Introduction

This chapter looks at the film component of Works and Words, an extensive “manifestation” of Eastern European contemporary art that was held in Amsterdam in 1979. The essay's focus is on examining how experimental cinema negotiated the transnational East–West circulation of culture during the late Cold War. As Klara Kemp-Welch and others have illustrated, Eastern European experimental art was brought fairly regularly to Western audiences during the long 1970s. Even in the field of experimental cinema, one finds such events across Western Europe. To cite just a few examples by future Works and Words participants, Hungarian director Gabor Body achieved successes at the Western European festival circuit with his experimental feature-length narrative debut Amerikai anzix (American Postcard, 1975), and members of Poland's Workshop of the Film Form (WFF) appeared at events such as the influential International Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-Heist in Belgium in 1974 and the extensive Film als Film: 1910 bis heute program, which was initially organized in Cologne in 1977.

The Works and Words film program, while representative of this transnational trend, also presents a unique example of the circulation of socialist-era film culture in the West by virtue of its ambitious size, featuring over eighty works, mostly shorts, on celluloid; its cross-regional character, including films from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia; and its institutional fluidity, involving both film cultural and contemporary arts institutions in Amsterdam.