“The cinema has become synonymous with fiction. This is astoundingly obvious.”
Edgar Morin (2005: 75)
Slobodan Šijan is well known, both domestically and internationally, as the director of critically and publicly celebrated early-1980s Yugoslav black comedies, Ko to tamo peva? / Who’s Singin’ Over There? (1980, Yugoslavia) and Maratonci trče počasni krug / The Marathon Family (1982, Yugoslavia). In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he explored the cinematic potential of experimental film and of paracinema forms that transcend the habitual understanding of what constitutes a film. His single-page, double-sided fanzine called Film Leaflet, created and distributed monthly from 1976 to 1979, was conceived as a samizdat project of serial “paper movies.” Following ideas of the influential film critic and scriptwriter, Branko Vučičević (1998: 20-21) who introduced this term, the film theoretician Pavle Levi (2010, 2012) calls such combinations of text and image “cinema by other means.”1 The full set of 43 Film Leaflets was recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, and is now available to researchers.
This article focuses on Šijan’s Film Leaflet examining it as an alternative platform for propagating new critical experimental film practice and interdisciplinary explorations of the medium. Conceived as a platform for the free use of film history, mass media, and pop culture in critical practice, Šijan’s fanzine exercised direct appropriation—re-signification, re-combination, and re-production—of content from different media in order to articulate the new critical practice of thinking film.2 Following Levi’s concept of “cinema by other means,” I suggest that Šijan’s fanzine can be understood as 1) a ciné-dispositive for thinking film, and 2) a real, concrete, experiential form of the Yugoslav 1970s cinema apparatus (ciné-dispositif).3 The Yugoslav 1970s ciné-apparatus included a network of ciné-clubs, a number of film festivals of both mainstream and experimental film (such as the Genre Experimental Film Festival [GEFF] in Zagreb, the Interclub Authorial Amateur Film Festival [MAFAF] in Pula, and the Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival), state-funded institutions for producing, making, and distributing films, along with “individual authors, formal and informal networks, links with other spheres of arts, and in some cases even politics.”4 They all formed a particular “network of relations”—a network of discourses, practices, and institutions, reciprocally linked and governed by strategies of power within the 1970s socialist Yugoslavia—which I call the Yugoslav ciné-apparatus (dispositif). The ciné-dispositive, on the other hand, is understood as “the mechanism of a device, instrument or machine” which allows spectators to attend to a representation.
I argue that Šijan’s fanzine, as a ciné-dispositive for thinking film, is contingent upon the “schema, a dynamic play of relations” that articulates discourses and practices of its three basic elements: spectator, representation, and medium materiality. I examine the mutual relations between these three elements to both illuminate and critically assess the effects Šijan’s Film Leaflet aimed to produce. Such an alternative critical practice of thinking film represents not only an investigation into the material ontology of different reproductive media, but also extends the notion of fiction by investigating where the ontological levels of the media’s reproductive power and the human body (our physio-psycho-sociological actions) eventually convene. I demonstrate that Šijan’s radical practice of thinking film aims to harmonise the subject and the object, the internal and external rhythms of behaviour, and to bring the reality and the film onto the same ontological level, which may be called the cinefied matereality. Rather than engaging with a particular definition of fiction among the multiple existing ones, my paper aims to reflect on the nature of their diversity arguing instead that any definition or theory of fiction is a relational function of dispositive/dispositif.
Although conceived and printed during the late 1970s, Film Leaflet both reflected and embodied Šijan’s decade-long experience of living as an emerging artist in the increasingly westernised cultural milieu of socialist Yugoslavia.After graduating from the Fine Arts Academy in Belgrade, Šijan enrolled in Belgrade’s Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio, and Television in 1970 to study with Živojin Pavlović, a well-known Black Wave film director. In 1972, Šijan witnessed the reactionary reversal of the political climate of the film school triggered by the controversy surrounding Lazar Stojanović’s Plastični Isus / Plastic Jesus (1971, Yugoslavia). He graduated several years after the witch-hunt at the school settled down, at the time when artistic freedoms among filmmakers were drastically curtailed.5 Šijan’s art practice was inspired by diverse cultural phenomena, including the 1960s counterculture and psychedelic art, the idea of the “junkyard” promoted by Leonid Šejka (an established visual artist, writer, and founder of the Mediala group in Belgrade), and both American underground and Hollywood films. But Šijan was even more influenced by his close friendship with Tomislav Gotovac and the experimentation with time-based arts—photography/slides, video, film, and performance.6 These practices developed within the conceptual paradigm in experimental art, established within the framework of the Yugoslav New Art Practice of the 1960s and 1970s and promoted around the youth and student cultural centres in Novi Sad, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade.7
Šijan started Film Leaflet in 1976—“out of frustration” (Šijan 2009: 7)—as an intermediary step between his work with experimental films (from 1970 to 1976, he directed and assisted in the making of about twenty experimental and short films) and his first TV films, while trying to break into professional Yugoslav cinema. Influenced by the conceptual art and the New Art Practice that were emerging from the Student Cultural Center (SKC) Belgrade, Šijan’s Film Leaflet was a conflation of his work with the “time-based arts,” in a form that enabled him to combine his knowledge of visual art and cinema in a moment when he was moving from one to the other. He began his fanzine as a way to continue his painterly practice after he stopped making paintings and drawings and started Xerox copies of his graphic works:
Film Leaflet is a sort of “fanzine” or “do-it-yourself” newsletter, halfway between poor graphic and samizdat, created with the idea of making, once a month, a visual and textual statement about film, or related to film (conceived in the broadest possible sense). It was printed using whatever technology was available to me, on one A4 sheet, and distributed to friends and other people interested in film (Šijan 2009: 7).
Despite its small scale—the print run of the original leaflets ranged from 50 to 250 copies—the fanzine was ambitious in the range of issues it covered. From the start, it addressed the social potential of cinema as both a countercultural form and a practice promoting the free development of socialist culture. The first three leaflets, for example, propose a critical re-thinking of the history of both experimental and popular cinema in international as well as domestic contexts. Thus, the inaugural leaflet represents a reaction to George Maciunas’ December 1969 Diagram, in which the Fluxus artist offered his own classification of the newest trends in avant-garde cinema. Šijan adds to Maciunas’ classification the most important films made in 1963-64 by structural filmmakers Mihovil Pansini and Tomislav Gotovac, thus enhancing understanding of the Yugoslav “anti-film” movement in the wider context of Western avant-garde cinema.8 Leaflets 2 and 3 respond to domestic issues and represent Šijan’s reaction to the communist witch-hunt surrounding the Black Wave film movement.
Šijan’s fanzine displays and articulates a transition from understanding cinema as a subversive instrument for social change, characteristic for the Black Wave filmmakers, to seeing it as an instrument for critical inquiry into cultural reproduction. Many examples of Šijan’s fanzine show how they reflected and responded, both affirmatively and critically, to the practice of either revealing his penchant for mass culture, kitsch, and camp aesthetics, cinephilia and Americanophilia, or the reciprocal relation between his involvement with the State-funded cultural institutions (Yugoslav Cinémateque, SKC, Studentski Grad Film Club) and his Film Leaflet practices (selecting films and awarding authors), or his take on the movie star phenomenon.9
Šijan’s 1973 manifesto “Ho(l)lywood or Bust,” printed in 1976 as Leaflet 6, is emphatic in ascribing equal importance to both “experimental” or underground film and “commercial” Hollywood cinema, through an imagined discussion between Šijan and Andy Warhol (“Me: Hollywood is beautiful. Andy Warhol: Hollywood is beautiful. Me: Underground is beautiful. Andy Warhol: Underground is beautiful.”) that includes quotations from Jack Smith.10 “My taste at that time,” explains Šijan in 2009, “inclined towards extremes like underground and ‘trash.’ I could not stand the middle ground; those films which were here [in Yugoslavia] and all over the world considered great works. I loved esoteric, highly personal experiments or products of mass culture” (Šijan 2009: 7; translation modified).. Šijan’s work with a series of kitsch postcards, which has been instrumental in promoting the image of the consumption-centered “good life” in socialist Yugoslavia, perfectly illustrates his peculiar taste at the time.11
Furthermore, a number of Film Leaflets make unambiguous statements about the importance of American cinema for Šijan and subsequent generations of Yugoslav moviegoers.12 Šijan went on promoting American commercial cinema out of his belief that significant ideas are often born in the domain of popular culture.13 It is hard to overestimate the roles of cinephilia and Americanophilia in Šijan’s thinking about cinema.14 For example, the November and December issues of his Film Leaflet were conceived, respectively, as “official selections of film festivals” and awards to the experimental film authors or journals participating in the “competition.”15 The guiding concept behind the November and December issues of Film Leaflet resembles that of FEST, an annual international film festival in Belgrade established in 1971 to assess the films of the previous year. Nonetheless, these issues focus exclusively on the films distributed in cinemas and highlight what official awards ignored. With the introduction of the Film Leaflet Award, Šijan continued to recognise and promote Yugoslav experimental filmmakers and alternative film critics while mimicking a mainstream practice of the Yugoslav ciné-apparatus.
On the other hand, the most obvious and ubiquitous example of the cultural reproduction among the cinemagoers is the collective obsession with the movie-star phenomenon. Šijan states that it “is the main ingredient that makes up the seductive nature of mainstream cinema. The audience eagerly anticipates a chance to inhabit the image of their favourite ‘star,’ no matter which character they portray. […] The childish need to identify with the ‘stars’ and join the harmless adventure of the ‘imitation of life’ may be at the core of our fascination with cinema” (Šijan 2009: 226). Although Šijan saw the movie-star phenomenon as universal, the examples in Film Leaflet suggest again the dominant presence of American over other foreign cultures in Yugoslavia at the time.16
More importantly, Šijan’s approach to the phenomenon of stardom reflects his constant interrogation of the essence of cinema and its complex relationship to mimesis. This is best illustrated in Leaflet 41, featuring John Wayne (born Marion Morrison) in a well-known 1954 Camel tobacco advertisement, and its Hustler magazine parody which inserted a 1979 photo of Wayne, then dying from cancer, into the original ad. Taking its title from Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976, USA), Wayne’s last film, the Leaflet not only alludes to the iconic status that “the Duke,” as Wayne was called, had achieved during his fifty-year career in Hollywood, and the intriguing parallel between Wayne’s life and the life of his character in The Shootist. Both are aging and facing terminal cancer. An important difference, however, lies in their respective deaths: while the gunman in the film decides to die in a duel instead of in bed, John Wayne died from abdominal cancer three years after making the film. By referring to The Shootist as a film that fuses real life with “on-screen life,” Šijan’s leaflet turns Hustler’s tobacco ad parody into the vehicle for generating conceptually stimulating questions regarding the relationship between John Wayne’s cinematic and Marion Morrison’s lived life: Which part of his life was more palpable? What kind of life and what kind of death are registered on celluloid? What is the essence of cinema and its mimetic nature?
These questions remain a constant of Šijan’s engagement with cinema and, simultaneously, represent the springboard for his practice of thinking film. As his Film Manifesto (1972) states, lives on and off the screen are both real and have porous borders: “1. The truth of a film is not in simulating life but in the fact that it exists as a natural phenomenon. 2. Film is an extension of our behaviour and we can behave outward and inward” (Šijan 2010: 8). Not only does Šijan align with the preceding radical thought of general cinefication of reality, which considers reality as always a cinefied reality that is “thoroughly mediated by the all-subsuming dynamics of cinematography” (Levi 2012: 82), but he also comes close to Edgar Morin’s concept of cinema as the world with “double and syncretic nature, objective and subjective, […] the function and the functioning of the human mind in the world” (Morin 2005: 204). For both Morin and Šijan, cinema externalised the imaginary process: the dreams are projected and objectified in the external material reality by the means of cinema, by the machine (dispositive), while we simultaneously reabsorb them through the consumption of images and thus reintegrate the imaginary in the reality of our (human) mind.
Finally, Šijan sees The Shootist as “a magnificent essay about cinema” which grapples with the above questions and hints at possible answers: “‘On-screen life’ thus becomes as real as life off the screen since the conversation between James Stewart and Wayne’s character about the latter’s terminal disease in the film may belong to both worlds. This story about filming one’s death in order to conquer death through a film’s monumentality surpasses all other film stories, maybe because its hero is the greatest film star of all time” (Šijan 2009: 233). One of the most important qualities of fiction, according to Šijan, is inseparably connected with the human fear, courage, and desire to overcome our own mortality. Šijan recognised the task of conquering death by entering filmic reality as both a challenge and a venture of his future explorations of the film and its medium specificity.
It is as if our fascination with cinema, at the core of which lies our obsession and need to identify with the movie stars, prompts us to ponder “the possibility of directly entering the filmic reality,” which is, according to Levi (2012: 127), a key question that has persistently motivated Šijan’s work. Many issues of Film Leaflet tackle this question, starting from those that examine the limits of the medium of film, (Leaflet 4 and 11) to those that embody the so-called graphic-visual statements about the characteristic rhythms of shot progression in the films of renowned Hollywood directors (Leaflets 32-36), to those conceived as storyboards (Leaflet 8) or comic strips (Leaflets 12, 27 and 37), to those that conceptualise the act of watching films as a latent, continuous process of film creation (Leaflets 26 and 28).
As a ciné-dispositive for thinking film, Šijan’s fanzine is contingent upon the “schema, a dynamic play of relations” that articulates discourses and practices of its three basic elements with one another: spectator, representation, and medium materiality. The examination of mutual relations between these three helps illuminate the effects Film Leaflet aimed to produce.
Leaflet 37, “An Outline for the Cinema of Socialist Yugoslavia,” represents Šijan’s graphic-textual statement about the leaflet’s formal features, i.e. medium specificity. The leaflet is a reproduced page from a 1946 pioneer magazine featuring a storyline about a boy fighting on the side of “the people” during the Second World War and reproducing an ideologically proper narrative favoured in Yugoslav Partisan war spectacles. Yugoslav Partisan films, known as the Red Wave cinema, created a multilayered image of the enemy: German and Italian soldiers fit the category of the “foreign occupiers,” while the Ustashas and Chetniks fit the category of “domestic traitors.” Representation of Chetniks in Leaflet 37 resembles one of the most salient examples of this film genre, Veljko Bulajić’s Bitka na Neretvi / Battle of Neretva (1969, Yugoslavia), in which we see almost neutral Italians and bad Germans, along with the brutal Ustashas and almost demonically evil Chetniks. Such relativised treatment and gradation of the enemy can be explained in different ways. For example, the producers’ ambition to sell the film on various international markets very likely influenced the depiction of certain groups of enemies. Simultaneously, their portrayal, stressed especially in the longer version of the film that was made primarily for domestic consumption, can be explained with the notion of two different enemies, introduced by Susan Buck-Morss in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe. According to Buck-Morss (2002: 12, 31, 34) one is a normal, safe enemy which behaves as the enemy in its own imaginary terrain, while the other is the absolute enemy which represents the threat to a collective primarily in the ontological (rather than physical) sense, because it questions the very concept upon which the identity of the collective is formed. The absolute enemy becomes the symbol of the absolute evil, because they, in the ideological-ontological sense, so to speak, represent the absolute opposition to Yugoslav communists: the Ustashas, as ultra-nationalist fascists, and the Chetniks, as the representatives of monarchical capitalism. That is one of the reasons their demonisation had to be (and was) more prominent than the demonisation of the rest of the enemies.
Yet, it is the leaflet’s quality as a type of comic strip, which, according to the author, creates almost a “shocking mental experience as your mind struggles to switch back and forth from ideograms to words, which is the ideal effect that the Film Leaflet should cause” (Šijan 2009: 214; translation modified). As this example illustrates, the conceptual task of Šijan’s Film Leaflet series is to generate, by juxtaposing pictographs and text on the page, an effect on the reader’s perception that is similar to the one projected moving images have on their audience. Film Leaflets that resemble storyboards produce the similar effect. Following the principles of Fluxus and conceptual art, these storyboards are created as a series of research projects into the language, structure, and semiology of cinema that was practiced and realised by other means, to use Levi’s notion. Leaflet 8, for example, displays the visual facts of materialisation of the process of thinking film, by being formed of a collage of scribbled storyboard frames in the margins of the shooting script for Šijan’s first professional TV feature, Šta se dogodilo sa Filipom Preradovićem / What Happened to Filip Preradović (1976, Yugoslavia). Another example is Leaflet 28, made by putting together a drawing from 1973 and a strip of the photo-performances realised in the medium of photo-booth photography of Šijan himself. This Leaflet refers to George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (USA, 1951) and also registers immediately the physical presence of Šijan the artist and cinephile. Its storyboard quality, sequential narration, and collage juxtaposition turn it to yet another example of Šijan’s pervasive cinematic thinking about and with the phenomenon of cinefied reality.
This “shocking” effect is possible to achieve, however, only for those who allow themselves to experience it. It is the experience of film that allows for the effect of the Film Leaflet series to become operative. Šijan explains how one becomes initiated into this mental experience in his 1973 manifesto “Ho(l)lywood or Bust,” by quoting from Lazar Stojanović’s 1971 text “In memory of Spinoza”: “The experience of film is accessible only to the initiated… There is no way the uninitiated can be initiated except by voluntary permanent concentration on the search for film” (Stojanović 1971: 15; my emphasis). This is one of many informative quotes Šijan included in his 1973 manifesto. Another important quote in this manifesto is from the text on Leonid Šejka’s drawing “Intra Plus Extra”, which connects film to a “wedding,” while another section cites Gene Youngblood’s book Expanded Cinema (1970): “the objective and subjective become one.” Šijan combined both of these quotes in his earlier Film Manifesto (1972): “3. Film is a wedding: the object and the subject realise they are one” (Šijan 2010: 8), which is a variation of Tomislav Gotovac’s credo hinting at everyday reality having been thoroughly subordinated to cinephilia. Although Gotovac created his own experimental films characterised by their structuralist minimalism—whose importance in the international context Šijan acknowledged in the inaugural Leaflet— Gotovac’s main activity was related to cinephilia as experienced by a spectator. As his oft-used phrases “All is movie” or “As soon as I open my eyes in the morning, I see a film” suggest, Gotovac perceived everyday experience as film, and focused on the filmic way of thinking about art. It is not hard to recognise his influence on Šijan’s 1972 Film Manifesto, which asserts: “4. That is why making a film is watching a film and vice versa. 5. Anyone who knows how to watch a film also knows how to make one” (Šijan 2010: 8).17 The two manifestos from 1972 and 1973 are important for understanding Šijan’s cinematic credo, the effect of his Film Leaflet, and the experience of film that lay at the core of this radical praxis of thinking film.
Lazar Stojanović’s definition of “voluntary permanent concentration” resonates with that era’s discourse of contemporary psychedelic art in the Western Europe. Psychedelic art was inspired by psychedelic culture: sex, drugs, and Rock and Roll were the crux of an exciting counter-culture, with its magic realism and the spiritual climate of psychedelia aiming at “exciting one’s mind” (Timothy Leary). The experience of experimenting with psychoactive substances as stimulants for reaching these states of consciousness, along with music and Eastern philosophical, meditative, and religious practices, informed the psychedelic art that attracted many Yugoslav visual artists, including Šijan himself.18 “Those were the times,” as Nebojša Milenković (2013: 43) describes, connecting this culture to Šijan’s work, “of esoteric and pilgrim travels to India and Nepal to visit Buddhist gurus as spiritual interlocutors and teachers, who teach meditative techniques whose practice is necessary on the road of reaching higher states and forms of consciousness: therefore a whole series of Šijan’s work has as its central theme the guru presented in the meditation pose.”
Several works that Šijan made during the early 1970s, all represent meditation as “voluntary permanent concentration,” his so-called guru series concentrates on a search for chakras as energetic points.19 With their awakening, the transcendental journey into oneself begins. The best visual illustration of such concentrated perception is Šijan’s signature with which he started signing his artworks around the same time. Such a search succeeds in erasing the distinction between the inside and outside, the subjective and objective, thus initiating the practitioner into transcendental experience. The practicing of meditative technique that is necessary for reaching higher states of consciousness, I argue, perfectly illustrates the radical practice of “voluntary permanent concentration” that is necessary for initiation into the experience of film. Both are based on the transduction of concentration into perception, of a mental activity into a mental experience. It is as if the moviegoer becomes a practitioner of “meditative techniques” on the road towards reaching a complete experience of film.
The question of entering the filmic reality Šijan investigated primarily on the level of materiality, that is, the medium specificity of the spectator (body) and representation (audiovisual media). Visions of the inner cinema or the spectator’s own inner film can exist without the projection, but the film on a reel cannot function without an encounter with the spectator. The notion of the juncture between the viewer and the projection is necessary for understanding both the experience of film and the effect that Šijan’s Film Leaflet aims to create. This relation between the spectator and the representation is essentially a material relation: it must include the media specificity of both human body and the page (screen, skin). That is, it must encompass the “unique plane” of external materiality and interior realm of affects, while simultaneously erasing the distinction between the outside and inside, the objective and subjective, the cinemascope-fanzine and its consumer.20
Šijan’s visual experiments titled “Media Suicide”, for example, investigate the material ontology of different reproductive media. The project, which was aimed at exploring the boundaries of media that reproduce image and sound, was conceived as a series of “investigations” on 1. Photocopying; 2. Photography; 3. Sound; 4. Film; and 5. Video. Šijan describes the process of his research in the following way: “Imperfections of the reproductive media systems accumulate through successive reproduction of each subsequent reproduction, resulting in the complete self-exhaustion of media’s ability to reproduce” (Šijan 1977: 30). Artistic media are thus used as the means for inspecting their own formal and ontological characteristics while their limits are examined through self-annihilation.
Through investigating the possibilities of the auto destruction of media on a material level, Šijan demonstrates the disappearance of the distinction between the materiality of media and that of the human body. Only “Investigation No. 2” was reproduced as a separate Leaflet (Leaflet 11). Its front page is comprised of a series of experimental photographs, while the work process is explained at the back: “I photograph myself in the mirror. I photograph the photograph. I photograph a photograph of that photograph. I continue this way until the photo system self-destructs by accumulating errors resulting from its own imperfections, thus losing its own ability to record images” (Šijan 2009: 66; translation modified). The very nature of the photographic medium conditioned the narrative produced in its self-destruction: along with the disappearance of the representation on the formal level, the disappearance (symbolic death) of the author has been staged on the thematic level. In this way, the experiment demonstrates that the ontological levels of reality (a living person) and fiction (a representation of that person) eventually meet. In other words, the total exhaustion of the media’s reproductive power and the human mortality convene on the same ontological level.
The “Media Suicide” project prompts us to recognise the viewer/reader as “prosumer,” i.e., a reader/spectator who simultaneously acts as a consumer, producer, middleman, channel, and medium. The notion of the prosumer extends the existing definition of the reader/spectator, to whom Šijan assigns an importance equaling that of the author, and thus gestures towards the disappearance of the distinction between the inside and outside, the subjective and objective, as does the proper experience of film. Finally, materiality characteristic of both media and the prosumer is what enables the intersection of different ontological levels of fact and fiction, i.e. the possibility of physical entering the filmic reality. As Albéra and Tortajada (2015: 33) claim, the user-spectator (the prosumer) “is not placed in front of the dispositif; she or he literally belongs to it.” The physical entering the filmic reality is probably illustrated best in the “Investigation No. 4,” conducted in the medium of film and used as an ending to Šijan’s feature Maratonci trče počasni krug. The film ends with a scene of a 35mm film frame burnout in the projector gate, filmed from the large movie theatre screen with a 35mm camera using colour film. This material destruction of the frame’s surface is both a literal (self)-destruction of the image/representation and physical penetration into the film reality.
Šijan designed another project that tackles the same set of issues: “Project for a Family Film,” which he published as Leaflet 4. This Leaflet features pages from Šijan’s notebook with the following idea for an experimental film:
When a child is born, shoot one frame of its close up every single day, always framed the same way. You will need the camera designated only for the purpose of this film. When the child grows up, it may continue to photograph itself. After the person dies, its descendants or friends may photograph the last frame of the film. If technically feasible (shooting through the glass window of the coffin), filming may continue after the person's death until the flesh decays and only the bare bones of the skull remain.
When editing the film not one frame (day) should be left out in order to get an absolutely accurate record of Death in action.
If we suppose that the hero of the film may live 100 years, and the last frame will be recorded at the time of his/her death, than, projected at 24 fps, such film should last 25 minutes and 22 seconds (Šijan 2009: 26).
The case of the “Project for a Family Film” appears to be at the opposite end of the “Media Suicide” series. Namely, the final result of the “Media Suicide” project, regardless of whether it is an investigation of the medium of photocopy, photography, film, or video—is always the disappearance of the representation. This irreversible process of the successive reproduction of each subsequent reproduction increases entropy and stages the (symbolic) destruction of media that is, again, represented in and by the media. The “Project for a Family Film,” on the other hand, aims to create the cinematic representation of the medium of the human body: from the birth, growth, and development of a person, to his/her death and bodily decomposition. That is, the life-death trajectory of the human body, i.e. the literal destruction of the human body as a medium, would be captured on film as the representation of that medium. Despite their apparent oppositions, both projects end up with conceptually identical outcomes: the power of representation both captures and is captured by the total exhaustion (total entropy) of the medium’s reproductive power. Thus juxtaposed, the medium’s power of representation and the medium’s reproductive power reveal that even if they occupy the same ontological level, they may simultaneously function on different ones.
Taken as an analog for The Shootist, this insight transduces into the following: the lives off and on the screen are both functions of media, that is, of dispositive. This is what we learn from Šijan’s investigation of ontological limits of reality and fiction in which he explored the extreme cases revealing the points of their encounter. Šijan’s exploration of the material ontology of different reproductive media demonstrated that the very notion of fiction becomes contingent upon the dispositive that defines it through the system of relations between its constituent parts: spectator, representation, and medium materiality. The spectator belongs to the dispositive as its constituent part as long as they perform both participatory detachment (they never enter the action: at the very most they make gestures or signs) and affective participation (the filmic reality is affectively, but not practically lived through the projection-identification complex).21 One could say that any definition or theory of fiction is thus a relational function of dispositive/dispositif.
In order for a real experience of cinema to happen, Šijan writes in his 1973 manifesto “Ho(l)lywood or Bust” (Leaflet 6), it is required that the spectator focus simultaneously on the film’s rhythm (i.e., on the patterns of the film’s audiovisual movement) and on their own inner rhythm. According to Šijan (2009: 38), a film happens “only when we open all our entrance valves and let the images and sound coming from the screen flood in and rampage through our guts,” when we become aware of the meaning of each “vibration of sound and each movement of any grain of the emulsion, as the harmony of all these vibrations and moves, together with all meanings and messages, verbal and nonverbal, produce something that in touch with all vibrations and motions within ourselves gives birth to the film. If there is no such harmony, nor valves opened for it to happen, there is no film.”
The radical practice of thinking film aims to harmonise the subject and the object, the internal and external rhythms of behaviour, and to bring the reality and the film onto the same ontological level, which may be called the cinefied matereality. Šijan’s understanding of film, in this aspect, resembles Jean Epstein’s definition of photogénie as the automorphic space of encounter—at once imaginary and real—between complex motions of all things on screen and complex bodily affects within spectators. For Epstein, only cinema has the power to make subjects and the world meet through the phenomenal truth they share: automorphosis.22 So-called mediated experience is thus potentially more “real” than unmediated experience.
Šijan’s experiments materialised over several issues of the Film Leaflet, “In The Rhythm Of…” series of drawings, are the most successful illustration of this belief. Composed of a variety of hand-drawn dashes, lines, and dots meant to be cinematic graphs and diagrams, “In The Rhythm Of…” represents a series of graphic-visual statements which, as Levi (2012: 131) puts it, “sought to capture the characteristic rhythms of intra- and inter-shot progression” in the films of John Ford (Leaflet 32), Howard Hawks (Leaflet 33), Alfred Hitchcock (Leaflet 34), Vincente Minnelli (Leaflet 35), and Robert Altman (Leaflet 36).
The main focus of each Leaflet is not on the plots, but, rather, on Šijan’s effort to figure out the internal rhythms of their workings. One can find the roots of such artistic practice in Šijan’s experience of watching movies, which intensified when he met Tomislav Gotovac and became a regular visitor of the Yugoslav Cinematheque, a film museum and archive in Belgrade.23 There, instead of the content, what became key for them was their inner experience of each film. Gotovac described this inner rhythm, shaped by the manner of filming, framing, and developing of the narrative, by explaining that what is important is “not the content of the films, and not their genres, but the rhythm which every individual person brings, the lifeblood and breath which that person gives to each film. You feel that behind every film there stands—if the film is good—a person, who is, for example, nervous, who enjoys pans, tracking shots, who is keen on close-ups, who has a certain rhythm of cuts” (Trbuljak and Turković 2010: 78).
According to Levi (2012: 131), Šijan aimed to distill in each of these cine-rhythmic diagrams “some elementary information pertaining to the patterns of audiovisual movement in the works of the aforementioned film directors,” implying that “they might also be put to practical use” by applying Šijan’s “extrapolated matrices” to various aspects of reality itself: “The spectator-cum-become-filmmaker would thus find himself/herself in the midst of producing a ‘living cinema’ environment. That is, by endeavouring to activate some of Šijan’s Codes amid an array of everyday occurrences, the spectator would temporarily assume the task of ‘directing’ life in the rhythm of Howard Hawks, John Ford, or Alfred Hitchcock.”
One could argue that Šijan’s fanzine was a Yugoslav 1970s ciné-dispositive aimed at turning the reader/spectator into a self-producer. As such, it resembled other critical-art projects, which showed that Yugoslav socialist culture was conceived only on the institutional margins as “performative self-production.”24 One could also argue that the effect that 1970s Yugoslav socialism produced through practices of cultural reproduction may have enabled the experience of ordinary life, the so-called “Yugoslav Dream,” to resemble the experience of living in cinefied matereality. Šijan’s ciné-dispositive thus reflected the Yugoslav ciné-apparatus (dispositif) both affirmatively and critically.25 Just as Yugoslav cultural institutions (SKC, Cinematheque) invited Šijan to experience being “alone in the cinemascope,”26 so did his fanzine invite the consumer of cinema to be “alone in the ciné-dispositive”— both the cultural institutions and his alternative ciné-zine functioning as spaces that shape our behaviour. And just as Šijan the moviegoer became a prosumer (a productive cinema programmer and visual artist around these institutions), so the consumer of his fanzine had a chance to apply the automorphic framework of thinking film to his/her experience of living in Yugoslav hybrid socialist-capitalist reality.
Šijan’s Film Leaflet (1976-1979) emerged as a form of “praxis of radical amateurism,” to use Aldo Milohnić’s (2012: 4) definition, which established a “new language” of film thought and production outside the dominant models, using the resources within State-funded institutions (Yugoslav Cinématheque, SKC, Studentski Grad Film Club). Forged in an environment of the hybridisation of the arts, within a network in which official and alternative cultures coalesced, and through the practices of cinema-going and programming, Šijan’s ciné-dispositive emerged as a self-referential hypertext of radical amateurism that both developed thinking film as a critical practice and introduced the critical inquiry into the cultural reproduction within the late 1970s Yugoslav socialism.
Aleksandar Bošković
Columbia University
aleksandar.boskovic@columbia.edu
I would like to thank Slobodan Šijan for his generous assistance with the materials and helpful suggestions on final drafts of this article.
1 In his book of the same title, Levi argues that the art forms that fall into this category are not made “under the influence of, or referring to, the cinema.” Rather, they conceptualise the cinema “as itself a type of practice that, since the invention of the film apparatus, has also (simultaneously) had a history of execution through other, ‘older’ artistic media” (Levi 2012: 27). These art forms tend to create an alternative cinematographic apparatus by circumventing existing technological apparatus (photo camera and cinematograph). They “oppose normativisation and technological reification of the apparatus by inviting the process of its infinite re-materialization” (Levi 2010: 56).
2 The phrase “thinking film” deliberately sounds grammatically awkward to reflect its equally incorrect form in the original (“misliti film”). In both Serbo-Croatian and English the phrase temporarily changes the intransitive verb into a transitive, thus transgressing its relation to the object and dispersing its existing meaning into a network of connotations (expressed by transitive verbs such as “to consider, assume, imagine, conceptualize, hold, picture, project,” etc.). As a result, the passive process of contemplation (thinking about cinema) transforms into a more active process that, paradoxically, has no subject and in which the action passes over to an object (thinking film).
3 Taking my cue from Françis Albéra and Maria Tortajada’s discussion of dispositif, I follow Ruggero Eugeni’s definition of “dispositive” and “apparatus” as two different and connected concepts to which the French term “dispositif” refers. See Albéra and Tortajada (2015: 21) and Eugeni (2017).
4 “The cinema clubs, for example, provided opportunities for avant-garde experimenting, for self-organisation in the spirit of socialist self-management; and for a certain form of political engagement, film festivals offered insight into wider local and international film production, and the networks enabled the circulation of ideas, people, and knowledge” (Piškur, Janevski, Meden, and Vuković 2010: 12).
5 Šijan describes this state of affairs in his commentary to the Film Leaflet: “The purges at the Film School continued with undiminished intensity until Aleksandar Petrović was fired and Živojin Pavlović transferred to the post of teaching aides custodian. […] The witch-hunt expanded beyond the School, forcing Dušan Makavejev to leave the country. Lazar Stojanović was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison, which he served almost in full, for a graduation film that was never publicly shown” (Šijan 2009: 150).
6 For more on his friendship with Gotovac and his influence on Šijan, see Šijan (2018).
7 Ješa Denegri, one of the central figures in historicising and theorising Yugoslav experimental art, introduced the term “new artistic practice”. He took the term from Catherine Millet after her visit to Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade in 1971 to install two exhibitions, and first used it in the catalogue of the exhibition New Artistic Practice 1966-1978, organized in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1978. See Denegri (1978: 11).
8 For more on Yugoslav “anti-film” see Jovanović (2008) and Janevski (2010, especially 19-23; 223-242).
9 According to Šijan, some Leaflets - especially after Leaflet 8- were realised with the technical assistance of the SKC, and printed with silk-screen and mimeograph.
10 Šijan quotes Jack Smith’s “The Perfect Film Appositeness of Maria Montez,” published in the journal Film Culture: “Eventually someone is going to make a so-called underground movie that will revive Hollywood” (Šijan 2009: 38). Šijan’s professor in the Film Academy in Belgrade Dušan Stojanović accepted this unconventional essay, which would later become a leaflet, as a seminar paper for his course Theory of Film. See Šijan (2009: 36).
11 Leaflet 29, titled “Kitsch Biography,” features a straightforward narrative characterized by kitsch’s aesthetic of denial, which transforms disgust into universal approval and thus ignores all that is difficult about life. Šijan experimented with photocopying the original “Technicolor” postcards in order to achieve the same effect as the domestic kitsch quality of Yugoslav pulp magazines, such as in Leaflet 13 that gave colourful postcards a black and white, dirty “underground” quality reminiscent of “trash” and “camp” aesthetics. According to Šijan, some postcards were of Yugoslav production, such as “Foto Banek,” but the majority were made in Germany or other western European countries and sold in Yugoslavia.
12 Leaflet 9 features the famous list drawn up by the French filmmaker Jean Pierre Melville, which served as a guide for Šijan through the jungle of American cinema. Šijan organised a retrospective at Yugoslav Cinematheque featuring a number of titles from the list. He reproduced the program of the retrospective as Leaflet 16, titled “Hollywood ’30s,” with Mae West in the centre of the leaflet as she appears in a scene of Leo McCarey’s film Belle of the Nineties (1934, USA). In a similar gesture of appreciation for American film, Leaflet 21 praises the “new sentimentality” of New American Cinema, providing a list of relevant American films made between 1967 and 1977, starting with Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967, USA). Penn’s film was the most watched film in Yugoslavia in 1968; it influenced different aspects of everyday life and popular culture there. See Vučetić (2018: 55-56).
13 Hence the three leaflets endorsing American B movies: Leaflet 10 featuring Šijan’s essay on the film Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarifian, 1971, USA), published in the brochure for the retrospective of director Richard Sarifian that Šijan organized at the SKC Belgrade in March 1977; Leaflet 24 representing Šijan’s essay about the Hollywood film director Richard Fleischer, printed in the brochure for the retrospective of Fleischer’s films at the SKC in April 1978; Leaflet 42 promoting Šijan’s unpublished essay about Richard T. Heffron’s film Trackdown (1976, USA), in which Šijan articulates that B-movies offer something that Yugoslav socialism suppressed for fear of spreading violence among the youth. See Šijan (1978, 1978b).
14 Šijan found a guide for his exploration of American cinema and practice of cinema-going in an important figure in the early interwar Yugoslav ciné-apparatus, Boško Tokin, coauthor of “The Zenithist Manifesto” (1921). Tokin was one of the first Yugoslav cinephiles to write about American film in the 1920s. Leaflet 5 features several of Tokin’s ciné-poems, accompanied by a short handwritten note from Šijan on his work, acknowledging the latter’s unsuccessful co-directorial venture with the Yugoslav Dadaist Dragan Aleksić, their unfinished and lost 1924 avant-garde film.
15 At the end of 1976, Šijan came up with the idea that the December issue for each year would present a Top 10 list of the best foreign films shown in Yugoslav movie theaters and, more importantly, announce that year’s Yugoslav winner of the Film Leaflet Award. At the same time, Šijan proposed that the Film Leaflet Award winner would earn the right to publish his/her work in the next year’s November issue of the fanzine.
16 There are several Leaflets addressing this phenomenon, starting with the Leaflet made in response to Elvis Presley’s death in 1977 to Leaflet 25, which is a collage of mostly worker “movie stars” who were the actors in Šijan’s feature for television, Najlepša soba / The Most Beautiful Room (1978, Yugoslavia) to Leaflet 40, which features a postcard with a glamour shot of Tony Curtis and on which Šijan, as a teenager, replaced the actor’s name with his own. Several years later, Šijan “recognized” this postcard as an “artwork” in order to make an ironic commentary on the power of the star phenomenon and his early infatuation with it—the self-ironic gesture re-signifying the simple postcard of a movie star into a conceptual artwork.
17 In his conversation with Šijan in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Pavle Levi was the first to notice that what one finds in Šijan’s Film manifesto (1972) is a variation on Gotovac’s often-used phrases, and concluded: “This means that reality itself is perceived as always already cinematic, cinefied, and writing, drawing, a music score could in different ways depict that omnipresence of cinema” (Šijan 2010: 14). For more on Gotovac, his ideas, work, and friendship with Šijan, see also Janevski (2010: 36-37; 72-93), Levi (2012: 127), and, most importantly, Šijan (2018).
18 “Part of that counterculture, based on leaving the existing codes and conventions, were the then very popular (hitch-hiking) travels—so that the largest part of Šijan’s psychedelic works was made during his hitch-hiking trips around Europe in 1968 and 1969” (Milenković 2013: 41).
19 These work include: Epic / Ep (1970); Oath / Zavet (1970); Big Guru / Veliki guru (1972); Guru 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 / Guru 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 (1973); Meditation 1 / Meditacija 1 (1973).
20 These ideas, which Šijan takes from different sources, echo Jean Epstein’s holism, “the unique plane” uniting bodies, minds, and objects with a clear Spinozist intent (Epstein’s photogenie), as well as the Kantian dream of the exterior material manifold fitted to the interior realm of the human—what Kant calls “the schema”. For more, see Wall-Romana (2013: 122-123).
21 For more on the notion “projection-identification complex” as affective participation, see Morin (2005: 87-93).
22 Automorphosis is “a new term needed to denote the autonomous transformation of moving images.” It occurs naturally (growth of living beings, the autonomous malleability of streaming water, clouds, smoke, etc; the motion of flocks or schools or crowds of animals and humans), but the “cinema is the first artificial form of automorphosis” (Wall-Romana 2013: 377n34; see also: Keller and Paul 2012).
23 The Yugoslav Cinematheque was the most important physical space where the juncture of film reels and cineastes took place in 1970s Belgrade. Its visitors could enjoy the same experience as cinemagoers in Paris or New York—that is, consume un-dubbed original films, for less than the price of a cup of coffee, “which was the cheapest thing one could enjoy” (Šijan 2010: 62). The poor material conditions of the museum’s theatre in particular (its wobbly and uncomfortable seats, chipped and cracked walls, etc.) inspired Šijan to create Leaflet 12, a collage comprised of frames from Alan Ford (1969-), an Italian comic book series popular in the former Yugoslavia (Šijan 2009:70). For more about the Alan Ford and its popularity in Yugoslavia see (Džamić 2018). For the link between Alan Ford and Šijan’s second feature film, see Džamić (2018: 209-224).
24 In these projects, such as October 75 in Belgrade SKC, the “line between the producer and consumer of art is erased” and the consequences of socialist self-management are radicalized. See Vesić (2012: 30-53).
25 Historian Patrick Patterson (2010: 367) defines “Yugoslav Dream” as “a Yugoslav version of the Good Life, a modest and moderated but nonetheless satisfying approximation of the consumption-driven abundance that had remade the capitalist West in the years after the Second World War.”
26 “Alone in the Cinemascope” is a phrase from Šijan’s “Ho(l)lywood, or Bust.”
Aleksandar Bošković is a Lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade, 2008) and a number of articles dealing with issues of cultural memory and avant-garde photobooks, and a co-editor (with Tatjana Aleksić) of Mediated Resistance: The Struggle of Independent Mediascapes During the Yugoslav Dissolution (forthcoming at Brill, 2019). He is currently working on several projects, including the anthology of Yugoslav avant-garde “Biblioteka Zenith” editions (with Steven Teref) and the book manuscript, Slavic Avant-Garde Cinépoetry, a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration of interwar photopoetry and bioscopic books within Slavic avant-gardes.
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URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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