quoting
#11 The quote is a transferring and rearranging of elements, sub-structures of some existing art-/non-art-deed into the new art-deed that is being created. According Mishko Shuvakovic (1995:24), at the avant-garde, the quote is used in a formal, destructive and anti-narrative function for destroying of the organic whole of the art-deed and of the originality of the very originality of the art making. In the postmodernism, the quote is used as an expression of the idea that there is no origin-source text, but that there are only the transformations and rearranging of the existing deeds (quoting of the quotes, transfiguration, linguistic traces). Rejecting the subjective types of strategies that consider the expression of the author’s originality, the postmodernism creates an art from a game of quoting, openly showed imitations, borrowings and the variants of other one’s themes. In Angels on a Dump is present the link with the surrealistic film, through the quotes of De Sika and Fellini, the legendary scene with the boat. In Gypsy Magic, Indian films are directly quoted. In Maklabas, there is a direct omage of the pop art. In Light Gray are quoted the well-known films of Sergio Leone. And, in the Goodbye to the 20th Century the quotations are numerous: Mad Max, 101 Dalmatians, The Fifth Element, Batman, the Manaki Brothers’ films, the partisan films, etc.
self-reference
#10 The self-reference is a special metatextual situation in which the author (or/and his poetics) became an object of its own text. So, in Maklabas, Aleksandar Stankovski recycles his own previous deeds, his previous art-means and poetics from other media – paintings, photo-arts, installations, intellectual preoccupations and theses expressed by him in numerous other media, etc. Gaining the self-conscience about his own means and poetics, the postmodern artist also gains the conscience onto the way of the discourse’s constructing, both art and non-art ones. In many cases, the postmodern self-reference is a comment on the esthetical history of the genre it has adopted. Exactly that kind of use is the one applied on the classical spaghetti-western opening in the omnibus Light Gray, where the familiarity with the genre is used in one banal, common and marginal sequence with no importance – whatsoever – for the film diegesis. Stole Popov, on the other hand, in his films practices his own appearance – with no lines – pointing his “status” that way.