I Miss Sonia Henie (1971)
I Miss Sonia Henie (1971)
XVID 720x528 25.00fps 2207Kbps | Serbo-Croat Stereo 128Kbps | English Subs .sub/.idx | 0:14:47 | 248 MB
Genre: Short/Arthouse | Directors: Karpo Acimovic-Godina, Tinto Brass, Mladomir 'Purisa' Djordjevic, Milos Forman,
Buck Henry, Dusan Makavejev, Paul Morrissey, Frederick Wiseman | aka Nedostaje mi Sonja Henie
A review:
A film on which Karpo Godina, Duљan Makavejev, Tinto Brass, Bogdan Tirnanic', Mladomir “Puriљa” Рor?evic', Paul Morrissey, Frederick Wiseman, Miloљ Forman, and Buck Henry all collaborated? Sounds like a cinephile’s dream — too good to be true! As a matter of fact, I thought it was a phoney listing on the Internet Movie Database — but then I saw it. It’s for real. And it is absolutely one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. Almost indescribable. Though it’s only 15 minutes and 24 seconds long it is so rich that after a single viewing I couldn’t remember everything I saw.[…]
How did this movie come about? Well, it was the brainchild of Karpo Godina, who got his start by serving on the crews of a number of commercial movies. Then he started making short films, outside the studio system, on his own. In the US, people who do such things are considered to belong to the “Independent Filmmaking” movement. In Yugoslavia the movement was called the “Amateur Movement,” with “amateur” being used in its original and correct meaning of working for love rather than money, not the current erroneous definition of untrained ineptitude.[…]
And that leads us to I Miss Sonja Henie. What was this odd little unseen movie? Olaf Mцller, a film curator in Kцln, writing in the on-line film journal Senses of Cinema, included it in his list of “Ten Treasures.” Sufficiently intrigued, a few years ago I wrote to Herr Mцller, asking him, among other things, to describe the film. Here’s his response:
A few words about this insanity of a masterpiece. I’m not surprised that you couldn’t find anything on this particular film — as it was more or less never shown, at least in public; even the usually quite-reliable and well-researched BFI Encyclopedia of Russian and Central European Cinema got this one wrong: They say that it is a documentary about the Belgrade Film Festival made by some of the invited directors of the (I think) ’72 edition, among them Sergio Leone — which is bulls–t, as the film is neither a documentary nor had Sergio the Great anything to do with it.
It’s a kind of cinephile experiment: Godina asked some of the directors that were present at the Belgrade Film Festival in (I think) ’72 to shoot a short film following a very strict set of rules: no pans, no zooms, no travellings, only one lens (the same for everybody — i.e. a fixed gaze), one roll of raw stock for each director, and at some point the actors had to say “I miss Sonja Henie” (Snoopy is actually credited as the film’s screenwriter). Now, each of these directors shot his segment (some lameass, some weird; some pop up only briefly; some were used, it seems, in their entirety), and out of these individual segments — plus a few additional scenes (stock footage of Sonja Henie, etc) — Godina edited the final film — which did not please the censors. Except for one, all of Godina’s earlier efforts — most of which are EXTRAORDINARY, BRILLIANT WORKS OF A GENIUS — were forbidden to be shown publicly: They said the films were works of Western decadence and therefore a danger to the Yugo-Soc-mindset; now, in the case of this particular masterpiece (his last work as a director for quite some time), they said that now he’d even worked together with those Western decadents, that he’d become their tool. Well, that’s the film, that’s its story. By the way, now Godina is considered to be the most visionary artist Slovenia ever brought forth — together with Serbia’s Ћelimir Ћilnik (check out my piece on Ћilnik in Film Comment 1/2 ’04!:-) and Croatia’s Lordan Zafranovic' he became something like an avant-garde inside the Yu-black-wave-avant-garde of the late 60s and early 70s. And: The real documentary in this case is the making of: 5 hours’ worth of a lot of great filmmakers having a whale of a good time shooting the s–t, filmmakingwise — now, this mother is certainly a document about a place in time in cinephilia!
Never had my appetite been so whetted! I wrote to Karpo Godina, but he didn’t reply (because his English was too poor and my Slovene was/is nonexistent). I asked Tinto Brass to tell me about it, but he just smiled in fond recollection and said that he had never seen the movie, and had no idea how his footage had been used. […]
I Miss Sonia Henie (1971)
