From 1972 to 1981, Boston’s WCVB-TV—an ABC affiliate then known for adventurous local programming—broadcast Screening Room, a late-night ninety-minute talk show hosted by filmmaker and Harvard anthropologist Robert Gardner. The format was conventional: each episode saw an independent, experimental or otherwise non-normative imagemaker seated next to the inquiring Gardner in a studio. The two would engage in a long, freewheeling discussion, often enveloped by clouds of cigarette smoke and interspersed with excerpts (or entire films) from the guest’s oeuvre. At times, the visiting artist was accompanied by a scholar, critic or translator, yet the norm was a pointed one-on-one conversation to the tune of formally intrepid films and videos rarely aired on North American network television before or since. To name examples of featured cineastes is to reiterate a Who’s Who of the post-War visionary canon: Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, Jan Lenica and Suzan Pitt, to look only at the show’s inaugural season. While the program’s viewership was anecdotally immense, few reliable measurements exist to evidence statements such as Gardner’s in an interview with Scott MacDonald: “At one point we did a survey and found that 250,000 people were watching ... The station didn’t really know who we were reaching, but we knew it had to be a younger crowd. I’m sure a lot of the movies were seen through a haze of marijuana smoke.” Scholar Brian L. Frye explains that “there is no hard data on audience size because the ratings services stopped operating at 1 a.m.” As if in an intentional, tactical effort to evade metricization and remain underground, Screening Room started at 1:05.

To supplement The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957-1988, four Screening Room episodes will stream online free of charge for the duration of the month-long series, November 9 to December 9. All with and about Yugoslav filmmakers spotlighted in the series, the selected shows are not the only instances of Gardner’s cinephilia looking eastward; a 1981 taping that may or may not have ever aired deliberated on the early works of Serbia’s Srđan Karanović, while HFA founding curator Vlada Petrić spent time in WCVB’s Needham studio at least three other times. Hungarian cinema and Polish animation were profiled in 1973 and 1980 respectively, as were documentarian Marian Marzyński and the aforementioned Lenica. Yet these are rare exceptions in what is otherwise an overwhelmingly American, Western lineup.