28. 07. 2010The InVisible MAFAF
(Information program of Cinemaniac 2010)
Exhibition
July 18-August 6,2010
MMC Luka, Pula, Croatia
Cinemaniac established in 2002 as the support programme at the Pula Film Festival in order to present innovative events in art and cinema, thus creating a new social space to introduce recent achievements in the fields of experimental video and filmmaking, and multimedia installations. Within such practices, contemporary art reveals itself as both a kind of parallel history and a signpost to possible futures for avantgarde and experimental filmmaking – as well as a space where the depths of possibility are plumbed, borders argued, and the language of film image – and, crucially, new cinema forms – investigated.
The 9th Cinemaniac festival is dedicated to MAFAF – the Inter cine club Alternative Amateur and Artist Film Festival, which ran from 1965 to 1990 in Pula as an annual prelude to the Yugoslav Feature Film Festival. Two decades later, aided by available documents and archive material, we want to try and make the festival’s invisible history visible, in order to best contextualize it, reassess its real significance and rehabilitate the memory of an important event where the sheer number of applicants and their works made it the biggest event dedicated to alternative and non-professional filmmaking in Yugoslavia.
Twelve years on, Cinemaniac brought MAFAF forcefully into the 21st century by retaining a flair for researching practices in moving images, and inviting to Pula a number of the erstwhile MAFAF participants along with a new generation of visual artists. Amongst them are two artists from Slovenia, who have already participated at the previous editions of MAFAF. Marko Kovačič re-participates at the exhibition The InVisible MAFAF with his film Casus Belli (Super 8, ŠKUC, Ljubljana 1983, 15′) and Mirko Simić with his two films Passer by (VHS, BRIS & V.S. Video/Forum, Ljubljana 1990, 4′ 18”) and Positive Connection II (VHS, BRIS & V.S. Video/Forum, Ljubljana 1990, 3′ 16”).