Robber

Twist-Twist is constructed from static shots of the reflection of ships’ masts dancing on a surface of the sea to a musical rhythm. A black-and-white film with strong visuals and contrasts, it is unlike any of his other films: a simple, playful arabesque that was shot, developed and edited in a single day, without any other story or subject underlying it. Although it is often compared to his final cineclub film, Fluorescences (1967), as it makes a somewhat similar impression on the viewer, the two films are quite different. While Twist-Twist possesses the fresh approach of an emerging filmmaker, Fluorescences reveals the sum of his artistic and personal evolution in terms of both technique and subject matter.

This structuralist film translates Rimbaud’s famous sonnet onto the film screen, thus placing it within the context of cinema. Where Rimbaud associated vowels with colours, the film represents them using different forms of video manipulation or camerawork – for instance, the letter “I” is represented by a jump cut.

Close-up details of sculptures and architecture in public spaces and shots of people on big city streets, set to music ranging from romantic tunes to jazz. The series of portraits and anthropological sketches shows one day in the life of Kyiv.

Šimunić uses double exposure to combine footage of people and scenes from 1970s Belgrade with garish images from television shows containing elements of pornography to create an illusory film. He joins scenes from everyday life with his penchant for erotica. This debut film, which took five years to make, uses visual games to explore the limits of the human perception.

Using dynamic editing of a collage of black and white photos and a multi-layered soundtrack, the first photographic film in the history of Latvian cinema offers a portrait of Moscow in the mid-1960s. Under the symbols of power, hanging threateningly over the streets of the city, everyday life flows by, carefree and triumphant.

A short film named after a Rolling Stones’ song shows improvised performances, during which the members of the Slovenian art collective OHO make drawings on a concrete wall erected in the middle of a field, spontaneously running, dancing and finally putting on a cardboard box with only their legs sticking out. The film promotes OHO’s artistic and philosophical approach to the so-called reism, i.e. a philosophy in which objects are viewed as equal to human beings and not only recognised for their utilitarian value.

An urban symphony comprising a visual collage of the Estonian capital city. With an emphasis on rhythm, it sets into motion a stream of compositions depicting various buildings and corners of the city. Its primary focus, however, is on the human element as a bearer of action and vitality, capturing the period of political thaw, carefree fun, and the joy of life.

This two-minute film, which thoroughly confuses the viewer’s senses, is dominated by the use of the split-screen technique – one possible way of working with video. The footage of ping-pong players from three different angles creates spatial paradoxes that are combined to create a continuous match in real time.

This important film presaging the Ukrainian poetic school was intended as Osyka’s graduation work, but the diploma committee deemed it too formalist and rejected it. A panorama in a series of inquisitive shots of a crowded beach serves as a prologue for a lyrical study of the movements, faces, and bodies of the men, women, and children; of the sun and the sea.

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.

A performative miniature in which the filmmakers – students of the Polytechnic Institute in Kharkov – document their public street performances. Their unselfconscious playfulness seems an unwitting omen of the fall of the Communist regime.

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.