Gratinirani mozak pupilije ferkeverk (1970)

　　Gratinirani mozak Pupilije Ferkeverk (1970) aka The Gratinated Brains of Pupilia Ferkeverk
　　This short was taken from extras on Splav Meduze DVD.
　　How did this movie come about? Well, it was the brainchild of Karpo...展开 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. Among these “Amateur” films was The Gratinated Brains of Pupilia Ferkeverk (1970), featuring the Slovenian poets who constituted a collective called ‘Pupilia Ferkeverk.’ The movie opens with a shot of a woman on a swing in a river, shot at different times of day and night, and in different weather. When we think, after a minute or two, that we are going to see nothing else, other characters suddenly interject themselves, standing naked or nearly naked in the water, miming different stages of life and politics, using symbolism so abstract as to be meaningless were it not for the captions that are in Serbo-Croatian (or Slovene?) and are not translated into English. The characters all conclude that the universal solution is to take LSD. The depiction of drug use, of course, got the movie banned. But that was probably just a pretext. The movie’s real subversion is not a mention of a drug, but the depiction of civilization reduced to a cartoon level of unoriginal people standing around in the water mimicking one another and following the pointless commands of advertisers and politicians. The imagery is hilarious.
　　Asked by an audience member at the Brooklyn Academy of Music who had written the background song, Karpo Godina confessed that he knew someone would ask, and that in anticipation of this he had been racking his brains all day trying to remember, to no avail. But now a Google search reveals the answer. The song was written by Rory Gallagher for a group called he was then in called Taste, and the name of the tune is “On the Boards” from an album of the same name.