21 Jul 2010

MMC LUKA presents CINEMANIAC 2010: The InVisible MAFAF

CINEMANIAC 2010 / The InVisible MAFAF
* exhibition is dedicated to MAFAF Inter cine club Alternative Amateur and Artist Film Festival (1965 – 1990, Pula ex Yugoslavia)
 
Curated by Branka Bencic
Research associate: Ivica Gunjaca
 
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 contextualise 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.

In his preface to the 1990 catalogue Vladimir Anđelković foresaw what was to become reality by writing about video stepping in through the front door and taking its rightful place alongside film. 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.

Today MAFAF is pretty much under the public radar, the festival being next to forgotten, or just about ignored, in many respects. Surely, no worthwhile recontextualisation and critical scrutiny is possible without taking into account institutional actors and the wider public context. During the years MAFAF saw autors such as Tomislav Gotovac, Želimir Žilnik,Vladimir Petek, Lordan Zafranović, Franci Slak,Ivan Faktor, Zdravko Mustać, Boris Poljak, Vladislav Knežević, Josip Zanki, Dan Oki, etc...

The InVisible MAFAF is a research platform, a project to be realised in stages and several recognisable presentation formats. Our aim is not to hold on to simple historical reconstructions: we want to provide room for a subjective critical reinterpretation which would be shorn of eulogy and myth, by putting available fragments on a map which is temporary and unstable, inviting a second look by the wider contextual eye.

Organization: MMC LUKA
Partners: Pula film festival, Pula film factory, Croatian Film Association

www.pulafilmfestival.hr/hr/index.php?p=list&group=67