MAPS OF APOCALYPSE: GASP! (1975) BY VLATKO GILIĆ IN THE LIGHT OF TODAY'S EXPERIENCE
Posted: Sep 30th 2008
Author: Srđan Vučinić
This essay is devoted to Kičma (literally: The Spine; distributed as Gasp…!, 1975) by Vlatko Gilić (1935). The focus is on the philosophical ideas and anthropological dimension of this work, and on its relevance for our times, more than three decades later. It is an attempt to actualize Gasp…! in the light of global ecological threat, while stressing the real source of danger that Gilić\'s film presents: the secret of human nature and its self-destructiveness. This short foray into film history tries to find (foreign) predecessors and successors of Gilić\'s worldview and aesthetics which made Gasp…! a unique and never repeated work in the history of Yugoslav and Serbian cinema. The film is placed as a continuation of similar tendencies found in the works of such diverse authors like M. Antonioni, R. Bresson and S. Brakhage, while in the decades that followed Gilić\'s film the paper finds similarities with certain works of the visionaries of the mental apocalypse like D. Cronenberg and Tsai Ming-Liang. Depersonalized, affectionless people that roam the clinically sparse urban settings of Gilić\'s New Belgrade were not recognized when they were first shown by either critics or audience; today, they are our contemporaries. A brief connection is made with Gilić\'s short documentary films which today, due to their cinematic and philosophic virtues, belong to all anthologies of world cinema.
2007 - 2012 Novi kadrovi, supported by Open Society Institute New York, and SCP Pro Helvetia Beograd, website by Breve