A Bunch of Amateurs: an interview with Matevž Jerman

“It's alternative film!” – “No, it's anti film!”

Fedor Tot

As a Yugoslav republic from 1945 until its independence in 1991, Slovenian cinema was often left in the shadow of its bigger brothers to the east, Croatia and Serbia. But the experimental cinema which emerged there was as thrilling, liberatory, and exciting as any in the region. This experimental scene is the subject of Alpe-Adria Underground!, a documentary directed by Matevž Jerman and Jurij Meden, which recently screened at Cinema Rediscovered alongside a selection of the experimental shorts. The documentary is a roving account of the country’s avant-garde film scene, starting from its beginnings in the 1950s, its widespread growth through the cultural explosion of the ‘60s, all the way up to the shift towards tape and video art in the 1980s, aided by acres of restored footage, interjected with the talking heads of a grizzled crew of critics, curators and filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia.

Alpe-Adria Underground! emerged partly in tandem with a digitisation and restoration project alongside the Slovenian archive. As co-director Matevž Jerman explains during our chat ahead of the Cinema Rediscovered screening:

“The funny thing is that the sole process of producing this film really accelerated the digitization and restoration of this whole body of work of experimental cinema. Because if we were to be waiting for some official funding, if you decided to make it a project to digitise the avant-garde films, I think we would have to wait years and years.

And actually, the film was kind of an excuse, so we digitised 1700 short experimental films to be able to include them in the film. Then we have perfect 4K scans, so we can work on restoration afterwards. The project of the documentary developed into two big projects. One is the film and the other one is the digitization and restoration of the films that we talk about and many others.

And regarding the restoration, it's a bit different compared to restoring 35mm films, which they often make them mint clear and remove everything to emulate the first copy with the colours and no scratches. We decide to leave these traces of the life of the small formats¹, because usually there was only one copy of the film which travelled festivals and maybe after one or two screenings there were already some scratches and dust which means that the film was never seen in a perfect version. So we decided to not digitally remove scratches and stuff like that. We tend to be really minimalistic with the restoration work so that even the digital copy shows the life of the reel of the film.”

Yugoslav cinema has, since the country’s violent implosion in the ‘90s, remained largely terra incognita. Films (and filmmakers) feted in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s were suddenly forgotten, both by Western critics and cinephiles confused by the cosmopolitan, consumerist society captured on Yugoslav film compared to the chaos and murder on their TV screens, which they had been told were the result of ancient tribal hatreds; and by domestic figures seeking to forge new ethnonationalist political paradigms which erased Yugoslavia’s multiethnic context. The Yugoslav screen’s ‘dissident’ heritage, represented by figures like Lazar Stojanović, Želimir Žilnik or Lordan Zafranović, didn’t fit the new nationalist paradigm; they mostly criticised the old Communist state from leftist positions, so what’s the use of them for your ethnonationalist nation-state building project?

Critical laziness too plays its part, with its tendency to pitch Communist Eastern European filmmaking as an endless battle between liberal, freedom-seeking auteurs against authoritarian, humourless state bureaucrats and censors. The truth is a lot more complicated than that, revealing a constant negotiation and renegotiation between filmmakers and institutional figures (many friendly, some not so much) between what is possible and not possible. The Yugoslav kino-club movement is a one such example of the constantly shifting ground, and one seldom discussed by historians and film critics.

Ravaged by World War II and without a pre-war film industry to rebuild, Yugoslavia started the process of constructing an industry from scratch. The socialist state led by Josip Broz Tito believed in Lenin’s maxim – as all socialist states did – that “of all the arts the most important is the cinema”. The top-down approach created film studios in each republic in Yugoslavia, with personnel trained (often abroad) in the technological aspects of film. But from the bottom-up emerged kino-clubs, analogous to something like the film societies sprouting up in the West in the ‘50s; these clubs provided technical resources and workshops for amateur filmmakers to (as we say in the modern parlance) ‘fuck around and find out’.

“The Kino clubs were part of this big umbrella called the ‘ljudska tehnika’, [The People’s Technique]. The idea was to make art available for everyone. So you had not only Kino clubs, you had clubs of radio amateurs or you had clubs for photographs. Kino clubs would make equipment available for everyone, and I think one of the early ideas was that they would document everyday life or some social reality of the time…And then people would make their home movies with equipment available or they would make some fiction films, copying what they saw in cinema. In Yugoslavia they could see all the contemporary art house production from all over the world. The French New Wave was available in cinemas straight away. The New Hollywood films were screened.

Among all of this, there was some conceptual stuff that we can now belatedly recognise as experimental cinema, but for many, many years, all of this production was labelled as amateur cinema. So it was independent and because of this independent nature, no institution would take care of these films. This is one of the reasons why in Slovenia there is a gap of a couple of decades when these films were sank in a swamp, forgotten. Only in the 2000s did we start to rediscover them. Because of this label, ‘amateur’, and also because Yugoslavia didn't have a common agreement on what to call these experimental films, in Zagreb they would call it anti-film, in Belgrade, alternative film.

It was all a big mess in this sense, especially in Slovenia. At least in Zagreb and Belgrade, they had theoretical schools behind it. For example Mihovil Pansini in Zagreb was one of the main theoreticians and he organised GEFF [Genre Experimental Film Festival].

That the terminology consigned these films to the dustbin for such a long time is illustrative of restrictive language can be when discussing film, with a whole section of Alpe-Adria Underground! devoted to talking heads debating what the right term is. Terminology debates are part and parcel of Yugoslav historiography (cultural and otherwise) and are largely really fucking boring² but, as Jerman acknowledges, it had a material effect on how these films were received.

"Especially in the case of calling them amateur, it really impacted how these films were treated throughout the years. But if we talk about how to label these films, I think the discussion about terminology is more interesting than the result that would come out. It's really funny how, even now, some authors or theoreticians that were already active in the ‘60s and ‘70s are still arguing. For example, a couple of years ago, in Alternative Festival in Belgrade they were still insulting each other and calling each other names: “It's alternative film!” – “No, it's anti film!”

But for the sake of discussion, I think the easiest way is to label them as experimental, because then anywhere in the world you go, everyone would know what you're talking about.”