This year's Pansini Days film program draws upon several researching trajectories that will expand, deepen and upgrade over time. At the centre of these trajectories are the films and the film theory of Mihovil Pansini, one of the first avant-garde directors of the second Yugoslavia, and also one of the earliest Yugoslav and Croatian film theorists who approached this medium in a theoretically unique, authentic and comprehensive way. In his texts, Pansini also demonstrated his relationship to the world through his love for film, following the close aspirations of the French film critic Serg Daney. In addition to his official career as a doctor, professor and long-time scientific advisor at the Zagreb Polyclinic for the Rehabilitation of Hearing and Speech (SUVAG), Pansini, in a way, continued his work as a director through his texts. Although he made his last film in 1963, his passionate love for the medium of the moving image continued through texts in which Pansini combined film methods, science, and art, often using expert knowledge to speak about the ineffable that surrounds a human being – feelings, soul, love and faith. These are 50 texts that were created in the early 2000s, published on the websites of SUVAG (2001-2004) and the Croatian Film Association (2004-2011), which are still waiting for their systematization and interpretation.

Through this year's four film programs – two feature films and twenty short experimental works – we will present the historical and contemporary production of the Zagreb and Split cinema clubs, open up the unexplored field of Pansini's textual reflections on independent contemporary films, and through them look back at the films of Mihovil Pansini himself. As a guest of the program, we will be joined by Zorko Sirotić, a Zagreb-based documentary filmmaker, experimentalist and member of today's Zagreb Cinema Club (Kinoklub Zagreb or, shortly, KKZ), whose work continues to reflect the "liberating idiocy" of the Pansini KKZ in the 1960s, bringing authentic film research to the contemporary film landscape, most often possible only within the safe and uninhibited framework of film amateurism.

Petra Belc

October 2, 2024

6 pm

This afternoon block continues with the research of the relationship between the body, space and the camera, which we thematized within the first Pansini Days by connecting the work of Valie EXPORT and Mihovil Pansini. In the film Body Trail, which is also an urban intervention, Michael Palm and the choreographer Willi Dorner play with the often film theme: creepiness of space. Two films by the doyen of the Split Cinema Club (Kinoklub Split), Ante Verzotti, focus on human bodies in the concrete environment of Split, at the same time connecting them with images of the entire Mediterranean – its static and its change. Verzotti's film Today is organically followed by the film Clearings by Renata Ruić, also a member of the Split Cinema Club from the time when women became more present in the work of the club. Dušan Tasić's film Expropriated Complex approaches the diagnosis of the state of the exploited space of the Mediterranean in the present day.

• Body Trail (8’) Michael Palm, Willi Dorner, production: sixpackfilm, 2008.
• Danas…?// Today…?  (7') Ante Verzotti, production: Kinoklub Split, 1965.
• Čistine // Clearings (2'38'') Renata Ruić, production: Kinoklub Split, 1989.
• Jukebox (6'40'') Ante Verzotti, production: Kinoklub Split, 1966.
• Eksproprirani kompleks // Expropriated Complex (10') Dušan Tasić, production: Kinoklub Split, 1975.

8 pm

Thus, for example, the Kinoklub Zagreb in ancient times, probably partly even today, was a refuge of freedom, or less pathetic, a shelter for fugitives from civic obligations – family, educational, professional, social and all others. At that time, a kind of drug addiction. Just like in Idiots. Everyone could ask themselves if I was an "inner idiot" and socially useless enough. – Mihovil Pansini, 2006.

The evening program begins with an exploration of independent film production of the 21st century, which Mihovil Pansini followed and commented on textually. Tracing the footsteps of the text dedicated to Lars von Trier's Idiots – a Danish dramatic comedy that follows a group of social self-outcasts, finding refuge in a simulation of unrestrained idiocy – we will observe Pansini's film from the anti-film-theoretical trilogy, K3 – a two-minute "empty" image that has never been so theoretically "full" until that moment.

• K3 ili čisto nebo bez oblaka // K3 or the Cloudless Sky (2'45'') Mihovil Pansini, production: Kinoklub Zagreb, 1963
• Idiots // Idioti (114') Lars von Trier, production: Arte, Canal+, Danmarks Radio, Nordisk Film- & TV-Fond, Scanbox Entertainment, Zentropa Entertainments2 ApS, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, 1998

October 3, 2024

6 pm

Zorko Sirotić and Petra Belc present KKZ

Although today's Kinoklub Zagreb is more than half a century away from the historical one, the spirit of the virgin microbe is still very much alive among its members. Through this film program, Zagreb director and amateur cinema club member Zorko Sirotić will present his work and the activities of the contemporary KKZ, whose authors reaffirm the historical framework of Yugoslav amateur film. To this day, the KKZ has continued to be a "refuge of freedom", unburdened by the logics of the market and art theory, sovereignly avoiding all the traps of urban blase. From the contemporary structuralism of Dalija Dozet and Miro Manojlović, through the mathematical research of film by Tomislav Šoban and Mateja Zidarić, to the questioning of the theoretical concepts of Iva Gavrilović and Sunčica Veldić, the program is rounded off by the distinctive poetics of Neven Dužanac and Sirotić himself. After the film program, stay in a short conversation with the author.

• The Awakening of Jacob (7'40'') Zorko Sirotić, 2019
• Frame Fragmenti // Frane Fragments (2') Dalija Dozet, 2018
• Charlie volim te // Charlie, I love you (5'25'') Miro Manojlović, 2012
• Turist // Tourist (12'38'') Tom Šoban, 2023
• Nepovrat // No Return (4'55') Mateja Zidarić, 2018
• Višak popušim sam // Excess I Smoke Myself (10') Zorko Sirotić, 2015
• Soba s pogledom ili razmišljanje u slikama // Room With a View or Thinking in Images (10'1'') Iva Gavrilović, 2021
• Precijenjena dramaturgija // Overrated Dramaturgy (20'42'') Sunčica Veldić, 2017
• Moj galebe // My Seagull (1'20'') Neven Dužanec, 2003

8 pm

"Comparing the film to an earthly paradise is just a Jarmuschian joke, a gentle irony of the United States, and the essence is biblically magnificent, it speaks of people thrown into the world, of humanity descended from Adam and Eve, which has never and will never live in paradise, of adversity and the greatness of ordinariness," wrote Mihovil Pansini in 2006 about this early film by American independent director Jim Jarmusch. Through long shots of this black-and-white film, the three protagonists of the film Stranger Than Paradise wander through the "promised" land in search of meaning, evoking the dead time of Pansini's Siesta. Is it even possible to connect the seriousness of the existential minimalism of the Siesta with the comedy of the tragedy of the internal and external exile of Jarmusch's paradise, and what this comparative view offers?

• Siesta (6'15'') Mihovil Pansini, production: Kinoklub Zagreb,1958
• Stranger than Paradise // Čudnije od raja (89') Jim Jarmusch, production: Cinesthesia Productions Inc., 1984

Concept and production: Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research

In cooperation with: Centre for Culture Korčula and City Library “Ivan Vidali”

Pansini's days curated by:

Petra Belc

Sonja Leboš