Petra Belc holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Zagreb and is currently working on her book on the history and aesthetics of Yugoslav experimental cinema. As an independent researcher her focus is on the field of experimental cinema with a chosen interest in the archiving and preservation of small-gauge films.

Abstract | Clear Skies as Theory films – Two Examples from the History of Yugoslav Experimental Cinema  This paper foregrounds the concept of theory film as an innovative cinematic form developed within the antifilm movement of 1960s Yugoslavia by Mihovil Pansini and the polyglossia of the Kinoklub Zagreb members. Rooted in the dialogues of “Antifilm and Us” (1967), a key text within the antifilm movement, and the GEFF film festival (1963-1970), an important gathering of Yugoslav avant-garde filmmakers, theory film departs from the “common genres” of experimental cinema, positioning film as an independent mode of theoretical inquiry. Pansini’s antifilm trilogy – K3 or Clear Sky Without Clouds, ScusaSignorina, and The Courtyard (all 1963) – serves as the primary expression of this concept, utilising minimalist techniques, reflexive structures, and scientific analogies to explore cinema’s potential as a medium of thought. Fifteen years later, Croatian painter Dubravka Rakoci shoots her own film “nothing”, unknowingly echoing Pansini’s clear sky, as she seeks to analyse, materialise, and identify with the form in an intuitive exploration that extends her canvas. Taking its inspiration from the logics of cinema by other means, this paper focuses on two cinematic skies, arguing that theory film embodies a unique epistemology which reframes cinema as a platform for intellectual experimentation and radical sensory engagement.

Anna Hodel is a scholar of Slavic studies and has studied and worked at University of Basel, Humboldt University in Berlin, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, University of Zagreb and University of Belgrade. She is currently working on a project about post-Yugoslavian and post-Soviet theater at the University of Basel. In her first book, she dealt with imperial geopoetics in South Slavic romanticisms; in other projects, she examined documentary in literature and theater, feminist and queer literature in Eastern Europe, post-imperialism and post-colonialism in Eastern European art, multilingualism and polyglossia. In addition to her academic work, she is regularly involved in the cultural scene, in literary readings, exhibitions and theater projects.

Abstract | Kurbas by Other Means: Cinematic Libido in Ukrainian Avant-Garde Theater   Although Les Kurbas devoted only a small part of this creative life to film, he soon became one of the founding directors of the fledgling Ukrainian film industry. Before that, he used cinematographic devices in his experimental theater. What does Les Kurbas’ artistic transgressions between theater and cinema highlight with regard to Pavle Levi‘s ideas on the libidinal as a key concept of the artistic worlds studied in “Cinema by other means”? We have, on the one hand, Kurbas’ expressionist anti-realism and avant-garde theatricality, his ecstatic handling of rhythm, religion and beauty, his spontaneity, material objectification of emotions and materialization of political erotica. And on the other hand, Levi’s notes on the principles of the free outpouring of energy and insubordination of desire to formal coherence, on the form- and formlessness of the cinematographic (and the theatrical) object/fact, the morphing and vulnerable corporeal entities and the dynamization of pure materiality. Departing from Kurbas’ theatrical composition Jimmy Higgins (1923), this talk aims at connecting some of Levi’s observations on the cinematic libido to Kurbas’ practice and theory on cinema (within theater) in the context of the Ukrainian avant-garde in the 1920s.

Milan Milosavljević is curator and organiser at Academic Film Center in Students’ City Cultural Center in Belgrade. He is the main organiser of Alternative Film Video and Balkanima, the European festival of animated film. He is also co-founder of the independent film center Vorky Team, named in memory of the pioneering film artist Slavko Vorkapich. In 2020 he established the production company Kinematika, which is focused on producing animation, documentary and experimental films. Milosavljević graduated from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Belgrade.

Abstract | On the move(ment): Early works by Slavko Vorkapich  This short presentation is focused on the life of Slavko Vorkapich (Vorky) and his early ideas and works in the theory and practice of moving images. From his native Yugoslavia and studying in art academies, to the key years in Paris living as an artist in the late 1910s, to arriving in the US, first in New York and finally in Hollywood in the early 1920s, where he found success as a montage artist and professor.

Nikola Radić is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on landscapes and architecture in post-Yugoslav cinema at the Film Studies Department at the University of Zurich, under the supervision of Volker Pantenburg (UZH) and Pavle Levi (Stanford University, co-advisor), while also working as a researcher on the SNSF-funded project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices. He has written extensively on post-Yugoslav cinema.

Sonja Simonyi is a Brussels-based independent scholar. Her writings explore diverging audiovisual cultures of socialist Eastern Europe. Her dissertation, completed at New York University, discussed frontier imaginaries and the appropriation of the Western genre in socialist-era films. She co-edited a special issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (2016) on experimental filmmaking under state socialism as well as the volume Experimental Cinema in State-Socialist Eastern Europe (2022) published by Amsterdam University Press, both co-edited with Ksenya Gurshtein. Simonyi is a board member of the artist group Messidor, and occasionally collaborates on creative projects with Messidor artists Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann.

Philip Widmann is a researcher, curator, and filmmaker. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practicesat the University of Zurich. He has contributed film programmes to festivals, exhibitions, and symposia. His own film and video work has been shown in art spaces and film festivals internationally. In 2023, he initiated Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema, a collaborative project on unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, and films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. He edited a book with the same title that was published by Archive Books this year.