“The potential of film history in its cut-up form remains an open possibility,” writes Catherine Russell in her recent Archiveology, a monograph on reuse, recycling and borrowing in avant-garde and documentary film. “Images and sounds are recordings that engage the senses, documents that are mysterious and secretive until their energies are released in flashes of recognition. Moving image artists are those who create these sparks, which only occur in the presence of the viewer.” Rarely has a cinema hijacked, pirated, embezzled and diverted already-existing cinematic and televisual streams as spiritedly as alternative, amateur and non-normative filmmaking in Yugoslavia. Rarely has a cinema ignited as many sparks—or what Pavle Levi via Makavejev calls jolts—as in the abundant state-endowed “kino klubs” that developed under Tito in the late 1950s and 60s. Not all of the eight chosen works originate from that influential institutional context: Ljubomir Simunic (an “outsider’s outsider”) embroidered his 8mm multiple-exposure extravaganzas independently, without the aid of formal organizations, while Davorin Marc’s sublime meta-punk firecracker Fear in the City was made in 1984 (at the age of twenty) as ciné clubs and indeed the SFRY itself were on the decline. Marc’s film has recently been restored and digitized by the Slovenian Cinematheque. Yet all the shorts are united in their risky but never reckless—spectacular yet always smart and thoughtful—use of (foreign) iconographies, citations and aesthetico-historic references in ways that constitute neither uncomplicated political critique nor myopic consumerist adoration. In radical (and radically different) formal modes, they tune into, quote, lift, absorb and détourn international(ist) trajectories of film not just to “carry the principle of montage into history,” as Walter Benjamin put it in the Arcades Project, but “to grasp the construction of history as such.”

“The only way to subvert or challenge the world of images that we inhabit is from within that world,” continues Russell. “The apparatus conceals ‘productive forces’ that can be redirected and restaged … Insofar as we live in the society of the spectacle with no way out, we need to reuse the remnants of past image cultures in order to better conceptualize the future.” Yugoslav cineastes took Russell’s suggestion to heart, from Erna Banovac’s eco-apocalyptic found-footage premonition (the author’s sole surviving film, made under the hugely patriarchal auspices of Kino Klub Beograd when she was eighteen) to Ljubisa Grlic’s Reindeer, Dear Reindeer, a hypnotic quasi-readymade of which the filmmaker-scientist left no account. Grlic’s opaque objet provocateur, as experimental cinema expert Petra Belc describes it, is in all likelihood a structural piece of re-photography (appropriating Norman McLaren) with a voiceover pulled from a television nature show; the copy playing at Harvard is a brand-new digital restoration. With Straight Line—the opener of film-multimedia performer-extraordinaire Tomislav Gotovac’s “Belgrade trilogy”—we ride on board a street train as it tracks down Revolution Boulevard in the direction of homage. The film is an avowed, direct tribute both to the titular George Stevens and Duke Ellington, as well as to the implicit yet nonetheless vividly felt legacy of early train-affixed and technomobility-fixated cinema. (If the Lumières had the audacity and tech to mount their Cinématographe in the locomotive’s front instead of on a platform tripod, Straight Line would have been the result.) The program’s subdued first half wraps up with Nocturne, Vasko Pregelj’s arcanely powerful assemblage of newspaper excerpts, superimposition and death. 

The mood about-faces suddenly with Tatjana Dunja Ivanisevic, whose zappy Woman (Yugoslavia’s earliest example of feminist cinema according to most accounts) shares Pregelj’s enchantment with song, photography, and the printed word, yet retains none of his somber haute metaphysics. Ivanišević luxuriates in John Lennon’s cover of “Stand By Me” and the proto-funk anthem “Funky Broadway,” playing them from vinyl LPs while lounging in bed. Attention then shifts to Gerdy; its unwieldy, entrancing combustion of innumerable micro-samples—recorded over the course of years and edited in-camera—needs to be experienced to be (dis)believed. Film critic Neil Young, a Simunic superfan, notices Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974), Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966), and a Tina Turner variety broadcast among Simunic’s sources, while the narcotic audioscape by Aphrodite’s Child is unmistakable. Last Tango in Paris sustains the cinephilic line by filming and double-filming cathected moments from Bertolucci’s erotic classic, replacing Marlon Brando’s singular mumble with that of Jim Morrison. Approaching (and in the same gesture exceeding) the aesthetic conventions of video art, Fear in the City completes our media-historic diagram. From newspapers, magazines, and other print media to photography, cinema, television and ultimately video, Yugoslav film’s engagements with international sights and sounds are rich. Let this chronological trip into and out of the flow work as a potion—a psychoactive cruise of Benjaminian “shocks” and Makavejevan “jolts,” “no matter what the outcome.”