“Is this even film?”

Expanded cinema as a cinema-action: multi-layered gesture in the new media art of celluloid

Film program: VALIE EXPORT and Mihovil Pansini

Curated and introduced by Petra Belc Krnjaić

Q&A session. Moderator: Sonja Leboš

“The film is not a medium through which an author must express him- or herself. We still have not entirely liberated it,“ said Mihovil Pansini at the Symposia about experimental film in the Student Centre in Zagreb in 1963, while theorizing antifilm in his works Scusa Signorina, Dvorište/The Yard, and K3 ili čisto nebo bez oblaka/K3 or the cloudless sky (1963). 

About 10 years later the Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT shot her theoretical film Adjungierte Dislokationen/ Adjunct Dislocations (1973), whose form as if had resembled the paradigm presented in the book of GEFF (Genre Experimental Film Festival, established in Zagreb and held in 1963, 1965, 1967, and the last in 1970) from 1963/67, entering therefore in an inadvertent dialogue with Pansini’s ideas about the applying cinematic technologies to the scientific and research context. Camera here is not just a means of expression but, together with a body, it is a dispositive which enables the authors to think visually – to think camera (therefore, about the camera), and through camera. The comparative analysis of the films Scusa Signorina and Adjungierte Dislokationen will serve as an introduction to three research units which connect these two authors, and which (1) analyse the relationships among biological and mechanical elements in the construction of the cinematic reality, time, and space, (2) postulate the category of expanded and automatic cinema as a tool-method for thinking, 3) tackle singular aspects of the Austrian and Yugoslav experimental film as important historical (neo)avant-garde processes.

Petra Belc Krnjaić

Translation:  Sonja Leboš

*This film program is discursively linked to the exhibition Body and Territory: Art and Borders in Today's Austria and it is conceived in collaboration with the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research.*

Film program

VALIE EXPORT (26')

Selbstportrait mit Kopf / Self-Portrait with Head, 1967, 4'

Interrupted line, 1971-72, 6'

Raumsehen und Raumhören / Space-Seeing and Space-Hearing, 1973-74, 6'

Adjungierte Dislokationen/Adjunct Dislocations, 1973, 10'

Mihovil Pansini (26')

Piove, 1959, 6'

Scusa Signorina, 1963, 5'

K3 ili čisto nebo bez oblaka/ K3 or the cloudless sky, 1963, 3'

Dvorište/The Yard, 1963, 12'

Film program and the introductory lecture by Petra Belc Krnjaić  “Is this even film?”

Expanded cinema as a cinema-action: multi-layered gesture in the new media art of celluloid resulted from the curatorial research carried out within the project Utopian Dissonances II  by the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research (AIIR).

 The Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research is institutionally supported by the Endowment Kultura nova.

BIOS:

VALIE EXPORT was born as Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, where she attended the School for the Arts and Crafts. In 1964 she graduated from HBLVA for Textile Industry in Vienna. Since 1967 she has been going by the name VALIE EXPORT, an artistic concept and logo. She works with a wide range of media and caught the attention in the 1960s an 70s with actions in public space that belonged to the field of performance and to media art and were developed from a feminist perspective.

A co-founder of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, she has participated in numerous film and video festivals all around the world. In addition to presenting her work in international exhibitions and participating in major exhibitions like the Venice Biennale (1980) and documenta (1977), the 1970 saw the beginning of her curatorial activities, with the focus on feminism and media art, furthermore she taught at institutions such as the Art Institute in San Francisco, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee/USA, and Berlin University of the Arts. Until 2005, VALIE EXPORT held the professorship for Multimedia and Performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In 2009 she was the co-commissioner for the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. For her work to date, VALIE EXPORT has been awarded numerous accolades and prizes, including the Max Beckmann Prize in 2022 and the Grand Decoration of Honor with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria. In 2019 the Roswitha Haftmann Prize recognizing outstanding achievements in the visual arts, the Lebenswerk-Preis (Lifetime Achievement Award) from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education and Women's Affairs and the Gold Decoration of Honor of the City of Linz for Services to Culture in 2015, the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts (2014, together with Laurie Anderson, Marianne Faithfull, Gustav Metzger), the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2005), the Alfred Kubin Prize (2000), the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (2000) and the Gustav Klimt Prize (1998).
She lives and works in Vienna.
(quoted from https://www.valieexportcenter.at)
For further information on VALIE EXPORT, see: www.valieexport.at

Mihovil Pansini is a Croatian film director and doctor (Korčula, May 29, 1926 – Zagreb, May 13, 2015). He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb (1953), specialized in otorhinolaryngology (1960). He worked at the Clinic for otorhinolaryngology of one hospital in Zagreb, was a professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. His amateur film debut Gospodin doctor/Mr Doctor took place in 1953, and he was an active member of Zagreb Cinema Club, incessantly inclinated towards naturalist notes (e.g. Osuđen/Convicted, 1954), but, especially, as a proponent of the so-called antifilm, also towards film experimenting that is visible from the elimination of the most conventions of film expressions, psychological stereotyping and abhorring hypocritical worldviews. We can emphasize the films such as Piove (1958), in which he uses image distortions, Siesta (1958), Dvorište/The Yard (1963) i Zahod/The Latrine (1963), in which he prevalently uses the methods of fixation of a certain ambiance and procedures of structural film, Scusa signorina (1963), ruminating in the field of poetics of serendipity, and, aesthetically most radical one, K-3, ili čisto nebo bez oblaka/ K3 or the cloudless sky (1963). Pansini is a founder and leading theoretician of GEFF (Genre Film Festival, Zagreb), and he received a title of Master of Amateur Cinema for his creative amateur work on film. (Source: Croatian Encyclopedia)

Petra Belc Krnjaić 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.” As an independent researcher her focus is on the field of experimental cinema with a chosen interest in the archiving and preservation of small-gauge films, feminism, and visual art. For years she has been also working as a film-editor and a producer of film and TV announcements and promotion of TV programme.

Sonja Leboš, Ph.D., defended her doctoral thesis under the title “City on Film, Film in the City: Zagreb 1941-1991, cultural-anthropological perspective” in November 2022. Cultural anthropologist, expert for cultural tourism, art pedagogist, she also studied set-design and architecture in Prague and Zagreb. Her activities are in the domain of cultural and urban studies, education and production in culture and art, visual and urban anthropology, and discourse analysis, while her artistic, curatorial and scientific work tends to merge on the liminal fields of narrative urbanism and visual arts, design, theory and practice of performativity, film, and new media.