On May 19, “Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990” opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Highlighting the depth of work, much of it based in documentary practice, created in the Eastern Bloc during these three decades, the series travels across borders and, in the process, reveals a heretofore-unknown strand of artistic and cinematic history. It begins with two feature films — Jonas Mekas’s “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” and Dusan Makavejev's “Innocence Unprotected” — but the real treasures are to be found in the five programs of short films, which track the form’s development from early social-problem documentaries to video experiments and attempts at collective production.Joanna Raczynska and Ksenya Gurshtein co-curated “Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990” for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it appeared in 2014, before coming to BAM. ARTINFO spoke with them about their experience with the cinema of the period, the expansion of the term alternative space, and what they were not able to include in the series.What drew you to the idea of making a series about the films made in Eastern Europe during the period covered?Ksenya Gurshtein: Joanna and I have different backgrounds. I’m not a film person; I’m an art historian. What united us and propelled this series into existence was the fact that we both have an interest, partly having to do with our biographies and partly scholarly, in Eastern Europe.Joanna Raczynska: My family is Polish, and I’m drawn to Polish experimental film and animation. I used to work at an alternative art space in Buffalo, New York, called Hallwalls, where in 2002 or 2003 I had the chance to work with Łukasz Ronduda, a film historian and academic who is the curator of the Filmoteka Muzeum of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. He has done a great deal of research on this period and saved a lot of these films, which are now accessible through the museum’s Website. He and I worked together at that time to present films from the Workshop of the Film Form [an art group active between 1970 and 1977 at the Film School in Lodz that sought to release film structure from narrative and literary confines] and collaborated on a accompanying book titled, like the film program, “ATTENTION: LIGHT!”KG: A big part of it is that we knew a lot had happened, but there were not a lot of readily available sources, particularly in niche areas like experimental or avant-garde cinema. As an art historian, I had done work on the Slovenian artist collective OHO, which was active between 1965 and 1971. It made more than 30 short films, which I had seen and wrote about. I started going to exhibitions and looking at catalogues. I knew there were other underground, or unofficial or semiofficial, artists who were making films. So in addition to our shared interests in the medium and the region, we both knew there was a really big knowledge gap so this was a really exciting opportunity.JR: It was very fortuitous, and it was also a lot of work. It wasn’t readymade. It was an incredible learning experience, and it remains so. But I also want to highlight how important the archivists were to this project. It was co-curated by Ksenya and me, but it was a collaboration among all these different organizations, the people who work at the archives, and the filmmakers themselves, who have really taken care of their work over the years.KG: It was an incredible network of people without whom it would have not been possible.Was it difficult to find information about certain artists or specific films?KG: If I’m being honest, the things that were really difficult ultimately didn’t make it into the series. For instance, I contacted a film archive in Bosnia, and we never heard back, and none of our connections worked there. So Bosnia wasn’t represented, even though I think there would have been at least one or two films worth including. Bulgaria is another place we tried and didn’t make any headway. With the places whose films we did include —Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, East Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia —we were able to reach people, and they got back to us. Much of the research was figuring out whom to contact.Were there any big gaps?KG: After the initial series was over, thanks to the generosity of the National Gallery and the Mellon Foundation, which funded my postdoc, I had the chance to travel to Budapest and discovered amazing films by an artist named Miklos Erdely, who worked at the Balázs Béla Studio but whose works haven’t been anthologized or widely shown for complicated estate and copyright reasons. That may be the biggest hole I would want to fill retroactively — and something I hope to rectify by writing about Erdely's films in the next year.One of the most intriguing parts of the series for me is in the title: alternative spaces. Can you talk about the importance of these spaces?JR: For us, “alternative space” was specific to the physical space but also a conceptual space in terms of working methods. I think alternative spaces also reflect the archival processes and the saving and accessing of these works today. But in terms of the Workshop of the Film Form in Poland, in the early 1970s, the members got together almost like a collective. They created works together and shared them with one another. The Balázs Béla Studio is a little different because of what was happening in Hungary at that time.KG: Each of the alternative spaces is so different. It’s almost a misnomer to call them alternative spaces. A big part of the people’s creativity was not just in making the films but in envisioning the spaces themselves — making a physical space happen and also creating an alternative state of mind. The Balázs Béla Studio didn’t start out in the way that the Workshop of the Film Form did. BBS was established in 1959 as an official film studio. Its existence shows you how complicated the narrative of a repressive Eastern Europe is, because it was actually a progressive move, in a country where the entire film industry was state run, to have a film studio designated for young filmmakers who couldn’t compete with older masters to make more expensive films at more mainstream studios. BBS was supposed to be a training ground for young filmmakers 5 to 10 years out of film school, and it also was a concession to the intelligentsia after the Hungarian revolution of 1956. By the late 1960s there were filmmakers there who were really interested in having a dialogue with artists and sociologists, and people were into structuralism much more than just having a dialogue with filmmakers. So they started bringing in these nonprofessionals who were able to make films and develop these totally new practices. One of these films is “Self-Fashion Show” (1976), which was made by an artist, Tibor Hajas, who was given the opportunity to work at BBS. It’s so interesting, because it’s speaking to documentary but it’s a conceptual art work as well. It’s blurring all those lines.The films in the series all seem to have a foundation in documentary practice. KG: I think that’s true. One of the takeaways from this series for me was that we could have done a whole other series on documentaries. I think that was a really rich and important tradition. The Western movements of cinema verité, in France, and free cinema, in England, which were rethinking documentary, had parallels in Poland and Hungary and Latvia.Was it surprising to see so many parallel developments?KG: It was a surprise that these possibilities of creating subversive documentaries existed at a time and in a place where we assume that the atmosphere was restrictive. Documentary was seen as an important form because of its claim to truth — this was a way of telling new narratives. In Hungary, especially, at the Balázs Béla Studio, there was a long tradition, from the late 1950s through the 1960s, of making documentaries about social problems. With the Black Film series, Poland was the first of these countries where you saw critical documentaries that were also departing from documentary conventions. For me, it was a revelation to learn that was possible. In some cases, these films likely couldn’t have been made outside the state-funded studio system because they would have had very little commercial appeal. It really brought out the complexities of how the filmmakers had to balance censorship on the one hand against the possibility of making really interesting films with state funding. How do Jonas Mekas’s “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” and Dusan Makavejev’s “Innocence Unprotected,” by filmmakers who are better known in the West, fit into what these other artists were doing?JR: We chose these two feature films precisely because these are two filmmakers who bridge the continents. They are both known in certain circles in the states. In Jonas’s case, he actually moved to the states. So these two feature films seemed to me really good examples of the space we were trying to create.KG: Even though they’re not chronologically the earliest, for the original series at the National Gallery, they were the opening films. This set the scene in terms of the historical shadow of the trauma of World War II and, for places like Lithuania, Soviet control. It gave people something more familiar at the onset, to draw them in and get them to see things they might have never heard of. As Joanna noted, there is a diaspora aspect: Jonas Mekas immigrated to the United States, and Zbigniew Rybczynski immigrated to California, where he has been an important figure in the development of new cinematic technology for decades. This was one way to highlight that a lot of these filmmakers ended up moving around the world and taking their insights and aesthetics and knowledge with them.
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