new media center_kuda.org

Podcast Series Past • An Introduction to the Problem

 

This series brings together conversations addressing questions that are central to Peripheral Visions and Past • An Introduction to the Problem. Held over a period that now exceeds a decade,  the conversations have gathered insights from a variety of hopeful contributors to a trans(l)national publishing culture. Bringing together artists, scholars, activists, editors, curators, and administrators, these participants examine what constitutes a periphery and what kind of culture it can generate. From the aftermath of state socialism and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, these conversations think about culture as one the structures that kept it in place: they consider what materials we can use now to know a place that no longer exists and how we can translate them for new readers of that past.

 

1. The Case Study of NEOPLANTA FILM Production Company, Novi Sad

NEOPLANTA FILM was a production company based in Novi Sad that had a crucial role in starting the careers of Želimir Žilnik and other young filmmakers in the 1960s. It was founded by decree, in September 1966, by the Assembly of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, to build on the practice of amateur Cinema Clubs operating throughout Yugoslavia. 1971 saw a turning point in company management when a political decision changed the production climate, radically deviating from previous practice. NEOPLANTA FILM was shut down by political decision in 1986.
Panelists: Zoran Pantelić, artist and editor kuda.org, Novi Sad; Želimir Žilnik, film director Novi Sad; Karpo Aćimović Godina, film director, Ljubljana; Stevan Vuković, film critic and philosopher, Belgrade; Petar Latinović, cameraman, producer, Novi Sad; Srdjan Ilić, producer, Novi Sad; Prvoslav Marić, film director, Novi Sad.

This episode draws on documentation from a public talk organized, recorded, and archived by kuda.org as well as the following sources:
- Public talk Želimir Žilnik in Conversation with Karpo Aćimović-Godina, moderated by Sabina Sabolović (WHW, Vienna/Zagreb) and Jurij Meden (Austrian Film Museum, Vienna), on the occasion of the exhibition 'Shadow Citizens' in Kusthalle Wien, 2021
- Public talk from the project 'Omitted History' produced by kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2011
- Film footage used from the archives of NFC Kino klub Novi Sad
- Documentary film "Short film about cinema enthusiasm", director Filip Markovinović, Mafin production of audio-visual products Novi Sad, 2019

Duration: 38:49

 

2. Social and Political Contexts of Cultural Production in Socialist Yugoslavia

A panel of scholars and artists gathered in 2005 to discuss the contexts and conditions of possibility for cultural production in socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1991), including historical and political pressures on artists and administrators.
The past is no longer where it used to be. It is no longer behind us as one dimension of time continuous with the present in which we live or the future that is ahead of us. Past is not even what it once had been. Today it is a cultural rather than temporal category.
Boris Buden, Past • An Introduction to the Problem, 24

This public event was organized, recorded, and archived by kuda.org.
Panelists: Latinka Perović, historian and politician, Belgrade; Lazar Stojanović film director, Belgrade; Želimir Žilnik, film director, Novi Sad.

Duration: 33:22

 

3. Modalities and Practices of Cultural Censorship in Film Production

This understanding also ascribes censorship—and in its exclusive sense—to an experience strictly delimited in space and time, to the experience of so-called historical communism located in the space we now very generally call the East, referring to Eastern Europe, that is the space of formerly actually-existing socialism, including Yugoslavia. It goes without saying that this precise locating of censorship in the past of the East implicitly assumes that the democratic, capitalist West has had nothing to do with this experience, not today and not yesterday. The forgetting of censorship, or rather its denial, thus becomes one of the ideological presuppositions of the memory of that censorship.
Boris Buden, Past • An Introduction to the Problem, 67

This episode draws on documentation from a public talk organized, recorded, and archived by kuda.org as well as the following sources:
- Public talk from the project 'Omitted History' produced by kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2011. Panelists: Stevan Vuković, film critic and philosopher, Belgrade; Želimir Žilnik, film director, Novi Sad; Nebojša Popov, sociologist, Zrenjanin.
- Public talk Želimir Žilnik in Conversation with Karpo Aćimović-Godina, moderated by Sabina Sabolović (WHW, Vienna/Zagreb) and Jurij Meden (Austrian Film Museum, Vienna), on the occasion of the exhibition 'Shadow Citizens' in Kusthalle Wien, 2021

Duration: 27:33

 

4. Archiving Partisan Surplus: Partisan struggle manifesting as a discursive figure of resistance

Zoran Pantelić, artist and editor, kuda.org Novi Sad, in conversation with Andrej Mirčev, scholar and theoretician of dramaturgy at the University of Bern and Art Academy Berlin, and Gal Kirn, theorist and Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Berlin.

Former Yugoslav memorial landscape is marked by intense processes of erasure and revisionism of the partisan past. Reinventing and promoting exclusive nationalist histories and futures has been the major preoccupation of the dominant forces. In recent years, various artistic, political, and digital projects have begun to retrieve documents, photographs, and other archival remainders of partisan liberation that evoke its potential in the emancipatory struggles of the oppressed.

Duration: 47:04

 

5. Some Tasks of the Translators of the Past

Zoran Pantelić, artist and editor kuda.org Novi Sad and Olivera Jokić, translator of Past • An Introduction to the Problem (Associate Professor, CUNY) in conversation with Boris Buden, the book’s author, philosopher and scholar living in Berlin, about what it means to translate anything, let alone a text about a problem.

Does the relationship with the past not also entail a moment of repetition, re-actualization, re-cognition, in short, an act of reenactment that transcends the cult of authenticity? This is not just about the new dressed up as the old in order to experience the past as it ostensibly really was, reduced of course to a cultural way-of-life; on the contrary, this is about the work of translation that enables what has passed to speak the language of the present, and, quoting the work, to revive the attitude that had made that work possible and gave it form. Because, what is the alternative?
Boris Buden, Past • An Introduction to the Problem, 42

Duration: 56:20

 

6. Želimir Žilnik vs. the Can(n)ons: Avantgarde On a Timeline

Olivera Jokić (English and Gender Studies, John Jay College, City University of New York), in conversation with Aleksandar Bošković, scholar of Russian and East European modernism (Columbia University). Jokić and Bosković discuss the status of “avant garde” art made in socialist Yugoslavia, and the ways of thinking about art made in conditions that are now inconceivable on a timeline of world-historic events. Looking at Past • An Introduction to the Problem, they consider what it means to “translate” the work of artists working in those inconceivable conditions and see them on a timeline of events or think about them in a global language.

And that is precisely one of the primary goals of this book: to give resistance to authoritarian canonization as a god-given right of institutionalized cultural practice; to sabotage the national heritage project; to point to its inherent contradictions, falsifications and manipulations of cultural and social values, to its ideological functions and political abuses. It is not just the cinematic work of Želimir Žilnik but precisely its social, political, and moral dimensions that themselves defy all attempts at canonization, especially that undertaken by a national culture.
Boris Buden, Past • An Introduction to the Problem, 18

Duration: 52:36

 

7. Demystification in Favor of Creation

Zoran Pantelić, artist and editor, kuda.org Novi Sad, in conversation with Greg de Cuir Jr., film critic & Artistic Director of Kinopravda Institute, Belgrade.

Žilnik uses the camera as a scalpel, and he really does that to unearth and unveil and to excise what's happening in society and what's happening with people. One of the things that's unique about him is he's considered one of the pioneers of fiction or let's say, hybrid film-making. So what that means is he's freely blending fact and unreality or surreality or whatever you want to call it. He keeps things very open and very fluid in terms of situations that he creates for his performances, for his protagonists. Sometimes he will come in with a very loose scenario, a road-map that lets him get where he needs to go.

Duration 25:45

 

8. The Liberated Form - On the History of Yugoslav Cinema

Petar Milat in conversation with Petra Belc, about the specificities of modern Yugoslav cinema, and the particular importance of Želimir Žilnik within it.
Petra Belc holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Zagreb; her thesis explored The Poetics of Yugoslav Experimental Cinema from the 1960s and 1970s. She also holds degrees in women’s studies and philosophy and comparative religion. As an independent researcher she is exploring the field of amateur and experimental cinema and is interested in the archiving and preservation of small-gauge films. As a member of the Cineclub Zagreb, she is taking care of the preservation of the club’s heritage.
Petar Milat is the president of association and the main programme coordinator at Multimedia Institute, in charge of the Institute’s publishing, music, and film programmes. Since 2008, he has been managing the Human Rights Film Festival. The nexus of normative social and aesthetical theory is the main focus of his research.
Duration: 32:25

 

9. Archaeology of (Post)Yugoslav Visual Culture

Petar Milat in conversation with Dejan Kršić about Archaeology of (Post)Yugoslav visual culture, related to the Žilnik-Buden volume, Past • An Introduction to the Problem. Želimir Žilnik on Film, Communism, and Former Yugoslavia

Dejan Kršić, a graphic designer and writer, based in Zagreb, Croatia and an associate professor at the Department of Visual Communications, Art Academy Split. Dejan was one of the founders and later editor-in-chief of Arkzin magazine, and since 2000 he has been collaborating with the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW on many international exhibitions, media projects, and publications.
Petar Milat is the president of association and the main programme coordinator at Multimedia Institute, in charge of the Institute’s publishing, music, and film programmes. Since 2008, he has been managing the Human Rights Film Festival. The nexus of normative social and aesthetical theory is the main focus of his research.

Duration: 30:05

 

10. Meta Žilnik—On Cinema, Books & Cinematic Books

Igor Marković and Petar Milat (both Multimedia Institute — MaMa) talk about the nexus of cinema and book-publishing, with a focus on publishing as a medium of “cinema by other means”. Relating the Žilnik-Buden volume Past • An Introduction to the Problem to some of MaMa’s earlier publications, they try to contextualize it within a broader intellectual field.

Igor Marković is an independent scholar and free-lance theoretician with a focus on visual, film, and cultural studies, co-selector of Human Rights Film Festival. He is co-founder and co-editor of Limen – journal for theory and practice of liminal phenomena and member of editorial board of journals Ubiq and LibraLibera.
Petar Milat is the president of association and the main programme coordinator at Multimedia Institute, in charge of the Institute’s publishing, music, and film programmes. Since 2008, he has been managing the Human Rights Film Festival. The nexus of normative social and aesthetical theory is the main focus of his research

Duration: 35:10

 

Editorial team: Olivera Jokić, Petar Milat and kuda.org
Production: kuda.org, 2024

Podcast Series Past • An Introduction to the Problem are part of the “Peripheral Visions —Towards Trans(l)national Publishing Culture” a partnership project produced by Kulturtreger, Maska, eipcp, kuda.org, Kontrapunkt, Multimedia Institute, and financed by the European Union, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, and the Administration for Culture and the Foundation for Arts Initiatives of the City of Novi Sad.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.