Works and Words, 1979: Eastern European Film and/as Art

• In Event: Locating Eastern European Experimental Cinema in the Socialist-Era Cultural Landscape

Abstract

In 1979, an art event held in Amsterdam showcased the dynamic contemporary art scene of “Central Europe”, including participants from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia. Entitled Works and Words, it was organized by art institutions across the city in collaboration with art workers from participating countries. The key curatorial vision for this event sought to blur disciplinary boundaries to provide a thorough overview of the region’s recent artistic output and included performances, lectures, video installations, photographic work, as well as a series of film screenings. 
 
This paper explores the ways in which the film component of the program functioned within the overall project, and what the tracing of particular curatorial, organizational, and institutional decisions reveals about the status of the selected films. The filmic works shown in Amsterdam were notably often made by visual and performance artists without a formal film education who operated at the margins of accepted cinematic (and artistic) milieus in their home countries. While within this context, they regularly struggled to find proper ways to screen their films, as part of Works and Words, they were showcased at key institutions of film culture, such as the Nederlands Filmmuseum. In discussing the particularities of the film event, the paper highlights the shifting status of these films and delineates filmic experimentation as distinct from other modes of artistic expression showcased within the “art manifestation”. In doing this, it traces the possibilities and limitations of intermediality as a curatorial strategy within a distinct historical and socio-cultural framework of the late 1970s.

Author

• Sonja Simonyi, Independent Scholar