Radmila Djurica

Between other present Serbian Production Films on the International Film Festival FEST 2015, among all other films that are dealing with the political conflicts of Serbia and social themes, there is one film that I would like to talk about as opposite of the usual Serbian film themes featured in films today. 

The Loop/Petlja directed by Serbian director Milutin Petrović; is classified in FEST Program in the section "Microwave" as the film shot with a minimal budget, but great freedom. The famous director and co-writer Petrović signed photography, editing and music, while the co-writer and lead actor is Sasa Radojević. Petrović is very well known by the films that feature political authority on a very negative and cynical way. He is the director with the guts. But this film may not be translated the guts but it may rather be translated the loop. In the politically oppressed country artists are marginal and naturally many feel as they are living in the loop of time, past time in  common cases. So the The Loop/Petlja is a small garage, underground film that honors work of a great Yugoslavian photographer Ljubomir Šimunić, author of avant-garde films and photographs whose output is dedicated to the "Loop". The catalog of the festival described the film as a "meeting of Hollywood and European underground" and visual research on the phenomena of eroticism on film, which is one of the possible interpretation of the film.

For me the roots of his style in the film are in Petrović’s career as music video art maker in 80s, in also his career as musician. The Loop is symbol of tangled we may say, anthropological field: the mixture of past, present, great confusion and even greater guessing, all this as the dedication of the opus of erotic photography made by Šimunić in past. Loop is dedicated to the artist who very competently dealt with eroticism seventies and eighties. In the meantime, our small planet has been swept off with free internet porn that breaks the essential meaning of erotica. It totally changed the state of civilization in terms of secrets, intimacy and generally all that is hidden. Laces are now cheap and knit the industry ... there are no real art boundaries. Someone peek through the keyhole or peek under the skirt has become something almost romantic, even ridicules. And yes here things gets tangled up in the anthropological field.

However, if the film may appear as low budget in a worse sense of confusion, a small television video art of the great 80s style for those who know Šimunić and art establishment in Serbia, this work may appear different. It may be viewed or connected to any other museum art installation in the world and it may belong to a gallery more than to a big screen.  Movies are a complex matter, you must watch and listen, it makes little sense to talk about them before the screening. But if you need something to supposedly attracts audiences and film advertised as a product of "guts" it is a drive through pure cinematic elements, the moving image in the garage film of the XXI century. It even features Hitchcock’s films in the background, because basically, by its story, it is a mystery thriller. Well lets say that the film has subtle references on Hitchcock’s famous scream in Psycho and the erotic infatuation and the elemetal voyeurism in Vertigo.