The Avant-Garde Does Not Surrender: Cinema of Želimir Žilnik, an international symposium organized by Aleksandar Bošković.
Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for The Avant-Garde Does Not Surrender (after Anger Jorn's L'avant-garde se rend pas, 1962), a symposium dedicated to the cinematic works and practices of the renowned Yugoslav filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, who has been in the vanguard of socially committed and politically engaged cinema in Europe since the 1960s. His extensive body of work, comprising over sixty short films and features, has steadfastly adhered to the principles of cinematic resistance against the prevailing status quo, cultivating a distinctive cinematic style that prioritizes agency over mere representation.
Žilnik's films, particularly his documentaries and docudramas (referred to as docufiction), serve as a platform for giving voice, stage, and agency to various marginalized, underrepresented, and often overlooked individuals and groups. In his distinct approach, Žilnik transforms cinema into an instrument of praxis, a form of cinema that not only empowers its protagonists—the homeless, the unemployed, immigrants, refuges, the politically, racially, and sexually oppressed, or marginalized subjects—but also fosters an engaged social experience. Žilnik’s “cinema-as-praxis” (Levi) relentlessly resists hegemonic regimes of knowledge by espousing modes of understanding and interventions in the world rooted in practical experience.
