Introduction to Newsreel 55: Which Side Are You On?

In the cinema of independent Slovenia (considered in the field of film history to be a segment of post-Yugoslav cinema), documentary film has lately been gaining ground. While Filmografija slovenskih celovečernih filmov: 1931–2010 (Film-ography of Slovenian feature films: 1931–2010) contains only one documentary title made between the end of World War II and 1991, in recent years the situation has changed to the point that the main awards at the Festival of Slovenian Film, or Festival Slovenskega Filma, have gone to feature-length documentaries. The first title to receive such an award was Miran Zupanič's Otroci s Petrička (Children from Petriček Hill, 2007), a documentary about attempts at ideological indoctrination after World War II that had not spared even the youngest inhabitants of Slovenia. In 2014, the main award went to Siniša Gačić's Boj za (A fight for), which deals with the expansion and subsequent disintegration of the Slovenian version of the Occupy movement. Among the documentaries of more recent date, we come across works of highly diverse content, vision, and approaches, focused both on important social questions and on various aspects of individuality in the forms of subjective or first-person documentary. But the common denominator of these films is still in the endeavor to, on the one hand, right the wrongs of the (recent) past and, on the other hand, to draw attention to the current problems in the social and political sphere. In the broadest sense, such documentaries belong to the framework of political film, with the most radical ones expressing their commitment both at the level of content and in the questioning of the formal determinations with which they probe social reality.

An example of such a documentary is Newsreel 55 (Nika Autor, 2013), which Andrej Šprah considers one of the most important recent developments in Slovenian filmmaking, specifically in the sphere of committed political documentary film. In the text that follows, Šprah examines this film project, created collectively by the Newsreel Front under the leadership of Nika Autor. Autor is a cineaste and visual artist who entered the film world in 2010 by exploring the refugee question and the restrictive asylum policies in Slovenia with her short Postcards and the feature-length Report on the State of Asylum Seekers in the Republic of Slovenia, January 2008–August 2009. She continued her documentary engagement with In the Land of Bears (2012), a feature-length work presenting the struggle of the exploited and humiliated seasonal workers from Bosnia and Herzegovina in Slovenia. The film shows the difficult position of workers with virtually no rights who, having been left without pay or any social rights, organized themselves in an activist initiative of invisible workers of the world and strove to right the wrongs committed by the exploitative Slovenian employers and state. In Newsreel 55, which deals with current political events through a revitalization of the newsreel genre, Nika Autor expanded her individual commitment and joined forces with Marko Bratina, Jurij Meden, and Ciril Oberstar, who all work in the fields of theory and art, to establish the Newsreel Front collective. In his discussion of the film Newsreel 55, Šprah analyzes in detail various forms of newsreels as types of oppositional film practices through the perspective of political documentary. He shows how the revitalization of certain initiatives and formal elements of the past can establish the possibility for a cinema of active resistance along with a reflective approach that addresses social reality and at the same time reflects on the status of current political documentaries in Slovenia—and the world.

On the one hand, the theoretical framework of Šprah's study coincides with the references we come across in the film itself. This is the case, for example, with Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image as an examination of the "real image of the past"; with Georges Didi-Huberman's questioning of the (im)possibility of representing the most chilling traumatic facts of the past in his "Four Pieces of Film Snatched from Hell"; and with Bertolt Brecht, whose critique of capitalism...