YUGOSLAV STRUCTURALISM
Organized by Greg de Cuir Jr. in attendance from Belgrade, Serbia
Thursday November 8 | 7:30PM
Capitol Theatre | 121 University Ave West, Windsor
Retrospective screening 1963-1984
You might be forgiven for believing that structural-materialist film is strictly a North American and Western European phenomenon. The canon has fortified itself over the decades, primarily through the activities of conservative writers and curators. This screening program lays siege with a selection of films that testify to the pioneering conceptual work taking shape in Socialist Yugoslavia from the 1960s through the 1980s.
The principles of structuralism in film were incubated at an early stage in Yugoslavia, as kino culture was very advanced, no doubt owing something to the radical principles of self-management in culture and non-alignment in geopolitics that helped the country forge its own independent path. The film artists that this program introduces were aware of and influenced by this nascent Western aesthetic, but likewise uncovered their own routes to realizing a moving image avant-garde. If many of these brilliant works have been lost in the seams of film history, it is because we have not shifted our own perspectives. Imagine an international structuralism, free of hierarchies and received wisdoms. And then allow these Yugoslav objectifs to trace those inner shapes and outer boundaries while simultaneously exceeding them.
YUGOSLAV STRUCTURALISM
K3 ili čisto nebo bez oblaka / K3 Clear Sky Without Clouds
Mihovil Pansini, 3 min, 1963
Inventur-Metzstrasse 11 / Inventory
Želimir Žilnik, 9 min, 1975
Putovanje / Journey
Bojana Vujanović, 2 min, 1972
Kružnica / Circle
Tomislav Gotovac, 9 min, 1964
Praznik / Holiday
Bojan Jovanović, 11 min, 1983
Pravac / Straight Line
Tomislav Gotovac, 1964, 7 min
Ugrizni me. Že enkrat. / Bite me. Once already.
Davorin Marc, 2 min, 1978-1980
sfaĩra 1985 – 1895 / sphere 1985 – 1895
Ivan Ladislav Galeta, 10 min, 1984
Greg de Cuir Jr. (Los Angeles, CA). Studies at the University of Arts Belgrade. Selector for Alternative Film/Video (Belgrade); screenings and exhibitions at The National Gallery of Art (Washington), ICA (London), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington), Los Angeles Filmforum, Slovenian Kinoteka (Ljubljana), Flaherty Seminar (New York), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque), etc. Author of Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema in Socialist Yugoslavia (2011). Current Managing Editor of the book series Eastern European Screen Cultures and the journal NECSUS. Co-translator of Tomislav Gotovac: Life as a Film Experiment (2018). Lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia as a curator, writer and translator.