The Soundscapes of Karpo Godina’s Timeless Cinema

The text examines the role of music in Karpo Godina’s short films, conceived as an intertwinement of fiction, documentary and experimental elements. The use of music is pronouncedly multi-layered, subject to aesthetical, social and political imperatives. On the basis of the initial division ascribing the music a transfiguring, a performative and a narrative function, the text focuses on three films as the most representative examples of the use of the mentioned functions: Picnic on Sunday (Piknik v nedeljo, 1968), The Gratinated Brains of Pupilija Ferkeverk (Gratinirani možgani Pupilije Ferkeverk, 1970) and Litany of Happy People (Zdravi ljudi za razonodo, 1971). In dialogue with the feature film Red Boogie or What is the Matter Girl (Rdeči boogie ali Kaj ti je deklica, 1982), and in accordance with the studies of music in experimental cinema, the text thematises further determinations, including creative approaches, sound principles, various kinds of music and the types of subversion achieved by it. The subversion concerns the aesthetical dimension in The Gratinated Brains, where music importantly contributes to the dissolution of the conventions of film articulation; the social dimension in Picnic on Sunday, where it emphasises the bourgeois aspects of sticking to conventionality and tradition; and the political dimension in Litany of Happy People, where the musical interventions undermine or at least ironise the ordered “love” among different nations in Yugoslavia, encapsulated in the famous slogan “fraternity and unity”.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!