Third part of a series about rarities and now-forgotten finds from three decades of media and electronic culture

The carousel was to blame: ever since Italian circus and carousel operators came to Yugoslavian cities in the fifties playing loud rock’n’roll, some sort of radical pop-cultural change there was inevitable. In a music clip that the Serb director Jovan Ristic made in 1967 for the group Crni Biseri (Black Pearls), this topos is appropriately honoured: the members of the band sit with their instruments on a roundabout and abandon themselves to the centrifugal forces, filmed from an equally »flying« perspective. The then new, driving beat music as a medium for overcoming social gravity – this utopian gesture of liberation has seldom been given more striking visual form.

This clip is only one of dozens that were produced for RTB (Radio-Television Belgrade) at the time. They are among the pioneering achievements in the field of music video. This one was saved – together with six others – by the Belgrade artist Uros Djuric for the exhibition »Go Johnny Go« (Vienna Kunsthalle). And whereas the latter institution threatened to burst at the seams owing to its overweening ambitions regarding the history of art, music and everyday life, Djuric’s selection concentrated solely on one historical moment and its socio-historical repercussions. The small display of clips, accompanied by a small amount of paraphernalia from the time (mostly magazines and record covers), was impressive precisely because of its reduction and concentration on an ephemeral historical constellation – that concentrated moment from which a large number of overlapping alignments and lines of development can be seen to emerge.

The selection of clips makes it possible to reconstruct a context starting with material that has barely ever been seen. In the liberal cultural climate of this state after it became bloc-free in 1948, Western influences – such as the music played by the travelling amusement parks – were extremely welcome and received with interest. From 1961, this resulted in increasingly active forms of appropriation, and there was an upsurge of new bands that was matched by almost no other country in continental Europe. Starting at this time, early beat culture began to flourish in Belgrade in a way that went far beyond mere mimicry. Although the groups, at least those filmed in the videos, predominantly played cover versions, sung either in Serbo-Croatian or with onomatopoeic »la-la-la« fillers, in most of the songs you can feel an energetic contrariness that is every bit the equal of the »originals« - such as the Yardbirds, Animals, Troggs or Jimi Hendrix. For example, the way the group Samonikli (The Wild Ones) translated Hendrix’ »Can You See Me« into the local idioms a few months after it came out is a convincing demonstration of how the scene back then had its finger on the pulse of the times. This pulse may have been dominated by Anglo-American influences, but precisely its decentral translations went towards giving underground culture of that time concrete power.

Ristic’s video works show that new visual formats were also tried out as part of this wave. The genre of the promo film was still young – since the start of the sixties, there had been the first boom in so-called Scipitone productions (short music films for video juke boxes), and groups like the Beatles had begun in 1966 to send short, self-produced song clips on promotion tours through the television stations instead of going themselves. In this regard, the numerous clips made in 1967 for RTB strike out in some very innovative directions, not just in comparison with their international counterparts, but also in their emphasis on specific local characteristics and their choice of subject. For example, we see the group Elipse placed in a huge industrial complex amid the signs of a modernity that seems still »clean« and uncontaminated. Chimneys, gratings and metal steps that place the masks and grids of a standardized world over the images serve as a frame for the backlit musicians. As if the high emotional content of the music – we repeatedly hear the words »Don’t go! – I’m coming« – had to be brought back to earth by severe industrial design.

In addition to various emblems of modernity, the reference to canonized film genres also plays a role in the clips: for example, when the group Silhuete – very ironically – mimes a Western shoot-out with guitars instead of revolvers. Or when, in the context of a James-Bond theme, an ensemble of girls gives a dance performance on, of all places, a disused industrial site. But, in the end, it is always places of amusement – carousels or the beach – that are the main settings in these proto-videos. At the beach, for example, we see the »Wild Ones« from strange, crooked angles and in extravagant frames, filmed through car tyres and water pipes. »Can You See Me?«, they sing in Serbo-Croatian; and exhibitions like this one at last help us to do so – after almost four decades. One piece more in the jigsaw picture of pop geography – a picture that still has far to go before becoming complete.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---