Amateri in Sarajevo

Mr Cole's movie Amateri, or The Lost Innocents, will play at Sarajevo Film Festival next week. As you may remember, the video was produced as part of an artist residency at Kino Klub Split, and is a poetic interpretation and perversion of the history and culture of the Kino Klubs of the region of the former Yugoslavia.

EVENT: Amateri at Sarajevo Film Festival
PROGRAM: BH Film
WHERE: Art Cinema Kriterion, Obala Kulina bana 2, Sarajevo 71000, Bosnia and Herzegovina
WHEN: Tuesday, 15th August 2017, 15.00 
COST: 5KM (€2.55) (buy online)

Amateri in Split

Mr Cole's latest picture, Amateri, or The Lost Innocents, will premiere at Kino Klub Split in Croatia as part of the cineclub's 65th Anniversary celebrations.

The video was made in collaboration with the Klub during his artistic residency in April-May 2016, and is inspired by the club's specific history and the culture of the Kino Klubs of the region of the former Yugoslavia in general.

A selection of films made by the students of the Institute's roaming art school, Unfound Peoples Videotechnic, will also play.

EVENT: Amateri at Smotra Vi – 65 Godina Kino Kluba Split
WHERE: Kino Klub Split, Ulica slobode 28, 21000 Split
WHEN: Friday, 24th March 2017, 19.00
COST: Free

This project was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. 

Unfound Peoples Videotechnic: Alpha Semester Graduate Screening in Split

Following a harrowing semester in which students grappled with modules such as Mythology of the Self, Rotting the Image, and Setting Your Attitude In Stone, the first ever class of the roaming UPV film and video school are to present their coursework for the public’s appraisal. 

Each of the students created a series of one-minute films in response to the aforementioned topics, contributing to a program of true range and appeal. The Videotechnic took place at Kino Klub Split in April of this year, where the students were aggressively reprogrammed with a warped practical history of artist-oriented film and video. 

Furthermore, the Videotechnic’s principal, failed filmmaker turned guru Graeme Cole, will present the work in progress of his Kino Klub-inspired new video, created as part of an artist’s residency at Kino Klub Split. There will be a brief introduction, and a Q&A at the end, after which those students who graduate will be freed to the outside world to pursue careers of unparalleled artistic excellence and enviable economic stability. 

The screening is open and free to all who wish to attend. It should take less than 2 hours. 

This project is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. 

EVENT: Unfound Peoples Videotechnic: Graduate Screening 

WHERE: Kino Klub Split, Ulica slobode 28, 21000 Split 

WHEN: Sunday, 18th September 2016, 20.00 

COST: FREE

Sarajevo-Split Log 1

"In the time when there was the law that people were not fully responsible for the crime they commited [sic], during stormy weather along Adriatic Coast. (Because there was a southern wind (Yugo) which made people depressive.)"

So reads the .srt introducing the start of the late Montenegrin filmmaker Živko Nikolić's peculiar 1977 little-islander flick, Beštije (Beasts). Coming on like Jean Rollin without the boobs, or even Peter Greenaway without the rhythm, Beštije dwells in uncanny territory, shot on location in the castle town of Kotor, but lit and performed with such artifice that it feels like a claustrophobic chamber play.

I don't think it gives too much away to point out that the only beasts in Beasts are of the humaine kind, a cast of self-interested eccentrics on one side and army of indistinguishable babas on the other, variously trying to shag, lynch, or bury alive a pale stranger who arrives on the island one rainy night (when morning is finally portrayed in the epilogue, the very concept of daylight feels alien). Neither does the wind make much of a an appearance; a relief to me, as I was already discomforted by the introductory lines, having chosen at random to watch this movie on the very day I commenced editing the as yet untitled but Yugo-wind themed video we shot in May as part of my Kino Klub residency.

I've been in Sarajevo for a week, to commence the second part of my Balkan residency (vagaries of scheduling compelled me to switch the Zagreb section of my itinerary for Sarajevo, although I'll still reach Split as planned in the second week of September). My time here will be divided fourfold: the festival; a second, youth film festival; completing the aforementioned wind work ahead of Split; and trying to draw out some connections between the Sarajevo Kino Klub scene and its more celebrated equivalents in Split, Zagreb and Belgrade.

Split Log 9

Preparations gather pace towards the production of an artist's video in response to my residency at Kino Klub Split: baffled by words, feelings, ellipses, images and impressions, I've penned a pseudo-screenplay about a desperate videophile of the future, roaming the abandoned city in search of off-line VHS footage with which to soothe her prosthetic eyes - whose license has expired, making them criminally allergic to internet.

Recce and casting: our cyborg video hunter will be played by fabulously noir-voiced Edita Momić.

Split Log 6

Mihovil Pansini called his Zagreb ‘anti-films’ a “visual acoustic phenomenon” but it is the middle word that best evokes the feeling, of vibrations on air, of an architectural space to be filled, of an in-between rather than a finite surface. His opposite number on the coast, Ivan Martinac, regarded his own pictures as “films of state”, pyschogeofilmic distillations of a/the “shared otherworldliness” of Split on small format stock. Despite my narratively-oriented work, I feel closer thus far to these Croatians than the distant Belgrade Klub with all their ‘plot’ and “unembellished reality”. It is not so much that I have lost the plot, as that it has dissolved: in the spirit of Martinac and Pansini, hoovering up their images with scant regard for causality, and in unnerving contrast to my infamous Nexus residency in which I literally pre-scripted every minute of the whole three month trial, I have drifted these weeks, absorbing information and experience like a sponge, releasing pungent drips when squeezed by the participants of the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.

The workshops have progressed well: the participants are broadminded, self-determined and curious, with a healthy dose of dissidence. Despite labelling this inaugural program UPV’s ‘Alpha Semester’, though, it remains very much a beta proposition: I am as yet unsatisified with both form and content, but these are early tests that need to be made, the felling of outlying trees (with attendant squirrel carnage) necessary to get our tractors to the rich bounty at the heart of the forest. We have, I believe, struck a nice balance of my meaningless English-language blather prompting homework assignments of serious enquiry inspired by mis- and partial-understandings of the obscure words and unstable theories asserted in class by a professor who must, above all else, profess to be a terrible speaker.

The Institute’s enemies will be bitter to hear it’s going so well that we have decided to extend my time at the Kino Klub for a few extra weeks. Research into the culture and history of the Kino Klubs, combined with preparing the workshops, has eaten into the time that I had hoped to devote to putting a new video together. Inspired by those historic enclaves of young (mostly) men, engaged in their ideas and their surroundings, creating and solving their own artistic problems, entitled, imprisoned and inspired, I hope I can work something out with their (mixed) spiritual descendents. As a pack-dog, a member of one official, one unannounced, and thirteen secret artist collectives, anyway, it is an unpassable opportunity to hole up in a Klub of huge cultural importance for a few weeks, to steal and to leak esoteric techniques and forge some irreverent tribute to the Yugoslavian ‘amateurs’ who changed the direction of Balkan film and art. I hope to warm up the sensors in the first couple of weeks of May.

Gastrodimensional cake-chart illustrating total of work yet to be achieved.

Split Log 05

The birds are chirping, although there’s no sign yet of the sun. I envy them their circadian rhythms, behaviour as secret information. I have become convinced that my own rhythms have become faulty, my feelings – which perhaps I should have left at home – ebbing and flowing with the unpredictability of the capricious Dalmation winds. Meanwhile, my information sources are wholly orthodox: books, videos, the internet, the flawed recollections of other people. They are reforming as quivering inaccuracies in my mind and, occasionally, as words on the internet or out of my mouth.

Saturday, we officially – but without ceremony – inaugurated the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic at Kino Klub Split (a temporary lodging for a roaming academy). The opening lecture, titled Mythology of the Self, seemed to be well-received by our historic initial cohort. It was a relief just to get through the damned thing without running out of things to say or being assaulted or, worse, called-out. I hope it was of some use, but in developing a total filmmaking education program (indeed, it is billed as a radical de-programming reprogramming program) this first lecture can only be regarded as the damping of the nib. It was far too factual, if my opinions were admirably smeared into the raw information, and with too many references to the ‘real world’. In preparing (destroying) a limited edition .pdf of notes for participants to take away with them, I began to find a greater poetry in omission and deliberate obfuscation; words, as some wise old chap once said, are given to us to hide our true meaning. I’m running an artist’s workshop, not a cooking show.

My own studies, however, focussing presently on the Kino Klub movement, are drawn into a peculiar dichotomy of word and sound-image: the Klubs’ golden era, the hub of their collective thematic resonances, was half a century ago; the movies of the time are largely wordless, but are explained in a tornado of written manifestoes, articles and histories which variously overlap, correct and contradict each other. It’s most inspiring, all this writing, and a curious analogue to what would have been the equivalent had I ‘been there’ – conversation, both languid (lazy young revolutionaries pushing ideas around with twigs on the beaches of Split) and quasi-diplomatic (the minuted, numbered and catalogued ‘discussions’ of Zagreb’s smoky projector rooms). Of course, I wouldn’t have understood a word if I’d ‘been there’. Maybe that would have engendered a more appropriate feeling. Certainly, I’m enjoying (and understanding) the films more on a collective level, starting to feel I know the filmmakers (which I never will) better than I know the films (which I have watched repeatedly). Projections…

Your corrections are welcomed in the Comments box.

Split Log 02

The first Friday night at Kino Klub brings a screening of Duet for Cannibals, Susan Sontag’s take on the daftness of politicians and activists alike, starring a young Martin Freeman.

Afterwards, we discuss the movie (a Bunuelian Godard spoof?) with Kino Klub director Sunčica Fradelić. A bottle of slivovitsa is brought through from a smoky backroom where local musician and Kino Klub member Karlo Silic is routinely thrashing his colleagues at some esoteric card game. Such is the dynamic social tension that pulses beneath the surface of the Klub today. I am introduced to their pet Super 8 camera (just when I thought I got out of Super 8) and the possibility of 16mm is also dangled enticingly in front of my slivovitsa-reddened eyes.

Saturday is spent flipping through archive DVDs, reading up, wandering through Split: two millennia of settlement, obsessively traced on film by the Klub’s camera-clutching flaneurs who – as my meagre research so far suggests – preferred the body of the polis to cinegraphic contemplation of their own flesh.

Split presents itself as a languid port town in which countless concrete people-boxes have sprouted from beneath the extended back yard of the Diocletian Palace, the still-inhabited stone labyrinth which remains the social hub of the area today. Diocletian was the first Roman Emperor to voluntarily retire, and the people of Split have prided themselves on their laziness ever since. Beyond the palace walls, leather jackets and torn jeans form a triumvirate of distressed patinas with the ubiquitous concrete, and tiny dogs are de rigueur, perhaps as a device to draw attention towards the owners’ footwear, which is universally excellent.

The filmmakers of the Yugoslavian region didn’t get around to making their first feature until 1941. The first Tito-sponsored amateur film clubs popped up as classical Hollywood faltered and Cassavetes itched, the key second generation of the Split chapter emerging as new waves began to roll in Europe and elsewhere. The Klubs thus form a unique node between a very brief classical cinema, and both the cinematic and 'fine' art developments to come (perhaps best exemplified through the legendary figure of Zagreb's Tomislav Gotovac, who was muddled up both with the cinematic 'Black Wave' of the 60s/70s and the art scene over the half-century before his death in 2010).

My early impressions of the early Kino Klub Split filmmakers are of an equipe of antagonistic (not angry), curious (not academic) men (not women) with a self-imposed mission that I am not yet at liberty to disclose. As one band of curators points out, these filmmakers have been categorized under a number of overlapping terms – amateur, experimental, avant-garde, anti-film (mostly their Zagreb cousins), alternative film (Belgrade) – precluding, at least until much more recently, the label of ‘video artists’ because video (and possibly artist) is a dirty word. It is curious, then, to work with the club today, when everyone’s packing video, everyone’s an artist, and the former terms have lost their pungency.

Except, perhaps, for that of amateur, a word that adds legitimacy/democracy to the efforts of the casual masses and pride to the enthusiasts. I’ll continue in that spirit, as a kind of enthusiastic sponge, to be wrung out on film before the end of the month.