The InVisible MAFAF
Gallery Aneks, MMC Luka – 18/07/2010 – 06/08/2010
The 9th Cinemaniac festival is dedicated to MAFAF – the Inter cine club Alternative Amateur and Artist Film Festival, which ran from 1965 to 1990 in Pula as an annual prelude to the Yugoslav Feature Film Festival. Two decades later, aided by available documents and archive material, we want to try and make the festival’s invisible history visible, in order to best contextualise it, reassess its real significance and rehabilitate the memory of an important event where the sheer number of applicants and their works made it the biggest event dedicated to alternative and non-professional filmmaking in Yugoslavia. In his preface to the 1990 catalogue Vladimir Anđelković foresaw what was to become reality by writing about video stepping in through the front door and taking its rightful place alongside film. Twelve years on, Cinemaniac brought MAFAF forcefully into the 21st century by retaining a flair for researching practices in moving images, and inviting to Pula a number of the erstwhile MAFAF participants along with a new generation of visual artists. Today MAFAF is pretty much under the public radar, the festival being next to forgotten, or just about ignored, in many respects. Surely, no worthwhile recontextualisation and critical scrutiny is possible without taking into account institutional actors and the wider public context. The InVisible MAFAF is a research platform, a project to be realised in stages and several recognisable presentation formats. Our aim is not to hold on to simple historical reconstructions: we want to provide room for a subjective critical reinterpretation which would be shorn of eulogy and myth, by putting available fragments on a map which is temporary and unstable, inviting a second look by the wider contextual eye.