A SALUTE TO ANTIFILM

Amongst the entries at the “Croatian One-Minute Film Festival,” hosted in Požega, one stood out—at least conceptually. Marcin Szelagowski’s The End (2013) opened with a subtitle reading, “A one minute record of immortal life after death.” For 60 seconds, the screen was black, interrupted only by the cheeky warning, “When you wait for the end, even one minute seems to be eternity.”

It’s true, the film seemed to last longer than the others, precisely because there was no film. In some ways, this conjures up the principles of the antifilm movement of the 1960s. As Mihovil Pansini—the chief spirit behind the success of Zagreb’s first Genre Film Festival (GEFF)—explained in a biographical documentary, “That’s what antifilm is...You wait to see a film, yet what you get is something that is not a film. Let’s film that!” This is—though perhaps unintentionally—precisely what was at work last Friday night in Požega, and it truly caught the audience by surprise. Chuckles emanating from the screening room—as what the crowd likely assumed to be a technical hiccup became part of the festival—ran eerily parallel to Pansini’s reflections on a medical lecture where an accompanying film failed to work and inspired him to produce an antifilm: “Everyone was very cheerful about this.”¹

Surely, a relationship with death links this film to the antifilm movement. However, the distinction between content and concept here is crucial. Often using words like “murder” and “suicide” to define the idea from which their work was born, filmmakers who identified as antifilm enthusiasts were intent on damaging the material film itself and intended to banish representation in cinema. Reduction, here, was achieved through sometimes-literal destruction, with filmmakers often burning or drawing on the celluloid. This was their concept: reducing film to its materiality as a means of representation in and of itself. Whether or not you’d call it a success, Szelagowski’s film uses a similar tactic—literally, the lack of a film—to make a representation of death. It is a perplexing intersection of anti-film and no film at all, because it is explicitly representational; it professes to be a “one minute record of life after death.” A void of all content becomes the content.

Content aside, another distinction is helpful here: that between blackness and blankness. Whereas Szelagowski’s work contains blackness, Pansini’s work did not contain anything (save a few color fluctuations so as to make it more endurable). Pansini’s blankness presupposes a surface; there cannot be blankness without something that is blank. Materiality is therefore essential—without it, reduction is impossible. Reduction must strive toward a baseline. But if antifilm is reduction, then Szelagowski’s film is complete and utter demolition. Although the filmmaker’s purposeful lack of skill came off more as trite than as conceptually sophisticated, it highlights a key difference between reduction and emptiness. If nothing else, Szelagowki’s piece demonstrates how fine a line the antifilm directors walked those 50 years ago.

It seems that antifilm can therefore be found not guilty of murdering film. Aggravated assault, perhaps.

Gina Hackett

¹ Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (Oxford University Press, 2012), 115

10.06.2013.