Termiti

Milan Šamec (1942-2007) was a representative of the conservative stream in the Cineclub Zagreb, the one that resisted “anti-film” and ridiculed it. Termites was made as a rebuttal to “anti-film”, as a demonstration ad absurdum that “anyone can make an experimental film”. He took a tape, exposed it unevenly to the developer, and entitled the resulting dance of visual spots created by this uneven development, ants – termites – because the spots reminded him of them. In order to parody the new music from the Music Biennale that our avant-garde artists looked up to, he created a soundtrack with rhythmical tapping and scraping the radiators. Ironically, the result was both visually and sound-wise very impressive that it won an award at the first festival of experimental film GEFF and served as evidence that parody is a kind of liberation, opening new areas of sensibility, despite the author’s original intentions.