by Mariya Nikiforova
The documentary Alpe-Adria Underground!—completed in 2024 by Matevž Jerman and Jurij Meden and shown in May 2025 at the festival V-F-X Ljubljana—is a fast-paced, synthetic overview of the Slovenian experimental cinema heritage of the socialist years. An initiative led by the national cinematheque, the film is part of a bigger project intent on preserving and bringing to light a large body of works, many of which would have otherwise faded into obscurity.
In socialist Slovenia, like in other parts of Yugoslavia, filmmaking practices that today can be called “experimental” or “avant-garde” (or “parallel,” “alternative” or “different”) blossomed within so-called amateur film clubs that were part of the “Technology of the People” state policy introduced in the post-WWII years. These associations put cameras in the hands of non-professional filmmakers and granted them entry into amateur film festivals, where they received recognition for their achievements, such as “Little Pula” (or MAFAF, which took place in Istria on the fringes of the professional “Big Pula” festival) or the Genre Experimental Film Festival in Zagreb.
In comparison with other ex-Yugoslav countries, especially Croatia and Serbia, the history of Slovenian experimental film has been mostly overlooked by international scholars and programmers. Echoing this, the film opens by wondering if there really was anything, wryly addressing the question to interviewees who certainly were there to witness it, such as cultural historians Barbara Borčič (who led the Škuc Gallery in the 1980s) and Jože Dolmark, film critic Zdenko Vrdlovec and archivist Borko Radešček, not to mention the numerous filmmakers who appear on screen. In fact, some historiographic groundwork was already accomplished in the previous two decades—first, by the Slovenian Cinematheque’s original director, Silvan Furlan (1953-2005), whose 2004 article “Ali je bilo kaj avantgardnega?” (“Was there anything avant-garde?”) gave the film its Slovenian title and whose quotes intersperse the film, followed by two publications released in 2010: Experimental Film in Yugoslavia, 1951-1991, and a special double issue of KINO! magazine.
Still, so much work remained to be done: though it may have been written about, Slovenian experimental cinema was not seen. To rectify the situation, Jerman and Meden set off to assemble the scattered films and testimonies, not only to reestablish the historic fact of their existence, but also to articulate the resulting collection as a national archive. By Jerman’s admission, the responsibility involved in dealing with a near-tabula rasa inevitably gave rise to certain challenges and ethical dilemmas, which the authors have managed to overcome more or less successfully, modestly alerting the viewer of the “brief and imperfect” nature of the result.
The first highlight, described as a groundbreaking work in the field, is from 1957: Fantastic Ballad by Boštjan Hladnik, a beautiful and troubling black-and-white ink animation based on the macabre drawings of France Mihelič. Similarly haunting are the early films of Vasko Pregelj made in 1965-1967. Less than twenty years old at the time, the prolific artist, filmmaker and screenwriter combined his own paintings and sculptures, reminiscent of traditional motifs, with surrealist set designs and performances suggestive of pagan ritual.
The cinema of Vinko Rozman is given a special place in this early part of the film. From the six minute short Echo and Response (1965), we are in poetic territory, where the solemn toll of a village bell serves as a point of attraction for the filmmaker’s wandering gaze. The following film, Prague Spring (1969), reveals a more politically-minded author, as it combines a eulogy for Jan Palach, the Czech student who immolated himself in protest in 1969, with a film journal shot in Prague around that time. Rozman’s restless 8mm camera searches the streets for signs of the profound collective trauma experienced in Czechoslovakia and more widely in the socialist bloc after the Soviet invasion, producing a precious record of both the specific political context and the filmmaker’s sensitive response to it.
The late ‘60s and early ‘70s bring even more incredible discoveries. This was a time of happenings and conceptual art, an era exemplified in Slovenia by the OHO Group. Among the many performances, installations and other time-based works put on by the collective, the 10-minute film featured in the documentary, White People (1970), with its Beatles opening, white robes, and hilariously absurd actions and gestures, feels like a distillation of late-1960s zeitgeist. The only woman filmmaker featured in the documentary, Ana Nuša Dragan, also participated in the performative and conceptual art currents with her 1971 short Communication Gastronomy. Composed of a series of frontal shots of the artist and her friends eating sausage, the film’s structural approach playfully studies the gesturality of appetite; although there is no overt feminist message, it can be placed in interesting dialogue with Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). The animator Tone Rački and OHO Group member David Nez, on the other hand, delved into flicker and color field with A Study for an Unfinished Abstract Film (1968), around the same time when Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Robert Breer were making significant advances in this domain. Črt Škodlar, also an animator, is represented in the documentary with his nod to Norman McLaren, Morning, Lake and Evening in Annecy (1965).
The hippie spirit of the times is palpable in the 11-minute cult classic The Gratinated Brains of Pupilija Ferkeverk (1970), a deliciously-composed and hilarious ode to emancipated sexuality and psychedelics. The film’s author Karpo Godina is arguably the most recognized of the Slovenian experimental filmmakers, and the section on him feels particularly elaborate. While the first works he made at the Odsev film club (Game, 1965; A.P. [Anno Passato] and Dog, 1966) stand out for their imaginative use of camera movement and frenetic montage, from the 1970s onwards, Godina began working with meticulously framed, colorful tableaux that would become his signature. Healthy People for Fun (1971) dresses a joyous portrait of the multicultural rural region of Vojvodina in northern Serbia that feels kindred to Parajanov and Kiarostami, and, in some ways, Pasolini. For his following film, On Love Skills, or Film with 14441 Frames (1972), Godina improbably obtained the support of the military, attesting to his extraordinary capacity for persuasion. The film’s portraits of fresh, innocent faces within the incongruous contexts of the army and the factory—two tightly-controlled realms divided along gender lines—paired with a quintessentially ‘70s soundtrack written especially for the film, create an ineffably cinematic ode to peace, youth, and love, which was promptly censored upon completion. Despite the setback, Godina went on to work in narrative cinema, first as cinematographer for what came to be known as the Yugoslav Black Wave (most notably, Želimir Žilnik), later directing his own features. His evident significance for Slovenian cinema was celebrated by the national cinematheque last year, with a large exhibition dedicated to his work, a full retrospective, and a beautiful catalogue that brings together a collection of articles and reminiscences as well as striking reproductions of photos and stills.
Other unique voices emerged in the mid-1970s and 1980s, such as Franci Slak, whose hour-long Daily News (1980)—Slovenia’s first experimental feature—chronicles the mostly grey everyday between Poland and Slovenia, begging comparison with the film diaries of Jonas Mekas, punctuated with escapes into abstraction (including through refilming a television set) that bring to mind the introspective work of Stan Brakhage. Among other intriguing authors of this period (Matjaž Žbontar, Vasja Bibič), the work of OM Produkcija stands out, not least because of the conceptual gesture of concealing his identity behind a multitude of Pessoan alter-egos with improbable names. In the rapid overview of their films, one can see a recurring motif of exploring the expanded possibilities of the cinema apparatus. In Dislocated Third Eye Series – Bismillah (1984), credited to “Sulejman Ferenčak”, the mysterious (though visible) author spins the Super8 camera around an axis, simultaneously testing the endurance of their own dervish-like body and that of the camera’s recording capacity as it whirls into blurry abstraction (a film that can be compared, both in its technical approach and mystical inspiration, to Claudio Caldini’s Gamelan from 1981); in Yin-Yang (1977/1978), attributed to “Ismailhači Cankar”, images are projected onto the filmmaker’s face in what looks like an expanded cinema performance. The last ‘historic’ author represented in the film is Davorin Marc, a hyperactive enfant terrible with titles like Slaughter Ahoy (1981) and Bite Me. Once Already. (1979/1980).
Of the 179 historic films that had been selected for digital preservation at the time of making the film (and which are over 200 at this point), a little over sixty have been included in the documentary. There is still so much work to be discovered and presented to the public. With a project of such ambition, naturally, questions arise. How to make selections among all the available material? What differentiates a work of ‘experimental cinema’ from a humble ‘amateur film’? Such decisions ultimately involve a certain level of subjectivity. Regrettable exclusions are inevitable for a host of reasons, including a lack of willingness by certain filmmakers or rightsholders to participate in the project. Fortunately, the authors do not intend to close the chapter on this history and express hope for the research to continue.
Furthermore, how to portray a wildly diverse corpus of films, each filmography a universe unto itself? Jerman and Meden have made the choice to impose an overarching formal strategy by splitting the films into double or multiple screens and thus presenting several sequences simultaneously, as well as playing with the vertical placement of the frames. Although this approach has a destabilizing effect in the beginning, potentially misleading the viewer about the nature of the presented works, it has the advantage of speeding through the films, showing off their most striking aesthetic features. After all, the purpose of the documentary is to whet the appetite without giving anything away, paving the way for future retrospectives and focus programs. The historic overview is rounded out at the end with a rapid montage of experimental films made in the 2000s, set to a song by the Slovenian group SBO, attesting to the vitality of the contemporary film scene in the country. This seems to be the most tenuous part of the documentary, as the logic behind the selection of the included films, which look quite heterogeneous, remains unclear. It could have been interesting to find formal echoes between the past and the present, thus bridging the gap between the two political eras. Still, one can’t help but catch the infectious, youthful and punky energy that emanates at the end of this joyful film: a real gesture of love and care for Slovenian experimental film and its survival.
Mariya Nikiforova is a Paris-based curator who works with experimental and photochemical film in various capacities. She has been the collection manager at Light Cone since 2019. She has made several short films at artist-run film laboratories L’Etna and L’Abominable; she also occasionally curates film programs, writes, and teaches. Her creative and research interests include conceptual performance and video art in Eastern Europe in the 1970s-1980s, representations of post-socialist urban landscapes in cinema, questions of peripheries and edgelands, and hybrid photochemical/digital practices.
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a rich, complex and extensive history I’ve never realized.
TYVM