Ljubomir Šimunić (b. 1942) is an outsider’s outsider, though his work has garnered some attention in recent years. In the 1970s, he began making amateur films on his own, without the support of the amateur film clubs popular across Yugoslavia, and showed them only to friends in private rooms and apartments. To date, his films, of which Pression is the earliest, have been shown publicly only a handful of times, and the screening of Pression in Washington marks Šimunić’s US premiere.[1]

Šimunić’s working method is markedly different from that of any other amateur presented in this series. His films are, like many shot with 8 mm cameras, all edited in-camera—for Pression, Šimunić used a Normal 8 Kodachrome. Unlike most amateur films, however, which were usually made very quickly, Šimunić’s were shot over longer periods of time, sometimes years, with Pression taking the longest of his five films to make. Working with his friend Dragan Taubner, the filmmaker used color film reels that could record approximately four minutes of footage each and which he kept in a refrigerator for months or years, painstakingly double exposing select frames over time to achieve resonant overlappings. These combined, on the one hand, footage of everyday people and events around Belgrade shot on foot and from a car during day and night and, on the other hand, garish spectacles, movies, and ads, both Yugoslav and Western, that he shot from a flickering TV screen.[2] According to Šimunić, his interest in double exposure was “an attempt to prove in and by art the current scientific facts which [claim] that only a small part of [the] human brain is exposed and able to accept [the flow of] information."[3]”

The result, as seen in Pression, is at once insightful and disorienting, unsettling and mesmerizing. It offers a combination of the filmmaker’s private obsession—Šimunić enjoyed making voyeuristic erotica and in his film Summer Dreams (1976–78) even included footage from commercial pornography[4]—and prescient comment on the way popular culture enters even the most reclusive life to feed into its desires. When screening his films, Šimunić infused the dizzying array of shifting images with additional energy by using a sound track of contemporary music; in Pression, the songs are 1970s disco and funk tunes recorded by a friend onto cassette tape from a New York radio station (WBLS) along with the dj’s commentary. Thus combining sound and images, Šimunić himself seems to have treated his films less as fixed works and more as environmental projections, which he sometimes slowed down and projected at four or eight, rather than 16, frames per second to change the atmosphere among his friends. Even though the digitzed version of the film shown in this series retains the “proper” 18 fps rate, it still allows one to start grooving and let one’s mind wander as the film’s wild juxtapositions make unexpected connections between ideas with a rapidity that no traditional form of narrative could match.  — Ksenya Gurshtein

With thanks to Ljubomir Šimunić, David Šimunić, Dejan Sretenović, and Miodrag Milošević, Head of the Academic Film Center at the Student City Cultural Center (Akademski Filmski Centar Dom Kulture Studentski Grad), Belgrade, and to the entire staff of the AFC for their assistance with research and help in making a screening of the film possible in Washington. With special thanks also to the Film Center Serbia (Filmski Centar Srbije), Belgrade, which generously sponsored the digital restoration of this film shortly before its screening in Washington.

Kazimierz Bendkowski’s (b. 1948) characteristically abstract work explores the limits of sound and image montage. Filmed at night in the heart of Warsaw—though at times, the location could be mistaken for almost any Western urbanscape of the time—Centre (Centrum) cuts up a panorama of lights and neon signs with sounds from the street, creating a rhythmic panoply of noises and textures.[5] Prismatic effects of bright lights, lenses, and various close-ups of kinetic neon signs—including the tell-tale PKO for Bank Polski—form a sweep of red-green-blue intensity matched by the highly manipulated sound track. Layers of inaudible speech and the sound of traffic and crowds are deftly melded with electronic spectrums and disorienting echo effects. Ultimately, the film cycles back, returning to the night street scene with which it began.

Trained as a photographer, Bendkowski was a founding member of the Workshop of the Film Form. In 1982, he emigrated from Poland to Germany and taught film and animation at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel until his retirement in 2010. He currently lives in Warsaw.  — Joanna Raczynska

With thanks to Łukasz Mojsak, Filmoteka Muzeum, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw for his assistance, and Weronika Czołnowska, Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Lodz for making a 35 mm print of this film available for the screening in Washington.