Counter-Godard: On Makavejev's Anti-Formalism

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Sezgin Boynik

not be of any help. As a result of the latter; Makavejev should be felt, and Godard has to be understood.

The table of topography of Godard-Makavejev comparison which I have elabo-rated in the15th issue of Kino journal, shows that this imagination seems coherent not only in Mortimer’s book, but that even writers, who seem to oppose non-discur-sive and haptic interpretation of Makavejev’s films, have reproduced similar forms of representation. Readers of this text should therefore refer to the mentioned top,ography, where I have used the stereotypical topography of Makavajev-Godard comparison in order to discuss the limits of this assumed dualism; primarily, to show that with this imagination some social and political dimensions of Makavejev’s works would be overlooked: for example the notion of cultural policy which was an important component both in former’s and in latter’s cinematic practice.

My aim is not to insist that there are no differences between Makavejev and God-ard, but to deconstruct the index of this stereotypical dualism, based on the above mentioned ideological imagination. I strongly believe that there are differences be-tween these two directors, especially in their references to Marxism; but I claim that in ideological imagination of the difference between the two suspends the contradic-tions, and as a result, Marxism, to an arbitrariness of this filmic practice. One could say that both were making films, not politics; the fact I would fully agree with, but the way how they made their films and how they constructed the politics (Marxism) in their films should be understood through the filmic references, not through extra filmic references such as “Calvinism versus paganism”, spontaneity versus organiza-tion or “abstract versus concrete.”

My aim, paradoxical/controversial as it might seem, is to show that the difference between Makavejev and Godard would make sense only at the point where we start to discuss their work through the film practice; not as a projection of certain extra-filmic components such as Balkan men, humanist Marxism, sexual energy, sponta-neity, etc. For this filmic difference between Makavejev and Godard to take place, the formalist approach could be of great help: the references throughout the text on Russian Formalism has to be understood as an alibi for specific and materialist discussion of the filmic practices. I would prefer not to exaggerate this specificity as some kind of idealized autonomy or intrinsity of formal method; rather it should be viewed and understood as something which alludes to the limits of interpretation. Roman Jakobson’s text on formal method of discussing Russian avant-garde poetry could be the starting point:

The subject of literary scholarship is not literature but literariness, that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. And yet literary scholars up to now have often behaved like policeman who, in the course of arresting a particular person, would pick up, just in case, everybody and anybody who happened to be in the apartment, as well as people who happened to be passing on the street. Similarly literary historian used

Counter-Godars: On Makavejev’s anti-formalism

Sezgin Boynik

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In the following text, I aim to resume my previous discussions on theoretical and ideological consequences of the comparison between Dušan Makavejev and Jean-Luc Godard. I have previously argued that the comparison of these two directors set the norms for ideological positioning of Makavjev and other East-European film makers within the ideological field of what some researchers have called Bal-kan imagination or Eastern sentimentality. The most enduring form of Yugoslav film makers’ ideological imagination, especially of Makavejev, could be found in Lorraine Mortimer’s book length interpretation of former, which has persistently invested in conceptualization of film-forms through the affective, haptic, sensu-ous, biological and other terms which defy theoretical elaborations. In the case of the mentioned imagination, we have a double-binded situation; on one hand, Makavejev in comparison to Godard represents a film expression, which should be grasped only through the elements that are missing in Godard, and as such it acquires a new theory that should be non-Godardian. As a result, Makavejev’s films, even if they deal with the same issues as those Godard is dealing with, namely with the issues of Marxism, sexuality, labour, contradictions of socialist formations, etc, the expressive totality of the former is based on different norms; these are Marxist films of different nature. The differentiated nature of Marxism in Makavejev’s work, is also related to a different experience of that aspect of Marxism, where words, theory, discursive explanations, and the film-form will

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DISINTEGRATION IN FRAMES Counter-Godard: On Makavejev’s Anti-formalism Sezgin Boynik

film theory and criticism in Yugoslavia; on the contrary, if one reads the writings of Dusan Stojanović, Bogdan Tirnanić and other film theoreticians, contemporaries of Makavejev, he will realize that Yugoslavian New Film is compared to Godard’s ex-actly through the work of Makavejev.

Godard referred to Makavejev indirectly, in his film on Czechoslovakia, Pravda (1970) co-authored with Jean-Pierre Gorin as Dziga Verrov Group. In this film after discussing contradictions in the state of existing socialism, particularly the contra-diction of being influenced by Western commodification of sexuality in a socialist state, he is showing a still from Makavejev’s film, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T., 1967); a black cat sitting on the naked white body of Eva Ras, photography which has become icono-graphic of Black Wave films. Another film in which he mentions Yugoslavia is Far from Vietnam (1967); disappointed by the fact that he was not granted a visa to shoot in Vietnam, he says in desperation that maybe he should visit Yugoslavia instead.

The third occasion, at least to my knowledge, on which Godard mentions Yugo-slavia, actually a part of Yugoslavia, is in the film Notre Musique (2004), more pre-cisely in the scene in which the rebuilding of Mostar Bridge takes place. Pavle Levi has interpreted this particular scene as a change in the work of director, which he describes as:

What is at stake is no longer the cinematic articulation of a radical political stance in-spired by the theoretical lessons of Marxist anti-humanism, as was the case with the projects of the Dziga Vertov Group. Rather, it is the possibility of a political revalorisa-tion of intersubjectivity that motivates Notre musique. Montage here enacts, on the level of form, Godard’s search for reserves of solidarity among the shreds of the fabric of humanity (Levi, 2009: 58).

Actually, what has changed in Godard’s films is this “fabric”. Before becoming the “fabric of humanity”, the films of Godard, as in Pravda, were described as the “fab-ric of contradictions”. My aim is to actualize these contradictions and to show that any film, including those of Makavejev, which claims the truth, should pave its way through the contradictions.

I.To resume this discussion on dualist approach regarding the relation between art and politics in cinema, as it is depicted through dualism of Makavejev and Godard, I have schematized the discourse on this issue by pointing at the strict cinematic topography, which can be drawn from the writings on Makavejev. By referring to this basic scheme, which is pointing at limits and re-occurring motifs of Makaveje-vian cinematic topography, I have detected two general tendencies which could be described as ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’. The division of the entire cinematic avant-garde

anything that came to hand: biographical evidence, psychology, politics, and philosophy. Instead of literary science they created a conglomeration of homegrown disciplines. (Ja-kobson, 1997: 179).

This literariness, or ‘cinematicness’, as some Formalists were referring to it, is not a magical keyword which can decode the inner meaning of film; more, it refers to the limits of forms, which does not exclude the excesses involved in this formation. On another level, as Darko Suvin has clearly shown, the materialist axiom of formalist methodology will provide a concrete and historical understanding of the dialectics of the art work, “all the lessons of Russian formalism, without which we cannot begin to make sense of fiction, belong here under the heading of materialism (albeit a partial and in-consistent, not yet a dialectical one). Fornalism is the A and B of any integrally materialist approach to art, from which we should then proceed to C D, and so on.” (Suvin, 1988: 667)

In the end, this essay is about Makavejev, it uses the cinematic discourse related to Godard in order to perform a frontal attack on spontaneous understanding of cinematic language1. What I am aiming at, is to show that without this deconstruc-tion of spontaneous, ‘Makavejev as counter-Godard’ imagination, we are not in a position to develop a serious and historical-materialist understanding of Makavejev and other representatives of Yugoslavian New Film; also, the aim of this text is that knowledge, produced on Makavejev and Yugoslavian New Film which is based on this imagination, will reproduce certain clichés related to theoretical and historical researches of film; namely, it will reproduce the clichés that “Black Wave” is a reflec-tion of Praxis philosophy stating that “Black Wave” films are beyond formalism, that Marxism in “Black Wave”, especially in Makavejev’s films, was an arbitrary and stra-tegic reference that helped him finance his films, etc.

Actually, my aim is to, once more try to open a space for discussing Makavejev independently from unlimited configurations of sensual, haptic and spontaneous imaginations. This aim will serve to nothing else then to historical-materialist criti-cism of Makavejev.

Two or Three Things about Godard and Makavejev Makavejev refers to Godard in many of his interviews, writings and comments on cin-ema (Tirnanic, 1970). Branko Vučićević, a film critic and a long time collaborator of Makavejev found no words to express his feelings and thoughts on Godard’s first film.

Živojin Pavlović in his discussion with Nebojša Pajkić and Slobodan Šijan made fun of their excitement with Godard’s Numero Deux, which he called “social pornog-raphy” (Pavlovic, 2001). There were no uniform ideas about Godard in Yugoslavian cinema; nor there was such a Makavajev as counter-Godard discourse in prevailing

1 It should be noted that this cinematic discourse related Godard is an Althusserian Godard which was a theoretical currency of the seventies cinematic theory.

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ing from this position we can thoroughly detect the relation of filmmaking towards reality and representation. With this method, I believe it is possible to grasp the in-ternalizations of contradictions of Ideological State Apparatuses, or we can talk about the “fabric of contradictions” of even film in more formalist and rigorous way.

II.The idea of ‘Makavejev as counter-Godard’ is primarily associated with the issue of anti-formalist and non-theoretical approach to the filmic practice. The dominant dis-course on cinema, written in Anglo-Saxon and other Western European languages, is most of the time reproducing this imagination, which is similar to certain Homi Bhabha-derived post-colonial theories discussing the issue of representation as am-biguity or shock, induced by encountering the other as absolute different. They are imagining Makavejev’s film practice either through unsurpassable earth likeness (Warren, 1996), or through Dionysian drive of madness (Durgnant, 1996).

From the point of view of Eastern European film theoreticians and critics, the film-form in Eastern European cinema is completely intertwined with the state poli-tics, and for that matter, it is impossible to talk about the autonomous and inde-pendent existence of forms in these political conditions. This thesis of impossibil-ity of emancipation from the state in the Eastern-European cinema is actually the driving force behind the thesis on Makavajev’s anti-formalism. The logic is based on a silent assumption that Makavejev cannot be a Godard because he is working in a socialist country, where totality of state and ideological apparatuses are ubiquitous and have penetrated in every pore of people’s everyday and intellectual life. Thus the artistic forms are discussed as crystallization of the state apparatuses. Here is how Antonin and Maria Liehm explain this situation in the introduction to their primer-book on Eastern European cinema:

“Even those who were not interested in the social implications of film, but primarily in its formal aspect, were gradually brought over to the political camp by the progressive distortion of this original conception and attempts to transform film into an instrument of state propaganda. First they encountered the effort to place each and every formal discovery, each and every experiment, into the “service of the Idea”, which shortly became the demand to give up all searching “in the name of the Idea”. Consequently, even the problem of form became political, and all efforts to assert new formal approaches beca-me political efforts, as did all subsequent efforts to consciously sidestep political issues through form. Film language and film form did not develop smoothly in a single one of the Eastern European countries, not even in the most favourable periods, but was inste-ad dependent on many extra-artistic influences. No analysis of the formal structures of

these materials. For this reason approaches to artistic works which concentrates on the issue of fabula, or story, are missing essential device of artistic distinctiveness.

into two oppositional or alternative tendencies could be placed in general schematiza-tion of cinematic modernism or cinematic political modernism which corresponds to avant-garde films after the sixties. Initially discussed by Peter Wollen in his text ‘Two Avant-gardes’, this schematic dualism of avant-garde cinema is not based on total and definite conceptualizations; but as Wollen indicates, this dualism (“two avant-garde”) is about distinctiveness of abstract and concrete logic of cinematic expres-sions. Roughly, this division is set to delineate the cinematic modes of productions in two general tendencies: form based cinema, or as Wollen puts it, signifier oriented cinema; and content based, or signified oriented cinema. To be more precise, the dif-ference between these two ‘counter-cinematic’ streams is based on the difference of their historical formations or genesis. If one is based on visual art, the other is based on theatre; if one is closed, opaque and self-referential, the other is open, social and activist oriented; or more precisely, if one is about forms, the other is about content (Wollen, 1982: 92-104). In Wollenian system, Dziga Vertov, Peter Gidal, Jean-Marie Straub & Danielle Huillet belong to the former; whereas Sergei Eisenstein, Godard, Glauber Rocha to the latter orientation (Wollen, 1982). If we follow this dualist avant-garde topography, can we examine what would be the position of Dušan Makavejev in this system?2 From the above indicated elements, it is clear that the distinction between Makavejev and Godard will not hold a grip. If Godard is in opposition to Gidal, then, in order to describe Makavejev, which in most of the cases is described as “counter-Godard” and as clear opponent of structuralist film-making like Gidal, we would need a third option; something that could situate Makavejev beyond God-ard and Gidal. My proposal is that in order to conceive this difference formally, as a distinction of devices which determines the art productions, we have to approach to this topography from a completely different theoretical position. We should then not look at the similarities or differences in content, or sujet, or in signified in the above mentioned filmmakers works; but at the artistic devices used by filmmakers, which ultimately determine their film-form3. One device, which would be easy to detect, is internalisation of the extrinsic or pro-filmic material to the artistic text. By proceed-

2 In Wollen’s avant-garde topography apart from Glauber Rocha, who by accident appears in one film of Godard as actor, no other films of non-Europeand and non-North American film makers is mentioned.

3 According to Russian Formalists, the difference between story and plot is crucial for under-lining the materialist analysis of the text. Initially proposed by Viktor Shklovsky, the term “plot formation altered the traditional notion of plot as a set of motifs and redirected it from the provenance of thematic concepts to that of compositional concepts” (Ejxenbaum, 2002: 15-16). Boris Ejxenbaum describes “plot formation” as most important device of artistic work: “the concept of plot (sjuzet) acquired a new meaning which did not coincide with that of story (fabula), and plot formation itself assumed its natural place in the sphere of formal study as a specific property of literary works.” (Ejxenbaum, 2002: 16). Thus, in order to execute proper Formalist approach to a text we have to conceptualize plot not as a depiction of events, or “story-stuff” (Shklovsky, 1990) which is only material for filling the plot, but as artistic laws which organize, or compose

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the formal system of linguistic strategies in Stalinist and post-Stalinist ideologi-cal climate with reference to arbitrariness of political speech, where constative and performative become inter-related to such a degree that meaning is suspended as a combinatory of “quotations”: “[the] narrative structure of the text was becoming circular, to the point that many formulaic speeches and addresses could be read top to bottom and bottom to top with similar results” (Yurchak, 2005: 49-50).

Dejan Jović’s work on Yugoslavia is based on a similar pattern, and it is no sur-prise that many recent studies dealing with the film and artistic productions during self-management socialism are referring to his work. According to Jović, ideologically Yugoslavian state was a “no-win situation” of perplexed antagonist political categories, where reason of contradictions was the theory and practice of socialist self-manage-ment primarily supported by Josip Broz Tito and theorized by Edvard Kardelj. Jović is describing the theory and practice of self-management as the pragmatic outcome of the irreconcilable social and political forces constituting the Yugoslav reality.

Formally, these political conflicts of Second Yugoslavia (or Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, 1945-1991) were not only of ethnic nature, as Jović argues, but also of “ideological nature”, mostly to do with the conflicts of ‘administrative’ (‘statist’) and ‘self-managing’ (‘non-statist’) understanding of the objectives of so-cialism (Jović, 2003: 161). This understanding of socialism had strong repercussions on the understanding of what generally ‘Yugoslavism’ is: as an alternative socialist conceptualisation of the state regulating the ever-coercive ethnic and ideological an-tagonisms. According to Jović, consequences of these contradictions between two irreconcilable tendencies in Yugoslavian ideology led to a grievous position: “The suc-cess of Kardelj’s anti-statist project led to weakening of the state, thus making it vulnerable and unable to defend its unity. Yugoslavia was first weakened from within, by its own ideological concept of ‘withering away of the state’” (Jović, 2003: 158). Another conse-quence of this ‘no-win situation’ was, that paradoxes of ‘new Yugoslavia’ should be all-embracing, or as Jović describes it, as “‘catch-all’ formula, which offered something to many sides, but to none everything” (Jović, 2003: 160). As a result of this, the mean-ing of socialist self-management became everything and nothing at the same time; some kind of a linguistic game, keeping real antagonisms away from eruption, in a kind of fine and harmonious relation. Jović’s main argumentation in which he states that self-management ideologies (‘anti-statists’ ideologies) underestimated the “real danger from the real world”, led to “almost religious belief in the power of the words”, which ultimately created an un-realistic politics through the “resolutions and propaganda” (Jović, 2003: 181). Formally, this version of Yugoslavia was bound on paradoxes and contradictions which hoped for re-conciliation of antagonistic ideo-logical tendencies by self-management theory. But instead of a solution, as Jović aims to demonstrate, self-management’s “non-statism” generated more deep and structural contradictions where reality and the fiction have been blurred through the synthetic linguistic constructions.

Eastern European film and their development, no analysis of the best works of Eastern European film, is completed unless one takes into consideration the close connection between film art and the development of society and politics that is characteristic of a nationalized film industry – sometimes as its boon, sometimes as its bane.” (Liehm and Liehm, 1977: 2).

Accordingly, the cinematic apparatus (and form) was inseparable from and also inter-woven with the state apparatuses: thus, the emancipation of art from politics meant also the proliferation of the distinct and avant-garde expressivities. Once this pattern became the norm, the discourse on avant-garde film practices from socialist countries has become indistinctively associated with this kind of existential impossibilities. This is mostly viable to a conceptualisation of the artists as dissidents: artists and film mak-ers emanating from socialist countries are either real artists and as such they do not have anything to do with the state apparatuses and forms (if that is possible); or they are cultural apparatchiks and opportunist artists, instrumentalized by the state. Not only form became ideologized in this total imagination, but also sexuality, language, reference to theory and politics (Marxism) is moulded according to this imagination.

With this ideological operation, the anti-formalism, in a paradoxical way, turns to expression of dissident emancipation. This is paradoxical because Russian For-malism not only was in most direct communication with avant-garde artistic ten-dencies; but also with issues such as class struggle and organization, which were instances of political practice, and were also the concern of formalist approach. Theo-retical and methodological repercussions of this historical reformation invested by anti-formalist dissident imagination can be felt in many different fields of cinema studies; bellow in this text we will have a closer look at the example of reformation of Roman Jakobson’s theses on geometry of poetic language.

There are few different theoretical approaches dealing with ideological contradic-tions of art in post-revolutionary socialism. One of them is the theory of speech-act that approaches the issue of ideological contradictions from the aspect of discourse, usually linguistic, formations. These discussions are mostly addressing the issue of political slogans in art-works and everyday life, produced in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary context. As discussed in the context of post-Stalinist Soviet ideological field by Alexei Yurchak, the constructions of slogans are one of the main constituent practices in the ideological and cultural vacuum of socialist countries. Yurchak’s theory on construction of political speech in Stalinist and post-Stalinist ideological state, involving the complex set of relations between performative and constative speech-act positions, is typical of these tendencies. He is arguing, through mixing post-structuralist theses on language together with Austin’s general speech-act propositions, that fundamental constituent of ‘performativity’ of the language in the field of semantic ‘constativeness’ is speech-act’s ability to have multiple, poly-valent, and transformable nature (Yurchak, 2005: 20). Accordingly he deals with

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palimpsest of confusions, lies, ideologies, and politics. Or as Sudar describes it, it is a process of “unravelling the political picture of the time and place, as it can be deciphered from viewing Petrovic’s films” (Sudar, 2013: 6)5. The purity of Black Wave phenom-enon as of an “anti-dogmatist” stance is constructed, as Sudar is viewing them, not only through harmony of the story (fabula) of these films, but also through a device of plot (sjuzet) which aims at more effective integration between form and content.6

III.To resume, the conceptualisation of ‘dissident’ with the terms of anti-formalism in-duced by political contradictions is not unfamiliar to Yugoslav and Eastern-Europe-an socialist cinema studies and cultural politics in general. For example, Yvette Biro’s book on modern cinema is also built on this dualism between abstract and concrete notion of film phenomenology; which she discusses as dichotomy between poetry and grammar. This device, which is in fact based on the theory of Russian Formalism, is used in Biro’s book as some kind of paradoxical deformalization of the artistic text; she is recognizing artistic text as a refraction of the extrinsic reality, but adding that the concrete reality itself has artistic (poetic) characteristics. Biro’s phenomenologi-cal formalism represents a complex position in the cinema theory because it uses the formalist theories in order to propose an un-formal (non-formal) reading of cinema works. Considering that Biro’s theories of cinematic formalist-phenomenology had a large influence on reception of Eastern European films and on conceptualization of political cinema in general, it is important to clarify this theoretical model and its ideological and political outcomes.

One of the main theoreticians of Russian Formalism, Roman Jakobson, from whom Biro is deriving her thesis on ‘poetry of grammar’, has formalized his propo-sition in two oppositional axis, as ‘poetry of grammar’ and as ‘grammar of poetry’. Biro, by referring only to the first one, is delimiting the scope of Jakobsonian theory exactly in its strongest or most formalist point. For Jakobson, ‘grammar of poetry’ is one of the most crucial logics for artistic creativity; it makes possible to use art and poetry as a device in order to formalize extrinsic materials. Philosophically speaking, it is about structuring the intelligibility of art through the prescriptions whose ef-fects do not necessarily limit the expressions of artistic excesses. We are confronted with the latter by the artistic prescriptions which are alluding to Spinozist point of geometricity; or as Jakobson describes:

5 That this anti-formalist imagination as “unravelled political picture” is furnished with anti-communism and sympathies towards proto-fascism, via Milos Crnjanski, is extra gain of conservative reformation.

6 Describing Petrovic’s erarlier political documentaries where he experimented with the new filmic-languages, Sudar is claiming that: “Petrovic’s formal innovation was carefully integrated into the more traditional documentary form, making the film very dynamic and at the same time coherent in its content” (Sudar, 2013: 59).

An example of the application of Jović’s theses on Yugoslavian (cul-de-sac) con-tradictory politics to cinema studies is a recent publication of Vlastimir Sudar deal-ing with Aleksandar Petrović, another dissident film maker from Yugoslavia. Sudar is reiterating the thesis of this “no-win situation” clearly and concisely: “Tito was liberating with one hand but holding back the process with the other” (Sudar, 2013: 45).]. Follow-ing this line, Sudar is proposing a historico-biographical analysis of Petrović’s develop-ment as emancipation from this paradoxical and abstract conception of the state. The evolutionary linearity of Petrović’s formal and filmic development is in his research depicted as inversely proportional to Yugoslavian political and ideological history. Ac-cordingly, parallely with deepening and complicating of Yugoslav self-managing ideo-logical contradictions, Petrović’s cinema became more and more detached from these self-management induced contradictions. The result, as author shows us, is to turn more toward the concrete elements of society and emancipation from ideology and abstractness of political discourse. Artistically, this inversion meant detachment from politics and culture toward the issues of eternal values of nature.

This cinematic solution for concrete reality, peculiar to many Eastern European film-makers as a sign of detachment from the tensions of abstracted politics, was transformed into the genuine cinematic style of dissidence. Petrovicćs film I Even Met the Happy Gypsies (Skupljači Perja) which won the Cannes Grand Prix Jury Prize in 1967 is the clearest example of this concreteness, or as Sudar describes it: “[the film depicts] gypsy lifestyle as a specific culture, which communists were not willing to un-derstand … and were not allowing their specificity (their nomad lifestyle) to be practiced.” (Sudar, 2013: 133).

It is no surprise to read that Sudar is interpreting Petrović’s detachment from the contradictions of politics, and his shift toward the issue of nature and harmony, as the detachment from the formalism; or as the “abandonment of the ‘capriciousness’ of formal experimentation” (Sudar, 2013: 94). In order to contextualize this shift of de-formalization, we can describe it schematically based on the scale of Sudar’s histori-ography of Yugoslavian artistic films, as a shift from New Film to Black Wave4. In the case of Petrović, who has written two books on this issue; the Black Wave represents exactly this mode of giving up the ideas of imagined socialist progress through the device of de-formalization (Petrović, 1988). Sabori in this case of historicism, as de-picted by Sudar, is a transitional film; the moment of detachment from the form that gives the way to an un-mediated grasp of the truth. Methodologically speaking, this evokes the claim that Black Wave films as art of counter-history were a condition for the truth in Yugoslavia that revealed the contradictions buried under the official

4 In historiography of Yugoslav artistic films one of the most difficult questions is the distinc-tion between New Film and Black Wave. Usually, New Film is seen, compared to Black Wave, as a more formal approach to depicting modern urban life; in opposition to this, Black Wave is referred to as cinema of truth, depicting the left-overs of the urban socialist progress (Hatherley, 2012: 180-212; Goulding, 2002).

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that V-effect in Brecht is not only about stressing the position of audience as alien-ated mass from the art-work; but more about pointing at the procedure of alienation which the structure of art-work itself carries. In other terms, instead of understand-ing the V-effect (alienation made perceptible) as a device which makes us conscious that we are in front of an art-work; Suvin claims that real emancipatory potential of Brecht-Shklovsky’s device is that it makes perceptible social, political and ideological construction of certain elements involved in the constitution of the art-work (Suvin, 1965: 579-580). But the use of the V-effect solely as a device of experience of the world, of unmediated relation to reality is, according to Suvin, a “nihilist estrange-ment aiming at affecting a ritual and mythical, rather than a cognitive approach” (Suvin, 1984: 252). Formally, the horizon of all nihilist estrangements, according to Suvin “is a beautific vision of the discontinuous flux of things, related to a consciousness of the limits of philosophical humanism and of the positive meaning of alienation” (Suvin, 1984: 253). This methodological correction of the two distinct uses of estrangement, the nihilist and political, is important because of two particular claims of this text. First, Suvin’s intervention on the “nihilist estrangement” (which he is further describing as “religious, mystical, and mythical”) is targeting at the intellectual conjuncture of art theory “substituting pseudo-biological values for historical ones” (Suvin, 1984: 232), particularly in the work of Lee Baxandall. Earlier on, I have discussed the writings of Baxandall, especially his text Towards an Eastern-European Cinemarxism as instru-mental in appropriating Makavejev’s film-form as something distinctively (Eastern-European!?) political, which does not use heuristic means of politicisation as Godard does, but instead through mobilization of elementary and deep biological forces and effects (Baxandall, 1983). In criticising the shortcomings of Baxandall approach and its methodological consequences I have also criticised other examples of similar ten-dencies prevailing in cinema studies which refer to Makavejev’s works as an exem-plary case of film-works, de-politicizing the artistic devices by using grotesque and excess in metaphorical forms (Boynik, 2012).7

Secondly, following this model, it could be easy to situate Biro’s approach in the field of “de-familiarization as de-sensualisation”, or of possibility of mythical de-vice where “dominant fossilised views of reality should, when juxtaposed to ‘unpackaged’ events be revealed ‘as grotesque, inadequate and dangerouS” (Suvin, 1984: 249). This is strikingly similar to the cinematic position which Biro is describing with the terms “ostranenie-as-lifestyle”, or the “anti-film” tendency , whose typical representative are the films of Dušan Makavejev (Biro, 1982: 92). Accordingly, as the best exam-ple of “poetry of grammar” and grotesque, this strand of ‘anti-film’ is distinct from a Godard for many reasons; primarily because it is constructive as opposition to

7 Political cinematic modernism is here described in a larger frame, corresponding to the idea of intersection of art and politics and consequences of contradictions of this encounter (Rodo-wick, 1994; Harvey, 1982; Kovacs, 2008).

The obligatory character of the grammatical processes and concepts constrains the poet to reckon with them; either he strives for symmetry and sticks to these simple, repea-table, diaphanous patterns, based on binary principle, or he may cope with them, while longing for an ‘organic chaos’. I have stated repeatedly that the rhythm teachnique is ‘either grammatical or antigrammatical’ but never agrammatical (Jakobson, 1987: 132).

Departing from this description, we could say that Biro is hoping for an “organic chaos” of artistic creativity without grammar which is the condition of artistic work. Furthermore, her thesis of cinema as the “new mythology” whose richness derives from poetism of concreteness and un-mediated reality, is further explicated with a sociological observation that in modern, institutionalized, over-ideologized and standardized life “events and people are becoming more and more formalized and mechan-ical” (Biro, 1982: 67). As an opposition to these limits of mechanistic notion of ab-stractness, she proposes the resourcefulness of the concrete, as “poetics of grammar” of everyday reality. A film can reach this layer of reality, only at the moment when it extracts all ideological meanings, or to put it more precisely, when it suspends the ef-fects of ideological state apparatuses inscribed to the art-work. This de-politicization of cinema, according to Biro, has far reaching philosophical consequences which she, following one stream of Jakobson’s formalism, describes as “the negative significance”: “This missing layer [meaninglessness, ‘loss of deep human meaning’m sic], is what the film can make visible when it descents into the object-world’s unintelligible jungle and presents it to us for what it really is: chaos, indifference, and dreary subsistence; it is an empty ex-istence, of, if you will, a nonexistence” (Biro, 1982: 89). Considering that Biro names the device of this ‘negative significance’ as semiotic exaggeration, excess, or sim-ply as de-familiarization and estrangement (“ostannenie”) (Biro, 1982: 78) and that her proposition of “indifference” reminds of Shkovsky’s “plotless device” we have to grasp these terms in their full formalist understandings.

Since I will further on deal with the conceptual importance of the device of “os-tranenie” in the work of Makavejev, it is important to situate this artistic device within another similar device, namely with Brecht’s concept of “de-familiarization” (V-effect). Literature in comparison, influence and relation between Shkovsky’s ‘os-tanenie’ and Brecht’s ‘Verhemdurnefekt’ was in many occasions discussed (Mitchell, 1974; Brewster, 1974; Striedter, 1989). The main theoretical tenets of these dis-cussions are divided into two; one claiming that ‘ostranenie’ and ‘de-familiarization’ refer to the device of attraction, shock and that it has a deliberate effect on a purely perceptual mode of aesthetic experience; and another, referring to them as a proce-dure of signifying the heuristic process of overlooking the context of politicization in arts. In order to discuss these different modes of ‘estrangements’ or ‘de-familiariza-tions’ in a broader, and more politicized realm, I am proposing to have a closer look at the writings of Darko Suvin, Yugoslavian Praxis philosopher and dramaturgist, who discussed the terms in direct relation to avant-garde art. Suvin made it explicit

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another Praxis philosopher, Rudi Šupek, in his article “Some Contradictions and In-sufficiencies of Yugoslav Self-Managing Socialism” has written about Yugoslavian self-management as if it was something between Proudhonian ‘coordinating organi-zation’ composed of producers and a vertical organization of societal power which is represented by the communist party, as a state of irrevocable antagonisms. One of the most obvious (negative) consequences of the contradictions of self-management was the legal and business-like equalization of productive and mediating organiza-tions, that is to say, those who produce the surplus of wealth and those who have this surplus at their hand.

One of the criticisms regarding the theory and practice of self-management is its relation toward the formation of the political subject, which leads the discussion from political formation easily to a cultural formation.

It is not surprising then, that there are many accounts dealing with determinis-tic relation between Praxis’ philosophical notions on self-management’s reification and Black Wave’s form of ambiguous images: suggesting that the latter’s ambiguity is a reflection of former’s contradictions (Eagle, 1983; Baxandall, 1983; Goulding, 2002; Levi, 2007: 29-35).

The thesis on relation between Black Wave and Praxis is arguing that philosoph-ical proposition of Praxis on human nature as spontaneous, creative and genuinely non-reified, was the determining factor in constituting the formal component of Black Wave film subjects. Accordingly, Black Wave responded to the contradictions of self-management through the lens of Praxis philosophy; or to be more precise, through the lens of humanist theses on Marxism which is not subsumed under the rubrics of structural conception of human formation. Most of the researches dealing with the representation of contradictions in Black Wave films tend to dis-close the analysis by conceding it to an easy applicable equation between Yugoslav un-official cinema and Yugoslav un-official philosophy and are assuming that the notion of ‘un-official’ or un-dogmatic could be the link between these two. In these accounts, the concept of un-official has a rather peculiar nature of blurring the lines between intrinsic elements, or forms that constitutes the art object, with the ideo-logical notion of un-mediated creativity. In order to demonstrate the shortcomings of this representational projection of Black Wave philosophy we would have to deal with many important components of these approaches; for example, with the true conditions of un-officialness of Praxis philosophy, or more precisely to define the basic antagonisms between institution (until now described as platform) of Praxis philosophy and the policy of self-management; it would also be useful to have more concrete information regarding the contradictions between philosophical volun-tarism of Praxis and collectivism of Yugoslavian self-management socialism.9 But

9 There are many accounts which deal with the formal similarities between Praxis’ notion of freedom and neo-liberalist position of economism (Markovic, 2006: 84-88). This similarity

destruction, and also because it does not use politics as “slogan like comic abstrac-tion”, “as unambiguous and direct means of information” and as “didactic language … of one-dimensional truth of an ideology” (Biro, 1982: 93-95). So instead of poster-like Godard we have affirmative life-like Makavejev. Or instead of slogans of Godard, we are having murmurs or poetry of Makavejev.

IV.As mentioned earlier, the imagination of Makavejev as counter-Godard is also sup-porting an idea that Marxism of Makavejev was different from Marxism of Godard, both in form and in content. Makavejev’s Marxism was not inspired by Althusserian Marxism that “advocated a kind of surgical practice, one that tended to cut out the heart, soul, even the guts of the film experience to get out the cancer of ideology” (Mortimer, 2005: xi); but a reflection of Yugoslavian Humanist Marxism that was based on hu-man agency and praxis, instead of science and structures.

One of the most important philosophical platforms in socialist Yugoslavia was a group of young theoreticians gathered around the journal Praxis and Korčula Sum-mer School which were highly productive between 1964 and 1974, the years which correspond to activities of the Black Wave. The main philosophical tenets of Praxis were the emphasis on young Marx’s humanistic theses on alienation, inevitability of communism, self-realization, Hegelian notion of contradictions, and utopian poli-tics influenced primarily by Lukacs, Bloch and Goldmann.

As Mihailo Marković, one of the leading philosophers of Praxis wrote, the main proposition of their platform was the philosophical struggle against “transcendental and extra-human realms where human is reduced to mere things, i.e. where human is reified.” (Markovic, 1979: xxxi). He detects this reification in many fractions of phi-losophy, including some fractions of Marxist philosophy (especially Althusserian branch of structuralist philosophy8).

The philosophical struggle against reified conceptualisation of human being was also a background agenda for voluntaristic conception of political action; i.e. the hu-manistic formulation of political action, or praxis of un-reified subject unconstrained by the state apparatuses. This re-formulation of the subject would implement both re-conceptualisation of politics and of the art and culture. But as many philosophers of Praxis including Marković have argued,, this policy was impossible because it was in direct contradiction with the politics of the state centred conceptualisation of socialism. Even if self-management was aiming at withering away of the state and its apparatuses; Praxis philosophers have claimed that this was half way done. As

8 Althusser’s article “Contradiction and Over-determination”, which launched his international fame as Marxist philosopher, was initially submitted to Praxis International journal; but it has been refused to be published by the editorial board on the ground that it had a position of “Stalinist-positivism” (Kangrga, 2001: 19).

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Concept of equilibrium of form and content in art works had impact also on the way how art and general culture had been connected with the politics and economy in the theory of Praxis. Branka Ćurčić showed the difficulties with Praxis’ philosophy of art rests especially in this contradiction between assumed immateriality of the creative work and reification induced by the transcendence of non-Praxis philoso-phy. Somehow, Praxis was trapped between materiality of action and immateriality of creation; it is interesting that art has suffered most evidently from this contradic-tion. Ćurčić has discussed the consequences of this conceptual approach of Praxis, which separated the processes of labour of artist from the workers; and showed that with this separation Praxis missed some of the most essential discussions related to the artistic production in post-Fordist conditions (Ćurčić, 2012)

In fact, the main problem with the philosophy of art of Praxis is, that it has been silenced, and so it postponed the contradictions inherent to art work itself. By refu-tation of tensions that are constituent in formation of any art work, Praxis philoso-phy of art was, somehow, conceptually responsible for proliferation of researches assuming the immediate representational relation between art and politics. In this case, we can claim that thesis on Black Wave films as representation of Praxis philos-ophy are part of theoretical conjuncture of Praxis philosophy itself. More precisely, the thesis on representation is theoretical effect of Praxis philosophy.11

In order to proceed with proper discussion concerning the relation between con-tradictions of self-management and ambiguities and tensions of Makavejev’s film form, we have to introduce a different conceptual set that does not reduce cinematic work to a mere reflection of social and political transformations. Instead of looking at the contradictions (of self-management) in Black Wave films through the lens of Praxis; indicative to the conceptualisation, I rather suggest to delineate the micro-scopic dispositive of cinematic intelligibility. In order to realize this model, one has to accept the fact that the cinematic apparatus was built on the excess of contradictions, and that the equilibrium between form and content has to be abandoned in favour of proper materialist and formal approach to artistic device. By doing so, it is possible to deal with Black Wave not as a reflection of contradictions through a lens of philoso-phy which imagines art as a non-contradictory expression; but as a construction of contradictions through the logic of avant-garde art itself, which is based on merits of negation, coercion and antinomy. Following Adorno’s assertion that a successful art work “...is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure” (Adorno, 1967: 32) it is possible to claim

11 Basing his thesis on the work of Emanuel Barot who claims that “political film is privileged agency of crystallisation and analysis of contradiction of social relations,” Gal Kirn is claiming that Black Wave cannot be reduced to reflection of Praxis philosophy, because political implica-tions of humanistic theses of Praxis cannot be accommodated in the field of Black Wave’s formal pluralism (Kirn, 2012a: 254-255).

instead, for my purpose it is sufficient to briefly look at the art theses of the Praxis philosophy. As it might be clear from the above indicated propositions of Praxis, the artistic agency in this configuration would be a true guarantor of the non-reified, non-alienated, and spontaneous human expression. In many ways, this is echoing the possibility of philosophy and life style which has artistic merits of emancipat-ing from formalistic and structural conception of an un-restrained man. Probably, this is the most important aspect to mention in connection to ‘Praxis’ theses on art: even if philosophy of Praxis, en toto, has a strong association with the action and practice which have direct artistic connotations; not all the arts have a charac-teristics of non-alienated experience. In many occasions Praxis philosophers took great pains in order to delineate this Praxis-based art from the rest of the art which does not have the mentioned characteristics. Danko Grlić, a philosopher associated with the Praxis group, who had dealt with the issue of art and aesthetics most thor-oughly in his work, has described in his programmatic text “Art and Philosophy” published in 1963, the role of art as chance for “unanticipated possibilities of humani-sation” (Grlić, 1963: 213). For this possibility to be realized, art, same as philosophy, has to comprehend the reality and ideas not in formalistic and intrinsic way, but as expressions of concrete and harmonious relations with the world. That is why expressions such as, “morbid eruptions in glass, with wires, around countless squares, or crumpled and glued wreckages of irons, etc.” (Grlić, 1963: 208) should not be seen true and genuine artistic positions.10 Real artistic value is in the form – not in the form which has been intrinsically defined; but in the form which is not in contradis-tinction with the “artistic way of life”, that is, with the form “that reached the highest point of synthesis with the content.” Only in these instances, Grlić reminds, “we can talk about the true meaning of art that overcame the tension between form and content” (Grlić, 1963: 209). From this schematization it is sufficient to understand that logic which determines the un-reified humanist philosophy designates also the logic of art within the Praxis theory.

between neo-liberalism and praxis oriented conception, sounding like Boltanski and Chia-pello’s concept of avant-garde of “new spirit of capitalism”, had been already underlined by some radical ‘non’ dogmatic’ approaches within the theory of Marxism (Negation Collec-tive, 1975; Boltanski & Chiapello, ). But even if mentioned as an anecdote by Kangra in his autobiographical history of Praxis, it is important to mention that institutional conditions of self-management and the emergence of Praxis have very close ties. As Kangrga remembers, the first appearance of Praxis philosopher’s texts was in the cultural pages of magazine Indus-trial Worker. This periodical which was dedicated to the problems of industrial production, included also, due to the conditions created by self-management, pages that were not neces-sarily dedicated to the issues of labour and productivity. In these pages dedicated to culture, Praxis philosophers published their texts (Kangrga, 2001: 21-22).

10 Similar description of abstract art, according to Ernst Bloch, was made by Georg Lukacs in 1916, who, after seeing an exhibition of the group Blaue Reitter, said that this reminded him of “nerve wracked gypsy” (Aesthetics and Politics, 2007: 13).

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to work, is14Althusser has tried “to avoid metaphysical and naturalist theories (dear to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche) of power, and proposed that the energy A, or Force or Violence, conceptually should be approached to as something designating a “conflictual difference” (2006: 109). As a result, the true element of the state and ideological apparatus, the power which runs it, is based on radical difference, or on excesses: “It is this excess of conflictual force, real or potential, which constitues energy A, which is subsequently transformed into power by the state-machine: tranformed into right, laws and norms” (Althusser, 2006: 104).

There are attempts to deal with the dynamics of self-management’s contradictions also from this position of Althusserian theory of state, which claims that the real pro-ductive excess in self-management contradictions should not be searched in the state of equilibrium of co-existence of classes; but in the dynamics of class struggles that are taking place in the socialist self-managing institutions (Kirn, 2012b). Following this, the self-management contradictions are not seen as reification of human agency of creativity; but in the contrary, as true constituents of the social formations.15

If we are to understand Yugoslavian cultural politics not as a reflection of harmo-nious contradictions, but as a work of excesses and coercions, then it is necessary to grasp the contradictions of self-management in their impure form.16 Furthermore, this impure form could then be delineated in the effect it has on the practice of film making. This is not an effect of reflection, but an effect of inscription, which under-lines both the cognitive aspect of art works and the distinctive logic of this cognition (“a certain specific relationship with knowledge” as Althusser would say). In order to formalize this proposition, it is possible to claim that between extrinsic (outer materials, and forces, such as society, economy, politics, or general laws of ideology)

1984: 306-315), but to allude to a conceptual approach of Althusser’s formalism which deals with the state and ideology as the device regulating the coercions and contradictions.

14 “What then is this energy A that is transformed into (legal) power by the state machine?” (Althusser, 2006: 107).

15 “The self-management project which, after the period of market socialism, continues with the compro-mises and perfectioning of legal communism, which essentially failed to organise and promote social forces that could shift the capitalist tendency into a more communist sphere. The self-management model did not fail, as some would claim, because it was not liberal enough, which actually confirmed its inadaptability and inefficiency in terms of the world economy. The project failed because it was not communist enough: it did not continue revolutionary politics in all the fields of society; it did not reanimate the link between masses, working class and LCY” (Kirn, 2012b: 327).

16 “Contradictions are ‘originally’ ‘impure’. Because all contradictions are or have been real contradic-tions they also are or have been over-determined contradictions. When, furthermore, it is taken into account that over-and under-determination are characterised by displacement and condensation, one notices that all contradictions are or have been displaced and/or condensed contradictions. Again, displacement and condensation, like over-determination generally, are possible only if elements from some other contradiction or contradictions are displaced and/or condensed into the contradiction, and vice versa” (Lahtinen, 2009: 54).

that art’s intelligibility, its scope of conceptualization, is based on this singular nega-tivity. But this should not be understood as reflection of philosophical concepts, as Adorno, in another instance referring to Sartre has claimed that “however sublime, thoughts can never be much more than one of the materials for art” (Adorno, 1977: 182).12

One possibility to deal with this encounter between art and politics would be to emphasize the contradictions of self-management from different theoretical perspective; one which is not silencing the struggles, excesses and noises of ideo-logical formations. Louis Althusser’s “crisis writings”, as it is usually referred to, on relation between state and ideology would be an interesting point to start the discussion with. Althusser’s claim, that the real problem with Marxism is reductiv-ism in dealing with the relation of ideology and state, should be reiterated. Even if there were all possible conceptual components for such a theoretical elaboration, Marxist theory did not get a grip on excesses of state and its relation to force and struggle. As Althusser puts it, the class struggle, or general ideological struggle which is constitutive of Marxist conception of social and subjective formation, is actually a never-ending struggle, and seemingly stable results such as state ap-paratuses are conditioned by silencing these excesses. In order to grasp the ideo-logical components of the state, Althusser has proposed a thesis that “the state is a machine in the full, precise sense of that term … a man-made device (dispositif) comprising a motor driven by an energy 1, plus a transmission system, the purpose of the whole being to transform a specific kind of energy (A) into another specific kind of energy (B)” (2006: 105)13. To fully describe what this energy which makes machine

12 Negative dialectics in art is usually related to the writings of Theodor Adorno. But it would not be an exaggeration to claim that most of the avant-garde writings between Two World Wars – as it is depicted in the book Aesthetics and Politics (Jameson and all, 1977) – and in the art works made during the sixties in context of social activism and conceptual art could be also discussed with the terms of refusal, negativity, withdrawal, and destruction. For a historical and formal analysis of a politics of negation, writings of John Roberts are very useful (Roberts, 2010). In Yugoslavia, an internationally renowned formalist theoretician Aleksandar Flaker’s book on avant-garde art was named “poetics of negation” (Flaker, 1984). Pavle Levi and Boris Buden are among the first who have dealt with the avant-garde artistic form of Black Wave through the issue of negativity (Levi, 2007; Levi, 2012; Buden, 2011). As such they represent the first initial intellectual breaks from the assumption that the form of Black Wave had affirmative and normative function (of human values) in socialist Yugoslavia.

13 This model is indeed based on a strange ‘machine’: “the machine which sets a whole series of tools in rapid motion, whereas the human hand can manipulate only one, and slowly at that.” (Althusser, 2006: 84). Probably this is a closer description of what was discussed as over-determination by contradictions, where the issue of subject is also considered as part of conceptualization. Due to this subjective factor, and also particularly due to the machinistic imagination as part of XIX century discourse, Peter Steiner has labelled and criticized Shklovskian model of Russian Formalism (differing from three other models) as mechanistic, and consequently as reductionist model of machinal determinism. Here, my aim is not to underline the complex-machine of Shkolvsky’s concepts, which was pointed out by many Formalist scholars (Flaker,

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and intrinsic (art’s distinctive set of elements constituting its own intelligibility and historicity) elements there is no direct and uniform relation, only a complex set of coercions, which, according to Colin Mercer, could be described as “inscriptions”. 17

This model of impure inscriptions of politics and history to the art work will al-low a concise negation of representational and dualist depiction of Yugoslavian film, which claims that the true artistic and dissident cinema is a strategy of overcoming the state induced antagonisms; and as such, it sees the form of the artistic cinema as an expression which is above political contradictions. The structural position of this theses is that in real artistic films there should be some strange coherence and co-habitation between form and content. The contradictions are happily merged.

It is exactly this impurity and coercions which cannot be found in the discus-sions on Black Wave and anti-formalism of Dušan Makavejev. For example, the usual intellectual position in dealing with contradictions of self-management is one based on the image of Yugoslavia seen as an ideological imbalance, or a politico-ideological un-sustainable state. In these cases, ideological contradictions are del-egated to the non-functionalism of state.

Already in the seventies, researchers who were dealing with Yugoslavia, for ex-ample Dennison Rusinow, have depicted the state of self-management socialism as a contradictio in adiecto state, where two irreconcilable tendencies of centralism and liberalism co-exist in constant clash over the influence of policy. As Rusinow de-scribes, there were ‘conservatives’ (they wished to conserve the partly de-Stalinised quasi market economy and politically monopolistic party control) and ‘liberals’ (they sought an expansion of entrepreneurial and civil liberties, a diminishing role of state and the extension of the effective franchise) (1977: 142). According to Rusinow, an explicit distinction between these two tendencies did not exist; their differentiation was due to pragmatic daily needs. Because of this reason, the state’s apparatuses became perplexed in such a degree that the language available for differentiating these two distinct positions was not sufficient anymore, or as Rusinow described it in reference to one ordinary party meeting, which claimed that it “[was] often difficult to understand why the participants have become so angry with one another over appar-ently fine and unimportant differences of phrase or emphasis” (Rusinow, 1977: 218). It is

17 As Mercer showed in regard to inscription of 1848 Revolutions to arts, these coercive inter-sections do not happen logically and linearly. From the position of temporality, the traces of these inscriptions should be attained through delineating the “mis-cognitions” of ideology. What Mercer is calling for, following Althusser, is an “informed gaze” which would be able to decipher the leftovers of historical narrative. As he writes: “it is not the ‘evidence’ of a particular ‘chunk’ of history; it is precisely another history, the history of a specific signifying practice seized within and not vis-a-vis social relations” (Mercer, 1986: 20). Combining Althusserian notion of ‘distinct intelligi-bility’ of art with Voloshinov’s semiotics (“this all takes place in language”, p. 24) and Benjamin’s motif of “ragpicker”, or counter-collector, Mercer is proposing a historical-materialist theses on art-politics relation, which does not follow the historicist notion of transformation.

interesting to note that Rusinow’s writings on Yugoslavian political formation had a large influence on researchers, dealing with the formation of cultural and artis-tic field in Yugoslavia. Rusinow’s influence is especially visible in Daniel Goulding’s book on Yugoslavain cinema written in 1985, which was for a long time considered as one of the most important international sources on this subject.

Goulding, in his approach of Yugoslavian cinema, states that two completely op-positional tendencies in cultural politics of Yugoslavia created an almost impossible situation for the film-makers; they were on one hand expected to experiment with the new forms and expressions (liberal tendency in Yugoslavian cultural politics) and on the other to be respectful and in line with some essential Yugoslavian ideological parameters (centralised tendency in Yugoslavian cultural politics). The effects of this impossible co-existence could be artistically elevated only in cases where expression tended to regard these paradoxes as state produced and discarded them as ideological surrogates of the state apparatuses. The common nominator of this position is that the real constituent of discourse and ideology of Yugoslavian socialism was based on paradox and impossibility of any political position; and as such, the genuine artistic expression is possible only when it is positioned outside of these paradoxes.

One of the most striking consequences of this dualist methodology, which situ-ates Makavejev in opposition to Godard, is the reduction of certain conceptual possibilities of former’s complexities. For example, the dualist thesis of restrained structuralism, which is theoretically in opposition to complex form of over-determi-nation, does not say anything about excesses and contradictions of Makavejev’s ar-tistic formation. On another level, also situating Makavejev as opposition to Godard is methodologically evading important issues such as importance of slogans and art-historical component in Makavejev’s film-form. Instead of conclusion I will, in ad-dendum to this text, briefly expose what are the anti-formalist and counter-Godard imagination of Makavejev studies missing. With this, I aim to demonstrate that the ideological imagination of Makavejev, which suppresses the real coercions and con-tradictions involved in artistic formations, is not capable of having historical materi-alist understanding of filmic expressions. I hope this will intervene in the prevailing superficial studies on Makavejev, which prefer to minimize the impurities of artistic formations, and reduce the political art to a mere reflection of democratic policies.

V. Addendum A. _ Three Contradictory Uses of BeethovenMakavejev has referred three times to Beethoven in his films, each time the uses are based on different and contradictory parameters.

In his first film Man is Not a Bird (Covek nije tica, 1965), which depicts social and political contradictions in transformation of means of productions in one industrial city, Makavejev uses music and reference to Beethoven as an artistic reference for showing the cultural gap between the workers and managers of a factory, and fur-thermore, to point at the confusion of this uneven situation in the cultural field. In

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noises.20 But the real problem –we can name it a historico-temporal problem - arises when we face the fact that the contradictions, which Makavejev had brought to the art-text via Beethoven, were a set of contradictions that belonged to the histori-cal antagonism between aristocratic and bourgeois conception of politics. Sooner or later it became obvious that this set of contradictions was insufficient for the set of political contradictions which represented the scope of Makavejev’s cultural politics; namely in the set of contradictions belonging to antagonism between bourgeoisie and communist conception of politics. This cultural dead-end, which was induced by unevenness of contradictions, or residual effects of contradictions, was formally dealt with in Makavejev’s film WR: Mysteries of Organism, by exposing its impossibil-ity. Makavejev has not dealt with this by surpassing the contradictions, so that art-text would be pursued in its smoothness; but by adding a new set of contradictions, which, to make it shorter, we can name “Leninist contradictions”.21 By introducing this new component or new conceptual set to his art-text, Makavejev has aggregated the contradictions of socialist formation to a new configuration, or dispositive; he has proposed a new art conceptualisation for a new social and political situation. Accordingly, there was no place for Beethoven in this new set of elements. Going back to the earlier discussed conception of art as state of equilibrium between form and content, or harmoniously beautiful contradictions based on human “spontane-ous” agency of Praxis philosophy, we can easily claim that the form of contradiction in Makavejev’s films was different from this conceptualisation. This difference was most radically visible in the conceptualisation of the cultural policy that was inclining towards negative and antagonistic designations. With the new set of contradictions, which I named “Leninist contradictions”, Makavejev has invoked the role of excess, force and struggle in his device in more explicit terms than any Praxis philosopher – with exception of Darko Suvin – ever did. It is possible to name this position a nega-tive cultural policy; a conceptual model for cultural policy, over-determindated by con-tradictions, coercions and struggles.

VI. Addendum B: The Importance of Slogans in Makavejev’s Film-FormAbove, I have stated that Yvette Biro, in her discussion of Makavejev’s films as “po-etry of grammar” has situated his films as in opposition to the films of “slogan-like” Godard. Here, I will reiterate some theses from my two-part article “The Art of Slo-gans”, in order to underline that the films of Makavejev were slogan-like as well.

20 Here is how Jurij Lotman defines role of noise in art: “Art is capable of transforming noise into information. … This peculiarity of art is related to the structural principle which determines the poly-semy of artistic elements; new structures which enter into a text or the extra-textual background of a work of art do not cancel out old meanings, but enter into semantic relations with them.” (Lotman, 1977: 75)

21 Here, I am referring to an episode recalled by Gorky in 1912, about Lenin listening Isaiah Dobrovein playing Bethoven’s Appassionata.

his second film, Love Affair made in 1967, Beethoven represents the affirmation of workers’ freedom and multiculturalism of contemporary Yugoslavia. The third use of Beethoven in Makavejev’s fourth feature film WR: Mysteries of Organism, the refer-ence is directly linked with the issue of impossibility, cultural dead-end, coercion and basic contradiction between uneven fields of cultural emancipation.

By fully granting the importance to the fact that “Beethoven” in his core is a contradictory assemblage of distinct ideological components18, we should question what were the formal and political consequences of inscribing this contradictory ele-ment to the artistic text. Paraphrasing the above discussions on impurity of contra-dictions, I could say that Makavejev was over-determined by the contradictions of Beethoven. It is wrong to assume that Makavejev was in contradiction because he as a communist film-maker has refered to Beethoven which is usually considered to be representative of bourgeoisie values. This would be a reduction of Makavejev’s complex film-form to an ambiguity of humanist agency. As I am trying to show, the film-form and artistic device of Makavejev is far more complex and contradic-tory to be reduced to this simplicity. My initial thesis is that Makavejev did not use “Beethoven” as something antagonistic to his filmic structure which was about self-management. He did not put on cinematic clash, the extrinsic agency of Beethoven and his film-structure in order to demonstrate that “human values” in their eternality are in constant contradiction. Makavejev included or better, inscribed – to use Colin Mercer’s description – Beethoven’s contradictions in his film-structure. This means, to put it more schematically, that by including a component, or network of elements such as Beethoven to his film-structure19, Makavejev has included an excesses of contradiction related to Beethoven into his work. If we follow the conclusion of Esteban Buch who has shown that contradictions of “Beethoven” existed primarily because of genealogy of formation which rested on the contradiction between aris-tocratic ground of his musical origin and bourgeois intention of his artistic creativity (Buch, 2003), we have to acknowledge that Beethoven is formally contradictory. This tension in his music led to formal contradiction which made possible for music of Beethoven to be used in antagonistic instances such as Stalinist socialism, European Union and modern colonialism, just to name a few instances from twentieth cen-tury. In these episodes of using Beethoven, Makavejev has brought to attention the fact, that any cultural component in its formation bears inextinguishable/irrepress-ible elements of tension, contradiction and noise. Art-text has to give voice to these

18 This is the reason why I am using Beethoven’s name with quotation marks. As a walking contradiction, Beethoven has been until now used and referred to in such an antagonistic cultural and political field, that from now on it is almost impossible to talk about concrete, historical and true Beethoven.

19 Instead of “film-structure” it would be possible to also use also “art-text”, referring to Jurij Lotman. (Lotman, 1977).

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are efficient in mobilizing collective political formations (such as youth work actions) in a direct and striking way because they, as Makavejev describes it, have sensuous, biological and non-rational nature.23 In order to show the uncanny or artistic nature of the political formations, which in many cases are mobilizing the most illogical, dark, and ambiguous parts of the communication, Makavejev described them as ‘dream-practices’. This artistic device involved in political formation of slogans is a de-cisive component which turns politics into something more than a set of synthetic imagination of rules; and furthermore adds the “innovation”, “imagination”, “spon-taneity”, and some “surrealism” to the State slogans. It is related to a creative change in the language of politics; or, one could say to the making of “artistic politics”. Fi-nally, we can claim that Makavejev introduced the device of dream-practice in order to stabilise the antagonisms between politics and art; this scheme makes it clear that even if the role of “art” post facto concerns this refreshment of social circulation, its existence matters mostly in the constitution of this world as “creativity”.

3. Slogans in art have to be distinct: but these political slogans which have artistic character should not be included in the art text (or film) by simple reflection of the contradictions inherent to them. For slogans which are to take part in the art text (film), it is crucial that their structure or plot is re-composed or re-organized. Ac-cordingly, the set of rules which determines the inclusion of slogans in the art-text is distinct from the set of rules which determines the formation of the political slo-gans. Eventually, according to Makavejev, art and politics are not interchangeable; they have distinct rules of dealing with the contingencies.

LiteratureAdorno, Theodor (1967) Prisms, Cambridge: MIT Press.Adorno, Theodor (1977) “Commitment”, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. R. Taylor, London: Verso.Althusser, Louis (2006) Philosophy of the encounter: later writings, 1978-1987, London & New

York: Verso.Arvatov, Boris (1988) “Language Creation (On ‘Transrational’ Poetry)”, in Russian Futurism through

its Manifestos, 1912-1928, ed. A. Lawton, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 217-231.

23 The issue of non-rationality of slogans, or political semantics had unusual importance for Formalist theory of political speech. Since, according to Formalist’s, the plot (sjuzet) as device for organization and composition of materials was more decisive in formation of art text than the story (fabula) which was about depiction of events, or meanings out of the life materials; then we can easily claim that materials used in art work from Formalist point of view could be considered as arbitrary, or as excess of the text. Following this, it is easy to understand why Formalists had worked very closely with the Russian Futurist texts called zaum (trans-rational) poems which negated the usual meaning of art semantics, and emphasized the sounds, repetition, and the meaningless words. Marxist Formalists such as Boris Arvatov and Vinokur had worked on underlining the social aspect of these ‘meaningless’ trans-rational texts (Arvatov, 1988: 217-232; Markov, 1982: 168-175).

In the mentioned article, I have proposed that in order to understand the contra-dictions of Makavejev’s film-form, we have to look closely at the ways how he has inscribed political slogans in his films. I tried to demonstrate that once we get rid of the determinist and vulgar sociological components from theoretical work, and work on formalist methodology based on artistic devices, we could arrive at the far reaching conclusions on art-politics relation, and at the real constituents of the art-work. By analysing slogans (for the sake of being concise in this explication, I will not mention the consequences of Art & Language part of analysis) I have shown that Makavejev was, from the very beginning of his artistic practice (from the ama-teur period of short and documentary film making, circa 1956-1961), aware that the material, or pro-filmic elements, such as slogans which represented the crucial elements of ideological landscape of the Socialist period of Yugoslavia could not be represented in art-work by a simple verist reflection of the reality.22 As I tried to show, Makavejev did not “arrive” at this conclusion, or did not “discover” this device on representation suddenly and spontaneously; but on the contrary, he arrived at this conclusion through a theoretical and abstract discoveries woven with coercions, struggles, and debates related to this issue. My aim was not to reflect on this “his-tory” of discovery as if it was some linear development in understanding of relation between realism and art work; but rather to underline the complexities of art devices by concentrating on three distinct moments of transformation of conceptualisation of what constitutes the “real” as an intersection between, – to paraphrase Wollen’s semiotics - the signifier and the signified in the art work:

1. The necessity of reflecting on contradictions: while participating in the youth work action (radna akcija) in mid fifties, Makavejev realized that semiotics of these highly politicized places were not without contradictions, ambiguities and coercions. Some of the slogans chanted by the youth, participating in the work actions, or slogans written on the walls were not necessarily in accordance with the official political slo-gans of Yugoslavian Communist Party. Makavejev initially came to a conclusion that any art work which aims at dealing with the youth political activism such as work actions, should include these contradictions. Or, as he wrote: “It is impossible to make documentary films about youth work actions without including the slogans. I decided, then, not to escape the slogans. I had to approach them, to hear them, and to understand their inner meaning. This is the task that we [i.e., film makers] must undertake now in a more general fashion” (Makavejev 1965, 36).

2. Artistic-device in political formations: these contradictory and ambiguous mate-rials, such as slogans based on non-rational semantics, or following Futurist’s, the zaum (trans-rational) poetry belongs in the last instance to a political sphere. They

22 In this sense Eric Barnouw’s description of Makavejev’s film Parade (1963) as “hillarious direct-cinema kaledioscope” (Barnouw, 1993: 266), or Charles Warren as “earthlike cinema” (Warren, 1996: 206) represents an over-simplification of Makavejev’s formal novelties.

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DISINTEGRATION IN FRAMES Counter-Godard: On Makavejev’s Anti-formalism

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Pisanje sebe s pogledom: Dobro jutro Anteja Babaje1

Diana NenadićPrevedla Maja Lovrenov

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Kadarkoli grem čez zagrebški Iblerov trg, moj pogled poleti k fasadi in balkonom stavbe doma ostarelih, v katerem je svoje zadnje dni življenja preživel režiser Ante Babaja, ki je o tej izkušnji tri leta pred svojo smrtjo posnel svoj dokumentarni film Dobro jutro (2007) kot neke vrste oporoko. Med hojo z nelagodjem pomislim, da sem mogoče kot nekateri drugi naključni (in smrtni) mimoidoči zašla v nekega od njegovih kadrov, ki opazujejo in sugestivno »merijo« prehodnost; ugibam, s katerega okna je režiser svojo kamero uperil na trg, po katerem štiri letne čase kroži življenje, in s tem tudi na fontano, okoli katere se na kratko zadržujejo mame z otroki, zalju-bljeni pari in pijana mladež pa tudi kakšna »lepa punčka« in (zlovešče) »črni cucek«. Ta kontemplativni starčevski pogled je eden od ponavljajočih se motivov Babajeve avto-portretne kompozicije, sestavljene iz izsekov upokojenskega življenja in odlomkov iz njegovih filmov, narejenih v razdobju štiridesetih let.1

V kontekstu njegovega prvega in zadnjega avtobiografskega dela, a tudi avtor-skega opusa, v katerem se je kot trajna preokupacija utrdila prav potrošnost telesa, ponavljajoči se prizor simbolnega »izvora življenja« elipsaste oblike, daleč od vsake banalnosti, kriči s pomenom – kot memento mori ali »obsodba« na fizično izginevanje vsega, kar je zaobjel objektiv režiserjeve digitalne kamere. Kot da bi skozi njegov

1 Op. ur.: Besedilo je bilo prvič objavljeno v Hrvaškem filmskem letopisu (Hrvatski filmski ljetopis), št. 63, 2010, Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez, str. 46–51.

Counter-Godard: On Makavejev's Anti-Formalism

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