A Cousinly Slap, 2012
film
15’
The work was exhibited at and produced for the 53rd October Salon, Good Life.
The film is the artist’s personal story about an attempt to restore the long-lost or cooled connections with relatives he remembers from his childhood.
In the style of those trips down the family tree, I travel, get in touch with people I remember well from my childhood and ask them for advice on how to finally make that “real film”. Of course, as the title of the film says, we would sometimes get in a fight for this film. A friendly – cousinly fight. More of a slap fest, a wrestling match… Although many of them are past their prime, as opposed to back then, when I was a kid and my insolence was the cause of many, many slaps. Today, after all the thrashing, I usually sincerely hug them when we get together; I am hot, sweaty and strangely – happy. After all, those things are good and very healthy for me, since I am rather cowardly when it comes to fights and brawls. I remember a remark from a soldier, when I was in the army and after I had finally gotten into a fight with my eyes closed, probably not breathing: “Look at that, he got beaten up and it’s fine by him!”
Miloš Tomić, from the catalogue of the 53rd October Salon
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-131/1.6.2020.
Inventory No: 154
Photo: still from the film
Selected Bibliography:
53rd October Salon, Good Life: Physical Narratives and Spatial Imaginations. Cultural Centre of Belgrade, 2012
While I was in my mom’s belly, I touched my wiener and realised I was a boy!, 2013-2020
Digital video recording, short film, 16×9 HD video
10’
Edition: 1/3
“While I was in my mom’s belly…” is the final entry of the “Musical Diaries” that, for many years, followed the relationship between father and son (myself and Dren) through the theme of music. This sixth instalment completes the series both formally and substantially, with the final line of the film being: “Dad, I will never again film anything with you!”. Two strong obsessions are intertwined in the film: the father’s infatuation with music, and the son’s, perhaps even fiercer, infatuation with video games! The story is a futile attempt to rekindle the intimacy they had once had, through a reenactment of childhood situations when music used to bring them together. The father tries to draw his son into a series of new activities, too: from his first piano lesson with a legendary (now retired) teacher, to a cathartic, joint smashing of dilapidated windows and neon lights with his father’s crew, to a children’s orchestra that aims to exorcise the “video game devil” from the infatuated boy with a cacophonous performance. In a formal sense, the film has three layers of material: 1. Narrative-documentary scenes (using the motion picture method with actors, locations, costumes, scenery, analogue special effects…); 2. Clips from previous Musical Diaries in a live “dialogue” with acted scenes; 3. Home videos and selected documentary-voyeur scenes from the director’s archives that run a parallel, associative course to the main story, collected in the last five years.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon and the Artist Collection
Mining agreement: III-5-19/01.02.2023
Inventory no: 168
Photo: a square from the film
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Miloš Tomić (1976, Belgrade, Serbia) graduated in film directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in 2001, in professor Miša Radivojević’s class. He obtained his magister degree at the FAMU film academy in Prague in 2006, at the Department for Multimedia Animation, in professor Petr Skala’s class, and in 2013, also at FAMU, earned his doctorate, with the following thesis: “The Preciousness of Refuse – Rubbish, as Material for Film, Animation, Photography…”. He is a founder of the legendary group “Punks in Pudding”, a passionate collector and a patient collagist, an active participant and partisan of the “LO-Fi” Festival that stood for free, affordable and independent film in the 1990s, and has been a professor at the Belgrade-based Faculty of Media and Communications’s Department for Digital Arts and New Media for several years. As an author, he participated in numerous regional and European exhibitions. His artistic career gained new momentum in 2013, when he represented Serbia at the Venice Biennale with Vladimir Perić. He stubbornly continues to create various, mostly short video forms (short animated, documentary, or diary – occasionally motion picture – films, musical videos, festival trailers, and even TV commercials). At times, he engages in photo collage, intervenes in objects, assembles items into maniacal collections with no intent of ever exhibiting them in public. In parallel, and almost in secret, he sometimes plays music (embryonic melodies – “musical seeds”) that might, at most, become a theme in a film. He travels with his workshops across the country and the world with undiminished enthusiasm, and occasionally appears at festivals in the form of the “lecture-performance”. He lives and works in Belgrade.