Newsreel 55: Which Side Are You On?

The project Newsreel 55 (2013) has a special significance in Slovenian cinema for several reasons. On the one hand, this is because of the dialogue it establishes with its own filmic past, as evidenced by the number in the title, which derives from the fact that fifty-four newsreels were filmed in Slovenia between 1946 and 1951. Thus, the attempt to revive what has perhaps been the most widely exploited documentary genre includes a historical dimension or a welcome correspondence with its historical conditions. The other important point of departure is the fact that Newsreel 55 is a collective project of the Newsreel Front collective, which was constituted during the making of the film. The collective consists of Nika Autor (as the first listed in the credits), Marko Bratina, Jurij Meden, and Ciril Oberstar, who work in the fields of theory and art. The work itself is a specific filmic-cultural-political feat, since it explores the new possibilities of the chosen film form through its affirmation but in a way that simultaneously subverts a series of its fundamental determinations. The basic thematic affirmation lies in preserving the premise of the newsreel as a purposive film form with an expressly political and utilitarian charge. Nevertheless, Nika Autor frequently subverts this premise, which encapsulates a series of formal newsreel characteristics, by adding elements of various documentary (sub)genres. She establishes additional differences also at the level of content and form because the film is conceived according to the principles of a first-person documentary. This means that the filmmaker is directly inscribed in the film matter, which relativizes the objectivistic newsreel discourse of conveying a veritable truth of events. The vision of documentary authenticity is thus replaced by a reflection on what the most suitable images are for representing social struggle in various historical constellations; through such self-reflection, the film's essayist dimension is established and its stylistic heterogeneity radicalized. Newsreel 55 thus underscores the realization that all revitalization of established film forms contains an inevitable share of their subversion. Every formal decision is essentially also a political and moral act proceeding from the current constellations in which a film form from the past is used for the needs of liberating endeavors. The project at hand thus reflects the awareness that the main question in the revival of preceding visions is the question of identity or identities, for an act of resistance is possible only as the ultimate consequence of self-awareness, both awareness about one's current position in the world and awareness that this position is permeated with the heritage of past generations, which—as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out—is reflected in the need to take up new struggles "whenever the earlier one is betrayed."¹

Newsreel 55 is in every regard a complex work. We will therefore begin with a detailed presentation of the main content within the basic formal coordinates that draw on traditional newsreel approaches. Formally, Nika Autor's work is based on an episodic formula, which newsreel in its most traditional form borrowed from daily newspapers or weekly magazines and that arranged events according to the 'importance" of current events from daily politics to sports and entertainment. The structural line of Newsreel 55 is, however, governed by a logic diverging radically from the traditional approach. Instead of the standard hierarchical organization of an established sequence of content, we follow various thematic sections that are elliptically connected following the dynamics of the relation between the chronology of the growing class struggle and the psychopathology of the capitalist system that transforms everything into consumer goods for its own benefit—including the sharpest forms of critique aimed at it. The internal logic of the film's elements is governed by the filmmaker's first-person commentary; her personal experience forms the basis for the interweaving of the vision of individual memories with the search for the possibility of a suitable—new or renewed—image of class struggle.

The film begins with a prologue showing the preparations for a protest in the context of the so-called...