Dark April Days—an introductory note to Nika’s Editorial

by Koen Van Daele

When the editors at NANG magazine sent me the English translation of Nika Bohinc’s editorial written more than ten years ago for the Slovene film magazine Ekran, asking me for a short introduction to give a bit of context, to place the editorial within Ekran’s and Nika’s struggles in Slovenia at that time, the first thing that came to mind was how much we miss her. And when I read it again, it immediately transported me back to those dark days in the spring of 2008, when film culture in Slovenia had just received another blow. In a totally unexpected move, the Slovene Cinematheque had decided to shut down the city’s only arthouse cinema, Kinodvor. What was even more shocking was the way it happened. On the morning of April 1—and unfortunately this was no April Fool’s Day prank—the cinema’s staff found themselves locked out of the building. Without informing them, overnight, the Cinematheque’s management had secretly removed the 35mm projector from the cinema and changed the locks. “They killed Kinodvor” is the graffiti one can still read on a pillar of the adjacent building, as a quiet reminder of the local film-loving community resisting this inexplicably harsh intervention in Ljubljana’s cinephile scene. It was an act inflicted upon them by an institution that was supposed to be their principal advocate, protector, and fortress. How did it come to this? To be able to understand this brutal act, we have to go back to April 2005. After a totally unexpected short illness, the founder and first director of the Cinematheque, Silvan Furlan, died. The 51-year-old Furlan had been one of the central figures in Slovene film culture, most notably in struggling to give film its legitimate position among the other arts. He passed away at a time when a conservative government was running the country. One of Furlan’s many achievements for film culture in Slovenia was that he succeeded in establishing the Cinematheque not as a private or non-profit organization, but as a national public institution. It is a sad irony that because of this privileged status, for which Furlan struggled so hard (with the underlying idea that only in that way would he be able to secure and maintain the status and support of the Cinematheque in particular, and the position of the art of film in general), that the right-wing government of the time was able to take control over the institution, appointing someone as director who was merely their pawn, with the intention to overthrow and undo the most significant achievements cinephile Slovenia had been able to make during the Furlan years. This is the context in which Nika—this brave, passionate, spirited cinephile from out of town—had the guts not to let herself be discouraged by power games or party politics; not to give up, but, in an act of resistance and defiance, decided to become the editor-in-chief of Ekran in 2005. Facing the arguments made by those in power, she would respond with the power of the argument. Despite the heavy counterwind, all the obstacles she was facing, the recurring sabotage, she would remain positive and constructive. Instead of losing sight by dealing with all these local intrigues, she firmly kept her gaze locked on the infinite, reaching far beyond the horizon, beyond the—all so often, oh so claustrophobic—borders of her small country, always reminding herself of the bigger picture. So internationalizing Ekran and its the Autumn Film School was a top priority for her, as was training young, aspiring new film critics. What she achieved in the three years she ran the magazine could—in a cinephile-friendly environment—be called incredible. In the hostile surroundings she was working in, it was nothing short of monumental. Nika was a passionate visionary. A person who inspired and gave hope, because she was convinced there was another way. One way of stubbornly resisting the system was by constantly reminding her readers and listeners that it was about something bigger, something more essential, something more important. So it comes as no surprise that in this editorial, in which we start feeling her fatigue and in which she is beginning to announce her imminent departure, she reminds us that even if our own, personal flame of enthusiasm starts dying down, we shouldn’t be discouraged because there will always be new generations who will take over the torch. Nika, we miss you dearly…

Postscript

Nika expressed the hope that the city of Ljubljana would not be afraid of the challenge “to solve the problem of Kinodvor.” Fortunately, it was not. On May 26—so less than two months after its closure—the town passed the founding Act for a new public institution through the city council. Its mission: to run Kinodvor as a public, municipal cinema showcasing quality cinema. The town committed itself to cover six full-time salaries and half of the cinema’s running costs. In return, Kinodvor had to ensure at least 50,000 admissions per year for its arthouse program. Even commercial distribution companies believed this to be a very ambitious goal, considering Kinodvor is a single-screen venue operating in a town of less than 300,000 inhabitants. But the response to the re-opening exceeded all expectations and the interest in quality cinema steadily grew. Due to the lack of screens, the cinema had already reached its ceiling of around 120,000 admissions per year (so more than double the set goal!) by 2012. Kinodvor became a major game changer for the development of film culture in Slovenia, having a significant impact on the country’s film exhibition, distribution, and film education, as well as the country’s festival offerings. But maybe the most important achievement of Kinodvor is that in the ten years it has operated as a city cinema, everybody has come to take this vibrant center for the art of film for granted.

Originally from Belgium, Koen Van Daele has been working in culture since 1984. He moved to Ljubljana in the 1990s and worked as curator on numerous film and arts related projects. Since 2008 he is in charge of program at Kinodvor. As a film critic his reviews and essays have been published by a variety of magazines and newspapers including Ekran, AS/Andere Sinema and Muska.

Professionalism the Cinema Way

by Nika Bohinc

Ekran, Vol. XLV / April-May 2008, front cover (Courtesy Ekran magazine)

On the first Tuesday in March, Ekran’s program, Preschool of the Gaze, a series of lectures on film running for the second time and intended to educate young film critics and thinkers, commenced. The sessions, which are taking place in the screening hall of the welcoming Kiberpipa, are admission free. This year, there are 31 participants registered, which seems a rather high number, especially considering the experience of our Australian colleagues who tried to launch a similar “school” in Melbourne three years ago—when not a single person applied. The difference between Ljubljana and Melbourne is probably that in Slovenia the opportunity for a close encounter with “film studies” is limited to two film courses at the University of Ljubljana (Sociology of Cinema at the Faculty of Arts and Film Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences), while in Australia film studies, the studies of the theory and history of film, is a program available at all the larger universities. In addition to the Preschool of the Gaze, the Film Group of the Workers’ Punk University (Peace Institute) and the Retrovizor Club (after comedy, the second semester is devoted to New Hollywood, taking place every other Monday at the Gromka Club) deal with film theory and offer space for discussion, while the intersections between film and philosophy are examined by Zofijini ljubimci at thematic film evenings in Maribor. All these initiatives are an attempt to correct the shameful fact that in 2008 film is still the blind spot of the educational system of a supposedly cultured European country.

It is not difficult to appreciate how the small amount of space allotted to film thought, and writing about film, could potentially limit the motivation of the students of the Preschool of the Gaze. It must also be quite clear to young cinephiles in Slovenia that one can neither “study” film criticism at the university level, nor make a living from it, and that film professions (what I have in mind above all are curators, program assistants, film archivists, etc.) are extremely rare. This story has another element, which we could call the lack of film personnel, which presents a problem for film institutions such as the Slovenian Cinematheque, Film Fund and Archive, as well as for the media, including (or especially) Ekran. The lack of already established writers as befit eminent film magazines that boast a rich tradition was the key reason behind establishing the Preschool of the Gaze.

A film magazine is inescapably part of the film space in which it is created. For the last three years, the film space in Slovenia has been palpably shrinking—imploding even—as clearly illustrated by the latest of the quite incredible “acts” of the Slovenian film tragedy, the closing of Kinodvor. This arthouse, little more than four years old, is to be dismantled and locked, due to its unclear status, insufficient state funding and a meagre turnout, which has halved during the last eighteen months (a phenomenon that the management of the Slovenian Cinematheque, which is in charge of Kinodvor, attributes to the first two reasons [status and funding] for its closing down). It is true that the Kinodvor project was conceived very idealistically and also ambitiously, with its godfathers failing to factor in the screening monopoly, which, by pressuring distributors, has continued to pocket the profits of the most successful art films. In addition, these godfathers also failed to take into account Kinodvor’s inability to enter the market as a result of its status: Because the Slovenian Cinematheque is a public institution, it can only buy films that the “independent” distributors are not interested in.  The situation was later compounded by the tendency to circumvent the Act on Cultural Tolar, which had been conceived to support films in the arthouse distribution network, but which ended up primarily subsidizing the films of “independent” distributors screened at the multiplexes, which put an additional dent in the art cinema network. It is also true that without this idealism, which turned a blind eye to the basic financial conditions and bet on the power of film enthusiasm of the team behind the project, Kinodvor would never have happened. Given the choice between Kinodvor’s problems (financial and program related) and a non-existent Kinodvor, solving such problems is the better alternative. As the owner of the building in Kolodvorska Street, the City of Ljubljana took it upon itself to solve the problem of Kinodvor, and let’s hope that it is not scared of the challenge, especially if an enthusiastic approach is not too much for it.

We cannot rely on there being professional conditions in the field of film in Slovenia. In terms of solving the production crisis, keeping in check the monopoly of Kolosej Kinematografi, staffing at the Slovenian Cinematheque, preventing the introduction of film studies at universities, and introducing film into the curriculum of primary and secondary schools, it appears that the opinion of experts/professionals was not worth much. Furthermore, it seems that it is precisely this professional knowledge, also gained through many years of amateur, enthusiastic provision of the basic conditions for the development of film culture in Slovenia, that is the greatest obstacle encountered by political appetites on their path to establishing (the—at long last—right!) “professional” conditions. Instead of bringing together the already sparse existing film forces and educating new ones, the stakeholders primarily act on the basis of old or new grudges (and friendships) and enforce their own interests, which are anything but filmic. This is why we have been going round in circles for more than fourteen years.

Can enthusiasm fade? With individuals, it can, but in society—never. There will always be new generations with new energy, which will—regardless of the (non)professional nature of the given conditions—create new film spaces, ideas, cinemas, festivals, societies, schools, film texts, and magazines, regardless of the iron fist that divides and conquers and carelessly destroys what it has not itself built.

Hands always remind me of August Rodin, especially the sculpture La Cathédrale, next to which Valeria Bruni Tedeschi sits in Rodin’s museum in Paris in the film Un couple parfait (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2005). In the sculptor’s body of work, these two hands, which in a slight, barely perceptible touch, rise toward the sky and, in the space created between them, protect something very fragile, are considered a tribute to Gothic church architecture and art. The sculpture gives rise to reflections on the solitude of human existence and the human need and desire for contact that remains unfulfilled. Rodin’s sculptures feature hands as autonomous settings of life; in his body of work, we find people embracing without arms as well as independent, petite hands that live without the body, walk, sleep, awake, rise into fists and crimes… With a hand, we can take hold, we can protect, we can caress or strike, we can create. And we can also wave goodbye.

Translated from Slovenian into English by Maja Lovrenov.

First published in Ekran, Vol. XLV / April-May 2008.

Reproduced with the permission of the Bohinc family and of Ekran magazine. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Laurel Flores Fantauzzo, Koen Van Daele, and Ciril Oberstar in making this Editorial available here.