“A film is nothing else but the collection of your horrors,” asserted Dusan Makavejev, irreverent doyen of film in Yugoslavia and a 1977-1978 visiting lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. During his stay on campus, Makavejev taught a course alluringly named “Compressed Cinema,” consisting mostly of “viewing a ninety-minute feature film in thirty minutes by projecting each of its three reels side-by-side simultaneously.” He also devised an analytic-pedagogic avant-garde film. The “Ingmar Bergman Dream Film Experiment” (referred to by Mak and his assistant Matthew Duda as “Bergman’s Non-Verbal Sequences”) was spawned to complement the international “Bergman and Dreams” symposium, convened in the Carpenter Center auditorium in January 1978. The work’s serial anatomy is simple enough, as the artist-teacher-archivist-compiler recounts: “I collected non-verbal sequences from Bergman’s films: Persona, Wild Strawberries, all kinds of films. I had something like seventeen clips [nineteen to be exact] and I tried to organize them into a one-hour Bergman film that Bergman never made. It was clips from his films, but it was all him. I didn’t do anything. I just found some order. We made a three-screen presentation, with black-and-white dreams in the middle and then two screens in color after half an hour, but without words. There was a world appearing when you collected the clips and put them in order. Suddenly there was something going from sequence to sequence … I think I managed to get something that would look like a dream you can’t explain. The response was very interesting: there was a big silence. People would not dare to discuss it. It was a fantastic response.” In the audience at the experiment’s sole performance was Stanley Cavell, who later reflected on the oneiric collective experience (as well as on the three-minute silence that followed) in a vivacious article. Thirty-five years later, researcher Katarina Mihailovic sharply unpacked the project’s historico-conceptual layers, while film scholar Tanja Vrvilo recreated it digitally at a workshop in Sarajevo. The half-hour copy exhibited here is what remains of Makavejev’s surrealist power-blending of Bergman in the Harvard Film Archive vault.

The aphasic hypnagogic collage is followed by another video essay avant la lettre—this one also envisioned locally. Vlada Petric, the Yugoslav-born Henry Luce Chair of Cinema and HFA co-founder (alongside Cavell and documentarian Robert Gardner), was also a productive, multifarious filmmaker. Among his strongest yet least-discussed pieces is Light-Play: A Tribute to Moholy-Nagy. In the dearth of secondary accounts, our best decoder of the film is Petric himself. “This experimental film is a Constructivist realization in the literal sense of the term: it represents a montage deconstruction/reconstruction of the original short film constructed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Germany, and based on his kinetic sculpture Light Modulator [preserved at the Harvard Art Museums and to this day still operational], which he made with the intention of using as the subject of the film Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz, Weiss, Grau (1930), an extraordinary cinematic exemplification of his concept of ‘building an art-object of different pieces through a preconceived mathematical pattern.’ The original film consists of only forty-nine shots (many of them with multiple exposure), mostly close-ups of the rotating modulator which, under strong light and continuous motion, produces intricate optical effects on the screen. Fascinated by such visual dynamism, I undertook research to find more data related to Moholy-Nagy’s ideas about photography and cinema, and was surprised to learn that his concepts evoke Dziga Vertov’s ‘theory of Intervals,’ as well as his revolutionary idea of kinesthetic resolution (i.e., the cinema’s unique capacity to stimulate in the viewer motor-sensory responses through various kinds of movements occurring on the screen). With this in mind, I began to devise a strategy for re-editing Moholy-Nagy’s film by applying to it Vertov’s montage principles in an aggressive manner, while at the same time following Moholy-Nagy’s ‘pattern of three’ carried out in the modulator’s construction.”

In his completist cinephagia (“all the original forty-nine shots were recycled in their entirety, including dissolves as well as black and transparent frames”), Petrić was characteristically playful yet surgically precise: “To begin, I made a negative print of Moholy-Nagy’s film which for me represented white, and a high-contrast print which represented black, while the original print represented gray. My assistant Jim Lane and I began to edit the three prints from the tail, beginning with the last shot of Moholy-Nagy’s original film, and thereby corroborating his claim that for an abstract film it is irrelevant whether projected forward or backward!” The film was completed in May 1988, after eight years of arduous computer-aided editing. Hardly ever screened since its inception, Petric’s 1285-shot cine-analytic jewel will soon be distributed by the Belgrade-based Kinopravda Institute.

To catalyze our unpacking of these works, the screening will be followed by a conversation with Pavle Levi, Department Chair and Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts at Stanford University.