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In 1982, the Yugoslav film magazine Filmske Sveske published a themed issue titled The Left-Wing Theory, including the texts of French Marxist film theorists, focused on the interrelationship of film and technology – the body of work known as “apparatus theory” (Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean Comolli, Jean-Louis Narboni). This paper considers Yugoslav experimental cinema as politically engaged art and examines the extent to which it is theoretically grounded in the Western theory of experimental cinema. I propose a performative model of the concept of “engaged art” advanced by Yugoslav aestheticians Sreten Petrović and Danko Grlić. Moreover, following the typological classifications of experimental film and the understanding of cinema as a political practice (Malcolm Le Grice, Nicole Brenez, Jean Comolli, and Jean-Louis Narboni) and focusing on the works of Mihovil Pansini, Nikola Đurić, and Svetolik Novaković, this paper seeks to revise the categorisation of Yugoslav experimental cinema practices recognising technology as the key factor of the filmmaking process. The central objective of this article is to juxtapose the experimental film theories and practices of the democratic, capitalist West and those of socialist Yugoslavia, hoping that the results of this parallel reading might open up further research prospects.

This paper focuses on the editing career of Radojka Tanhofer, which can be divided into two main phases. The first covers Tanhofer’s years in editing (1940s - 1960s), learning and honing her craft, her work in numerous feature films with a number of domestic and international directors. The second covers her teaching at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, Croatia (from the founding of the Editing Department as a two-year programme in 1969, until its development into a four-year full university study programme in 1977). The aim of this paper is to outline Tanhofer’s significance in the context of Croatian and Yugoslav cinema through the use of existing literature, analysis of significant works of classic Croatian cinema, as well as my own insights into the history and current practice of the Editing Department at the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, as a former student, and now assistant professor.

New Perspectives on Early Cinema History is a selection of papers originally presented at an international conference held in Ghent, Belgium in 2018, organised by this book’s editors: Mario Slugan, a lecturer in film studies at Queen Mary, University of London (and a former editor at Apparatus), and Daniël Biltereyst, a professor of film and media studies at Ghent University and director of its centre for film and media studies. The eleven essays – written mainly by European academics, plus two from Canada and one from Malaysia – provide an excellent overview of new trends.

This paper presents a case study of rallies in absentia which took place in Russia during the quarantine of 2020 on the platform Yandex.Navigator. Created by tech giant Yandex and similar to Google Maps, it allows users to check in at a particular geographic location and post comments, as if one were physically present. On April 20, 2020, multiple users in major Russian cities simultaneously checked in at symbolically significant urban sites like Red Square in Moscow and demanded the declaration of a national state of emergency and the compensation of financial losses. Due to the functionality of the digital tool that was used to create the augmented reality of a video game, participants re-enacted the “space of appearance” (the term by Hannah Arendt) where bodies in their plurality put forward claims to those in power by performing their message. This interpretation draws on the concepts of public space, performativity, and virtual/augmented reality to suggest that it is productive to think of this rally in terms of the heuristic potential of the case. The rally can be seen as a generic case of virtual gatherings that might be sustained with the help of digital technologies creatively repurposed for political uses in an increasingly digitised world.

More than a dozen Covid-19 era TV series were produced and distributed on Russian subscription streaming services. In this paper, I examine four different series made under quarantine conditions that illustrate competing regimes for viewers’ pleasure and pedagogy. These low-budget productions acknowledge the coronavirus as a context but replace the fear, panic, and anxiety of outbreak narratives with comic domestic foibles of life under quarantine. They embody the ‘feast during the plague’ syndrome that ignores the mortal consequences of the disease and celebrates a gallows humour. These were the first ‘screenlife’ serials to be produced as a methodological approach to solve a range of production proximity restrictions and in turn their aesthetics is one of intimacy and authenticity. Image: Screenshot of #СидЯдома (Ol'ga Frenkel', #SidIAdoma 2020)

The paper focuses on the lesser-known moments of the partisan performances from the Yugoslav liberation struggle by highlighting three points: firstly, all of the analysed performances have survived in the form of photographs by the established contemporaneous partisan photographers Jože Petek and Edi Šelhaus. Secondly, Marta Paulin-Brina, who became the most famous partisan dancer, will be commented on through the prism of the partisan poem “Anthem to Agitprop Theatre” by Janez Kardelj. And thirdly, we will look at the performances of partisan school children that formed a star, a symbol of partisan resistance, and the name ‘Tito’ with their bodies in a snowy field. Despite the political recommendation that partisan photography should be limited to reportage and documentation, the last case studies serve as evidence of peculiar staging and performing for the partisan camera and thus subvert the propagandistic reductionism. These performances were addressing the community-in-resistance, that is, they expressed symbols of the liberation itself, and even anticipated the future ritual performance under the aegis of the Titoist state.

The paper focuses on the ritual aspects of the rallies (called “slet”) held during the Youth Day celebrations in Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1988. The author is applying Erika Fischer-Lichte’s model, which defines the ritual aspects of the Olympic Games, to the phenomenon of “slet”, acknowledging the similarities and differences between these two events. Relying on previous historical interpretations of the “slet” phenomenon (Jakovljević; Jakovina), the article analyses the ways in which ideology shaped these events, stressing its deliberate production of private and collective bodies, as well as comparing the Youth Day celebrations in Yugoslavia with similar sporting events in other political regimes. Following Susan Brownell’s thesis, the author defines the participants’ sincere belief in the project as the constitutive factor of “slet” rituality. In this respect, and with reference to Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s analysis of rituals, “slets” are defined as a predominantly liminoid phenomenon, which further problematises their political nature, especially concerning their relations to the dominant collectivist ideology in the Yugoslav state.

This text focuses on Bojan Djordjev’s theatre piece Diskretni šarm marksizma / The Discreet Charm of Marxism (2013), by analysing the politicality of the practices employed in it – the one of reading aloud and the one of listening to what is being read, and by enquiring what kind of transformation such acts could bring to the contemporary stage and the public sphere. It examines the politicality of such a community, formed by coming and being together in theatre to read aloud and listen to others reading Marx’s and Marx-related texts. Moreover, the paper advocates for collective reading and listening as autonomous performative and theatrical practices, which have community-formative qualities. Since Djordjev defined Diskretni šarm marksizma as a “six course dinner piece”, this article aims to look further into what happens when acts of reading and eating in a group become interchangeable. Is it possible to imagine a communist revolution, which began on a theatrical stage, when audience members surrendered to each other’s reading voices in the tactile act of listening (as a special form of attention in theatre) to political texts, first and foremost The Communist Manifesto?

The paper publishes previously unknown photographs of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics, from the private archive of the actor, stage director, and teacher, Pavel Vladimirovich Urbanovich. Urbanovich was a student of the first class of the Higher State Theatre Workshops. Shortly after beginning his studies, he started teaching biomechanics and acrobatics himself. While developing practical exercises, he collected various materials related to Meyerhold’s stage movement method. The photographs of biomechanical exercises, which were stored in his home archive, date from the early 1920s. Copies of some of the images are also stored in the A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum and are already known from publications devoted to Meyerhold and his students; others are published for the first time. Several photographs picture daily life in Meyerhold’s school at the time when the principles of theatre biomechanics were being formulated, developed and intensely practiced. They were to be deposited in the Meyerhold Theatre Museum and used for didactic purposes, possibly as illustrations for a manual of biomechanics.

This article investigates the fictionalization of the space age in contemporary Russian spaceflight history blockbusters Gagarin: Pervyi v kosmose / Gagarin: First in Space (2013), Vremia pervykh / Spacewalk (2017), and Saliut 7 (2017). This “second wave” of Russian films on spaceflight exhibits a greater affinity for the patriotic Soviet canon of portraying Soviet spaceflight history than their predecessors from the 2000s – Pervye na lune / First on the Moon (2004), Kosmos kak predchuvstvie / Dreaming of Space (2005), and Bumazhnyi soldat / Paper Soldier (2008) – which subverted the narrative conventions established by Soviet feature films on the history of spaceflight, i.e. their linearly progressive, normatively-optimistic plots, standard sets of historical characters, and common reliance on an authoritative third-person narrator. The article argues that blockbusters of the past decade, in contrast, reinvent the patriotic Soviet narrative in a particular, (no(w)stalgic) way. Drawing on the discussion on the chronotope (Bakhtin) of outer space in Soviet and Russian cinema, this article explores the productions in question through the lens of their constructions of literal and metaphorical diagonality, verticality and horizontality. In doing so, it argues that the examined films embed historical events into fictional narratives and audio-visual worlds that monumentalise and mythologise the Soviet space age through the use of these spatial vectors, creating a novel, yet eerily familiar fictional collage of a past. Table of contents image from Saliut 7 (Klim Shipenko, 2017, Russia).

Despite fiction film arguably being the privileged object of film theory the notion of “fiction” has been undertheorized by film scholars in general and those working in German in particular. Perhaps the most important exception to this trend has been Gertrud Koch and Christiane Voss’ (2009) edited volume on fiction on the intersection of philosophy, film, and media studies. This paper tackles two of the most notable film scholarly contributions to the volume – Koch’s and Vinzenz Hediger’s – and their attempts to define fiction in terms of medium properties as well as their efforts to articulate all photographic films as simultaneously fictional and nonfictional. In the first case, I demonstrate that medium underdetermines whether something is fictional or not. In the second, I argue that although fiction is a temporally unstable category, it is possible to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction at a given moment in time. I conclude with a call to applying Kendall L. Walton’s (1990) transmedial theory of fiction to film, by listing a number of its advantages over competing proposals and by emphasizing its suitability for investigating the change in films’ fictional status over time. Table of contents image from Un homme de têtes / Four Troublesome Heads (Georges Méliès, 1898, France).

On January 20, 1944, one day of filming took place at the Theresienstadt ghetto. This can be regarded as a ‘false start’ of Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, the infamous Nazi propaganda film subsequently shot there during the summer. The essay discusses how it came about, and why the filming, although planned to be the first day of a longer shoot, was aborted after one day. It shows that the shooting was based on a script that was different from the one later written by Kurt Gerron. It identifies the probable scriptwriter – Jindřich Weil – and shows, by analysis of his three surviving scripts, that the filming of January 20 followed the second of these. It describes the actual filming on a cold wintry day in the ghetto. It tracks the disappearance of Weil’s film papers after the war and, shows how when they finally resurfaced after 15 years, they were wrongly interpreted before being buried again in archive collections. The article presents the only remaining visual images of the shooting but, because of misinformation provided by the cameraman who preserved them, these 18 film stills have for decades been wrongly thought to be secretly made images showing the true misery of the ghetto rather than what they actually were: deliberate products of Nazi propaganda. It discusses the reasons why the cameraman chose to do this.

The aim of the submitted paper is the naming of some (potential) connotations among Schopenhauer’s model of disinterestedness, draught in his aesthetical and ethical theory and predominantly Toltec teaching of Jaroslav Dušek. Schopenhauer’s concept of art or his explanation of purposeless and non-utilitarian production of the genius that corresponds with Dušek’s perception (but even practical realization) of so-called synchronicity that satisfies thematic background of the introductory part. I focus my attention on the common reasoning of the reflections of both thinkers in ethical questions in the second part. I put the context of Toltec compliment and persuasion “You are my other I” (“In Lak’ech”) explained by Dušek into the context with Schopenhauer’s arguments for the elimination of the egoism, thus, with the topic of identity of inner essence of all the living.