At some point in the late 1970s, Davorin Marc — at the time Yugoslavia’s leading punk filmmaker, one who always took the idea of film experimentation to its most literal and radical extremes — decided to take the idea of making films without a camera, using only film stock, to a certain radical extreme.

The idea of a “camera-less” film is almost as old as the idea of avant-garde cinema itself: Dadaists and surrealists were already creating abstract moving images by placing objects directly on unexposed film in the 1920s, and the whole movement of structural film of the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s partially rested upon disregarding the camera as the primary filmmaking tool.

 In spite of everything that had already been done — and most likely without actually knowing it — Marc still managed to find an original, even more radical angle. Not only did he make a film without a camera, he made a film without using his hands. Titled, in a matter-of-fact way, Ugrizni me. Že enkrat. (Bite Me. Once Already.) is a result of Marc biting and chewing his way through an entire reel of an exposed and developed Super 8mm film.

His sharp teeth left behind a complex pattern of marks, while his saliva that filled the scratches immediately started fermenting the emulsion around their edges. Marc still clearly recalls the experience of making Ugrizni me, since the taste of film emulsion was so unusual. He describes it as “sticky” and “corrosive,” lingering inside his mouth for days despite Marc brushing his teeth thoroughly, multiple times. He also describes problems with little adhesive pieces of emulsion that got stuck between his teeth and simply refused to disappear.

 When projected — and the unique print is fortunately still perfectly projectable — Marc’s experimental sacrifice appears as a beautiful animated abstraction. But in fact it represents much more than that. Forty years ago Marc’s teeth not only “painted” across Super 8mm film emulsion, they also profoundly affected the film base, creating deep scratches, dents and even an occasional hole that transformed the seemingly flat film into a three-dimensional object.

 An important conceptual novelty and at the same time a uniquely beautiful abstract film, Ugrizni me is a rugged object, but not so rugged that it cannot run through a projector. However, copying or digitally scanning it might represent too much of a risk of flattening it, and thus irreversibly destroying one of its fundamental characteristics.

 Copying or digital scanning would also necessarily result not only in another film copy or a digital facsimile, but also in an entirely different visual experience. This is because the three-dimensional nature of the object — and the consequent impossibility of ever attaining steady focus during the projection — has always been an important visual element in the animated abstraction.

There is something inherently poetic — and inherently linked to the ephemeral nature of analog film — about the fact that Ugrizni me can only be preserved in two ways. Either by re-enacting Marc’s original act of chewing, thus preserving the essential artistic idea while abandoning the impossible concept of sameness, or as an anecdote.

Jurij Meden