Nocturnal Projections A Note on the Cinemas of Serbian Surrealism Krzysztof Fijalkowski

urrealism’s encounter with flm Croats and Slovenes was in efect centred has prompted much research and exclusively on its capital Belgrade. What publication ever since studies such makes it unique among the history of Sas Ado Kyrou’s Le Surréalisme au cinema surrealist groups beyond France is that (1953) or Paul Hammond’s Te Shadow a number of its leading members were and its Shadow (1978), some of it of not only well-informed about activities excellent quality and extending the subject in the nascent Paris group well before into unexplored territories. But, so far as I its ofcial inauguration in 1924, but have been able to tell, among all of them would participate extensively in the there is a chapter of this story that remains latter’s activities, establishing lasting to be written: the importance of cinema friendships, signing the French group’s for the Serbian surrealist group, active tracts and contributing to publications between around 1923 and 1933 (a group such as La Révolution surréaliste (itself not that is indeed one of the best-kept secrets in fact the frst formal surrealist journal in the history of the movement) is missing since the Serbian periodical Svedočanstva from all of these accounts. Signifcantly, (Testimonies) was launched a week earlier this would be a narrative built of absences and only a month after Breton’s First and impossibilities. Lost flms, unflmed Manifesto). At its height – the group’s (unflmable) scripts, collages and writings greatest momentum was gained at the start that fgure a ‘cinema by other means’ of the 1930s – organised around a core of (Pavle Levi), flm criticism languishing in over a dozen poets, theorists, artists and the vaults of obscure libraries . . . until the photographers, many of them active across instability of all of this activity leaves the several media – a number of distinctive sense of a flm projected not onto a screen interests and debates emerged, some of but onto the black cape of night. To throw which it has been argued actually helped at least a little powder into the air and to inform the Parisian group’s focus rather reveal some of these feeting images would than the other way around, making it all take a scholar with access to archives and the more puzzling that until fairly recently a knowledge of Serbian; the task of this so little serious scholarly attention has short text (alas) is simply to signal what been paid to this phenomenon. Serbian such scholarship might redress. surrealism privileged a number of formal Surrealist activity in the 1920s in what strategies, notably staged, manipulated was then named the Kingdom of Serbs, or documentary photography, collage 25

Patricide_7_Final.indd 25 17/10/2014 10:08 and assemblage. Engagements with the in a text mixing prose, poetry and writings of Freud, Marx, Engels and typography in which the eponymous hero Hegel, in particular the notion of the moves through fantastic, cosmic dream interactions between psychoanalysis and environments. dialectics, characterised the group, as did an abiding concern with the tensions Hipnison swallows the moon, puts and interactions between poetry and clouds in his pocket, raises his arm, and transforms the arbitrary social engagement – a theme experienced landscape into some other illusory with urgency for the Serbs given the set-pieces: an endless purple desert local context of increasingly totalitarian surrounding a hill. Tere is a black conditions that would eventually render tent at the bottom of the hill; ex group activity impossible (partly as the oriente, a purple and square sun is result of the imprisonment of three of its rising. […] Te band plays oriental members). melodies. (cited in Levi, p.46)

One of these abiding interests was flm. In Already for de Boully, as later for other common with a number of international members of the Belgrade surrealist circle, avant-garde environments of the 1920s flm is valuable above all as a vehicle for (notably in Czechoslovakia), cinema was moving not only between worlds but a central part of Yugoslav intellectual between the concrete realm of lived debates even if actually completed experience and imaginary, inner territories experimental flms were rather rare: it – a conducting medium capable of the stood for something quintessentially new, kinds of fashes of connectivity or perhaps dynamic, popular and anti-bourgeois, resolution between realities in tension that with an access to themes such as humour, would characterise the group’s recurring modernity, psychology, dream and the concerns. absurd. In emerging surrealist circles, this concern was felt especially keenly, but in At the height of Belgrade surrealism’s ways that give the focus a distinctively activities the group revisited the idea of hypnotic and imaginary quality. Already a scenario beyond realisation but whose by 1923 the poet Monny de Boully had form calls into question both the limits and published ‘Doctor Hipnison, or the conditions of cinema, in a collaboration Technique of Living’, a hybrid text that published in the almanac Nemoguće/ is in part an ‘unflmable’ scenario reading L’Impossible in May 1930. Crustaceans on like automatic writing in search of a seated the Chest combined Aleksandar Vučo’s audience. For Pavle Levi, this constitutes scenario, much of it apparently automatic an instance of ‘written cinema’, featuring in inspiration, with a suite of twelve directions for sounds or movements small collages by Marko Ristić recalling 26

Patricide_7_Final.indd 26 17/10/2014 10:08 the collage novels of Max Ernst. Based Ristić, who was interested in the boundaries on nineteenth-century line engravings between collage and photography, had from a book of instructions for amateur also produced a suite of ffteen hybrid magicians, these images only rarely refect images a couple of years previously the script directly, giving instead a sense combining photogram shadows of objects of a second, deeper identity to a proposal and materials (cameraless images made in that was already unflmable. Tey echo, the darkroom) with fgurative elements nevertheless, the scenario’s characteristic taken from traditional negatives, and their leaps and interruptions from one scene sequencing and repetitions suggested both and event to another in a sequential a dormant animation and a refection upon but rationally unrelated narrative that earlier, more properly flmic experiments suggests a familiarity with the flms and such as those by Man Ray. But more than published scenarios of Buñuel and Dalí this, flm theorist Pavle Levi sees instances (not to mention, via the flm’s title, a hint of a ‘cinema by other means’ occurring of the work of pioneering natural history repeatedly throughout the collage practice documentary flm-maker Jean Painlevé). of Serbian surrealists, notably in the (for Body parts, objects, animals all have its time) rather advanced experiment their roles in this dream-like succession in assemblage by Vučo and Ristić Te of swerves across logic, but a prologue Frenzied Marble (again of 1930), in which (‘Te Foreplay’, with an instruction ‘not clumsy materials – found objects, twigs, to be played’) sets up the very terms under straw, clay, paint – are smeared across which this imaginary, latent cinema was to a wooden ‘apparatus’ whose three-part be viewed. Part way between hallucination structure suggests both a narrative and the and primitive science, like some magic sequential ‘freezing’ of flm frames ready lantern projection of a dream, the flm’s to be stirred into life. Once again, the phantasmagoria should unfold in the notion of animating objects and materials, realm of the unconscious: of launching them (back) into a system somewhere in the prehistory of cinema Let the background be a shadow at a point when flm might not yet have or a black wave. Most suitable become that technologized, industrial would, in fact, be the dead of concern we know now but a ferry between night, that dark band of an eternal wall revealing no secrets. Te wet, day and night, seems to lie at the heart of dark brown colour has the good such works. property of concealing all traces of a crime: like a sponge, it soaks Te primitive cinemas of Serbian the marks left there by the bloody surrealism are no doubt absent from fngers. (cited in Levi, p.68) the mainstream accounts of surrealism’s encounter with flm in large part for the 28

Patricide_7_Final.indd 28 17/10/2014 10:08 very good reason that they left behind in Bor’s portfolio from the mid-1930s, no actual flms. One, nevertheless, did at presumably not directly linked to the least briefy exist, and though we know flm, but enough to give a glimpse of the almost nothing of it, the possibility of kind of oneiric, charged and transgressive its eventual reappearance is enough to atmosphere Les Mystères de Belgrade make us want to keep this chapter open. might have possessed. A fascinating Vane Bor’s Les Mystères de Belgrade was character who remains nevertheless completed in 1936 (that is, several years almost unknown outside of Serbia, Bor after the demise of the Belgrade group, made a signifcant contribution both though Bor’s continued commitment to to the surrealist groups in Belgrade and surrealist practice throughout the later Paris, but in parallel to his activities as an 1930s and early 1940s gives no reason to innovative painter, photographer, collage suggest it should not be considered in this maker and theorist he was also an active framework): given its première, the flm flm expert and critic, publishing reviews then seems to have disappeared without and critical texts in Serbian (notably for trace. Te project was apparently a kind of the journal Politika) on all aspects of the homage to silent screen legend Pearl White cinema during the inter-war years. He was (whose series Te Exploits of Elaine was especially committed to the medium of the known in France as Les Mystères de New photogram, with some of these cameraless York), and was a collaboration between works, according to art historian Milanka director Bor, pianist and producer Esther Todić, informed by his interest in avant- Johnson (originator, it would seem, of the garde flm. In 1944 Bor would leave Serbia scenario) and composer Josip Slavenski to settle in England, initially in London, (with Bor the co-founder of production where he would continue and extend company Filmska kulturna zadruga), and his work as an artist, theorist, poet and is said to have featured intersecting and inventor. In 1994 Michael Richardson oblique visions of the city of Belgrade. and I managed to track down his address Photographs of ambiguous urban locations to an old people’s home in Oxford, where evoking enigmatic fgures and imminent he had died the year before. mysterious or criminal events feature

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Bahun-Radudović, Sania, ‘When the Margin Cries: Surrealism in Yugoslavia’, RiLUnE, no.3, 2005, pp.37-52. http://www.rilune.org/mono3/6_Radunovic.pdf Belgrade surrealist group, Nemoguće/L’Impossible, Belgrade 1930, facsimile reprint Belgrade 2002 Nevena Daković, ‘Te Unflmable Scenario and Neglected Teory: Yugoslav Avant-Garde Film, 1920-1990’, in Djurić, Dubravka and Miško Šuvaković, eds, Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo Avant-Gardes and Post Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia 1918-1991, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2003, pp.466-520. European Context of Serbian Surrealism, http://nadrealizam.rs/en/page/home Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means, New York: Oxford University Press 2012 Museum of Modern Art, Belgrade, Vane Bor, exhibition catalogue, 1990 Milanka Todić, Te Impossible: Surrealist Art, http://www.serbiansurrealism.com/index.html (online version of the catalogue Nemoguće: Umetnost nadrealizma, Belgrade Museum of Applied Arts 2002) Milanka Todić ‘Cut and Paste Pictures In Surrealism’, http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/ doi/1450-9814/2006/1450-98140606281T.pdf

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