Screening of film/video oeuvre ’80-’10
Screening and talk
Tuesday, 12 March 2024, 8pm
Slovenian Cinematheque, Miklošičeva cesta 28, Ljubljana
After Neven Korda and Zemira Alajbegović left the Borghesia, they became a creative duo in the 1990s, which materialised in 1998 as the ZANK Institute. During this period, Korda continued to be involved in various studio systems and television production, giving him access to advanced technology that allowed him to work on films.
Each of the three films shown had a different production environment in terms of editing and manipulation of the material: post-production of Intolerance was done at Studio MI, The Sand Collectors at VPK, and Autobus was done at the RTV studio. The post-production was already included in the director’s book for Autobus and The Sand Collectors. At the same time, Korda created the visual image of the film space for Intolerance only during the editing process. The film was, therefore, a year in the making.
Here, Korda continued the logic of creating space in the context of video, which was already present in the videos for Borghesia: the main advantage of video and image layering for Korda was that, as a filmmaker, he was not bound to the image recorded by the camera, but could completely rework it in post-production: the mise-en-scene and its depth, which would have been created on the film strip with light and shadows, was transformed into “mise-en-layers”.
The unity of the production of the films presented in this series was achieved by first creating a soundtrack for all of them: the music, the narrator’s voice, the monologues, the dialogues, the noises and other sounds were edited, and from this, the author began to build the picture. Intolerance’s soundtrack is much denser than Autobus and The Sand Collectors: the latter is visually and sonically oriented towards functionality, while Intolerance radicalises collage tendencies on both visual and sonic levels.
Robert Kuret will talk with Neven Korda.
Director: Neven Korda, script: Zemira Alajbegović, Slovenia, 1995, Beta SP, colour, 12′
Video work tells the story of an art collector as remembered by herself in her old age and as narrated by her friend, a psychoanalyst. Through this narrative, the authors deal with the spirit of avant-garde art in the first half of the 20th century.
Director: Neven Korda, script: Zemira Alajbegović, Slovenia, 1993, Beta SP, colour, 11′
The narrator searches through documents and reconstructs Lela’s life: in the Middle Ages, she was accused of witchcraft; in the 20th century, she finds herself amid war; and in the future, she will leave the planet.
Director: Neven Korda, script: Zemira Alajbegović, Lela B. Njatin, Slovenia, 1991, Beta SP, colour, 33′
It is based on a novel by Lela B. Njatin, an extremely fragmented piece of narrative. The heroine experiences only fragments of events. She gets involved in meetings that start but never end. She has wishes that are outlined but never consumed. The delusive and ungraspable images fluctuate between reality and dreams.
Unknown Land III: ZANK
12 – 18 March
» View at Slovenian Film Database (BSF)
After Neven Korda and Zemira Alajbegović left the Borghesia, they became a creative duo in the 1990s, which materialised in 1998 as the ZANK Institute. During this period, Korda continued to be involved in various studio systems and television production, giving him access to advanced technology that allowed him to work on films.
Slices of Time is one of the most distinctive documentary works in the oeuvre of Neven Korda and the duo of Neven Korda and Zemira Alajbegović. It is an intimate documentary, as it is the story of both of Zemira Alajbegović’s grandmothers.
Zemira Alajbegović, Neven Korda, Slovenia, 2001, 60’
The documentary follows the stories of two older women (the artist’s grandmothers) born during the First World War, after which the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart and a new state, Yugoslavia, was established. They lived in different cultural and religious environments in Yugoslavia, in Bosnia (mostly Moslem) and Slovenia (mostly Christian), yet they were connected through their children and grandchildren.
Neven Korda: Unknown Land
Programme (January-April 2024)
31 January / 28 February / 12 March / 24 April
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana and Slovenian Cinematheque
Curator: Robert Kuret
Neven Korda is an artist who has contributed significantly to developing video as a new medium. He creatively expressed himself through various periods, experimenting with the expressive possibilities of media that produced video.
A survey of Korda’s works will be organized into four programmatic strands, which follow the development of his creativity, each linked to a specific historical, production, genre, and collaborative context. Except for his last period of filmmaking, Neven Korda has been a part of various collectives where authorship has been declared joint.
Co-production: SCCA-Ljubljana/DIVA Station and Slovenian Cinematheque
Partner: Slovenian Film Database (BSF)
Supported by: City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture
Thanks: Barbara Borčić, Miha Colner, Petja Grafenauer, Nikolai Jeffs, Nerina Kocjančič, Bogdan Lešnik, Majda Širca, Melita Zajc
