third sequences; in the second sequence, radio is also used extensively for the soundtrack. Here, a young woman describes a dream in which she was accused of something by her family; her attempts to defend herself are drowned out by her family members’ loud laughter and by her father’s radio. The editing in this sequence corresponds to the more methodical way the woman recollects her dream. The editing also turns the woman silent or has her talking over herself, mimicking the dream’s theme of voicelessness. The visual montage corresponds to the scanning of a radio dial that forms the soundtrack of most of the sequence. In the third sequence—the shortest and least developed— a young man’s recurring dream is reconstructed. The viewer sees a man—a radio mechanic, perhaps—holding a large radio in his lap while sitting in the middle of a

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barn covered in hay. The sequence concludes with the radio’s inner workings exposed while classical music plays in the background. Writing in 1981 about his film Train Trip, Erdély articulated explicitly an interest in exploring the “possibilities of repetition and interchangeability provided by film” as a time-based medium, allowing the same event to unfold in multiple ways over multiple takes.42 Repetition was already at the core of Erdély’s use of montage in the first parts of Dream Reconstructions, with the cinematic technology reproducing consciously and conspicuously what the mind does of its own accord unconsciously. László Beke has noted that the emphasis “on the relation between repetition and change” has great significance for Erdély’s artistic oeuvre as a whole. 43 In 1973, Erdély wrote “Theses on the Theory of Repetition,” a group of thirteen contradictory statements that sketch out the complexities of ideas surrounding repetition. All of the statements add up to the profound paradox of the apparent existence and the apparent impossibility of repetition—the fact that repetition and newness or change are mutually constituted and only intelligible in relation to each other—for example, “4. What is born, created, or changing, is manifested in repetition, it also dies in repetition” and “5. In the turmoil of creation the same can never be achieved twice.”44 In Dream Reconstructions, Erdély uses the technological means at his disposal to make these paradoxes apparent, arguing for the essential psychological and aesthetic role of what appears at first as repetition (which in the film is never completely identical) in allowing for moments of re-cognition and re-construction of reality beyond what a single representation can do. 45 As Kovács puts it, “Erdély technically manipulates the material so that even the staging of the reconstruction of the dream becomes a dreamlike 42 From the English-language summary in Annamária Szőke and Sándor Hornyik, eds., Kreativitási gyakorlatok, FAFEJ, INDIGO. Erdély Miklós művészetpedagógiai tevékenysége 1975–1986 (Creativity Exercises, FAFEJ, INDIGO. On Mikló Erdély’s Art Pedagogical Activity 1975–1986) (Budapest: MTA Művészettörténeti Kutatóintézet, Gondolat Kiadó, 2B Alapítvány, and Erdély Miklós Alapítvány, 2008), 497–523, https://monoskop.org/images/1/1e/INDIGO_summary.pdf. 43 Beke, “The Work of Miklós Erdély,”10. Erdély’s fascination with repetition also def ined contemporary art practice globally in the 1960s–70s. At BBS, this interest dominated Dóra Maurer’s oeuvre, though in a more strictly formal and structural vein. See Juliet Bingham, ed., Dóra Maurer, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2019). 44 Miklós Erdély, “Theses on the Theory of Repetition,” in Artpool: The Experimental Art Archive of East-Central Europe, ed. György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay (Budapest: Artpool, 2013), 186. 45 Closely related to Erdély’s understanding of repetition was his resistance to the demand for novelty associated with the historic avant-gardes. See Miklós Erdély, “What is Avant-Gardism?,” in Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions, tranzit.hu, http://tranzit.org/ exhibitionarchive/texts/what-is-avantgardism/.

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imagery, a third degree copy of the second degree conscious copy of the original dream material.”46 Erdély’s answer to the paradoxes of repetition is to embrace them—to produce a recursive and logically infinite chain of representations that communicate “a multilayered truth by presenting copies of copies of copies” that are both closely inter-related and, at the same time, emphasize each other’s uniqueness and singularity through gradual mutation. 47 The fourth and longest sequence in the film—which was completed first and originally stood on its own as the “Heraclitus Fragment”48—differs from the preceding three. It is bracketed at the beginning and end by images of a limping middle-aged man walking to one of Budapest’s thermal pools, where his swimming is given the visual quality of an epic plunge, accompanied by rousing classical music.49 Somewhere in the middle of the sequence, the viewer sees the man describing past dreams from years ago while sitting on a courtyard bench. These descriptions are the basis for most of the sequence, which takes place in a film studio, with a projector screen now foregrounded as the most visible piece of cinematic technology. In the studio, the man seems to believe he is conversing with a livestreamed image of a young woman asking him questions, while the viewer realizes quickly that he is speaking with a prerecorded apparition (Figure 11.2). This leads to a mostly abortive one-sided conversation, though their dialogue is surprisingly coherent in places—she comments on having watched the earlier recording of the man’s dreams; he responds. “Excuse me for being only a projected image, which is like not being here at all,” the woman says at one point, as if foreseeing the obvious unworkability of the setup. Despite the frequent breakdowns in conversation, the man continues. In the course of this peculiar exchange, the viewer first learns that he had undergone voluntary electroshock therapy. He appears to be the “not completely sane psyche” Erdély referenced in the description of 46 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 80. 47 BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film, 28. 48 According to the C3 Foundation, http://www.c3.hu/collection/erdely_miklos/indexen.html. 49 I haven’t been able to identify the man who appears in the last sequence, which could yield a deeper understanding of it. The woman with whom he converses is Eszter Bartholy, who appeared as Eszter Barthaly in Erdély’s film Spring Execution. Other credited collaborators include Ilona Bistey; György Harangozó, who also appeared in Erdély’s film Version; Zoltán Labas, who was a member of the INDIGO group of which Erdély was the leader; and Margit Rajczy, who was active in Budapest’s neo-avant-garde scene as a participant in at least one performance conducted by Tamás Szentjoby with Erdély (see Kata Krasznahorkai, “Black or White: Angela Davis, Bobby Seale und Black Power in den Akten der Staatssicherheit in den 1970er Jahren,” in Aktionskunst jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs, ed. Adam Czirak [Bielefeld: transcript, 2019], 170).

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Figure 11.2. Miklós Erdély, Dream Reconstructions (Álommásolatok), 1977. 16 mm film stills. Copyright György & Daniel Erdély.

the film project who “gets lost in this labyrinth of copies and cannot make a difference between reality and illusion.”50 In the film proposal, Erdély continued, “The task of the filmmaker is to point out this disturbance and treat it.” Dream Reconstructions certainly point outs—and heightens—the disturbance. In the climactic scene of the sequence, the young woman appears to set straight the distinction between reality and illusion when she dramatically tears apart the screen onto which her image had been projected and walks through it. The man and woman speak, but the film immediately turns this “real” moment into a looping, mediated, dreamlike one as the viewer sees the pair now watching together the filmed footage of their live encounter. Erdély enacts and then immediately undercuts the fantasy of breaking out of the cycle of mediation, which the film seems to equate with the processes of recall and reflection. This part of the film is dark, slow, flickering, and erratic—much like the man’s speech had been. As the film ends with the man walking away from 50 In a private conversation with the author, the art historian László Beke suggested that Erdély may have made questionable ethical choices in using this particular individual as a subject in the film.

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the pool building, we hear a tune from Georges Bizet’s Carmen—a reference to a dream the man described in which he sang a tune from that opera. Erdély’s proposal document suggests that he was not an adherent of a postmodernist view that would abolish all distinction between objective reality and a chain of self-replicating simulacra. At the same time, his films insist on layering and complicating the relationship between the “waking” and “dream” worlds. This was consistent with Erdély’s overarching aesthetic philosophy, which he elaborated in the “Theses for the Marly Conference of 1980.” “[A] work of art,” Erdély wrote, “may be considered to be a sign that amplifies and multiplies the various meanings at the expense of each, and causes them to extinguish each other, thus making it impossible for the work of art as a whole to have any meaning.”51 One possible illustration of Erdély’s philosophy might be found in a 1969 photograph titled SelfIllumination (Light Eats Up Man).52 Erdély is photographed holding a lit flashbulb next to his face. In the resulting image, the bright light illuminates half of his face and obliterates the other. The visual effects at the end of Dream Reconstructions—the destruction of a screen that turns out to be indestructible, the blinding of the viewer and those in the frame by bright studio lights—speak to a similar ambivalence about the possibility of the film offering any conclusive revelation. To the extent that the film offers insight into the workings of the human psyche, it does so on the level not of “plot” but of process, by suggesting that any attempt at self-knowledge, rather than being a neutral illumination of a pre-existing truth, is an ongoing event that is equal parts destruction or disfigurement (as of the “emulsion” of the dream that Erdély describes in his proposal) and self-creation. Within this philosophy of self-revelation, there is, finally, a key focus on the looping (rather than linear) temporality of the process. This, too, was presaged in an earlier photographic series and becomes vivid in Dream Reconstructions. “Albert Einstein’s suggestion that the time-space continuum might be warped and that time may be not a permanent one-way road pervaded Erdély’s thinking,” Éva Forgács writes.53 The Möbius strip was, for him, a key conceptual point of reference as an object that defied received ideas about movement through space-time. In 1976, at the Möbius Exhibition that he organized, in a move that was characteristically enigmatic 51 Miklós Erdély, “Theses for the Marly Conference of 1980,” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 100. 52 This photograph is illustrated in Székely, “The Influx of Images: Photo, Experimental Film and Video Art in the Hungarian Neo-avant-garde.” 53 Forgács, Hungarian Art, 227.

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Figure 11.3. Miklós Erdély, Time Travel, 1976. Photomontages (from a series of five). Collection of Szent István Király Museum, Székesfehérvár. Copyright György & Daniel Erdély. Photographer: László Lugo Lugosi.

and evocative, Erdély presented a single Klein bottle—an object, which, like the Möbius strip, is a surface with only one side, which can be followed endlessly. Also in 1976, Erdély created a series of five photomontages, Time Travel I-V (Figure 11.3), and a text titled “Time-Möbius” for the accompanying catalog.54 In the photomontages, the artist inserts images of his adult self into old family photos, treating photography as a tool of intervening in history and memory. In the twelve numbered statements of the text, Erdély wrote: 3. Only that which turns back and impacts itself as a cause is capable of molding itself. 7. Therefore freedom is a twofold determination in time. 8. If you live in the awareness that in each moment you have, you can re-(con)vert, you are enclosed within your own redemption.55

As Sven Spieker eloquentely puts it, In […] ‘Time-Möbius’ […] Erdély [argues] that in order to become ourselves, instead of ‘progressing’ through time, we must ‘turn back’ and act as a cause upon ourselves in the same way in which the artist ‘visits’ his forebears. [Thus] […] true freedom consists in the kind of ‘twofold determination in time’ familiar to everyone through dreams.56

54 Beke, “The Work of Miklós Erdély,” 25. 55 Miklós Erdély, “Time-Möbius,” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe, Museum of Modern Art, https://post.at.moma.org/sources/32/publications/291. 56 Spieker, “Texts by Conceptual Artists from Eastern Europe: Hungary.”

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With Dream Reconstructions, Erdély arguably was able to develop the ideas suggested in Time Travel more fully and expansively, because the medium of f ilm allowed for a far more complex journey through time. Looping back to Erdély’s own childhood, it’s worth noting that his mother was a renowned medium, a legacy he embraced.57 In his performances, Erdély practiced elliptical and oracular speech; in his best work with film, that medium became the medium—a tool for entering a liminal state in which each viewer might face her own repressed.

Part III: The Demons of National Memory Kovács writes that Erdély was interested in “how repressed, unconscious or forgotten meanings can be retrieved by [juxtaposition].”58 Dream Reconstructions focuses primarily on applying Erdély’s ideas about montage to the psyches of individuals. Even there, however, one juxtaposition that emerges across the entire film becomes a comment on the state of the Hungarian national psyche. In three of the four episodes, places outside of Hungary are mentioned and play an important role. The dream of the woman in the first sequence takes place in Rome and is thus impossible to reconstruct perfectly in her Hungarian setting. In the second sequence, the radio scanning across the dial goes not only through Hungarian-language programs but also Soviet news in Russian, news and rock ‘n’ roll in English, and a snippet of Romanian—all reminders that the radio waves were a major Cold War–propaganda battleground. In the last sequence, the man recounting his dreams says, “I dreamed I was in London, Paris, in the straights of Messina… I wish I were there… in Leningrad or Helsinki.” In the context of Eastern Bloc citizens’ restricted access to travel, imposed Soviet dominance, and the mid-1970s wave of emigrations and expulsions of members of Erdély’s intelligentsia milieu, these references to foreign places likely stirred potent and complex feelings about national identity in the film’s Hungarian viewers.59 It was not, however, until Erdély’s next film, Version, that his probing of the national, rather than individual, psyche took center stage. 57 Beke, “The Work of Miklós Erdély,” 7. 58 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 79. 59 Around 1975–6, under pressure from authorities, a number of key figures on the avant-garde scene—notably, artists Tamás Szentjóby, László Lakner, Endre Tót, as well as Péter Halász and the troupe of Room Theater—either chose to emigrate or were expelled. Gábor Andrási, Gábor Pataki, György Szücs, and András Zwickl, The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century (Budapest: Corvina, 1999), 207.

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Kovács argues that, in Version, Erdély’s “ideas about the relation between cinema and the unconscious functioning of the mind are demonstrated […] at multiple levels.”60 Using the formal vocabulary of montage and particularly repetition, the film examines the way the repressed—in this case, the taboo of anti-Semitism—functions in personal and communal life as an unresolved recurring trauma for both the persecutors and persecuted. Part of the film’s power and its ability to connect the personal with the communal is again rooted in Erdély’s biography. A Jew with no allegiance to Judaism, he was, nevertheless, strongly shaped by his ethnic heritage.61 Version is an adaptation of Gyula Krúdy’s novel Eszter Solymosi of Tiszaeszlár (A tiszaeszlári Solymosi Eszter, 1931). Both novel and film recall the 1882 blood libel in which a group of Jewish men in provincial Hungary were accused of murdering a Christian girl and tried in a case that hinged on the coerced confession of a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy, Móric Scharf, who testified against his own father, among others. In Version, which again scrambles documentary and narrative modes by showing actors both playing their parts and preparing for them, Erdély focuses most of his attention on the interrogation process in which the two police officers force Móric to concoct his recollections. As they feed him new content for his memories and as he tries to resist by telling his version of the events, the viewer sees the changing story play out over and over on the screen while the camera captures all the versions in grainy black and white that renders each mediated representation equally believable and equally questionable. Kovács argues that Erdély’s goal was to reproduce the process of gradual, repetitive brainwashing: [By] reconstructing the fake story, by showing the imagery of the ‘dangerous Jew,’ by making imaginable and plausible this version of the facts, he provoked all the repressed fears and feelings about and against the Jews and forced the viewers to look deep into themselves searching for the foundation of anti-Semitism.62

Arguably less formally inventive than Dream Reconstructions, Version was more politically potent, testing the limits of authorities’ tolerance toward 60 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 83. 61 Erdély addressed his complicated relationship with his Jewish identity in Miklós Erdély, “Lecture on the Exhibition (In Memory of the Council of Chalcedon),” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe, Museum of Modern Art, https://post.at.moma.org/ sources/32/publications/293. At least two members of Erdély’s family died in a concentration camp during World War II. Beke, “The Work of Miklós Erdély,” 7. 62 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 85.

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cognitive f ilm. Though the f ilm was completed at BBS, it was banned afterward and not seen again until after Erdély’s death. What may have made it particularly problematic was the parallel it drew between the nineteenth-century show trial and the Communist show trials of the late 1940s. This was done by casting as the chief interrogator László Rajk, whose father, also László Rajk, was sentenced to death in a show trial in 1949 during the bloody Stalinist rule of Mátyás Rákosi.63 Version thus addresses two different unprocessed historical traumas. Notably, though, the historical record is murky on which taboo caused Version to get banned. According to Kovács, the film was banned for six years after completion, because the leadership of the Jewish community in Hungary protested against it, concerned that the film’s staging of the concocted story was too powerful, despite the film’s debunking of the false accusations at the heart of its plot.64 Erdély himself was conscious of the social implications of his work, though he arguably saw all of it as equally political. He grasped art’s broad political potential: “We can only transcend something if we make ourselves aware of the mental-spiritual demands working within it,” Erdély said. He was also attuned to the game of cat and mouse with the political authorities, noting in one interview that the more difficult aspects of his films were a conscious attempt to exercise the kind of power over his viewers (including the authorities) that the authorities exercised over him.65 After Version, Erdély made two more films at BBS. Train Trip, shot in 1981, montaged footage of a train trip that Erdély took with other members of the INDIGO group into a complex temporal structure where “clips cut in succession from the end of the film and gradually spliced together are wedged into the real time of the shooting. Thus, when we reach the end of [the film] we arrive at the same time at the beginning.”66 Erdély’s last film, Spring Execution (1985), tells a kafkaesque tale of one man’s run-in with a murderous yet absurdly incompetent bureacracy. The film, like Version, touched directly on the theme of an individual’s relationship to represseive power, but hewed closely to the conventions of narrative fiction cinema. 63 András Müllner, “The Fiction of ‘Bare Life’: How Performatives Function in Hungarian Neo-Avantgarde Works of Art,” documenta12 magazines, http://exindex.hu/print. php?l=en&page=3&id=450. 64 Kovács, “The Experimental Cinema of the State,” 86; I have not seen proponents of either theory cite archival documents that could illuminate why specifically Version was banned. 65 “Zoltán Sebők: Towards a New Mysticism.” 66 Beke, “The Work of Miklós Erdély,” 38–39. To the best of my understanding, Erdély did not produce a final cut of this film before his death; what exists today at the BBS archive is a reconstruction based on his working notes and without English subtitles.

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Coda: Persian Walk Down Memory Lane One of the significant ways in which Miklós Erdély influenced the Hungarian art scene in the decade before his death, as well as the years after, was as a teacher. From 1975 to 1977, together with artist Dóra Maurer, he ran the Creativity Exercises at the GANZ-MÁVAG factory; these were followed by the Fantasy Developing Exercises (FAFEJ) at the Víziváros Cellar Club in 1977–8; and, finally, by Erdély’s leadership in the INDIGO (Interdisciplinary Thought) group of young artists in 1978–86.67 As the authors of The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century write, Erdély’s pedagogical exercises were radically different from the official academic training at the Academy of Fine Arts. They employed forms of visual expression as thought experiments, kept the participants in a state of ‘fertile uncertainty,’ and advocated the mutual interreferentiality of art and science.68

One of the participants of the INDIGO group was János Sugár, who, in 2003, recounted a formative experience with Erdély: Twenty years ago, in 1983, I was an art student at the art academy, dealing with […] the question of the art of the future. In this, two things made a particular impression on me. The first was Miklós Erdély’s Extrapolation Exercises: ‘Try to measure the stupidity of your age by imagining some kind of a future […] What you imagine will relate to future reality just as earlier imaginings related to the present that we have. This ratio is an accurate indicator of every age’s limitations.’69

Sugár inherited his teacher’s interest in experimental cinema and specif ically cognitive f ilm. He made ten f ilms at BBS, and one stands out as a testament to Erdély’s cinematic interests being further elaborated by the next generation of artist-f ilmmakers. Sugár made Persian Walk (1985) at a time when he both had been expelled from the Academy of 67 For more on this, see footnote 41 above and Dóra Hegyi, Zsuzsa László, and Franciska Zólyom, eds., Creativity Exercises: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 68 Andrási et al., The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century, 208; see also footnote 42 above. 69 János Sugár, “Attention Recycling,” in Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia 1947–2009 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 159.

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Figure 11.4. János Sugár, Persian Walk (Perzsa séta), 1985. 16 mm film still. Image courtesy János Sugár.

Fine Arts and became a member of BBS. The f ilm’s title is an allusion to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, a novel in which eighteenth-century France is described through letters supposedly written by two traveling Persian nobles. In the f ilm, the camera follows two young men as they stroll through Budapest, their conversation taken verbatim from articles on contemporary economic issues (Figure 11.4). Overlaid on top of this conversation are two voices that sing to each other observations made by imaginary viewers from the future about Budapest’s appearance. To

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do the voice work, Sugár hired students who were studying to be TV announcers. His calculation, which turned out to be correct, was that, for future Hungarian viewers of the film, the voices would be uncannily familiar as those of recognizable TV personalities. As much as any of Erdély’s films, Persian Walk is a temporal Möbius strip—a film where the past and the future are inseparable from each other, forcing any viewer to reconsider their perception of the present. In the midst of the film’s cacophony of the past and future competing with each other, the two protagonists enter an art exhibition, walk around it in silence, and leave. Though the film does not reveal this, the exhibition was Sugár’s f irst solo show titled Exhibition-Set Exhibition and created with the motto, “[T]reat the present as the past.”70 Thanks to the clout of working on a f ilm at an off icial studio, Sugár was able to get his art fabricated as props by studio employees and installed for three days in the prestigious Adolf Fényes Hall, otherwise inaccessible for his kind of abstract sculpture.71 Persian Walk was thus a worthy successor not only to cognitive film but also to the endeavor of siphoning official resources toward avant-garde art. The silent presentation of Sugár’s exhibition is a testament to the constraints within which potentially subversive unofficial art could be shown in an officially funded film. Yet its prominent inclusion and Sugár’s very ability to create the film make a clear argument that an enmeshed relationship between official and unofficial art scenes in Cold War–era socialist countries could exist for the decades when spaces like BBS made it possible. Also in keeping with the experience of the previous generation, Sugár had difficulties completing the film. Though it was shot in 1983, a final print was not made until 1985, and the first screening took place only in 1989. Nevertheless, Sugár, who today deeply laments BBS’s closure in the 1990s as a working studio, still sees BBS as an official venue that allowed people like him to “hack” the system.72 In the 1990s, he was among those who invested significant effort into creating the Balázs Béla Studio Foundation and preserving BBS as working studio that would continue to foster experimentation. Sugár sees it as a real loss that the studio did not ultimately survive the economic pressures of Hungary’s transition to capitalism and, by the early 2000s, had become only an archive of its past self.

70 Sugár, “Attention Recycling,” 159. 71 Ibid. 72 Author’s interview with János Sugár, Budapest, July 9, 2014.

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Bibliography Andrási, Gábor, Gábor Pataki, György Szücs, and András Zwickl. The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century. Budapest: Corvina, 1999. BBS Archive. “The BBS Research Archive.” Accessed April 21, 2021. http://bbsarchiv. hu/en. BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1985. Beke, László. “Hungarian Experimental Film and the Béla Balázs Studio.” In BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film, 6–9. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1985. Beke, László. “The Work of Miklós Erdély, a Chronological Sketch with Pictures up to 1985.” In Miklós Erdély, edited by Annamária Szőke, exh. cat., 5–47. Vienna, Budapest, and Kisterem: Georg Kargl Fine Arts, tranzit.hu, and Miklós Erdély Foundation, 2008. Bingham, Juliet, ed. Dóra Maurer, exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2019. Bódy, Gábor. “Introduction to the Work Schedule of Group K/3.” In Gábor Bódy 1946–1985. A Presentation of His Work, edited by László Beke and Miklós Peternák, 253. Budapest: Műcsarnok, 1987. C3 Foundation. “Hidden Parameters. Films by Miklós Erdély.” Accessed April 22, 2021. http://www.c3.hu/collection/erdely_miklos/indexen.html. Erdély, Miklós. “Lecture on the Exhibition (In Memory of the Council of Chalcedon).” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe. Museum of Modern Art. Accessed April 22, 2021. https://post.at.moma.org/sources/32/ publications/293. Erdély, Miklós. “Montázs-éhség.” In A filmről, 95–104. Budapest: Balassi, 1995. Erdély, Miklós. “Montázsgesztus és effektus.” In A filmről, 139–60. Budapest: Balassi, 1995. Erdély, Miklós. “Theses for the Marly Conference of 1980.” In Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, edited by Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, 99–101. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002. Erdély, Miklós. “Theses on the Theory of Repetition.” In Artpool: The Experimental Art Archive of East-Central Europe, edited by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay, 186. Budapest: Artpool, 2013. Erdély, Miklós. “Time-Möbius.” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe. Museum of Modern Art. Accessed April 22, 2021. https://post.at.moma. org/sources/32/publications/291. Erdély, Miklós. “What is Avant-Gardism?” Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions. Accessed April 21, 2021. http://tranzit.org/ exhibitionarchive/texts/what-is-avantgardism/.

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Forgács, Éva. Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement. Los Angeles: Doppelhouse Press, 2016. Fowkes, Maja and Reuben. “Liberty Controlled: Institutional Settings of the East European Neo-avant-garde.” Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, edited by Edit Sasvári, Sándor Hornyik and Hedvig Turai, 77–95. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018. Gurshtein, Ksenya. “Balázs Béla Studio (BBS).” Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990. Accessed April 21, 2021. https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/ balazs-bela-studio.html. Gurshtein, Ksenya. “Centaur (Kentaur).” Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990. Accessed April 21, 2021. https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/ censored-and-salvaged/centaur.html. Gurshtein, Ksenya. Personal interview with János Sugár, Budapest, July 9, 2014. Gurshtein, Ksenya. “Self-Fashion Show (Öndivatbemutató).” Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990. Accessed April 21, 2021. https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-easterneurope/city-scene-country-scene/self-fashion-show.html. Hegyi, Dóra, Zsuzsa László, and Franciska Zólyom, ed. Creativity Exercises: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020. Heidegger, Martin. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry.” In The Heidegger Reader, 117–29. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009. Kemp-Welch, Klara. Antipolitics in Central European Art. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Kovács, András Bálint. “The Experimental Cinema of the State: The Balázs Béla Studio.” In Experimental Film: The Missing Frames, edited by Benjamin Meade, 65–88. Kansas City: Avila University Press, 2010. Krasznahorkai, Kata. “Black or White: Angela Davis, Bobby Seale und Black Power in den Akten der Staatssicherheit in den 1970er Jahren.” In Aktionskunst jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs, edited by Adam Czirak, 157–82. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019. Moore, Rachel. Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia). London: Afterall Books, 2006. Müllner, András. “The Fiction of ‘Bare Life’: How Performatives Function in Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde Works of Art.” documenta12 magazine. Accessed April 22, 2021. http://exindex.hu/print.php?l=en&page=3&id=450. Simonyi, Sonja. “Artists as Amateurs: Intersections of Nonprofessional Film Production and Neo-Avant-Garde Experimentation at the Balázs Béla Stúdió in the Early 1970s.” Film History vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 114–37. Simonyi, Sonja. “New Year’s Eve (Szilveszter).” Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990. Accessed April 21,

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2021. https://www.nga.gov/features/experimental-cinema-in-eastern-europe/ balazs-bela-studio/long-distance-runner-new-years-eve.html. Simonyi, Sonja. “Second Looks: Archival Aesthetics and Historical Representation in American Postcard (1975).” Studies in Eastern European Cinema vol. 7 issue 1 (2016): 68–81. Spieker, Sven. “Texts by Conceptual Artists from Eastern Europe: Hungary.” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe. Museum of Modern Art. Accessed April 22, 2021. https://post.at.moma.org/ content_items/1059-texts-by-conceptual-artists-from-eastern-europe-hungary. Sugár, János. “Attention Recycling.” In Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia 1947–2009, 159–64. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Székely, Katalin. “The Influx of Images: Photo, Experimental Film and Video Art in the Hungarian Neo-avant-garde.” In Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, edited by Edit Sasvári, Sándor Hornyik and Hedvig Turai, 331–56. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018. Szőke, Annamária and Sándor Hornyik, eds., Kreativitási gyakorlatok, FAFEJ, INDIGO. Erdély Miklós művészetpedagógiai tevékenysége 1975–1986 (Creativity Exercises, FAFEJ, INDIGO. On Mikló Erdély’s art pedagogical activity 1975–1986). Budapest: MTA Művészettörténeti Kutatóintézet; Gondolat Kiadó, 2B Alapítvány, and Erdély Miklós Alapítvány, 2008. Szőke, Annamária. “Miklós Erdély.” Vivid [Radical] Memory: Radical Conceptual Art Revisited: A Social and Political Perspective from the East and the South. Accessed April 22, 2021. http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/php/author. php?pagina=1&id=42&id_tipologia=-1. “Zoltán Sebők: Towards a New Mysticism: In Conversation with Miklós Erdély.” post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe. Museum of Modern Art. Accessed April 22, 2021. https://post.at.moma.org/sources/32/ publications/294.

About the Author Dr. Ksenya Gurshtein is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She holds a PhD in the history of art, and her academic research focuses on postwar conceptual, experimental, and neo-avant-garde art in Eastern Europe. Her scholarship and criticism have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines, exhibition catalogs, and online.

12. Works and Words, 1979: Manifesting Eastern European Film and/as Art in Amsterdam1 Sonja Simonyi

Abstract In 1979, Works and Words, an art event held in Amsterdam, showcased the dynamic contemporary art scenes of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Its organizers sought to blur disciplinary boundaries with a thorough overview of “Central Europe’s” recent artistic output and included performances, lectures, video installations, photographs, and film screenings. This chapter explores how curatorial, organizational, and institutional decisions related to the film program negotiated experimental film’s in-betweenness, notably spatial divisions between realms of cinema and the arts. As the chapter argues, considering these issues in the context of an ambitious transnational film event staged in the West cannot be separated from the complicated contexts of state-socialist cultural production and distribution that crucially informed the implementation of Works and Words. Keywords: transnational film culture; neo-avant-garde; film and art; Cold War; film exhibition; second public sphere

1 I would like to thank Ksenya Gurshtein for her helpful feedback throughout the writing process and Nell Donkers, archivist of De Appel, for facilitating access to the archival materials featured in this text. I am also indebted to Lene Gravesen, Zsigmond Károlyi, and Aggy Smeets, who all shared invaluable insights into their experiences of the manifestation in Amsterdam. Last, I wish to thank Klara Kemp-Welch, Dóra Halasi, Miklós Peternák, and Endre Tót for offering possible answers to inconsistencies relating to the Hungarian chapter of the program.

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch12

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Introduction This chapter looks at the film component of Works and Words, an extensive “manifestation” of Eastern European contemporary art that was held in Amsterdam in 1979. The essay’s focus is on examining how experimental cinema negotiated the transnational East–West circulation of culture during the late Cold War. As Klara Kemp-Welch and others have illustrated, Eastern European experimental art was brought fairly regularly to Western audiences during the long 1970s.2 Even in the field of experimental cinema, one finds such events across Western Europe. To cite just a few examples by future Works and Words participants, Hungarian director Gábor Bódy achieved successes at the Western European festival circuit with his experimental feature-length narrative debut Amerikai anzix (American Postcard, 1975), and members of Poland’s Workshop of the Film Form (WFF) appeared at events such as the influential International Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-Heist in Belgium in 1974 and the extensive Film als Film: 1910 bis heute program, which was initially organized in Cologne in 1977.3 The Works and Words f ilm program, while representative of this transnational trend, also presents a unique example of the circulation of socialist-era film culture in the West by virtue of its ambitious size, featuring over eighty works, mostly shorts, on celluloid; its cross-regional character, including films from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia; and its institutional fluidity, involving both film cultural and contemporary arts institutions in Amsterdam. Through the inclusion of wide-ranging types of films and their diverging production and distribution contexts, it serves as a fascinating case study that allows one to sketch the key tensions and 2 Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). See also Piotr Piotrowski, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Jérôme Bazin, eds., Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989) (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016). 3 Bódy won a prize at the 1976 Mannheim Film festival. The Cologne program traveled to a number of German cities that year (Berlin, Essen, and Stuttgart), as well as to the Hayward Gallery in London in 1979 under the title Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910–1975. For a brief overview of the WFF’s international excursions during this period, see Marika Kuźmicz, “Workshop of the Film Form,” notably the section “Abroad. Edinburgh, São Paolo, Knokke-Heist, Documenta,” in Marika Kuźmicz and Łukasz Ronduda, eds., Workshop of the Film Form (Warsaw and Berlin: Arton and Sternberg Press, 2017), 181–86 . See also the exhibition catalogs Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath, eds., Film als Film: 1910 bis heute (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1977) and Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910–1975 (London: Hayward Gallery and Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979). While Mannheim was a film festival dedicated to rather conventional narrative works of nonfiction and fiction, the Cologne event, staged at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, designated an art space seeking to reflect on experiments on film away from traditional cinematic exhibition sites.

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contradictions that shaped the screening of Eastern European experimental film culture in the West. Addressing the organization and implementation of the film screenings in the Dutch capital reveals a series of ambiguities within the interrelated fields of experimental moving-image production, circulation, and exhibition. What follows serves to examine some of these strands of activity and highlight methodological blind spots for the study of Eastern European experimental cinema, dismantling the binaries through which this output has traditionally been classified. This includes nuancing the notion of official versus unofficial cultural output under socialism, revisiting the East–West dichotomy, and addressing the fusion of and division between the spheres of filmmaking and visual art. The study charts four interconnected thematic areas. The first one addresses the central organizational structure of Works and Words. In this broader curatorial framework, film simultaneously legitimized the project’s interdisciplinarity and stood out from the overall manifestation as a separate entity. This section thus addresses in general terms what this dual status of film meant for Eastern European output specifically and how the medium’s material specificity informed the exhibition of films from the region in Amsterdam. The second area concerns the fluid geocultural identity of the region, notably the challenges associated with fixing a diverse artistic output within a regional or national unit. Additionally, it critically assesses assumptions about how creative figures working in socialist contexts might have benefitted from the transnational scope of the event. The third section maps the reality of the second public sphere (a creative space embedded within, though often functioning in opposition to, official institutional structures under state socialism) onto the film event. It explores how this production reality collapsed Western conceptions of public vs. private, and freely circulating vs. censored fields of artistic activity, identifying ways in which the socialist production milieus informed their Western exhibition. Finally, the fourth area considers the dual categorization of experimental cinema within cinematic vs. visual art contexts, designated spatially via divisions between film theaters and exhibition sites, and how particular Works and Words film events negotiated this division. Any study addressing a regional Eastern European art event will inevitably fail to provide a full picture of the project, especially given the differences in (national) production contexts for individual works. Therefore, in lieu of completeness, this chapter foregrounds the abovementioned aspects of the project, in themselves fluid categories, to highlight fissures, contradictions, nuances, and ambiguity with regards to the habitual binaries attached to

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Eastern European (film) culture. It also serves as a call to increase scholarly investigations into areas of film distribution and programming beyond case studies of the mainstream film festival circuit.4 Viewing issues of exhibition not as a separate sphere, but as fully enmeshed with questions of production further expands our understanding of the ways in which moving-image experimentation was managed and made visible through transnational networks during the late Cold War period. Finally, in focusing on the film component of an art event, the methodological stakes of this chapter also connect the history of Cold War–era experimental cinema to that of art exhibitions. Estonian scholar MariaKristiina Soomre describes the latter field as particularly productive, because it engages different agents, objects, institutions and conditions, such as economic development, political reality and social formations, with the system of artistic practices. The study of exhibition history involves the study of the ‘nodes’ in this network, the interlocking elements of art, power, politics, individual positions and histories, geographies, space, architecture, etc.5

What follows is an attempt to detangle some of these nodes within the distinct context of the transnational exhibition of experimental cinema.

The Place of Film in a Transnational Interdisciplinary Art Manifestation Organized by De Appel art center, Works and Words took place between September 20 and October 1 in Amsterdam. It showcased the dynamic experimental art scene of “Central Europe,” a contentious geopolitical marker that, in this case, designated works by artists from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. From the mid-1970s onward, De Appel advisory board member Franck Gribling had been seeking to expand what he considered the excessively Western (that is, mainly U.S.-centric) focus of the organization, gradually shifting his interest toward more underexplored 4 For recent scholarship on film festivals in the context of state-socialist film culture, see, for example, Caroline Moine, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955–1990 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018). 5 Maria-Kristiina Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions: (Re)writing the History of (Re) presentations,” Kunsiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture 21, no. 3–4 (2012): 108.

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regions such as Eastern Europe.6 Yet the biggest impetus for the project came in 1978, when an Amsterdam delegation attended the international art event International Artists’ Meeting (or I AM) at Galeria Remont in Warsaw. This event focused predominantly on performance, but also held video screenings and discussions in conjunction with the performances. In addition to Polish participants, it hosted key experimental artists working across the Soviet Bloc at that time, from Hungarian performance artist Tibor Hajas to Czechoslovak conceptual artist Petr Štembera. Furthermore, beyond the sizable Dutch group, it featured invitees from other Western countries, such as American Fluxus artist Alison Knowles and the British punk band The Raincoats, who performed the first ever punk concert in Poland as part of the proceedings.7 Talks about a project in Amsterdam became more concrete with the creation of a working group in 1978, which consisted of Dutch gallery owner Harry Ruhé, curator Karel Schampers, Yugoslav performance artist Marina Abramović, and Franck Gribling, alongside De Appel staff members Josine van Droffelaar and Aggy Smeets.8 Additionally, Polish artist Piotr Olszański was brought on by the Amsterdam team to assist with organizational issues, proving to be an “excellent sounding board” for both practical and conceptual challenges the project encountered.9 Despite the signif icance of these individual connections to the region, it was I AM that launched the most substantial exchanges with art workers from Eastern Europe while fundamentally inspiring the event in the Netherlands. The Polish experience did not merely connect Dutch participants to the Eastern European art scenes. It also illustrated disciplinary multiplicity flourishing across the Soviet Bloc during this period. With the Amsterdam manifestation, the organizers aimed to build on these findings, hoping, as they wrote in one description of Works and Words, to inform “through presentation and documentation its public 6 Marga van Mechelen, De Appel: Performances, Installaties, Video, Projecten 1975–1983 (Amsterdam: De Appel, 2006), 243. 7 See Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, 358. For more on the relationship between Works and Words and the Polish event, see van Mechelen, De Appel, 244–73. 8 Abramović was Amsterdam-based and closely associated with De Appel at the time, serving in its advisory board. She participated in initial discussions regarding the planned manifestation. For an excerpt of an audio recording of such a group conversation that included the Yugoslav artist, see De Appel Archive’s web page dedicated to the manifestation, “Works and Words: FOOTNOTES #3,” accessed January 2021, http://deappel.nl/en/events/footnotes-3. In a recent exchange, Aggy Smeets emphasized that, while Abramović was open to the idea of participating in the project, she had “no active role in the birth of Works and Words.” Aggy Smeets, email correspondence with the author, December 7, 2020. 9 Email correspondence between Smeets and the author.

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of art developments in which artists express themselves in performance, video, installation, and film,” adding that Works and Words gave “special attention […] to the interrelation of different disciplines.”10 Beyond its own exhibition space, then located at the Brouwersgracht 196, De Appel mobilized an impressive number of venues across Amsterdam for the project. A former jail (Huis van Bewaring) hosted performances by local artists and those from socialist states who were allowed to travel to Amsterdam for the duration of the event. Fundatie Kunsthuis mounted an exhibition that included conceptual photographs from Czechoslovakia. This section served to counteract the marked absence of Czech and Slovak participants, who planned to perform as part of the manifestation, but did not receive travel documents from the Czechoslovak state authorities to make the trip to the Netherlands.11 The city’s commercial Galerie A, run by Harry Ruhé, also participated in the manifestation, presenting drawings by Hungarian neo-avant-garde artist Endre Tót. Additional events included various discussions and debates, as well as interventions and performances in public space. Finally, there was an ambitious film program staged predominantly at the Stedelijk Museum and the Nederlands Filmmuseum. The program consisted of over eighty films of varying lengths from Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, as well as a more modest selection of six films from Czechoslovakia (Figure 12.1). From the late 1960s onward, filmic experimentation increased as a significant mode of creative expression in the region, though such activities faced waves of ideological thaws and freezes, which uniquely shaped issues of both production and distribution. The extensive film component was considered from the start a foundational aspect of the inter- and cross-disciplinary curatorial vision of Works and Words. Preparatory conversations among members of the working group, for instance, underscored early on the output of the Łódź-based WFF as being of particular interest to the future Amsterdam event.12 Rather than being an afterthought, the works on celluloid anchored essential curatorial ideas surrounding the manifestation, including its interdisciplinary nature and the multidisciplinary practice of numerous participating artists. From Croatian conceptualist Mladen Stilinović to Hungarian Miklós Erdély, the moving image component 10 Marked-up document on De Appel stationary, page two of “schets concept brief September project,” June 4, 1979, Works and Words collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam. 11 van Mechelen, De Appel, 248–50. 12 See remarks made by Aggy Smeets during a preparatory meeting, “Achtergrond informatie bijeenkomst Oost-Europa,” September 9, 1978, Works and Words research – workgroup minutes folder, Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam.

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Figure 12.1. “Film List” reproduced from the Works and Words exhibition catalog (De Appel: Amsterdam, 1980), p 67. 2018 facsimile of the original. Image courtesy of De Appel, Amsterdam.

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underlined the fluidity of experimental artistic output within the oeuvre of specific artists, as well as across the region as a whole. Highlighting this fluidity was particularly important to artists working in socialist contexts where creative categories were rather strictly regulated and surveilled across different fields of culture. The manifestation as a whole was spread across the Dutch capital to evoke what organizers labeled a “labyrinth structure.”13 Within this framework, the film program offers a particularly rich case study. On the one hand, it illustrates the broader trend of dissolving disciplinary and institutional boundaries across experimental art and curatorial projects, as seen internationally during the decade. Integrating film within these was a foremost way to break down strict divisions between cinema and other forms of creative expression. On the other hand, the film section also underscored issues of circulation and exhibition at stake in moving-image-based experimentation specifically from Eastern Europe during the late socialist period. Despite film crucially foregrounding intermediality as the artistic-curatorial essence of the manifestation, the final film program stood somewhat apart from the rest of the events attached to Works and Words in terms of both the preparation and the presentation of the screenings. The diverging technical requirements of the selected films is significant in this regard. Several films in the program were 8 mm and 16 mm prints. Yet a number of Polish and Hungarian works were not. These used 35 mm film stock instead, provided by the WFF and the Budapest-based Balázs Béla Studio (BBS), respectively. This technical specificity for experimental output importantly detaches the 35 mm format from the realm of professional, mainstream filmmaking, a widespread categorization of the postwar period, which, by extension, posits 8 mm and 16 mm film as inherently countercultural. This is illustrated by Patti Gaal-Holmes’s study on the London Film-Makers Co-op, where, as she notes, members took on “an antiHollywood stance to filmmaking, identified by the very nature of working with small (or no) budgets and the use of 16 mm or 8 mm formats.”14 This status of the liberated small-gauge film opposing the high-end professional format denoting the mainstream industry existed in Eastern Europe as well, as the thriving Yugoslav amateur-experimental scene, and the much more 13 See Franck Gribling’s introduction to the exhibition catalog. Josine van Droffelaar and Piotr Olszański, eds. Works and Words: International Art Manifestation Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Mekka and De Appel, 1980), 67. Facsimile of the original (Amsterdam: Roma and De Appel, 2018). 14 Patti Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2.

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marginalized but nonetheless significant Czechoslovak cases illustrate. Yet at the WFF and the BBS, while the abstraction, fragmentation, and destabilization of the moving image occurred away from the mainstream cinema apparatus, and at times unequivocally opposed the state-socialist ideological apparatus as well, these experimental gestures unfolded within institutional spaces imbricated with the professional industry. In this regard, they were, if not fully embraced, then at least structurally supported by the state. This range of film formats may have informed the institutional spread of the Works and Words film event across different institutions in Amsterdam. Already during the earliest conversations, De Appel’s working group highlighted various logistical challenges for organizing film screenings, notably in relation to the selection of WFF films.15 Alongside the Filmmuseum, the collaboration with the Stedelijk possibly surfaced as a solution to the issue of projecting 35 mm, a format these sites were equipped to show, alongside 8 mm or 16 mm prints. The latter would have been easier to arrange in a gallery-type, alternative setting with mobile projectors that were still popular and widespread among institutions during the late 1970s. The expansion of the film project to the Stedelijk thus appears at least partially connected to the ways in which Polish and Hungarian experimental filmmakers appropriated the institutional structures of their respective professional industries, notably the film education system in Poland, and a formal pathway to professionalization in Hungary. It is a connection that invites the further investigation of the entwined nature of Western European sites of film exhibition with the particular production frameworks that experimental films from Eastern Europe navigated domestically. Importantly, the organization of the film event was carried out not by De Appel’s curatorial team overseeing other segments of the manifestation, but by Peter Rubin, a United States–born, Amsterdam–based alternative film programmer and all-around networker who ran an experimental film platform called Holland Experimental Film (HEF) in the city. Rubin’s contribution to the manifestation may have been implemented for a number of reasons. For one, the ambitious investigation of many strands of artistic activity across different socialist countries proved a challenge for a relatively small Dutch arts organization. The outsourcing of the film component to Rubin may have been a practical necessity. Second, the fact that the arts organization grappled with budgetary constraints in staging a project as complex as Works and Words may have prompted the institutional alliance with Holland Experimental 15 See note 12.

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Film. Some archival materials suggest that a number of Eastern European invitees were paid to come to Amsterdam via funds offered by HEF (via rather convoluted schemes of paid advances and reimbursements), even though these artists ended up staging performances and participated in other, non-film-related events during the manifestation, as well.16 The collaboration with HEF thus proved a way to merge funds for the event across disciplinary boundaries. Along with these administrative arrangements, and although Rubin was nominally in charge of the film component, De Appel curator Josine van Droffelaar was assigned to work on the film selections alongside him, confirming that the disciplinary fluidity of the curatorial approach also informed the film program.17 Finally, as Rubin’s former wife Lene Gravesen notes, he “was just always around at De Appel,” and his informal yet active presence within the art center’s inner circle might have induced the professional opportunity to develop the extensive film program.18 The films selected for Works and Words were ultimately shown simultaneously as part of the third edition of HEF’s annual experimental film festival entitled Experiment 79. Alongside the screenings of films from Eastern Europe, this event featured a Stan Brakhage retrospective (with Brakhage present), a presentation of West German experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes’s works, and a screening of the 1979 film Emily by Malcolm Le Grice from Great Britain, who was also in attendance. The following sections focus on the ways in which the different types of cinematic experimentation Works and Words brought together played out across the shifting institutional contexts of the film event.

Challenging Eastern Europe as a Regional Designation The production of Works and Words activated various questions of how to conceptualize transnational connection and influence. The first concerned 16 In a letter dated June 8, 1979, Rubin explained to Erdély that HEF would cover round-trip second-class train fare, as well as living and accommodation expenses. A later letter by Smeets, dated February 1, 1980, directed Erdély to transfer one hundred fl. he still “owed” to fellow Hungarian artist Tibor Hajas as a prepayment for the latter’s performance in Amsterdam in March of 1980. “Works and Words: Correspondence: Miklós Erdély (Hu),” folder, Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam. 17 See note titled “Enkele opmerkingen over September project,” March 8 [presumably 1979], Works and Words research ‒ Workgroup minutes folder, Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam. 18 Gravesen closely assisted Rubin with organizational activities throughout the event. She notably recalls being among the volunteers who cooked meals for the participating artists at De Appel site. Lene Gravesen, in conversation with the author, October 21, 2019, Amsterdam.

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a critical engagement with the regional and national contexts of the project, while the second addressed how the film program’s transnational scope affected its Eastern European participants. The extensive collaboration between the manifestation’s curators and local art workers across the socialist sphere is perhaps its most striking organizational attribute. During the preparatory stage in 1978–79, De Appel curators received extensive feedback from Tomáš Štrauss, Petr Štembera, and Jaroslav Anděl in Czechoslovakia; László Beke and Lóránd Hegyi in Hungary; Ješa Denegri and Marijan Susovski in Yugoslavia; and Józef Robakowski, Andrzej Kostołowski, and Zofia Kulik in Poland. The feedback from these artists, art historians, and curators was an essential tool for the organizers to not just obtain information, but to prevent the kind of backlash that befell the 1977 Venice Biennale, which was much critiqued by artists across the socialist bloc for presenting dissent culture as the primary framework for understanding artistic creation under Communism. This criticism partially related to the label's reductive, quasi exotic view of experimental art-making under socialism.19 Treading lightly in their role as the uninformed Westerners, the Dutch curators engaged in extensive exchanges with their collaborators across the region, open to receiving both information and criticism. One important resulting development was dropping the term “Eastern Europe project” (Oost-Europa project) in reference to the manifestation and instead using “Central Europe” as the geographic designation when discussing the region. Yugoslav critic Ješa Denegri and artist Goran Đorđević were the instigators of this change, decrying the “ghettoizing” and “exoticizing” impulses of an art event on “Eastern European” artists in the West, which, in their view, collapsed each country’s historical, sociocultural, and even political differences. (Yugoslavia’s break with Soviet-style Communism was an especially sensitive issue for the artists working in that country.) Denegri insisted successfully

19 Zsuzsa László, “Works and Words: The Invention and Renunciation of the Concept of East European Art,” Institute of the Present, 2018, https://institutulprezentului.ro/en/2018/11/15/ works-and-words-the-invention-and-renunciation-of-the-concept-of-east-european-art/. From a contemporary film and art historical perspective, the curatorial decision to focus on artists who worked within the socialist sphere, instead of on those who emigrated to the West, poses one of the more unique aspects of the manifestation in contrast to events such as the aforementioned Biennial. Yet Aggy Smeets maintains that this choice was always secondary to artistic (or even practical) considerations. Smeets recalls being confronted with the political ramifications of real existing socialism during research trips or when interacting with the embassy staff of socialist countries in the Netherlands. Yet she underlines that the prime focus of the manifestation was to highlight the artists for their unique artistic practices, rather than their position as Eastern Europeans living under socialism. Smeets, email correspondence with the author.

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that structuring the exposure of artists from the region around their “Eastern Europeanness” only served to reinforce a simplistic East–West dichotomy.20 Importantly, Rubin forcefully echoed these sentiments in his implementation of the film program. In a draft of the introductory text, likely presented at the launch of the film program, he stated: “I must make very clear that filmmakers from the above-named countries do not consider themselves ‘Eastern European’ filmmakers,” a term that, in his view, stripped them “of their true identities (either as individuals or as artists/filmmakers from a nationally rich cultural tradition).”21 Reacting to the criticism of the project’s “ghettoizing” impulse, the film program thus organized screenings around national categories. While effectively highlighting national differences, this categorization in turn erased the peculiarities of decentralized film cultural scenes such as those of Yugoslavia, while similarly obscuring the wide range of individual artistic practices by artists and filmmakers whose work could also have been grouped thematically across national borders. Regardless of the limitations of national labeling, the fact that Rubin’s text referenced the film cultures of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and even Albania and Bulgaria, beyond the better known and better developed Yugoslav, Polish, and Hungarian contexts, shows a rare willingness on the part of a Westerner to engage as fully as possible with the creative output of socialist states. Although Rubin tried to highlight all these national scenes, which were otherwise blind spots in the framework of international film programming, he must have ultimately found it unattainable to adequately represent films from the most politically oppressive states. But while the final program focused mostly on the “well developed avant-garde film movements” of Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, Rubin’s writing emphasized the issues experimental filmmakers faced in other countries as well, highlighting, among other things, “money problems and general social problems” standing in the way of the full blossoming of their alternative scenes.

20 Ibid. Defining the region references a complex, ongoing debate regarding not just the political but also the intellectual history of “Eastern Europe,” which cannot be adequately detailed in this chapter, but has been discussed elsewhere in relation to experimental cinema. See, for example, Gurshtein and Simonyi, “Introduction: Experimental Cinema in State Socialist Eastern Europe,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 2–11. 21 “Introduction by Peter Rubin,” on HEF stationery, n.d., Holland Experimental Film folder, Peter Rubin Collection, EYE Filmmuseum Archive, Amsterdam. Despite Rubin’s awareness of such creative diversity across the region, deploying national categories was applied to deconstruct the artificial unity of the Socialist bloc, a homogenizing gesture Rubin highlighted throughout his text.

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Rubin’s thoughtful general overview accompanied detailed descriptions of the situation in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, providing both an analysis of the production contexts, for instance the rich possibilities available to filmmakers within the amateur scene in Yugoslavia, as well as their key aesthetic concerns, for instance outlining relationships between the historical Polish avant-garde, the WFF, and the “(neo) (post) constructivist” movement. Rubin’s assessment appears to be a synthesis of ample material the filmmakers themselves provided. The folder with Rubin’s typed-up notes, for example, contains a rich resource of English-language declarative notes by artists, with the Polish contingent represented most extensively with texts by Robakowski, Ryszard Waśko, and Wojciech Bruszewski. Beyond these written traces, Rubin learned firsthand about the film cultures of each country through several research trips he undertook to the region in the spring of 1979, visiting, according to one research plan, the Yugoslav cities of Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade in April and Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary in June of 1979, mere months ahead of the Amsterdam screenings later that fall.22 Rubin’s trips across the region put his film-related research efforts on par with De Appel staff’s, who organized similar earlier excursions, confirming once more that the manifestation’s film component was a crucial piece of the interdisciplinary puzzle to be displayed at the Amsterdam event. While the question of how Works and Words negotiated a regional identity for Eastern Europe within a Western context designates one key area of concern for this transnational event, one should also consider its impact on the Eastern European participants, because its central aim was to facilitate creative exchanges between artistic spheres in the East and West.23 For the participants in the film program, interaction with their Western counterparts was firmly embedded in the activities of Experiment 79, whose international scope far exceeded the local Dutch context. The Filmmaker’s Forum or Film Forum, was one official encounter that was to serve as a platform of exchange. One undated version of the program typed on Holland Experimental Film letterhead describes the forum as a place where “members of the festival will meet to discuss various aspects of avant-garde cinema within the general context of contemporary art 22 Marked-up, typed document on HEF letterhead “Plans for an exhibition of Eastern European Film and Video,” January 28, 1979, “Works and Words film program” folder, Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam. 23 For Works and Words as a whole, the “encounter” was staged between Dutch and Eastern European artists, ultimately without engendering much effective exchange. van Mechelen, De Appel, 253–5.

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movements.”24 Planned for September 21 at the Stedelijk Museum, this public event featured filmmakers from across the political divide. The off icial program for the manifestation listed Józef Robakowski, Gábor Bódy, Tomislav Gotovac, Tomasz Konart, and Andrzej Paruzel, alongside established Western filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Malcolm Le Grice as its speakers, although photographs of the actual panel appear to show a different set of participants. While Le Grice and key members of the Eastern European group, notably Robakowski and Gotovac, were indeed present at the event, so were a number of additional female participants (among them Hungarian animation artist Ágnes Háy), who were a welcome addition to the original, male-dominated list. It appears tempting to frame this panel primarily through the lens of subjects from socialist countries finally gaining legitimization through this face-to-face public meeting with their lauded Western counterparts. Instead, the influential exchanges between individual artists on either side of the ideological divide appear to have occurred away from the official stage. A meeting between Rubin invitee Stan Brakhage and East German experimental filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher nicely illustrates this. While the latter was not featured on the official program, he was present in Amsterdam at the time. Böttcher’s wonderfully vivid recollection of the meeting, which occurred in a hotel room, describes Brakhage “bouncing on his bed like on a trampoline while shouting ‘Great! Great! You must make a film about them!’” when Böttcher showed Brakhage his signature overpainted postcards.25 It is an exciting thought that Böttcher’s trilogy of experimental films, discussed by Seth Howes elsewhere in this volume, may have been a direct outcome of this eccentric private exchange. Yet this serendipitous meeting also confirms that numerous informal interactions and exchanges, often rather animated and creatively engaging, intersected at any given international art event with officially orchestrated ones, frequently superseding the latter in significance. Alongside such meetings between like-minded artists across the ideological divide, Józef Robakowski’s recollections of Experiment 79 also belie assumptions about the event as a balanced encounter between East and West. In an interview from 2008, the Polish filmmaker recalled Works and Words as the space where BBS filmmakers and WFF filmmakers exchanged 24 Undated program outline “EXPERIMENT 79 Program—Page Two” on HEF stationery, Works and Words film program folder, Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam. 25 Böttcher cited in Franziska Nössig, “DEFA’s ‘Home-Made’ Experiment: Traces of GDR Reality and International Avant-Garde Film in Jürgen Böttcher’s Transformations (1981),” German Division as Shared Experience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday, ed. Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski, and Katrin Schreiter (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 163.

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ideas and engaged in heated debates.26 As he describes, the Polish and Hungarian participants were “arguing very hard and shouted [at] each other” about wide-ranging formal questions related to the fact that, according to Robakowski, the WFF operated in a much more innovative, cross-disciplinary, and expanded cinema paradigm than what he referred to as the more “traditional” BBS filmmakers. The exactness of these claims notwithstanding, this interaction launched a close collaboration between the two groups and Bódy and Robakowski specifically, which also developed via a shared move toward the video format in the 1980s. What appears significant for the conversation at hand is that, for the Polish director, sharing insights and experiences with colleagues working in similar sociopolitical and institutional environments seems to have been the most productive exchange of the Amsterdam event.27 Robakowski’s omission of any mentions of Western European filmmakers at the very least confirms that not all film cultural conversations were eagerly West-facing.

Situating the Second Public Sphere within the Amsterdam Event Rubin’s aforementioned notes keenly observed how experimental filmmaking transgressed the official–unofficial dichotomy in the region. Citing the situation in Czechoslovakia specifically, though without explicitly mentioning names, he noted that even the most progressive artists could at once make “state-sponsored films,” at least if their work was “‘understandable’ enough by the State” (the quotes within his own text presumably alluding to the fluidity of rules by which the authorities assessed a work’s accessibility), while also working on “privately supported projects.” The Works and Words film program bridged this division, showcasing films produced under vastly different conditions, from the quasi-professional to the essentially private, from films that circulated with some regularity at film and art events across 26 Józef Robakowski, “I Reject Temporality: an Interview with Józef Robakowski,” interviewed by Kata Krasznahorkai, fair ‒ Zeitung für Kunst und Ästhetik, April 2009, http://robakowski.eu/ tx24_ang.html. 27 Hungarian artist Zsigmond Károlyi, who attended Works and Words with a video performance, similarly recalls how, rather than meeting with Dutch artists, he excitedly spent his time in the Netherlands with Hungarian dissidents. These included visual artist Orsolya Drozdik, who briefly lived in Amsterdam in 1979, and Géza Perneczky, a Cologne-based Hungarian artist, curator, and mediator between international and Eastern European art scenes, who also attended Works and Words. Zsigmond Károlyi, telephone interview with the author, January 8, 2021.

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Western Europe (for instance, Bódy’s aforementioned American Postcard and several WFF films) alongside those that had rarely been shown in public (notably, the Czechoslovak films). These works in their totality drew up the contours of the second public sphere, and what follows addresses how these distinctive scenes informed the planning and implementation of the film program. As key sites of cultural diplomacy, Western European film festivals had, during the late Cold War, become the central platforms through which to showcase film cultural output of socialist nations on the other side of the ideological divide.28 In the case of Hungary, the relationship between the local film administration and HEF’s status as a “film festival” seems particularly relevant to explore. During the 1960s, state officials instrumentalized lyrical experiments on film by young Hungarian filmmakers that largely followed the formal explorations of European new waves.29 While these films were often produced at the Balázs Béla Studio, discussed extensively elsewhere in this book, by the 1970s, experimental films made at the BBS were rarely utilized for this purpose on account of the controversial thematic and formal elements they deployed, but also given the clear distancing of the studio’s output away from the film industry as a whole.30 Nonetheless, even during this period of relative alienation, the distribution of BBS works abroad remained attached to formal state channels, that is Hungarofilm, the country’s official organization charged with film distribution.31 Although difficult to know with certainty given the current limited information at hand, it is possible that HEF’s position as a “film festival” may have aided the collaboration with Hungarofilm, which provided most of the films for the Hungarian selection. Limited archival material concerning this process includes a typed-up list of Hungarian films organized into the categories “Hungarofilm selection,” “Other films selected,” “Hungarofilms [sic] not

28 For a discussion of the Hungarian context, see Balázs Varga, “Filmirányítás, gyártástörténet és politika Magyarországon 1957–63” (PhD diss., ELTE Budapest, 2008) 80–90. 29 István Szabó obtaining a prize in 1963 at Oberhausen for his early short Koncert is a prime example. 30 For more on this institutional shift and film distribution at the BBS in the 1970s, see the forthcoming publication Sonja Simonyi, “From the Antechamber to the International Stage: Early-Career Directors from Hungary at the Mannheim Film Festival in the Late 1970s,” in Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations, ed. Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2022), 99—116. 31 For a brief history of Hungarof ilm, see Lia Somogyi, “Egy f ilmkereskedelmi vállalat: a Hungarofilm története (1956–2001),” Filmkultúra 48 (2005), http://www.filmkultura.hu/regi/2005/ articles/essays/hungarofilm.hu.html.

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selected,” and “Also.”32 The ultimate selection for Amsterdam included most films proposed by this official state distribution channel, including works by Dóra Maurer, Gábor Bódy, Miklós Erdély, Tibor Hajas, and Zoltán Jeney, all working in the framework of the BBS. In addition to illustrating the seemingly straightforward collaboration between HEF and an official film distribution channel for the project, Rubin’s annotation to this short list hints at more hidden layers of filmic activity. The phrase “(political problems?)” appears typed alongside visual artist Zsigmond Károlyi’s title Mi, környezet in the “not selected” section. That this title does not correspond to anything within Károlyi’s filmography, an artist who in fact traveled to Amsterdam with a video performance, makes the true significance of this note frustratingly unclear.33 Regardless, this note does suggest Rubin’s awareness of potential ideological aspects driving Hungarofilm’s decisions. It is useful to contrast the Hungarian case with the Czechoslovak one, arguably the most repressive state Works and Words organizers dealt with in securing the program. The harsh realities of the “normalization” period in the country formed the political backdrop to the limited circulation of experimental works and the small number of Czechoslovak films included in the ultimate selection. The films from Czechoslovakia clearly pointed to experimentation occurring within a concealed, private, and amateur filmmaking realm that lacked the institutional opportunities several other socialist nations, notably Hungary and Poland, provided. Czechoslovak films were not explicitly named on most of Rubin’s preliminary lists for the event, some compiled as late as the summer of 1979. This further suggests that the lack of a distribution framework and harsh ideological policing by the state created an informal, covert system through which the prints reached Amsterdam. Lene Gravesen, who accompanied Rubin on his travels, confirms that they successfully smuggled several Czech films out of the country, along with a number of photographs to be exhibited at the Fundatie Kunsthuis location of Works and Words.34 The situation of Slovak sculptor Vladmir Havrilla additionally illustrates the extent to which the challenging Czechoslovak reality activated alternative 32 Marked-up film list on HEF stationery “Hungarofilm Selection – K 10 D 1979,” n.d., Works and Words film program folder, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam. 33 Media historian Miklós Peternák suggests that Rubin may have erroneously listed either Péter Dobai’s Együtthatók – szobaszínház (1975) or Életformák – játszma (1975), made by Gábor Dobos, and Péter Donáth. Both prints had “difficult” trajectories facing censorship and survive only as incomplete copies. Miklós Peternák, email correspondence with author, January 8, 2021. 34 Gravesen, email correspondence with the author, 7 January, 2021.

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curatorial strategies. Havrilla was an architectural designer who made films in his spare time. Rubin learned of his Super 8 work via De Appel curator Aggy Smeets, who was in turn informed of their existence by Hungarian curator László Beke, as well as Slovak theorist Tomáš Štrauss. This information flow also demonstrates the way local networks were drawn into the curatorial process, providing access to concealed, private activities that stand in sharp contrast with “official” experimental film scenes Rubin encountered in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Correspondence between Havrilla and the Dutch organizers reveals that the Slovak artist was not only unable to attend the manifestation, he was also unable to make suitable copies of his film prints for the screenings, either in Prague or Budapest.35 Instead, he sent the originals to Rubin, who made screening copies in Amsterdam before returning the originals to the artist, a back-and-forth process that placed the circulation of these films directly into the hands of the Dutch organizing team.

Sites of Film Activity: Situating Eastern European Experiments between Film and Art Experimental film exhibition continually operates across the dual spheres of art and cinema. It is a dichotomy that finds its spatial expression via the black box–white cube paradigm, opposing the darkened movie theater with the starkly lit gallery space, each of these sites drawing on different sets of infrastructural and institutional parameters for their respective creative fields.36 In the framework of Works and Words, it appears significant to consider how the film program operated simultaneously within established film and art spaces in Amsterdam, namely the Dutch Filmmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum. Instead of considering the way the Dutch city’s local cultural scene informed this organizational duality, I aim to examine it via the lens of the production and exhibition frameworks these films faced in their home countries. Through this reading, the material implementation of the film screenings reifies both visible and invisible structures of Eastern European artistic production under socialism. Within Rubin’s film series, a segment entitled “visual arts program”— staged at the Stedelijk—most usefully illustrates the coalescing of these 35 “Works and Words: FOOTNOTES #3.” 36 For a thorough examination of experimental film in postwar art contexts, focused on Western case studies, see Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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diverging elements.37 The program was conceived to present, as one description explained, “a number of film works […] created by artists whose primary art form is not film.”38 The foregrounding of a few select films that defied the boundaries between moving images and other forms of artistic expression might appear rather redundant within a broader curatorial project that, as a whole, sought to highlight the fluidity of such interactions. Additionally, the film program overall featured numerous artists, from Stilinović and Đorđević in Yugoslavia to Erdély and Maurer in Hungary, to name a few, whose film works constituted just one aspect of complex oeuvres concerned in equal measure with drawing, painting, and performance pieces, yet whose films were shown in segments within the series that were categorized according to national categories, rather than ones based on their cross-disciplinary status. Given this framing, the “visual arts program” may not have merely provided insights to intermedial formal explorations. Instead, it appeared as a way to diffuse, or potentially even conceal, the contentious political status of certain films that were part of the program. That Hungarian neo-avant-garde artist Endre Tót’s five-minute film I am Glad if I Can Take One Step (Örülök, ha egyet léphetek) appeared in this program alongside the Czechoslovak short Ceremony, a recording of a happening staged by Milan Knížák, appears to confirm this.39 Tót remembers making the work at the BBS in 1972-73 as part of I am glad if… (Örülök, ha…), a 16mm compilation film in which the artist performed a series of actions alongside provocative titles that proclaimed his ironic "joy" at executing each action, including taking a single step. As Klara Kemp-Welch notes, this simple yet subversive act (which also exists as 37 While this section highlights the Stedelijk event, it should be noted that Vladimir Havrilla’s previously discussed films were ultimately screened at the Huis van Bewaring location that was predominantly dedicated to performances, rather than the formal f ilm venues of the Filmmuseum or the Stedelijk. This discrepancy raises further questions about the effects local production contexts (in Havrilla’s case homemade Super 8 films) had on the exhibition framework in Amsterdam. 38 EXPERIMENT 79 program, 3, Works and Words f ilm program folder, Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam. 39 Knížák was an influential artist of the Prague underground scene throughout the 1960s, known primarily for his Happenings, and a member of the international Fluxus art movement during this time. During the period of normalization throughout the following decade, he was embroiled in repeated confrontations with the state that at times led to his arrest and even imprisonment, causing him to largely withdraw to the countryside. Ceremony, at times credited as Stone Ceremony, was directed by Dobroslav Zborník, a filmmaker who worked closely with marginalized experimental artists such as Knížák throughout the 1970s. For a short description of the film in English, see the entry of the video archive of the Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts, accessed July 2020, http://vvp.avu.cz/en/video-archive/2025/?table=art videoarchiv.

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a photographic work) "was one step too far for the Hungarian authorities": Tót indeed recalls a furious party official instigating a banning, although not outright confiscation, of the film after it premiered internally at the BBS. 40 It was a film that was notably missing from the earlier discussed preparatory list Rubin compiled following his 1979 visit to the Hungarian capital. This contentious status of the work may explain why it was missing from Rubin's preparatory notes following his visit to Budapest, but it does not elucidate how it came to be featured on the Amsterdam program as a 5-minute, 16mm film dated 1975. 41 Reflecting on their travel experiences, Gravesen emphatically contrasts their trip to Budapest with the oppressive atmosphere they experienced in Prague, with the former offering a far more dynamic, open, and “colorful” environment than the Czechoslovak capital. However, there were apparent limits to this openness: she and Rubin nonetheless exited Hungary with a number of film prints hidden in their luggage.42 Gravesen was unable to confirm if Tót’s film was among the prints that had secretly left the country. But her personal recollection, alongside Tót's experiences of censorship, does bring into relief how Hungarian experimental film activity simultaneously, and rather contradictorily, circulated across both overt and hidden spheres of artistic creation. While future research will hopefully shed light on the exact circumstances that allowed for I Am Glad if I Can Take One Step to be screened in the Netherlands, its unexpected appearance in the program already highlights the intricately entwined political, institutional, transnational, and disciplinary stakes and ambiguities of the Works and Words film project, straddling visibility and invisibility for works that pushed the limits of both acceptable film culture and the official artistic sphere. 40 Endre Tót, email correspondence with the author, February 7, 2022. Klara Kemp-Welch, “Affirmation and Irony in Endre Tót’s Actions of the 1970s,” in Art History & Criticism, 3; Liniara Dovydaityte, ed., Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe (Kaunas and Lithuania: Vytautas Magnus University, 2007), 138, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mariecuriesocanth/research_files/mik_3.pdf. 41 Tót's short filmography features different works thematically related to I am Glad if I Can Take a Step, complicating the tracing of each individual project, including the similarly titled One Step (1972), which some scholars, notably Kemp-Welch, have described as the artist's iconic banned BBS film. Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 154. It also features a confounding 8 mm version of I am Glad if I Can Take One Step from 1975, for which none other than Piotr Olszański, key collaborator of Works and Words, appears as the cinematographer. Tót was unable to recall the specifics of the Amsterdam screening and could not situate the 8 mm print within his oeuvre. Tót, email correspondence. For the cited filmography, see the exhibition catalogue Endre Tót: Very Special Joys (Debrecen: MODEM, 2011), 382. 42 Gravesen, interview. Károlyi distinctly remembers seeing Tót’s film in Amsterdam. Reflecting on its possible provenance, he notes that, given the pared-down gesture that the piece displays, it may have have been reshot abroad, pointing to questions of repetition and reproducibility central to Tót's artistic practice. Károlyi, telephone interview.

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In Conclusion: The Transnational Afterlives of Experiment 79 Although several main press outlets took note of the film program’s unique offerings, Marga van Mechelen describes the reaction of Dutch audiences to parts of the Works and Words film screenings, notably the Hungarian program, as rather muted. 43 Arguably, the effects of the program and its afterlife should be measured by means other than the appreciation of live audiences in the Netherlands for these rarely seen Eastern European productions. In subsequent years, for example, Peter Rubin enthusiastically deployed his extensive international network to further circulate the films shown in Amsterdam. As early as November 1979, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris showcased sections of Rubin’s program. The screenings there included both the aforementioned Czechoslovak films and Endre Tót’s short filmed performance; these were scheduled alongside sections dedicated to individual artists: one Polish program highlighted Ryszard Waśko’s works on film, and a two-day program was dedicated to Tomislav Gotovac’s 8 mm films. 44 Expanding the effects of this screening beyond the confines of the cinema space, Rubin also contributed to a 1980 special “dossier” of the French f ilm journal CinémAction with a short piece on Eastern Europe, using his experiences in organizing the Works and Words program to sketch the region’s experimental output for a French audience.45 The language Rubin used in Experiment 79 texts was not entirely free of a quasi-exoticizing tone used to express the political realities under which the experimental films were produced. This included describing the uniqueness of the program in relation to its “never before screened” status (connected to the oppressive realities of the state-socialist context).46 Similarly, the Hungarian selection was described as cinema that has, with few exceptions such as Bódy, “never before received official Hungarian sanctioning for exhibition.” While, in the Hungarian case, distribution of BBS films indeed relied on challenging, ever-shifting negotiations, Rubin’s assessment conveniently oversimplified the reality of how the second public sphere managed to 43 van Mechelen, De Appel, 248. 44 See the program brochure Centre Pompidou, Programmation cinéma 1979 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979). This French program appears to have been followed by screenings across Germany (Frankfurt, Munich, Oberhausen, Duisburg, and Hanover) in early 1980. 45 Peter Rubin, “Une planète à découvrir,” Special Dossier, Cinémas d’avant-garde (expérimental et militant), ed. Guy Hennebelle and Raphaël Bassan, CinémAction, no. 10–11 (Spring/Summer 1980), 209–218. 46 Typed notes “Hungary X79/PR5-3,” Works and Words film program folder, Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam.

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co-opt official systems of film exhibition across the socialist countries and beyond—a reality Rubin must have encountered while organizing Works and Words. Despite such occasional simplifications, perhaps inevitable in a sketch of a regional film culture, it appears rather difficult to overstate Rubin’s dedication to creating connections in the sphere of experimental filmmaking across geopolitical divides, and to doing so in an in-depth and nuanced fashion, staging programs that negotiated the socialist second public sphere alongside those that drew on considerably more invisible, private creative domains. That Rubin prepared a series of international avant-garde films to be screened in Hungary in 1980 “as no avant-garde films from outside of Hungary have ever been screened inside the country” illustrates that his activities, to the modest extent that this was possible, sought to expand networks of experimental cinema in multidirectional ways. Rooted in valuing genuine creative exchange, his activities, which started with the ambitious staging of the film component of the Works and Words project, provide an important connection between East and West during a period marked by fundamental differences, but not by outright isolation. 47

Bibliography Centre Pompidou, Programmation cinéma 1979. Program brochure. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979. De Appel Archive. “Works and Words: FOOTNOTES #3.” De Appel, Amsterdam. Accessed January 2021. http://deappel.nl/en/events/footnotes-3. Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910–1975. London: Hayward Gallery and Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979. Exhibition catalog. Gaal-Holmes, Patti. A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Gurshtein, Ksenya and Sonja Simonyi. “Introduction: Experimental Cinema in State Socialist Eastern Europe.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 2–11. Hein, Birgit and Wulf Herzogenrath, eds. Film als Film: 1910 bis heute. Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1977. 47 In 1985, Rubin helped program a major BBS retrospective across the United States, which screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. This further cemented his influence as a champion of Hungarian experimental film specifically. For his short piece in the accompanying catalog, see Peter Rubin, “Notes on the Hungarian Avant-Garde Film,” BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1985), 14–17.

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Holland Experimental Film folder. Peter Rubin Collection, EYE Filmmuseum Archive, Amsterdam. Kuźmicz, Marika. “Workshop of the Film Form.” In Workshop of the Film Form, edited by George Clark, Marika Kuźmicz, and Łukasz Ronduda, 169–86. Warsaw and Berlin: Arton and Sternberg Press, 2017. Kemp-Welch, Klara. “Affirmation and Irony in Endre Tót’s Actions of the 1970s. “ In Art History & Criticism 3, Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe, edited by Liniara Dovydaityte. 136–44. Kaunas and Lithuania: Vytautas Magnus University, 2007. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mariecuriesocanth/research_files/ mik_3.pdf Kemp-Welch, Klara. Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2019. László, Zsuzsa, “The Invention and Renunciation of the Concept of the East European Art.” Institute of the Present (2018). https://institutulprezentului.ro/ en/2018/11/15/works-and-words-the-invention-and-renunciation-of-the-conceptof-east-european-art/. Moine, Caroline. Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955–1990. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018. Nössig, Franziska. “DEFA’s ‘Home-Made’ Experiment: Traces of GDR Reality and International Avant-Garde Film in Jürgen Böttcher’s Transformations (1981).” In German Division as Shared Experience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday, edited by Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski, and Katrin Schreiter, 155–78. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Robakowski, Józef. “I Reject Temporality.” Interviewed by Kata Krasznahorkai. fair ‒ Zeitung für Kunst und Ästhetik (April 2009). http://robakowski.eu/tx24_ang.html. Rubin, Peter. “Une planète à découvrir.” Cinémas d’avant-garde (expérimental et militant). Special dossier edited by Guy Hennebelle and Raphaël Bassan. CinémAction, no. 10–11 (Spring/Summer 1980): 209–218. Rubin, Peter. “Notes on the Hungarian Avant-Garde Film.” In BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film, 14–17. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1985. Simonyi, Sonja. “From the Antechamber to the International Stage: Early-Career Directors from Hungary at the Mannheim Film Festival in the Late 1970s.” In Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations, edited by Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2022. Somogyi, Lia. “Egy filmkereskedelmi vállalat: a Hungarofilm története (1956–2001).” Filmkultúra 48 (2005). http://www.filmkultura.hu/regi/2005/articles/essays/hungarofilm.hu.html.

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Soomre, Maria-Kristiina. “Art, Politics and Exhibitions: (Re)writing the History of (Re)presentations.” Kunsiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture 21 no. 3–4 (2012): 106–21. Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. van Mechelen, Marga. De Appel: performances, installaties, video, projecten 1975–1983. Amsterdam: De Appel, 2006. van Droffelaar, Josine and Piotr Olszański, eds. Works and Words: International Art Manifestation Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Mekka and De Appel, 1980. Facsimile republished by Amsterdam: Roma and De Appel, 2018. Varga, Balázs. “Filmirányítás, gyártástörténet és politika Magyarországon 1957–63.” PhD diss., ELTE Budapest, 2008. Works and Words Collection, De Appel Archive, Amsterdam.

About the Author Dr. Sonja Simonyi is an independent scholar working on the visual cultures of socialist Eastern Europe. She completed her dissertation in 2015 at New York University on the Western genre in socialist Eastern European cinema. Her work on both popular and experimental cinema has appeared in a number of edited volumes as well as the journals Film History and Third Text.

13. Wizardry on a Shoestring: Čaroděj and Experimental Filmmaking in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia Tomáš Glanc

Abstract This chapter discusses the films of Čaroděj, an influential Czechoslovak underground filmmaker who not only created experimental films but also built a community of engaged and like-minded viewers around them between 1979 and 1986. This chapter highlights the performative character of late socialist Czechoslovak underground film culture, within which the entire process of filmmaking, from production to presentation, was construed as a creative public act. In addressing this reality, it additionally explores the role of the filmmaker’s community in turning experimental films into the focal points of the creation of a second public sphere. Finally, the study delves into how the film technology available to Čaroděj and his collaborators shaped the films’ multimedia aesthetics. Keywords: Czechoslovakia; amateur cinema; unofficial culture; Čaroděj; intermedia

Editors’ note: As editors of this volume, we wanted to ensure that at least one essay represented experimental filmmaking in every Warsaw Pact country outside the U.S.S.R., yet we found our efforts repeatedly thwarted by reasons beyond our control when it came to contributions about former Czechoslovakia. Therefore, we were extremely grateful to Tomáš Glanc, who stepped forward and offered to write the text below at a time when the manuscript of the book was nearly complete. While it is shorter than most essays found here, it sketches key issues that connect Čaroděj’s work to the many other practices discussed in this book. It is also based on the

Gurshtein, K. and S. Simonyi (eds.), Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462982994_ch13

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author’s engagement with primary archival sources, and it is our hope that wider knowledge of these will become a valuable resource for future researchers, as well. Čaroděj was the most influential underground filmmaker in Czechoslovakia, where he worked in this capacity mainly from 1979 to 1986, during the most intensive period of Czechoslovak underground film production. Born Lubomír Drožď in 1955, his pseudonym, Čaroděj, means “wizard” in Czech; his other pseudonyms have included Čaroděj OZ, Blumfeld S.M., and Homeless&Hungry, among others.1 Several members of Drožďs family had a history of working in the film industry, including his great-grandfather, who ran a traveling cinema in Bohemia during the early years of film history after World War I, and his grandfather, who ran the business during the 1930s. Drožď attended an art high school in Prague (School of Applied Arts) in the early 1970s. He was later repeatedly denied admission to the Czech art academy for political reasons. After his studies, Drožď spent some time in the psychiatric hospital to avoid military service in the Czechoslovak army and became a member of the cultural underground community, living almost entirely in the countryside. Today, all his major works are digitized, archived, and accessible at the Film and Television School of the Czech Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. The project of archiving and annotating the films and supplementary materials (including period interviews and other documentation) was undertaken by film scholar Martin Blažíček, whose work more broadly is focused on the preservation of Czechoslovak underground film heritage from the 1970s and 1980s. Information about Čaroděj’s activities specifically was also recorded in a 2012 interview with Alexandra Morzlesová, now also housed at the FAMU archive. In this audio recording, Čaroděj described his activities and commented on his own films. In my contribution to this book, I highlight key points and issues based on his films, interviews, and the available secondary literature, that make it possible to better understand Čaroděj’s unique cultural practice and compare it with other, more or less similar, forms of amateur and experimental film production elsewhere in Eastern Europe. English-language scholarship on 1 “Čaroděj OZ” is a reference to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a popular children’s novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” is an incomplete short story by Franz Kafka; its German title, “Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle,” was translated into Czech as “starší mládenec”—hence “S.M.” “Homeless&Hungry” is a quote taken from signs that Čaroděj saw held by beggars in London in 1977 during his first trip to the West.

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the subject of Czechoslovak experimental filmmaking from this period is extremely limited, and this essay is intended to be an introductory text that maps key issues related to the topic and, hopefully, opens the door for more extensive future studies of the work of Čaroděj and others.2 The available sources have an autobiographical and descriptive character, focused on the story of underground cinema in Czechoslovakia during late socialism. The issues I have chosen to focus on are the performative character of late socialist Czechoslovak underground film, the role of the community vs. the individual approach, and the relationship between film technology and aesthetics. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, Čaroděj was a member of a bigger community of people operating with a camera in the unofficial cultural milieu. This circle of people, which existed in complete separation from the state-operated film industry with its institutions and administration, sprang up in an environment of extensive cultural surveillance and censorship on the one hand and the existence of technological means for private filmmaking on the other. After the Soviet Union led Warsaw Pact troops in a 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to crack down on reformist trends in the local Communist party and society, the cultural politics of the country, which had been becoming increasingly free of censorship during the 1960s, changed dramatically. Over the course of a few years, ideological surveillance became extremely rigid and dogmatic. The best filmmakers of the Czech New Wave (Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jiří Němec, Evald Schorm, Pavel Juráček, Jiří Menzel, and many others) lost the opportunity to continue their work and careers. Numerous film projects were canceled, and many existing films were banned from any kind of distribution. Unlike the situation in Hungary, Poland, or Yugoslavia, there was no “gray zone“ of smaller film studios where progressive filmmakers could create state-supported work on the periphery of the official system. Starting in the second half of the 1970s, some prominent filmmakers, such as Jiří Menzel, began to search for compromises between their own ambitions and the restrictions imposed by the establishment. Another director, Věra Chytilová, was able to make

2 Two articles published on this topic in Czech include Jiří Blažek, “Čaroděj OZ: kutilskou tvořivostí proti establishment,” Dok.revue F4.13 (October 27, 2013), https://www.dokrevue.cz/ clanky/carodej-oz-kutilskou-tvorivosti-proti-establishmentu, and Martin Blažíček, “Čarodějné filmy ze země OZ. Kinematografie jako happening,” A2 magazine, no. 11 (2013) 8, https://www. advojka.cz/archiv/2013/11.

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several films after 1976, despite numerous complications, but these were barely distributed before 1989.3 For Čaroděj and the community he was a part of, there were no opportunities to find employment in the official film industry, and these people did not even think to try it. For this generation of underground artists, who did not have a chance to take part in the cultural life of the 1960s as adults, the segregation of cultural politics into official and unofficial during the 1970s and 1980s was radical and uncompromising, leading to experimental and subversive cinematographic approaches. In addition to Čaroděj, the most prominent filmmakers active in this milieu included Vladimír “Pan Karra” Gaar, Irena “Pigi” Gosmanová (who was also Čaroděj’s romantic partner), Tomáš Mazal, and Pavel Veselý, a.k.a. Pablo de Sax. In the 2012 interview with Alexandra Morzlesová mentioned above, Čaroděj spoke of a network of some twenty people who knew each other and were all engaged with experimental filmmaking. 4 Čaroděj was the leading figure in this community of people interested in engaging with both the possibilities of film as a medium and its social capacity and impact within unofficial cultural circles. Aesthetically, Čaroděj, a self-taught filmmaker, was an original and an experimenter who searched for the appropriate mode of self-expression attainable through the limited means at his disposal—typically a Super 8 camera that came without any additional equipment normally available to a cameraperson, without a sound system, professional lighting, etc. Socially, Čaroděj was an impresario of sorts for the unofficial scene, active in organizing screenings and even private film festivals in apartments of members of this community, thus producing his own context for both the distribution and reception of works, presenting and at the same time stimulating film activities of members of his community, who were involved in these social events as filmmakers, audience members, or both. Paradoxically enough, even during the period of his most intensive activity in the center of the unofficial film scene, Čaroděj lived mostly in seclusion in a small village in “ecological emigration.” He also suffered from schizotypal disorder, a mental disorder characterized by severe social anxiety, paranoid ideation, and transient psychosis—conditions that, at 3 For more on politics and policy as they related to official filmmaking in post-1968 Czechoslovakia, see Štěpán Hulík, Kinematografie zapomnění. Počátky normalizace ve Filmovém studiu Barrandov (Prague: Academia, 2011). 4 The films made by this group of people can be found in the FAMU Center for Audiovisual Studies Research Collection, searchable online at http://cas.famu.cz/research-collection/.

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the same time, stimulated his artistic creativity. From the second half of 1980s onward, he chose to leave metropolitan social life entirely and to live exclusively in the countryside, where he resides to this day. In terms of technology, small-gauge cameras became widely available, first in the West and later on also in socialist countries, during the 1960s—Kodak introduced the Super 8 camera in 1964.5 This equipment was primarily intended for making home movies, but underground artists used it for their own aims and artistic ambitions despite having no professional training as filmmakers. One might even argue that the lack of professional experience became a starting point or a basic condition for their subversive activity, which made it possible to establish a specific cinematic aesthetic. For films made with a handheld camera, an unstable, unsettled fragility of the image was symptomatic. The filmmakers also used the technical possibilities available to them extensively and playfully, turning the camera or using the ability to zoom in, contravening the rules of mimetic cinematographic representation. The lack or imperfection of the films’ editing reveals the crucial role which improvisation and the accidental character of cinematographic performance played during the shooting process. Socially, in the context of Czechoslovak postnormalization cultural politics, the unofficial activities of Čaroděj’s circle were doubly political. They subverted the official ideology of socialist cultural values, with their emphasis on a work of art’s positive social utility and realism. The unofficial films also created an autonomous community of people who shared their experiments and created an alternative public sphere, tiny in terms of the number of its participants, but productive in terms of its cultural impact and the ethos of cultural experimentation that it promoted. Čaroděj insists that this circle was not a formal or defined group or movement, but a free community of friends and acquaintances affected by the waves of intelligentsia emigration that followed first the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and then the persecution that took place in response to the publication of the Charter 77 manifesto in 1977.6 Starting in the late 1970s, in Čaroděj’s community of friends, self-made film sketches were projected as private entertainment. These activities had two stages. During the initial period in 1978–9, Čaroděj combined footage 5 Alan Kattelle, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (Nashua: Transition Publishing, 2000), 97. 6 Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative led by Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, and several other activists. It established the core of political opposition in Czechoslovakia throughout the 1980s, contributing to the eventual political transition of the nonviolent revolution in 1989.

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of his family from his personal home-movie archive, which was silent like all S8 films, with contemporary progressive music (Brian Eno, for example), so that in their new form, the moving images took on an unexpected and subversive meaning, juxtaposing the banality of family holidays with the conceptual approaches in contemporary music. In another example of a film that was later lost, he looped a short sequence—of his grandmother tossing and turning in bed, for example—and added a soundtrack that produced a completely new semantics, in this case through the superimposition of a voice reading a story by Franz Kafka. In the second stage, which started in 1980, Čaroděj started to make his own “feature films.” He hired his friend Jiří Vnouček (a.k.a. Giorgionne) as a cameraman who operated an Admira, a 16 mm movie camera. Later on, Čaroděj took on the role of both director and cameraman himself. Čaroděj’s debut narrative film, The Blessed Cleaner (Blahoslavený uklizeč, 6 min., 1980), was inspired by a hole that had been dug in the garden of his country house, originally intended for a small swimming pool but used in the film as a symbol for the world (Figure 13.1). The journey inside the hole evokes the possibility of being purified, with art relying on its intersection with life—the film’s lead actor, Pavel Veselý (Pablo de Sax), was working as a cleaner in real life. On-screen, de Sax wore female drag—a transgression of gender roles is a frequent motif in Czech underground films—and here, the traditional, gendered understanding of cleaning as a feminine activity was also at play. Chairs, hangers, suitcases, umbrellas, and other objets trouvés were animated and moved on the “stage” (in the hole). The spontaneous process of an absurd search for the meaning of life by a person walking around in the hole takes place amid this set of details from everyday life, accompanied by a mix of music, from timeless classics, such as Gregorian chant and J. S. Bach, to contemporary Western hits, such as the songs of Patti Smith. The particular aesthetic of Čaroděj’s films is defined by the fact that, especially at the beginning of his career, he was disinterested in the process of editing the footage shot for his films. Editing later became a part of the process, but achieving a precisely predetermined form for a film was never the focus of his endeavors. On the contrary, the process of improvisation without a script or a written score during filming was Čaroděj’s intentional method for making his films, which had a performative character at the time of both production and reception. Equally important for him was the process of working with mixed media. Music always served much more than only an illustrative function. The focus on it as an important feature was motivated by the filmmaking equipment itself: 8 mm, 16 mm, Super 8

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Figure 13.1. Čaroděj, The Blessed Cleaner (Blahoslavený uklizeč), 1980. 8 mm film stills. Čaroděj Collection / Courtesy Lubomír Drožď.

(the most frequent format used by Čaroděj), and similar cameras could not record sound during filming, so the soundtrack was always a separate dimension of the work added later, as were spoken words. This condition accentuated the visual dimension and, at the same time, made it possible to conceptualize text as a simultaneously intrinsic and extrinsic part of the work. Čaroděj often wrote essays on individual films, which he typically read out loud before the screening of the film as an introduction or the first part of the work. Čaroděj’s conception of sound elements as both essential and yet separable from the visuals of his films gives us insight into two key elements of his agenda and aesthetic as a filmmaker. He considered film to be part of a

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Figure 13.2. Čaroděj, Queen of China Town, 1981. 8 mm film stills. Čaroděj Collection / Courtesy Lubomír Drožď.

multimedia complex. For his first film-based work, which was lost, Čaroděj used only a minimalistic loop (described above) as a visual backdrop for a reading of Kafka’s “Description of a Struggle” (“Beschreibung eines Kampfes”), a 1904 text that was Kafka’s earliest short story and the only one that describes Prague.7 Text, included in spoken or written form or as an initial inspiration, played a major role in Čaroděj’s other films, as well. In 1984, Čaroděj created a loose adaptation of the novel 1984 by George Orwell, which the filmmaker set in Prague of the 1980s. He also worked in the genre related to music videos—for example, in his film Queen of China Town (16 min., 7 This description of Čaroděj’s early lost film comes from materials at the FAMU Center for Audiovisual Studies Research ‒ CAS/FAMU, Čaroděj Collection.

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1981), a parody on the eponymous music video by the decadent French disco superstar Amanda Lear (Figure 13.2). Čaroděj also created a music video for the song “You Get Cold, I Get Cold” (“Chladnu, chladneš,” 9 min., 1985) by the unofficial Czech rock band Precedens, and in 1986, he collaborated several times with the legendary Czech underground band The Plastic People of the Universe. In general, it is worth noting the broad range of cultural activities in which Čaroděj was engaged. In addition to shooting around twenty short and medium-length films, he also (in the same period and later) was the editor of several samizdat journals, and he was a rock/punk musician who played in the bands Hyenas (Hyeny) and OZ (an abbreviation that references the Czech words for fruits and vegetables—”ovoce, zelenina”).8 In many ways, Čaroděj’s film screenings were not, in a practical sense, different from his musical gigs. The audio component of each film was typically dependent on the personal presence and performance by the filmmaker, who, during screenings, turned music and other double-track recordings played from a separate tape recorder on and off, and who, for these logistical reasons, usually had to travel to each individual screening to make it possible. Filmmaking, for Čaroděj, resulted not only in singular works, but more in a performative practice, which encompassed the entire process of production and presentation: from planning and organizing shoots with friends to the shooting itself, distribution, and communal reflection in the context of screenings in people’s homes and at private festivals such the Golden Eyeglasses (Zlaté brýle, 1980–5). Typical of the underground culture in Eastern Europe, the community of which Čaroděj was a part created a “second public sphere” as a platform independent of any state-based institutions and structures, establishing—ironically—at the same time its own analogous structures and institutions (awards, festivals, production companies). They ignored amateur film competitions or took part very rarely, enjoying the fact that their films were never accepted. In this community, “pseudo” awards were introduced, and during such festivals, which were only another form of private screenings in apartments, numerous prizes were awarded—for example, the Zlatý Sürrek (The Golden Sürrek) for the Most Surrealist Film, or Zlatý Bruxelles (The Golden Bruxelles) for the Best Koan (with koan being a name used for a genre of visual lyric narrative poems).9 In 8 The journals Čaroděj edited include Opium for the People (Opium pro lid), For Madmen Only (Jen pro blázny), Sado-Maso, and Window (Vokno). After 1989, Čaroděj became the editor-in-chief of these prominent periodicals of Czech underground culture originally launched in 1979 by the underground activist František Čuňas Stárek. 9 This information comes from materials at the FAMU Center for Audiovisual Studies Research ‒ CAS/FAMU, Čaroděj Collection.

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speaking about his films, Čaroděj symptomatically underlines the social aspects of the reception of his films. In his narrative, for example, serving pudding to audience members during the screenings is a consistent part of the story. The fragility of the film stock was not only a physical feature of film as an object, but something that shaped the process of screening it—films jammed or got burned through and had to be repaired during the screenings, which created a particular cinema-going ritual of the host serving his guests pudding during the necessary technical breaks. The final piece of Čaroděj’s conception of the filmmaking process understood as performative from start to finish had to do with his self-archiving approach or attempts at documentation and self-documentation, which became an important part of his work already during the main period of his activity, in 1983, when the anthology titled Meliés edited by Vladimír Gaar was published by samizdat. The title of the project immediately suggests, among other things, the desire to establish a canon, referring to Georges Méliès, an influential French film director who contributed many technical developments, particularly in the area of special effects, to the earliest history of cinema. In the anthology, insiders of the underground cinema scene wrote about their films, which, for understandable reasons, had not at that point been an object of any external reception. The underground community thus created an opportunity to narrate and evaluate its own achievements and write its own history. In terms of the relationships of his filmmaking activities to similar ones elsewhere, Čaroděj claims he had no idea about the existence of experimental film elsewhere during the period when he was active as a filmmaker, although he knew, for example, according to the interview mentioned above, the work of the Canadian animator Norman McLaren, who used pixilation effects and superimpositions in animation to tap its experimental aesthetic potential. Čaroděj transformed the color of his film stock with aniline dyes, was influenced by collage techniques found in avant-garde art, and sought to achieve psychedelic effects through the use of double exposures and other simple methods of image manipulation. Typically for the situation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the difficulties in accessing information about the contemporary international art scene also enabled the introduction of specific highly idiosyncratic features in a particular artist’s practice; isolation did not mean an absence of information, influence, singular impulses, and inspirations. The end of filmmaking in Čaroděj’s community coincided with the decline of the 8 mm and 16 mm film formats. Few people from his circle considered creating moving images with the new video technologies that replaced

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amateur filmmaking equipment, namely VHS (analog video recording on tape cassettes, released first in the United States at the end of 1970s) or Betacam (a family of half-inch professional videocassette products developed by Sony in 1982).10 The new video equipment was expensive and inaccessible to nonprofessionals in Czechoslovakia. At the same time, according to Čaroděj, “the drive was gone.” The collective energy that had been aesthetically creative and socially significant for about a decade vanished into thin air with the technological turn and due to the changing personal situations of the people involved. Čaroděj’s last project, a film based on Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, remained unfinished, and the work of the group within which he had been active fell into oblivion for several decades, being revisited and digitized only in the last several years. As the proximate cause for the end of his filmmaking, Čaroděj cites the fact that the sole Soviet-made Super 8 Quartz camera that circulated among members of his community was stolen in a shoe store in Prague’s Old Town. 

Bibliography Baum, Lyman Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with pictures of William Wallace Denslow. Chicago and New York: G. M. Hill Co., 1900. Blažek, Jiří. “Čaroděj OZ: kutilskou tvořivostí proti establishmentu.” Dok.revue F4.13 (October 27, 2013). https://www.dokrevue.cz/clanky/carodej-oz-kutilskoutvorivosti-proti-establishmentu. Blažíček, Martin. “Čarodějné filmy ze země OZ. Kinematografie jako happening.” A2 magazine, no. 11 (2013). Hulík, Štěpán. Kinematografie zapomnění. Počátky normalizace ve Filmovém studiu Barrandov (1968–1973). Prague: Academia, 2011. Jack, Keith and Vladimir Tsatsulin. Dictionary of Video and Television Technology. Woburn, MA: Newnes and Elsevier, 2002. Kafka, Franz. “Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle.” In Beschreibung eines Kampfes: Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass. Prague: H. Mercy Sohn, 1936. Kattelle, Alan. Home Movies: A History of American Industry, 1897–1979. Nashua: Transition Publishing, 2000.

10 Keith Jack and Vladimir Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology (Woburn, MA: Newnes and Elsevier, 2002), 27.

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About the Author Dr. Tomáš Glanc is a senior fellow at Zurich University and a visiting professor at Basel University. He specializes in performance in Eastern Europe, samizdat and unofficial culture, Russian and Czech modernism, Slavic ideology, and contemporary Russian art and literature. Glanc is the author of numerous books and catalogs, most recently Autoren im Ausnahmezustand. Die tschechische und russische Parallelkultur (2017) and Pavel Pepperštejn: Memory is Over (2016).

Index 8 mm film 80, 117, 158, 170, 179-80, 221, 254, 300-1, 322, 326 16 mm film 105, 117-8, 179, 203, 207, 221, 223, 250, 260, 300-1, 322, 326 35 mm film 37, 80, 88, 107, 179, 204, 221, 223, 300-1 Abramović, Marina 157, 160, 297 abstraction 60, 64, 70, 206, 234, 288, 301 Academic Film Center Belgrade 27, 73, 158 Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw 77, 84, 86 Achsnick, Mario 221-2, 237 activism 25 anti-war 116 amateur cinema 13, 24-5, 27-8 festivals 63, 73, 103, 107-9, 112, 116-8, 123, 157, 164-5, 180, 207, 255, 320, 325 Builders of Developed Socialist Society festival, Bourgas 118, 120-1 Forum for Free and Absolutely Clever Ideas in Cinema, Bulgaria 115-6 in Bulgaria 15, 28, 103-23 Kyupsfilm 113-5 NCAA (National Center of Amateur Art Activities) 110-1, 122 Society of Bulgarian Amateur Filmmakers, Sofia 105 in Czechoslovakia 309, 317-8, 325, 327 in Poland 80, 94, 249, 260 in Romania 197, 199, 206-8, 215 in Yugoslavia 59-63, 66, 74, 151-2, 155, 157, 159, 163-6, 169-70, 177-8, 180, 194, 300, 305 Belgrade Kino Club 59-62 Croatian Film Clubs Association 27 Zagreb Kino Club 60, 62-4, 153, 164-5, 170 student 27, 105, 109, 113-4, 180, 184, 194, 199, 201, 206, 238 American Civil War 45 Amsterdam 293-314 Andrejew, Piotr 130, 132-5 animation 15, 37, 86, 105, 109, 133, 203-8, 306, 326 Antifilm 60, 151, 153-4, 168, 181-3 anti-Semitism 80, 138, 245, 284 Antosz&Andzia 258-61 Assault on the Snowman 261 Murderer 260 Antosz, Stanisław. See Antosz&Andzia Arad  25, 198-200, 204-11, 215 art exhibitions 186, 201, 214-6, 234, 247, 249, 281, 288 film in 295-314 Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces film program 7, 12

artists’ networks 18-21, 24, 28, 39, 62, 73, 78, 180, 199, 234-5, 239, 296, 301, 310, 313-4, 320 Arton Foundation, Warsaw 28, 99, 263 Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest 29 Atelier 16. See kinema ikon Belgrade 59-60, 63-4, 66-74, 159-60, 179-80, 188, 305 Bełza, Władysław “Catechism of the Polish Child” 143-4 Berlin 38, 41, 164, 222, 225, 232, 235-9 Black Series (Poland) 126-7 Black Wave (Yugoslavia) 178, 183-5, 189 Blagojević, Petar 60, 63-5 Blue Rider group (Germany) 70 B movies 191, 260 Bódy, Gábor 15, 22, 35-55, 269-70, 272, 274, 294, 306-9, 313 American Postcard 35-7, 45-50, 55, 274, 294, 308 biography 35-7 Dog’s Night Song 37, 44-5, 52-5 Four Bagatelles 36-7 Narcissus and Psyché 36-7, 50-1 new narrativity 44-5, 51, 54 new sensitivity 44-5 Private History 37 Psychocosmoses 36-7 The Third 36 Bonanza 70, 72 Böttcher, Jürgen 221, 224-30, 238-9, 306 Three of Many 225-6 Transformations 226-9 Brakhage, Stan 226, 302, 306 Bulgaria 12, 15, 25, 28-9, 103-23, 152, 304 1,300th anniversary 118 filmmaking in 25, 28-9, 103-23 Bulgarian New Wave 119 Revival Process 119 Buñuel, Luis 115, 189, 199, 213 Cântarea României festival, Romania 208 capitalism 35, 178, 186, 288 Čaroděj 25, 317-27 1984 324 Queen of China Town 324 Steppenwolf 327 The Blessed Cleaner 322 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 209 censorship 20, 83, 106, 128, 131, 137, 145, 201, 205, 208, 217, 226, 239, 246, 268-9, 295, 319 self- 112, 215 Chierowska, Katarzyna. See Antosz&Andzia cinéma vérité 127, 134, 138, 210 cinephilia 62, 65, 177, 189-90

330 

Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

city symphony films 40-2, 59, 61, 63-74, 154, 167 Cold War 17, 19, 28, 116, 122, 283, 293-6, 308, 326 Communism. See state socialism Comrade Woman conference 155 conceptualism 83-4, 131,180-1, 192, 245-8, 258, 262, 266, 269, 274-5, 297-8, 322 Constructivism 41-2, 83, 97, 305 consumer culture 95, 183-4, 186, 194, 261 counterculture 179, 184 cultural reproduction 24, 177-8, 184-8, 194 cybernetics 92, 97, 201 Czechoslovakia 12, 132, 293-4, 296, 298, 303-5, 307, 312 filmmaking in 23, 25, 27, 109, 294, 309-10, 317-327 Prague Spring 35, 138, 319, 321 Dada 83, 197, 216 Dammbeck, Lutz 226, 232-4, 239 Heracles 232-4 dance 23, 37, 65, 70, 204, 231-3, 236-7 De Appel, Amsterdam 296-305, 310 de Certeau, Michel The Practice of Everyday Life 168 Denegri, Ješa 303 de Sax, Pablo 320, 322 di Roes, Tohm 221, 224, 235-9, 239 7 x 7 Facts 237 Gegenwertig 236-7 I’s-Apocalypsis 236 Đilas, Vukica 151-4, 157-63, 170-1 Home Movies 158-63 Remarks 160-1 Dłubak, Zbigniew 249, 252 documentary f ilm 15, 36-7, 40-4, 46-8, 53-5, 59-63, 66, 68, 70-4, 89, 95, 97, 107, 111, 113, 119, 121, 203, 206-11, 224-6, 267-70, 274-5, 284 creative documentaries (Poland) 125-47 Đorđević, Goran 303 Drožď, Lubomír. See Čaroděj Dzieduszycki, Antoni 249, 252-3 Films That Anyone Can Make 252 East Germany 12, 25, 304 filmmaking in 221-40, 306 Stasi 222-3, 233-5, 239 emigration 38, 45, 49, 224-5, 283, 303, 320-1 Erdély, Miklós 22, 38-9, 46, 48-9, 265-288, 298, 302, 309, 311 cognitive film 275, 285-6, 288 Dream Reconstructions 266, 271, 275-6, 278-281, 283-4 montage technique 272-5, 277-8, 283-5 Partita 271-2 photography 274 Self-Illumination 281 Spring Execution 271, 275, 279, 285 Time Travel I-V 282-3

Train Trip 271, 278, 285 Version 271-2, 275, 283-5 experimental film definition of 14-7, 48, 96, 126, 136, 153, 181, 200, 203, 210-1, 213, 217, 223-4, 239, 258, 267-8, 274-5, 293, 326 fixation film 153-4, 171 preservation of 26-9 Falski, Marian Primer 142-3 FAMU (Film and Television School of the Czech Academy of Performing Arts), Prague 27, 318 Fellini, Federico 8 1/2 109 feminism 142, 151, 153-7, 160, 170-1 film army 16, 127-8, 137 distribution of 12-4, 17, 26, 127-8, 199, 205-6, 210, 215, 246, 268-9, 293-4, 296, 298, 308-9, 313, 319-20, 325 genre tropes 14-5, 46-7, 51-3, 61, 70-1, 89, 110, 113, 127, 129, 131, 142, 163, 167, 179, 183, 205, 260, 270, 324 historical drama 50-2 narrative 15, 64, 81, 106, 207, 211, 224, 246, 252, 258-9, 261, 262, 267, 274-5, 284-5, 294, 322 popular Hollywood cinema 59, 72, 132, 180, 185-6, 189-91, 193, 205, 260, 300 film festivals 23, 73, 85, 111, 136, 145, 191-3, 207, 269, 294, 296, 308, 320, 325 Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival 180 Experiment 79 film festival 302, 305-6, 313 FEST, Belgrade 152, 193 GEFF (Genre Experimental Film Festival), Zagreb 63, 153, 180 Krakow Film Festival 126, 133-5, 137, 145-6 MAFAF festival, Pula 180 Filmoteka, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw 27 film studios 13, 23, 45, 114, 121, 127-9, 145, 147, 207, 222-4, 268, 279, 281, 319 Balázs Béla Studio Foundation 288 BBS (Balázs Béla Stúdió), Budapest 25, 27, 35-6, 37-40, 45, 48, 57, 265-75, 286-8, 300-1, 306-9, 313 Film Language Series 39, 270, 272, 274 K/3 section 39, 270, 272 DEFA (Deutsche Film AG) Studio, East Germany 222-4, 226, 238 Hungarofilm 308-9 MAFILM studio 39 WFO (Educational Film Studio), Łódź 1256, 128-38, 142, 145-7 Fluxus 160, 181, 197, 216, 297

331

Index

found footage 37, 82, 86, 161, 268, 274 Fundatie Kunsthuis 298, 309 Galerie Oben 221-2, 237 Galloping Coroners 54 GDR. See East Germany Genchev, Gencho 107, 111 gender 155-6, 164, 256, 261 in filmmaking 25, 28 Germany 70, 248 Giorgione, Castelfranco da 226 Sleeping Venus 227 Godard, Jean-Luc 64, 69-70, 72 Breathless 109, 162 My Life to Live 70 Gotovac, Tomislav 22, 24, 59-74, 160, 163, 164, 179, 180-1, 183, 185, 188-9, 306, 313 Belgrade Trilogy 59-74 Blue Rider 59, 63, 66, 69-73 Circle 59, 63-9, 71-4 Straight Line 59, 63, 66-9, 71, 73, 181, 183 Gravesen, Lene 302, 309, 312 GSA (Galeria Sztuki Aktualnej), Wrocław 246, 253-8, 261, 262 Account of Changing Places 255 GSN (Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej), Wrocław 246, 258, 262 Hansen, Oskar 22, 77, 84, 89, 97 Open Form 22, 84, 89 Havrilla, Vladimir 309-10 HEF (Holland Experimental Film, Amsterdam) 301-2, 305, 308-9 Heidegger, Martin 276 Hesse, Hermann Steppenwolf 327 Hildebrand, István 50-51 historical avant-garde 270 art 69, 70 film 36-42, 49, 55, 59, 63, 69, 167 Hölderlin, Friedrich 276 Hornoiu, Florin 207 Commuters 210, 212 Hungary 12, 29, 35, 285 1956 Uprising 38, 49, 268 emigration from 45, 49, 283 filmmaking in 22, 25, 37-39, 43, 266-270, 288, 294, 301, 308, 312 Kádár era 35, 38 War of Independence 45, 49, 50 Iliev, Vladimir 28, 103-4, 110, 114-7, 120-2 Neohesychasm 115 The Valley of Pigs 110 INDIGO group 285-6 interdisciplinarity 14, 22-4, 35, 69, 84, 87-91, 200, 214, 217, 295, 296-302 Intermedia I festival, East Germany 232-5, 240

intermediality 14, 23, 82, 84, 201, 224, 229-35, 238-40, 255, 266, 300, 323-4 Ivančić, Tatjana 24-5, 153, 154, 157, 163-71 City in the Shop Window 166-7 Travelogue 166, 168-9 Jancsó, Miklós The Round-Up 49 Kafka, Franz 285, 318, 322, 324 Kandinsky, Wassily 70 Karabasz, Kazimierz 127, 134 Kassák, Lajos 35, 38-40, 271 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 134-8 kinema ikon 25, 28, 197-217 Kino Clubs. See also amateur film clubs Kisimov, Ivo 106-7 The City of Youth 107 Klick & Aus 235, 238 Krúdy, Gyula Eszter Solymosi of Tiszaeszlár 284 Kutera, Anna 258 The Shortest Film in the World 258 Kutera, Romuald 258 Kwiatkowski, Fine 232-6, 239 Structures 232 Kwiek, Paweł 77-97 1,2, 3…Cinematographer’s Exercise 86 Activities 84 Commentary 82 Kinolaboratorium 88 Numbers 82 Osieki 88 The Telephone and I 81 Video and Breath 92 Video A. Studio Situation  91 Lach-Lachowicz, Natalia. See Natalia LL Lachowicz, Andrzej 249, 251-2 Lazarov, Nikolay Beyond the Wall 117-8 Le Grice, Malcolm 302, 306 Lenin, Vladimir 87, 106 Ljubljana  27, 180, 305 Łódź 86, 94-5, 140, 144, 247 film production in 88, 125, 128-30, 245, 298 Löser, Claus 221-2, 226-7, 231, 238-9 Łoziński, Marcel 135 Ludwiński, Jerzy 248 Łukowski, Maciej 130-3, 146 MA (journal) 42 Marcolla, Jolanta 253-6 Caprice 2 256 Kiss 255-6 Turn 255 Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb 28 Maurer, Dóra 21, 38, 266, 278, 286, 309, 311 Mekas, Jonas 159, 161

332 

Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

Meliés (anthology) 326 Melville, Jean-Pierre 190 Miles Brothers A Trip Down Market Street 68 Miller, Glenn 64, 193 misogyny 25, 156 Moholy-Nagy, László 35-6, 38-42 Berlin Still Life 41 Gypsies 41 montage 42, 139, 146, 204-5, 211, 268, 272-3, 275, 277-8, 283-5 Morar, Ioan T. Autopsy of Oblivion 212 Mrożek, Lech 258 Museum of Art, Łódź 83 Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade 27 Museum of Modern Art Warsaw 27, 99 Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Ljubljana 27 Museum of Modern Art, New York 28, 74 music 23, 117, 205, 221-40, 267, 271, 273, 324-5 jazz 25, 64-6, 70, 221, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233, 235-6 live performance 223, 233-5, 239 punk 25, 54, 221-3, 231, 235, 242, 297, 325 soundtrack 47, 64-6, 70, 72, 81, 139-40, 158-9, 204-5, 223, 225, 227, 233, 252, 277, 322-3 swing 65 Natalia LL 247, 249-53, 259 17th of November 1970—24 Hours 250 Natural Surroundings of 250 km of a Road 250 Permanent Record of E 22 Highway Every 1 Km 250, 252 Permanent Time Record 250, 252 National Film School, Łódź 77-80, 86, 94, 125, 129-30, 134, 136-7, 246 Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam 298, 301, 310 neo-avant-garde 14-5, 158, 266, 293 Hungarian 36, 38-9, 40-2, 45-6, 51, 55, 266, 271, 286, 288, 298, 301, 311 Polish 83, 88, 97, 245, 247, 301, 305 relationship to historical avant-garde 42, 55 Yugoslav 158, 180 NEP4DISSENT 18, 20-1, 26 New Wave (France) 70, 77, 109, 190, 308 official culture 67-8, 80, 87, 103, 131, 137, 156-7, 209 gray zone 18-21, 319 vs. unofficial 13, 23, 25, 27, 29, 62, 85-6, 94-5, 105-10, 112-5, 117-8, 138-40, 177, 183-4, 193-4, 197, 201-2, 207, 210-1, 214-6, 231, 235, 248, 265, 267, 269, 270, 286, 288, 295, 307-10, 312-4, 319-321, 325

Olszański, Piotr 258, 297 Olszewski, Lechosław 82, 85 Open Form. See Hansen, Oskar Open Society Archives, Budapest 29 painting 69-70, 114, 122, 140, 181, 188, 190, 201-5, 215, 221, 224-32, 235-6, 248-9, 253, 271, 306, 311 Pansini, Mihovil 60, 164, 166,181 Scusa Signorina 153-4, 166 theory films 153 paracinema 24, 177-8, 252 Pavlović, Živojin 178, 186 performance 37, 140, 232-3, 235, 238, 293 relationship to film 23, 53, 65, 82-3, 85, 223-4, 239, 321, 325 performance art 18, 59, 69, 73-4, 92, 142, 180, 254, 266, 272, 283, 297-8, 302, 309, 311, 313 Permafo Gallery, Wrocław 24, 245-50, 252-3, 258, 261-2 photography 37, 42, 69, 71, 79-80, 89, 95, 109, 111, 135, 160-1, 170, 177, 180, 193, 201, 210, 215, 234, 246, 249-51, 253, 255-8, 261-2, 271, 274, 281-2, 293, 298, 309 Plesh, John. See Pleş, Ioan Pleş, Ioan 197, 202-5, 211 Effects of Spring 204 Illuminations 203 Pollution 202-3 poetry 38, 48, 50-1, 55, 114, 139, 143-4, 177, 188-9, 205, 224, 226, 231, 235-8, 271, 276 Poland 12, 28-9, 109, 152, 319 filmmaking in 22, 61, 77-97, 125-47, 245-62, 293-4, 296-8, 300-1, 303-7, 309-10, 313 March generation 80, 138 martial law 77, 93-4, 132, 137 Recovered Territories 247-8 postmodernism 45, 51, 281 professional unions 23, 25, 94, 107, 112-3, 118, 122-3, 206, 231-2 propaganda 80, 85, 87, 93, 95, 97, 106, 119, 122, 145, 206-7, 283 Przylipiak, Mirosław 127, 135, 138, 144 radio 64, 156, 205, 224, 235, 271, 277-8, 283 repetition 81, 136, 228, 237, 256, 262, 272, 278-9, 284 Robakowski, Józef 22, 77-97, 109, 133, 303, 305-7 22x 88 Art Is Power! 94 Biological-Mechanical Records 89-90, 92 Exercise 81 Exercise for Two Hands 90 From My Window 95 I’m Going 90 In Memory of L. Brezhnev 93-4 Living Gallery 88 Market 81, 109

Index

333

Test 81 TV Face 92-3 Roesler, Thomas. See di Roes, Tohm Romania 12, 29, 120, 283 filmmaking in 22, 25, 28, 197-217, 304-5 generation of the ’80s 214 Securitate 199-200, 214 Rousse 15, 103, 105, 107, 110, 113-4, 117, 120-3 Rubin, Peter 301-2, 304-7, 309-14 Ruhé, Harry 297-8

Strawalde. See Böttcher, Jürgen structural film 59, 63, 68, 74, 78, 81-2, 153, 162, 166, 180-1, 259, 269, 275 Sugár, János  Persian Walk 266, 286-8 Super 8 film 37, 170, 223, 232, 237-9, 310, 320-2, 327 Surrealism 51, 117, 145, 212, 216, 325 surveillance 198, 200, 217, 319 Szczepański, Piotr 130, 132

Săbău, George 22, 197-200, 204-5, 207-8, 210-6 Cuts 211, 213 Fragmentarium 213 Schlegel, Christine 232-4, 239 Structures 232 second public sphere 8, 20-1, 103, 197, 267, 293, 295, 307-8, 313-4, 317, 325 definition of 18 Šejka, Leonid 179 Šijan, Slobodan 22, 24, 28, 60, 72, 158 Film Leaflet 24, 28, 177-94 Smeets, Aggy 297, 310 Sobański, Oskar 130, 132, 134 soc-art 86 socialist realism 61, 103, 106-7, 111, 113, 140, 142, 245-6 Sosnowski, Zdzisław 253-5, 257, 259 as Goalkeeper 257 sound relationship to film 14, 23, 42, 47-8, 54, 64-6, 70, 72, 81-2, 117, 127, 131, 139-40, 144, 146, 158-9, 168, 201, 204-5, 221-40, 252, 277, 320, 322-3 Sowiński, Emil 127, 131, 133 Stalinism 12, 62, 106, 126, 139, 142, 245, 285 Stasik, Piotr Opera about Poland 145 state socialism 12-5, 17 cultural productions of 17-29, 60-3, 68, 77, 84-7, 93, 97, 103, 105, 112-3, 129, 130-42, 144-7, 151, 177-8, 194, 205, 207, 226, 230-1, 288, 293-6, 298, 300-1, 303-4, 308-9, 313-4, 321 in Bulgaria 106-7, 117-9, 121 in Czechoslovakia 317, 319 in East Germany 224, 236 in Hungary 35-6, 53, 267-70 in Poland 128, 245-8, 260 in Romania 198 in Yugoslavia 60, 151, 156-7, 178, 183-4, 186-8, 191 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 298, 301, 306, 310-1 Stevens, George A Place in the Sun 66 Stojanović, Dušan 153-4, 161, 185 Stojanović, Lazar 162 Plastic Jesus 158, 178, 180

Tannert, Christoph 230-2, 239 television 50-1, 70-2, 89, 91-4, 113, 117, 122, 125, 129, 132, 134, 136-7, 146, 156, 162, 181, 191, 199, 209, 224, 247, 253, 255-6, 259-60, 288 television studios 84, 141, 274 Țeț, Emanuel 205, 211 Todorov, Evgeni The War Will End Tomorrow 116 Tokin, Boško 189-90 Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb 28 Tót, Endre 39, 298, 311-3 I am Glad if I Can Take One Step 311-2 transnational exchange 22, 28, 59, 293-314 underground film. See experimental film United States of America 45-9, 59, 64, 66, 70-1, 110, 177, 199, 216, 296 filmmaking in 17, 40, 61, 68, 109, 114, 120, 180, 189-91, 199, 260, 275, 327 unofficial culture. See official culture vs. unofficial; See also second public sphere U.S.S.R. 12, 202, 283, 319 filmmaking in 61, 65, 107, 128, 270, 327 influence of 17, 49, 106, 118, 198 van Droffelaar, Josine 297, 302 Veselý, Pavel. See de Sax, Pablo video 12, 37, 73, 79, 141, 180, 215, 224, 293, 297-8, 307, 324-7 video art 16, 39, 91-94, 309 visual art relationship with film 14, 22-4, 38, 70, 79, 82-4, 88, 97, 157, 230-2, 239, 245-62, 265-88, 295, 311 Vučićević, Branko 158-61, 177, 193 Warsaw 27, 77, 80, 84, 86, 125, 127, 129, 139, 145, 245, 247, 297 Weöres, Sándor Psyché 50 Westerns. See film: genre tropes West Germany 224, 233, 302 WFF (Workshop of the Film Form), Łódź 7797, 128-9, 246, 248, 261, 294, 298, 300-1, 305-8 Williams, Raymond 144 Wiszniewski, Wojciech 15, 125-47 Foreman on a Farm 138-9, 145 Primer 138, 142-5

334 

Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

The Carpenter 145 Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver 134, 137-45 Workers’71—Nothing About Us Without Us 138 Woman on Film conference 152, 156 Works and Words film program, Amsterdam 293-314 Workshop of the Film Form. See WFF (Workshop of the Film Form), Łódź Wrocław 24, 245-62 Yugoslav Cinematheque, Belgrade 27, 160, 188-90, 194 Yugoslavia 12, 61-2, 67, 71, 199

café culture in 66, 71 consumer culture in 183-4, 186, 194 filmmaking in 22, 24, 27-8, 59-62, 64, 66, 68, 72-4, 109, 151, 153, 157-8, 160, 164, 170-1, 177-81, 183, 185, 188-91, 193-4, 293-4, 296, 298, 300, 303-5, 310, 319 New Art Practices  180, 297 women in 152, 154-7, 162 Zagreb 27-8, 60, 62-64, 153, 164-6, 168, 180, 305 Zhandov, Zakhari 111 Žižek, Slavoj 72, 153