In 1964, Gotovac inaugurated the golden age of Yugoslav underground cinema with his experimental films. Gotovac paid tribute in his films to directors and musicians he admired—Billie Holiday (whose name he used as a pseudonym for his female alter-ego), Glenn Miller, Jean-Luc Godard, and Paul Jutkevitch, among others. In _Krunica (Jutkevič-Count)_, shown here, Gotovac recorded the landscape from atop a building by rotating a camera 360 degrees, capturing the surroundings while simultaneously emphasizing the means of doing so—the film medium itself. This foregrounding of the devices of filmmaking linked Gotovac to a number of contemporaries working in Europe and the United States who were labeled as structural or materialist. Gotovac explored, bended, and exacerbated conventions of filmmaking in his search for a synthesis of film and life, as attested in his famous statement "When I open my eyes in the morning, I see a film."
Gallery label from Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016.