The Origins of Associative Editing in Vatroslav Mimica’s Cinema: Is Nature Indifferent to Revolution? 

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media I: Eco-Poetic-Cinema from Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Yugoslavia

Abstract

The legendary Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev once claimed in a 1969 article that his compatriot Vatroslav Mimica discovered “associative editing” for Yugoslav cinema in the 1960s. This genealogy goes back to the montage theory of Sergei Eisenstein—the Soviet filmmaker, who according to Makavejev, “invented” the very practice of montage itself when he “first discovered” how to put two pieces of film together to produce “a third meaning.” Makavejev’s genealogy poses a number of theoretical rich questions about what we mean by montage and how the historical meaning of it has evolved over time and space. Unlike the well-known uses of associative editing by Makavejev to bring together the archival materials of society, Vatroslav Mimica’s “first” application of associative editing in Yugoslavia has wholly different roots. Building on some of Eisenstein’s remarks in Nonindifferent Nature, I argue that Mimica’s cinematic practice takes the natural world and our environment as the site of montage’s origins. I present a reading of Mimica’s Monday or Tuesday (1966) and Kaya, or I’ll Kill You (1969) as films where the art object emerges as a form of spiritualized, revolutionary nature.

Author

• Filip Sestan, UC Berkeley