Exit Clause to Yugoslavia

A documentary collage consisting of images of fields and housing estates, young people having fun, or a university setting and staged scenes filled with humour and hyperbole, accompanied by a voiceover recalling propagandistic socio-critical documentaries. Though banned in the Soviet Union, the film screened at several foreign festivals.

A film recording of a performance by OHO involving the residents of Ljubljana in which the act of winking an eye is compared to the functioning of objects such as traffic lights or headlamps. The resulting film creates the impression that the Slovenian capital is a living being that interacts with people and responds to a winking person by winking back through seemingly lifeless objects.

A performance by visual artist Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdóttir, during which the author renders classical music compositions using a toothbrush and brushing her teeth. You will hear pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner as well as the notorious Happy Birthday melody.

This legendary musical film from the Perestroika era combines four video clips linked by the story of a young musician. It is a punk portrait of the Leningrad band Kino and its frontman, singer and actor Viktor Tsoi, whose performance style and looks made him a cult figure for Ukrainian youth.

The gap between the human microcosm and the macro view of universal time is depicted in an associative montage using rhythm and tempo as a significant element. Against a backdrop of ebbing and flowing in nature, a human anthill frantically teems, pulsing with the cycles of waking and sleeping, birth and death, sunrise and sunset.

This award-winning student film uses humorous animated collages to explore the characters, actors, and work of the big studios. Set to a dialogue-like commentary and music evoking various cinematic genres, the film engages in a critique of the star system of cinema.

A poetic look at the work of a man from an Abkhazian port town who looks after the nearby woods and hillsides. The expansive hilly pastures, mountains, animals, and rivers form the setting for a rural idyll and symbolist scenes in which the man frees a wolf from a trap or cleans a creek bed.

By combining footage of herself cutting up stockings stretched over her head with various images from television, Iveković confronts social stereotypes and propaganda in Tito’s Yugoslavia with the concept of personal identity. Each new cut is followed by another piece of television footage until her entire face is revealed.

An award-winning film at the International Festival of Short Films in Oberhausen in 1968 uses artistic means to document the experience of a heart failure. The film’s rhythm does not work only with the dynamic editing and a disrupted shot composition, but also with sound effects and music illustrating the rapid heart rate of an ill heart. By irony of fate, the debut’s director Wojciech Wiszniewski died of a heart attack aged 34.

Fluctuation is a movement that is divided into four chapters 1. Thinking space, 2. Moving thoughts, 3. Dissolution, 4. Specks. I base the form of the moving image on Sonata No. 2 by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849). Fluctuation is not related in any other way to the Sonata. It was showed as a video installation on a single floating screen in a black space.

Vird is a film based on the idea of “manual cutting on set” using only lights to make cuts in the video. The only post-production was the composition of a soundscape fitting to the movements and cutting the frame down to smaller frames that would play a fraction of a second later or sooner than the next small frame. Vird is the result of wanting to break up movement in time, effected by surrealism and the “bad” girls in Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, and using the new way of editing.

Besides possessing environmental appeal, this poetic depiction of the exploration of the Podillya cave system in the Termopil region holds a privileged position among the films from the Studio of Popular Science Films for its captivating storytelling, rhythmic assembly and distinctive visuals.