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Underground and in the Air: Musical Experiments in Yugoslavia

Screening on Film

Experimental, nonfiction and alternative film in Yugoslavia was, throughout its history, tightly imbricated with musical (sub)cultures, sonic playfulness, and deconstructions of image-sound relations of various kinds. This screening—the coda and closing salvo of last season’s The Yugoslav Junction—samples five radically eclectic instances in which sights and soundtracks in the SFRY (1962-1984) came into unexpected, explosive contact. With Justice, Ante Babaja’s early cartoonish farce, improvised free jazz (courtesy of the Zagreb Jazz Orchestra conducted by Anđelko Klobučar) chaperones and intensifies an otherwise whimsical street brawl. Music in Grožnjan, produced by Croatian state television and directed by one of the country’s most prolific documentarians, captures the aural ambience of an international summer school in the Istrian town of Grožnjan, in which classical music quite literally floats in the air. Delving underground, Olga Pajek’s stunning yet seldom projected Too Much is a student exercise that deploys suffocating chiaroscuro lensing to depict the ecstasy and anxiety of a throbbing basement punk club (the infamous Disco FV) in early 80s Ljubljana. Elsewhere that year, Juliana Terek and Miroslav Bata Petrović probed the interfaces of punk iconography and militarism with Personal Discipline, a haunting masterwork. At the same time, the enigmatic Sulejman Ferenčak—one of fifty members of the slippery production network OM, which concocted dozens of small-gauge gems in the late 70s and 80s—was more interested in the South African pianist-composer Abdullah Ibrahim, previously known as Dollar Brand. Against a repetitive trance-inducing loop of four carefully excerpted bars from “Ntsikana’s Bell” (1974, with Johnny Dyani), Ferenčak launches and spins his Super 8 tripod-attached camera in a methodical sequence of 360-degree rotations. Sky and earth are euphorically, deliriously transcended in what is not so much an homage to Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, but rather its spiritual detonation from within

PROGRAM

  • Justice (Pravda)

    Directed by Ante Babaja.
    Yugoslavia, 1962, 16mm, black & white, 12 min.
    Print source: HFA
  • Music in Grožnjan (Muzika u Grožnjanu)

    Directed by Eduard Galić.
    Yugoslavia, 1974, 35mm, color, 18 min.
    Print source: HFA
  • Too Much

    Directed by Olga Pajek.
    Yugoslavia, 1982, digital video, black & white, 9 min.
    Slovenian and English with English subtitles.
    Copy source: Academy of Theater, Radio, Film and Television Ljubljana
  • Personal Discipline (Lična disciplina)

    Directed by Juliana Terek and Miroslav Bata Petrović.
    Yugoslavia, 1982, digital video, color, 11 min.
    Copy source: Alternative Film Archive of Academic Film Center SCCC, Belgrade
  • Dislocated Third Eye Series III: Bismillah / In Four Movements / (Serija Dislocirano tretje oko III: Bismillah / v štirih stavkih /)

    Directed by Sulejman Ferenčak.
    Yugoslavia, 1984, 35mm, color, 29 min.
    Print source: Slovenian Cinematheque

Part of film series

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Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

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Theo Anthony, Subject to Review

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The Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World

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From the collection – Satyajit Ray