Festival Review - "Not(e) on the Map", Radical Tradition:30th Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade, Nero Magazine.

Tijana Mamula on the 30th Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade

Every year Belgrade hosts the Alternative Film/Video festival, one of the oldestexhibitions of experimental cinema in Europe. Over the years, experimentalfilmmaking has interwoven its history with that of other contemporary art forms,such as conceptual art, Op art or storytelling, participating in many of the issuesraised by more traditional visual art during the same period. On the other hand, thiscinema has always defined itself through a specific field of action, constituting a“radical variant” of classical cinema.This ambiguous standing, which is one of themost intriguing aspects of experimental film in general, emerges very clearly fromthe long tradition of avant-garde cinema programming in the Balkans. LastDecember, NERO collaborator – artist and writer – Tijana Mamula was invited bythe festival organizers to participate in a research seminar and had the opportunityto follow the program closely. We asked her to share her perspective on the festival,through this critical report written in collaboration with fellow researchers NicolasBrulhart, Dirk de Bruyn and Adeena Mey.

Alternative Film/Video Belgrade, 30th Anniversary Editionby Tijana Mamula

One of the things the Alternative Film/Video Festival shares with many initiativeswithin this genre is its fragmented history. The festival (originally, Alternative Film)was founded by the Academic Film Center in Belgrade in 1982, and held yearlyuntil 1991. Following an interruption caused by the Balkan wars of the 1990s, itresumed activity in 2002. At its inception, AFV followed on the wave of otherexperimental festivals in the Balkans – most notably, GEFF (Genre ExperimentalFilm Festival, 1963-1970), which grew out of the meetings of the “Anti-Film andUs,” a Yugoslav collective invested in the radical annihilation of conventional film,

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whose philosophy is perhaps best summarized in Mihovil Pansini’s Anti-Filmmanifesto of 1963.

Positioning itself as a like-minded promoter of experimental and non-narrative filmpractice, Alternative Film/Video – and its umbrella institution, the Academic FilmCenter – became instrumental in bringing together, in both space and discourse, anumber of important Eastern European avant-garde groups and individualpractitioners throughout the 1970s and 80s. This role was further strengthened bythe publishing and production activities of the Center, whose archive currentlyholds over 500 experimental and independent works made throughout its roughlyforty-year history.

Today, the festival remains an important, if sadly overlooked, showcase of historicalavant-garde production from Eastern Europe – particularly, and much against thegrain of the region’s recent political history, the former Yugoslav countries – as wellas promoting contemporary work by emerging artists culled from a much broadergeographical area. These latter works comprise the festival’s competition program,which awards the ten best entries with a one-month residency at the Academic FilmCenter. Viewed within the context of the festival’s retrospective programs – and thediscussions of them that follow here below – two works stood out for their bearingon the question of the medium-specificity of the filmic avant-garde, whosereluctance to part with the tropes of all things celluloid may be one of the reasonsfor its continued, or at least perceived, distinction from moving-image basedcontemporary art. Bolex Mon Amour (2012), by young Viennese artist DanielaZahlner, is simple, almost ingenuous, in its flirtation with the 16mm camera, but italso stands uneasily between a strangely upbeat swan song and a dreamyexhumation of this – in the artist’s own words – “beloved accessory and technicalplayground of avant-garde cinema.” The Bolex camera may be both “the muse andthe heroine” of this piece, but it assumes that role with more than a little ambiguity.

Daniela Zahlner: Bolex Mon Amour, 2012

On the other end of the spectrum, Rome-based duo Fabio Scacchioli (image) andVincenzo Core (sound) presented Miss Candace Hilligoss’s Flickering Halo (2011),a deeply Tscherkassky-esque flicker film extrapolated from Herk Harvey’s cultclassic Carnival of Souls. Like Tscherkassky, Scacchioli intervened into his sourcefilm to extract the far more abstract tale of “a girl lost in a movie,” in an operationthat circumvented the Austrian master’s punchier and more chaotic aesthetics toconstruct a near-liner commentary on the graphic motifs and patterns of Carnival ofSouls. Unlike Tscherkassy, however, he didn’t spend three years lasering, cuttingand collaging bits of celluloid, but used a digital editing suite to manipulate an .avidownloaded directly from the internet. A fact that further evidences some of theparadoxes in the relation between contemporary filmic experimentation and thecelluloid support that traditionally enabled and structured it.


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Here below, Nicolas Brulhart and Adeena Mey reflect on the significance of thefestival’s capacity to destabilize our Western-centric perspectives on the history ofthe audiovisual avant-garde and its traces in the present, while also affirminganother crucial and under-commented aspect of the institutional and discursivecontextualization of non-narrative cinema: namely, the productive resistance ofmany of these works to occupying a firm spot on the continuum between conceptualart and experimental filmmaking. Dirk de Bruyn instead examines, among otherthings, the messy confines between author and exhibitor, and the potent role ofself-reflexive curating in the contemporary presentation of long-archived works.

Not(e) on the Mapby Nicolas Brulhart and Adeena Mey

While the Palais de Tokyo in Paris saw the last days of East Side Stories, a programentirely devoted to contemporary Croatian videos, in Belgrade, a few miles west ofTokyo Japan, the Alternative Film/Video Festival reiterated its invitation to decenterour gaze from the Euro-American canons of experimental moving image practicesand their histories. Besides the official selection of experimental shorts, the festivalfeatured several, dense, programs of rarely screened films and videos from Serbia,Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary and more.

If historically, during the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, the East-West divisionwas assumed by artists themselves so as to enable appropriation of Westerninfluences and inscribe art practice within a modernist paradigm, a visit to AFV in2012 made a singular case for how one should go beyond simplistic discourses ofglobalization and homogenization. In this regard, what was particularly compellingwas the way the works presented at the festival easily straddled the art vs. filmdivide, evidencing a history of avant-garde practices less concerned with thismodernist distinction, so pivotal in the West. Indeed, what we got to see were filmsthat affirmed a blurred boundary between conceptual art activities and experimentalfilm.

This was well illustrated by the program devoted to the films of the Ljubljana-basedDavorin Marc, titled S Prstom v oko (With the finger in the eye). In a body of workwhich boasts around 150 8mm and 16mm films, Marc often appears as himself,among his friends, in situations that reside somewhere between the banality of dailylife and the kinds of feelings provoked by a suffering organism.


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Davorin Marc: Ne pozabi na kri, 1981

Tenderness appears as an answer to fatality as the process of the film in its makingreveals itself to the viewer. Indeed, what Marc seeks to address is the latter’scomplicity in the act of watching, while his modest creations are progressivelypenetrated by kinky puns, testifying to a subtle definition of the cinematic thatseemingly emerges out of nothingness. In such programs, which feature films thatare shot on celluloid and whose dates of production sometimes span over thirtyyears, discussing film by way of the dialectic of old and new media would not besatisfying (although the contemporaneity of such gestures certainly was an issuethat arose). The relevance of such works, presented in this precise context, seems toreside less in the articulation of a mediated relationship between media and viewer– leading to the latter’s dispossession – than in the establishment of a sense of directcontact: the actual stake, in these programs, seemed to lie in the possibility ofbuilding ephemeral communities.

Some of the intertwining, in independent filmmaking, between the aesthetic and thepolitical – which might indeed be where the contemporary relevance of shooting in8mm or 16mm lies today – was investigated by the Athens-based independentlaboratory LabA. Having already processed films throughout the Balkans in 2009,including a segment on a train between Sarajevo and Budapest, LabA founderVassily Bourikas and fellow Fanis Dalezios took residence at AFV to convene aSuper8 and 16mm workshop, setting up a DIY lab in a hidden room of the festival.

LabA processing workshop at AVF 2012 (photo Dirk de Bruyn)

With the exception of a few experienced filmmakers (David Kidman, Davorin Marc


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and Sebesteyen Kodolanyi), the lab was mostly attended by people who had noexperience in filmmaking: “They had never filmed, processed, edited or projected.”This resulted in a whole program on the last day of AFV. Yet, if the screening was“séanced,” it was also a means to exceed this very format. For instance, theaudience was asked to hold meters of reel, still in the process of drying, before itwas projected. The kind of activism advocated by Bourikas and LabA raises severalissues. First, if celluloid in the art world equates rarity of a medium with aneconomy based on the production of unique or serial commodities, without denyingthe increasing difficulty of working with actual film, what LabA’s methodologysuggested is that it is a medium open to the multiple productions of a community,without the need of traditional mediations. Also, against the division of laborimplied by the output of a conventional filmic event, LabA’s workshop andscreening managed to articulate a more horizontal model, which was actually onlyone crystallized moment in an open process. Moreover, developing celluloid on atrain and projecting in a station acted as a manifesto: no place is needed to makeand show films, thus opposing a logic of constant de-territorialization to theterritorialization of the art market and its spaces.

Finally, at the pace of 5 days a year, what AFV manages to do is to create suchsuspended temporalities. At a time when we are witnessing a renewed interest fromthe art world in experimental and avant-garde histories, as well as their(re)institutionalization, it invites us to reconsider their forgotten and grey zones.And by offering a space to present and discuss work that keeps challenging ourviewing habits, away from the more commodified sensible experiences of whitecubes, it is perhaps the potential for change ushered by the Avant-Gardes that isreactivated.

Two Artistsby Dirk de Bruyn

Slobodan Valentincic’s curated program, “Our Eyes are in Excellent Condition,”gleaned from his Slovenian OM Archive of 8mm, super 8 and 16mm films withsuch titles as “The Dislocated Third Eye Series,” surfs a gap between trauma andnirvana, myth-making and the present, speaking as much of our currenttechnological situation as the 1977-87 period spawning it.

OM produkcija

OM works exist only on film and the Archivist Valentincic turns each presentationinto a unique event, mediated by the quality of the projection equipment available.


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Though cloistered outside the digital the implication that each projection is differentsuggests or responds to digital’s ability for unending malleability, metamorphosisand permutation. If you wait long enough there is always another version.

Olaf Möller has noted “all these works are by Slobodan Valentincic: it is hard toimagine that even in large Yugoslavia, dozens of geniuses with fanciful nameswanted to make only one movie.” There is such a cohesive perceptual argumentregistered in this archive that each film as fragment slots into. It is this OM Archivethat is the cohesive whole. As the program notes point out: “The identities of theindividual members of the conglomerate remain shrouded in the haze ofunverifiable hearsay and innuendo.” The multiple personalities with whichValentincic has infused his archive puts Flora Schreiber’s Sybil (1973) to shame.

Is Valentincic’s fractured curatorial maneuver to be read philosophically andaesthetically, as commentary on a former Tito-led Yugoslavia? Does he performhere in aesthetic form the existential and political realities of living in itsself-contained fragments, of which Serbia is one?

What also registers in the shadow of Valentincic’s archival frame is the dramaticexplosion of digital and video works whose pervasiveness have brought the notionof the archive and curator to prominence. The true owner, compiler and editor ofpublic screens is now the curator, who claims processions of aspiring artists’ works,spitting back out long lists of winners and losers, discarded at will in everaccelerating cycles of ideas and style. In this situation Valentincic’s camouflagedoes enough to inoculate his oeuvre against such pedophilic madness.

The final moments of this program stay with me as Valentincic places himselfphysically up on the screen, framed inside of Dislocated Third Eye Series –Bismillah, by Sulejman Ferencak.

Slobodan Valentincic at the screening of Bismillah during AVF 2012

Dislocated Third Eye Series – Bismillah is a series of blurred, stretched andstreaking imagery, shot on super 8, in a mountainous landscape, the camerarepeatedly whirling like a dervisher, creating a compacted workingman’s version ofMichael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971).


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Whereas Snow moves from a point of surveillance and robotic mastery of hislandscape, Valentincic swims immersed, tossing and turning in a pre-dream state ofrapid eye movement. Now and then you see a tripod, a body jumping, thecameraman is spinning his tripod around like a shot-put that never takes off, with acamera at the end of it. You get such moments in surf movies, when the surfercrashes, bubbles and swirls all around inside the wave, with the surfboard glancedin a frame or two now and again. Bismillah sits inside a spinning top, a field oftension linking mobility and stasis. Dziga Vertov would be mesmerized. The bodyholds centre stage. The dance’s persistence communicates an artist on top of theirgame, pushing an envelope of technique completely new to me but strangelyfamiliar in its unerring commitment to a cinema from the margins, a cinema withoutcosts; a cinema for which you pay with your life. I respect the heart and mindunraveling this work and the invention of an unexpected marginal and slipperycorner of technique. What builds is an artist pushing the landscape, simultaneouslyshrugging it off and wrapping himself inside it. This unstable relationship isre-iterated by its screening framework, the OM archive as cocoon inside whichValentincic cloaks this work. Or, the other way around, the Bismillah’s cinematicblurs and streaks are the OM Archive’s “unverifiable hearsay and innuendo”performed and rendered materially present.


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Sulejman Ferencak: Bismillah, 1984

Layers inside layers, wheels within wheels, like the first locomotive, like the firstclock. Writing with the continuous movement of this blur, rush and haze is essentialto cinema’s birth, expressing those skills required to read the landscape out of themoving train. There are traces of such streaks in Robert Breer’s rotoscoped imagesin Fuji (1974), shot from a window inside a Japanese bullet train of the landscapeoutside. There it is a straight line, a metaphor of the mobility that technology brings.Here it is a circle, a point in the landscape. This difference reminds me of the story Iwas told after one of the festival’s screenings, about an 80-year-old Serbianintellectual who had lived in at least five different countries during his lifetime byremaining in the same house his whole life.

And in the end Valentincic nails himself to the screen, riding this film’s wave,reminding me of the legendary ghost ship, The Flying Dutchman, destined never tomake shore, with Valentincic tied to its mast. It too was a visual illusion, one thatsailors read as a portent of doom in the storm.

The Serbian film artist, Ljubomir Šimunic’s Pression (1970-1975), 24 min andGerdy, the Naughty Witch (1973-76) 16 min, shown on the final night of the festivalas part of a retrospective of his work, were both films that stayed with me. I can’tsay I haven’t seen such layered double and triple exposures before, bits of movies,faces, informal every day scenes and black and white cinema segments gleanedfrom the TV, street lights, neon signs sampled from city streets and other informalimages. In my city of Melbourne I usually saw such imagery at open screenings ofthe Melbourne super 8 group in the 80s. The musical soundtrack extracted frompopular culture was also familiar to me, part of my history of commercial radiolistening. It was the way the eye moved over these layers of movement that had itsown character and rhythm. A Situationist might refer to these films as recordingvisual dérives.

Ljubomir Šimunic: Pression, 1970-75

It interests me that these films were layered and structured on the run, edited in thecamera, a kind of stretched-out form of automatic writing, recording, tattooing thecity’s skin onto your own body. Šimunic was writing these songs in his camera over3-5 year periods and keeping this undeveloped work in his fridge over this time sothat the film would not spoil before processing. The habit of taking the camera outhad to be strong. This work resonates in other ways from merely recording the


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Spectacle as it is embedded in the Everyday from a different corner of the worldthan I am used to. Šimunic tattoos Beograd onto your eye, triggering your eyes tosing this archeology of fleeting gestures once again. Šimunic’s repetitive habitualgathering builds a performative history of the city, a compacted time capsulesampling daily life. He constructs and performs a way of seeing that the mobility ofthe city taxi-cab brought to everyday life. In these films Beograd’s city skinbecomes your skin.

Ljubomir Šimunic: Pression, 1970-75

Today the mobile phone and camera and the app explosion entices us all to becomeŠimunic’s in our cities, if only we had time. Such layering of imagery no longerrequires a taxi cab for speed-up or patience and an understanding for in-cameratechniques has metamorphosed into brand and shopping choice. The speed andmobility readily available in the flickering screens that pepper our cities creates apreponderance of what Vilem Flusser calls “Technical Images”:

“The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magicallyre-structuring our ‘reality’ and turning it into a ‘global image scenario.’ Essentiallythis is a question of ‘amnesia.’ Human beings forget that they created the images inorder to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decodethem, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned tohallucination.” (Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 10)

The recent history oozing out of Šimunic’s city films provide a welcome respitefrom Flusser’s amnesia.

Nichola Brulhart is a researcher at the University of Lausanne, and co-runner ofthe art space WallRiss in Fribourg.Adeena Mey is a critic and researcher at ECAL/Lausanne University of Art andDesign.Dirk de Bruyn teaches animation at Deakin University in Australia and has beenmaking experimental films for nearly 40 years.


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Festival Review - "Not(e) on the Map", Radical Tradition:30th Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade, Nero Magazine.

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