Fakty i fikcje. Na marginesie filmu Azyl

Author(s): Agnieszka Haska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Premiera filmu Azyl w reżyserii Niki Caro nie mogła w Polsce trafić na lepszy politycznie moment. Marzenia decydentów o tym, aby powstał – cytując ministra kultury i dziedzictwa narodowego Piotra Glińskiego – „dobry, wielki polski film patriotyczny, który promowałby Polskę na świecie”, zostały wpisane na listę politycznych i propagandowych celów rządu Prawa i Sprawiedliwości. O ważności tego planu niech świadczy to, że już w październiku 2015 r. prezes Jarosław Kaczyński deklarował zebranie pieniędzy „na jeden lub dwa wielkie, hollywoodzkie filmy, które pokażą, jak naprawdę wyglądała wojna w Polsce”.

Postsocrealistički arhitektonski onirizam na primerima filmova i stripova Enkija Bilala

Author(s): Jelena Smiljanić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 04/2013

The aim of this paper is to analyze and explore the way the media have transformed film and comic strips by applying an interdisciplinary approach to three dystopian, phantasmagorical science-fiction movies by Enki Bilal: Bunker Palace Hotel (1989), Tykho Moon (1996) and Immortal Ad Vitam (2004) using them as case studies. All three films are a cinematic view of postapocalyptic cities – Belgrade, Paris and New York in which Bilal’s narrative dramatizes specific problems associated with postmodernism – linking ancient mythologies with the dictatorships of Eastern European authoritative political systems and creating a strong aesthetics of a specific dreamlike degenerative world of humans and androids in which existentialism is examined. The art of socio-realistic hyperrealism is presented as a paradigm. The architecture used in the films is a hybrid of ultra modern skyscrapers of industrial structure, full of eclectic post-modern forms, while the city is a deformed, polluted, post-nuclear wasteland used as an allegory of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s. The deformed architectural portraits of these towns are pictorially dependent on German Expressionism as seen in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) and show the influence of Futurism and the Bauhaus. The combined influence of Hieronymus Bosch and Joseph Stalin as well as that of Egyptian mythology creates Bilal’s profoundly individual universe. The distorted and postmodern architectural expression is seen as a dystopian vision of the future.

Filmy Eldara Riazanowa w Polsce – z zagadnień recepcji

Author(s): Maria Mocarz-Kleindienst / Language(s): Polish Issue: XXII/2017

Eldar Ryazanov directed films including The Irony of Fate, Station for Two, Carnival Night, Beware of the Car, and Office Romance. These films, regarded as cult classics in Russia (the formerSoviet Union), are also known to Polish fans of Russian films. This paper takes account of two periods of reception of Ryazanov’s films in Poland: primary reception (1960s – 1980s) and secondary reception (beginning of 2000s). The reception analysis was conducted based on the following materials:press articles, collective monographs, Polish Television archival material and internet forums.Consequently, several areas of interest of critics and viewers were identified, including the following:1) the plot, 2) aesthetic and artistic impressions, 3) the reference of the director’s works to the works of the Polish film industry, 4) the director’s artistry, 5) the cast, 6) the quality of translation.

Suspended Moments of the Mundane Routine: Testing the Possibilities of Slow Cinema in Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break (2008) and Podwórka (2009)

Author(s): Kornelia Boczkowska / Language(s): English Issue: 18/2017

In this article, I analyze various ways in which Sharon Lockhart’s experimental films, Lunch Break (2008) and Podwórka (2009), develop the concept of an industrial landscape and local community by simultaneously incorporating and challenging narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the poetics of slow cinema. Focusing mostly on the realities of urban life, Lockhart’s unscripted and intimate portraits of American and Polish localities resonate with a highly meditative approach as well as blend rigorous film aesthetics with an anthropological and ethnographic sensibility to community engagement. Although the filmmaker’s legacy has been predominantly classified, akin to Peter Hutton’s or James Benning’s works, as representing slow cinema (see e.g. MacDonald, Avant-doc… 2; MacDonald, “Panorama” 636), it seems to have taken some of its formal traits to their extreme through juxtaposing stillness and movement of the imagery with “filmic time, subjective time, and real time in mediations on ritual, landscape, and labour” (Kuhn and Westwell 381). To achieve the desired effect, Lockhart experiments and expands on the genre’s typical devices such as: an extended shot duration, fixed camera position, minimalism and austerity or anti-narrative by the use of vertical planes, Z-axis, a single tracking shot slowed down to three frames per second, extremely long takes, a typical camera angles or a detached perspective.

Foltos farmerek az út mentén

Author(s): Gábor Beretvás / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 05/2018

Were there really hippies in socialist Hungary, or was it only some kind of mimicry of the West? How did beat sounds reach people through the Radio Free Europe the transmissions of which were always jammed? How did beat take root during the Kádár Era? How did the regime overpower rebellious generations? What did rock and roll, beat and the popular music of defiance mean to post-war film-makers? Gábor Beretvás answers these questions while exploring the feature and documentary films of the era.

Jak cię widzą, tak cię ubiorą

Author(s): Artur Zaborski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 754/2018

W odcinkach: Kostium

Author(s): Wit Szostak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 754/2018

Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory

Author(s): Miško Šuvaković / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

In what follows, I will point to theorization of concept of the experimental film. My main thesis is that experimental art is based on the project, research practice, innovation and open transgressive or subversive artworks. Art focused on subversion of institutional power features as a singular event performed within a particular social relationship, as a critical actionist, engaged, or activist practice. Transgression – literally – refers to: infraction, violation of a law or an order, while in geological terms it implies penetration and expansion of the sea over the mainland. The notion of transgression relates to excess, overrunning or, more precisely, departing the familiar for the unknown, control for freedom. Experimental art was created in different disciplines such as experimental music, experimental film, experimental theater, etc. John Cage’s concept of ‘experimental music’ has been the starting point for new experimental art and artistic practices since 1950. Experimental film (experimental, new, avant-garde or neo-avant-garde cinema) has featured since the Second World War. The concept and term describe a range of filmmaking styles which are generally quite different from, and often opposed to, the practices of mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking and entertainment-oriented cinematography. In the second and third part of the essay, I will present an analysis of the experimental films of the artists the OHO group and Neša Paripović.

Experimental (Structural Film) as the Concept of Film Innovation (Mihovil Pansini and Geff)

Author(s): Dragana Kružić / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

This paper concerns the historical presentation of avant-garde streams and the interpretation of their general characteristics. Emphasis has been placed on the neo-avant-garde art practice, especially European and American neo-avant-garde film, with the aim of carrying out a theoretical platform for the analysis and interpretation of the structural film by Yugoslav film experimentalist Mihovil Pansini. Its aim is also to understand and interpret the events that caused the establishment of world’s first experimental film festival, the GEFF (Genre Film Festival). The idea of film innovation, as a film experiment, was at that time much more feasible in democratically open Western societies than under the conditions that governed the hermetically strict environment of the socialist realism of postwar Yugoslavia. The paper will attempt to prove that the phenomenon of Yugoslavian amateur cinema clubs as such was an ideal and perhaps only possible solution for the realization of innovative, radically subversive and experimental film ideas.

The Kino-Eye Montage Procedure as a Formal Experiment

Author(s): Amra Latifić / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

This text presents an analysis of the relationship between Kino-Eye, the Russian montage technique that was most clearly demonstrated by Dziga Vertov in his 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera, and Russian Formalist theory, which underwent an intensive period of development during the 1920s. Russian Formalism, established primarily as a theory of literature, was likewise applied in film and the visual arts. A dominant characteristic of Soviet film authors and theorists from the avant-garde period was a preoccupation with linguistic aspects and an understanding of film itself in terms of language. Transposing Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization [остранение, ostranenie] to the visual experience of Vertov’s film contributes to an additional understanding of the usage of unconventional camera angles, diagonal camera positions, as well as to the interpreting of the Kino-Eye montage procedure. The experimental montage procedure of Kino-Eye is posited as an attempt to decode the world through the lens of a film camera, while understanding this procedure is linked to the impact of Shklovsky and Russian Formalism on Russian 1920s cinema.

Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax

Author(s): Luka Bešlagić / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film

Brazilian Video Art in the Early Days: from Experimental Video to Mainstream Television

Author(s): Rodrigo Esteves de Lima-Lopes / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

This article examines Brazilian video art in its early days, between 1973 and the end of the 1980s. This choice of topic is due to the historic importance of these artists: it covers the first experimental video productions in Brazil until their relative vulgarisation and assimilation by the mass media, especially television. I intend to discuss how Brazilian video art – which initially sought, inspired by ideological and technical issues, to disengage from the language of commercial media – became an element of aesthetic renewal in mainstream TV.

Emperor Tomato Ketchup: Some Reflections on Carnality and Politics

Author(s): Ana Došen / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

Terayama Shuji is one of the most prominent Japanese avant-garde artists of the 20th century. This paper explores Terayama’s experimental film Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971), dealing with children’s rebellion against (masculine) authority. With an apparent lack of conventional narrative, this 16mm tinted black and white feature, shot in documentary style, was filmed in public without permission, demonstrating the guerilla tactics of Terayama’s experimental approach. Reflecting the turbulent times of Japan’s 1960s, when the quest for reinvention of national identity was compellingly engaged both right and left, Emperor Tomato Ketchup illustrates a dystopian Japan where the brutal revolution of ‘innocent’ and immature takes place. The focus of this paper is on the notion of carnality and politics of postwar Japan, as film’s transgressive graphic content of pre-pubescent children’s sexual encounter with women can still be perceived as radical.

Listening to the ‘Multi-Voiced’ Feminist Film: Aspects of Voice-over, Female Stardom, and Audio-Visual Pleasure in Stephanie Beroes’ The Dream Screen (1986)

Author(s): Ben Ogrodnik / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

Experimental film literature often neglects the important role played by sound design as a key aspect within feminist film practice. Indeed, the utilization of audio techniques, such as voice-over, polyphony, and sonic collage, can powerfully challenge the scopophilic fetishism placed upon images of women. In order to expand the scholarly conversation, I focus on an exemplary found-footage film, The Dream Screen, 1986, by Stephanie Beroes. The 45-minute, 16mm film presents appropriated and re-edited footage of LuLu (Louise Brooks) from G. W. Pabst’s silent film Pandora’s Box. As we see Lulu in familiar scenarios from the original film, the audience also bears witness to a rich tapestry of quotations on the soundtrack, all spoken by different women. These quotations span 1970s feminist theory, Greek mythology, R&B song lyrics, personal diary entries, and Brooks’ own autobiography, giving new meaning and depth to Lulu’s character. I argue that Beroes’ mobilization of these disparate voices and discourses seeks to ‘undo’ (to borrow William Wees’ term) the misogyny of Pabst’s original depiction of femininity. In turn, her film refashions Lulu/Louise Brooks into a punk-feminist icon of resistance, while pointing to ways that women artists might recover images and sounds from and of their own experience.

The Effect of the Handheld Camera on Narration and Ocularization in the Dogme 95 Film

Author(s): Kristian Pandža / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

This paper aims, based on the method of case study, to investigate how the handheld camera affects narration and ocularization in the Dogme 95 film. The Dogme 95 (hereafter ‘Dogme’) film is a relatively recent filmmaking movement, which has its own set of strict rules – one of which requires shooting the film with a handheld camera. Regardless of the fact that the utilization of a handheld camera causes specific and recognizable image and movement aesthetics, which can be described as a specific handheld camera style, it is also an indispensable theoretical fact that it very much ‘speaks’ through narration, in particular through focalization and ocularization, which is also theoretically confirmed by theoreticians of the Dogme film. The two most representative, and most prominent films of the Dogme filmmaking movement are Idiots [Idioterne] by Lars von Trier and The Celebration [Festen] by Thomas Vinterberg. The Dogme movement, famous for its inescapable and apparent pseudo-documentary filming style – which enables one to ask the question what is here and how is the reality of reality here – raises additional questions, but also provides answers through thoroughly studying the way in which the handheld camera narrates audiovisually and how narration flows in the two aforementioned films. Additionally, it asks whether there is a difference in narration and ocularization, or if it is disabled, and how the handheld camera becomes the narrator, in symbiosis with the character.

The Imaginary and the Dead Media in the Works of the Kosmoplovci Collective

Author(s): Aleksandra Sekulić / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

Drawing from a movement which aimed to re-activate the practices of the emancipation of cultural production established in Yugoslav cine-amateurism: Low-Fi Video (1997–2003), the Kosmoplovci Collective, established in 2001, developed various interdisciplinary experiments, contesting the elements of the media framework of production. In a specific osmosis of practices stemming from the computer demo scene, video, alternative comics, electronic music and design, Kosmoplovci contributed to the contemporary explorations of the media-archaeological art, which uses archival work and historical materials related to the shifts of media paradigms. The videos, computer demos and online interactive projects of Kosmoplovci produced in the beginning of the 2000s can be seen as the projections, emulations or anticipations of the imaginary or dead media, or even a future excavation and re-invention of media (Void, Selfaware, X21, Artificial Detection). The treatment of media machines in the tension of their imagined untimely existence, as in the description of imaginary media by Siegfried Zielinsky, and the imagined future recovery from their deep death which is another form of their dislocation, destabilizes the fixed positions of the elements of contemporary media art production: the camera, the internet, but also the parallel relation of the image and the sound. The practice of this overall destabilization of fixed elements of the media system puts the Kosmoplovci Collective in the line of continuity of the experiments of radical amateurism.

Movement-Image in Experimental Archive Cinema

Author(s): Boško Prostran / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

In this paper, by applying three-mode division of image-movement by Gilles Deleuze to three case studies from the artistic practice of experimental archive cinema, I will attempt to point to three modes of reading/watching archive documentary film images, by which I tend to recognize also three different instances of reading/watching certain historical events, represented by images in these films. The three films, which I analyze following these guidelines, are Frammenti elettrici [Electric Fragments], by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi, 2001–2005; Блокада [The Block], by Sergei Loznitsa, 2006; and Respite, by Harun Farocki, 2005.

From Art Gallery to Movie Theatre: Spectatorship in Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto

Author(s): Hugo Ljungbäck / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

Experimental films have historically had a contested and marginalized position within film exhibition. With his Manifesto (2015), which has been exhibited both as a video installation in art galleries and as a feature film in movie theatres, Julian Rosefeldt collapsed the barriers between these exhibition spaces. By performing a comparative analysis of Manifesto in both forms, this article outlines the way spectators behave differently in the theatre and the gallery, the different demands the work makes on the viewer in each venue, and the difficulties of transforming the work from one form to another. By asking what is lost and what is gained, this article explores how the text, form, and venue function differently, to reveal underlying assumptions about spectatorship.

Creative Documentary Today: Challenges and Opportunities for Directors and Producers

Author(s): Željko Mirković / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

In today’s creative documentary, a director often decides to simultaneously assume the role of producer. This new situation has its own advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it gives the director/producer more freedom in story development and in leading a project. In addition, he or she is able to work more flexibly with the film budget and has a chance to change the direction of the project while following the storyline without fear that a producer will refuse such ideas. This position gives the director/producer room to work with smaller budgets and to claim the entire profit in the end. On the other hand, he or she must be prepared to work within a high-risk situation and assume complete responsibility.The new digital economy has opened opportunities to identify the most innovative ways to integrate digital platforms into the phases of story development, direction, promotion, and distribution of documentaries, thus allowing filmmakers to identify their niche audiences, build new value with it and find the right ways for monetization and revenue increase.

Postcinema, Motion Perception and Glitch Movies

Author(s): Michael Betancourt / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018