Look for the work of avant-garde filmmaker Zlatko Ćosić on a screen—or a giant cement wall—near you
By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Rachel Cosic
Zlatko Ćosić is on the patio at Kaldi’s, surrounded by chatty coffee drinkers and chattier sparrows, explaining how he won’t sleep this weekend. The 48 Hour Film Project is a day away, and as part of the Superfriends team, he’ll race to finish a film in two days. This marks Ćosić’s fourth time, and he knows what he’s in for.
“I’m the one that has to deliver the movie at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday,” he laughs, “so I don’t sleep on Saturday or Sunday. I just work.”
Ćosić will be post-production guy, using skills he’s honed as a freelance producer, including three days a week at CITY TV 10, where he shoots, edits and produces programming like Ovdje i Sada (“Here and Now”), a news magazine for St. Louis’ Bosnian community. He himself was born in the city of Banja Luka, Yugoslavia, (now Bosnia and Herzegovina) and trained at Belgrade’s Academic Film Center; when he came to St. Louis in 1997, while going to school and holding down production jobs, he still found time to make his own films, including the short ZONE (2002), which screened internationally. That film, he says, “really got my name out in St. Louis as an experimental filmmaker.” Which is how he discovered he didn’t need a screen to show movies: he began VJing at the Hi-Pointe with DJ Leon Lamont, using a four-channel mixer to torque his imagery in response to the music. In 2004, when Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko came to St. Louis at the invitation of Washington University’s School of Architecture, Ćosić helped stage a projection that was cast on the outside of the downtown library (his footage of the event was used in the 2005 PBS series Art:21: Art in the Twenty-First Century). And these days, he VJs for the Contemporary’s Select Nights (that’s where he’ll be the night before the 48 Hour Film Project kicks off).
Sometimes his projections become movies, like the 40-minute buildbetterbarrel: Nine Events in New Media. Co-produced with Paul Guzzardo, it’s partially based on SECRET: Baker, Guzzardo’s multimedia play about Josephine Baker (which used Ćosić’s animations as a backdrop) but expands the riff on St. Louis history, including segments on Cahokia Mounds and Marshall McLuhan’s years at Saint Louis University.
For Vox Novus’ 60x60 Project (a New York experimental music series where 60 composers create one-minute compositions), Ćosić’s movies will become projections. He’s been commissioned to create visuals for each piece, and he’ll travel around the country next year, remixing them during performances. And LookTalkListen, created for Speak Up, St. Louis! The American Democracy Project Redux is a projection that functions as visual art. “It’s a big installation, using eyes, mouth and ears projected on a big wall,” he says. “The way the eyes are cropped, it’s almost like a prisoner in his cell, or spying.”
Though his artistic reputation’s growing nationally, Ćosić isn’t itching to leave town.
“The first day I landed here in St. Louis, I thought, this city’s dead,” he says. “But it’s different now. For a long time, it was the East Coast and West Coast in art. I think maybe middleness will come in now ... I have a feeling there will be a revolution in art here.”
And Ćosić, sleepless, with a digital video camera and four-track projector at the ready, will no doubt have something to do with it.
LookTalkListen will be on view through August 26 at the Regional Arts Commission, 6128 Delmar, 314-863-6932, art-stl.com/Gallery.cfm. To see Ćosić’s work online, visit eyeproduction.com.
