Vladimir Petek

Shown at Genre Experimental Festival (GEFF) in Zagreb in 1963, this experimental short film by Vladimir Petek subverts the conventions of cinema, rigorously attacking the filmic material.

Unencumbered by a professional education and open to new ideas, Vladimir Petek (b. 1940) was energetically exploring in the 1960s what film could do as a medium if used in nonstandard ways. In his early works, the obsession with the medium was connected to his youthful delight with female beauty, and Petek created some of the most striking portrait films in Croatian cinema, which might be seen as the more filmically inventive cousins of the Screen Tests that Andy Warhol started doing in 1964 to explore film’s seemingly innate ability to turn almost anyone into a "star." Encounter offers a portrait of a woman (Ksenija Filipović, his then-girlfriend) whose face becomes mysterious, desirable, and endlessly captivating on film, all the more so because of Petek’s various interventions in the film stock.

A computer generated video exploring possibilities of new media through multiplications, cutting outs and other ways of manipulation with electronic and geometric image.

Petek is very versatile and is experimenting with all possible formats, the Zagreb film school of animation-influenced parts, the quasi SF childish games, the color splashes, the psychedelic timbres, the pop art/ collage experiments and a swirl of other 60s gestures.

Yugoslavian experimental short film.

Shown at Genre Experimental Festival (GEFF) in Zagreb in 1963, this experimental short film by Vladimir Petek subverts the conventions of cinema, rigorously attacking the filmic material.

Shown at Genre Experimental Festival (GEFF) in Zagreb in 1963, this experimental short film by Vladimir Petek subverts the conventions of cinema, rigorously attacking the filmic material.

Unencumbered by a professional education and open to new ideas, Vladimir Petek (b. 1940) was energetically exploring in the 1960s what film could do as a medium if used in nonstandard ways. In his early works, the obsession with the medium was connected to his youthful delight with female beauty, and Petek created some of the most striking portrait films in Croatian cinema, which might be seen as the more filmically inventive cousins of the Screen Tests that Andy Warhol started doing in 1964 to explore film’s seemingly innate ability to turn almost anyone into a "star." Encounter offers a portrait of a woman (Ksenija Filipović, his then-girlfriend) whose face becomes mysterious, desirable, and endlessly captivating on film, all the more so because of Petek’s various interventions in the film stock.

Unencumbered by a professional education and open to new ideas, Vladimir Petek (b. 1940) was energetically exploring in the 1960s what film could do as a medium if used in nonstandard ways. In his early works, the obsession with the medium was connected to his youthful delight with female beauty, and Petek created some of the most striking portrait films in Croatian cinema, which might be seen as the more filmically inventive cousins of the Screen Tests that Andy Warhol started doing in 1964 to explore film’s seemingly innate ability to turn almost anyone into a "star." Encounter offers a portrait of a woman (Ksenija Filipović, his then-girlfriend) whose face becomes mysterious, desirable, and endlessly captivating on film, all the more so because of Petek’s various interventions in the film stock.

A computer generated video exploring possibilities of new media through multiplications, cutting outs and other ways of manipulation with electronic and geometric image.

A computer generated video exploring possibilities of new media through multiplications, cutting outs and other ways of manipulation with electronic and geometric image.

Petek is very versatile and is experimenting with all possible formats, the Zagreb film school of animation-influenced parts, the quasi SF childish games, the color splashes, the psychedelic timbres, the pop art/ collage experiments and a swirl of other 60s gestures.

Petek is very versatile and is experimenting with all possible formats, the Zagreb film school of animation-influenced parts, the quasi SF childish games, the color splashes, the psychedelic timbres, the pop art/ collage experiments and a swirl of other 60s gestures.

Yugoslavian experimental short film.

Yugoslavian experimental short film.