Session as part of the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris.
FOCUS #3 - ANTIFILMS & PUNKS
Session organised by Petra Belc Krnjaic and Ejla Kovacevic
Founded in 1928 as part of the Zagreb Photoclub, the Zagreb Kinoklub quickly became a creative hub for budding filmmakers. Its early members were generally well-off professionals — doctors, lawyers and other urban enthusiasts — who owned their own film equipment. Rooted in amateurism and home movies, the club functioned as a somewhat bourgeois association of educated citizens united by a passion for cinema.
After the Second World War and the transition from monarchy to socialism, the club underwent profound changes, whilst retaining its commitment to a playful amateur spirit. In the 1950s, the club opened its doors to workers, becoming a place where doctors rubbed shoulders with lorry drivers in a shared culture of experimentation with the medium. The era of home movies was over, and radical poetic approaches were taking hold; the 1960s marked the height of this movement, a philosophy that resurfaced in the 2010s.
The scratches and burns inflicted on the film stock in *Rennes, chers rennes* ( 1963) or *Caryocinèse * (1965) reappear in the decomposition of the digital image in *k†›Å 7ë÷@qÀ and *Frame Fragments* (2018), whilst cheerful, proto-YouTube cat videos such as *Jusqu’à la dernière goutte* (1972) foreshadow postmodern gems of reference such as *La meilleure vie de Ken K.* (2018). *Drop by Drop Towards Healthy Hair* (1963) transforms a radio advert for hair loss into an improvised film club performance, whilst *Ljetodont* (2026) carries this same irreverent spirit forward through a summer spent with friends on the Croatian coast. Even when the films retain a certain aesthetic gravity, their formal rigour serves to unsettle the familiar. VSL-246 ( 2026), Below, * * (2022) and *Showgirls* (2011) disrupt perception by reconfiguring everyday forms, whilst the minimalist ‘nothingness’ of *K3* (1963) finds an unexpected echo in the digital void of our contemporary lives, embodied by the-room.exe (2023). Spanning from 1963 to the present day, these films reveal a remarkable continuity between amateur experimental cinema and the collective Dadaist spirit that has been driving cinema in Zagreb for over sixty years.
