Of all Godina’s early shorts, the strangest is “I Miss Sonja Henie,” perhaps because he was more project manager than director of the film per se, though his editing of it was instrumental in the film being finished. In 1972, Godina accosted a more or less random group of directors attending the Belgrade Film Festival to work on a formalist film experiment. Tinto Brass, Purisa Dordevic, Milos Forman, Buck Henry, Dusan Makavejev, Paul Morrissey, Bogdan Rinanic and Frederick Wisemen were each asked to create a short film following these instructions:
- The film must be shot on 35mm, at the same location, with 25mm fixed optics, using the same static visual angle and same background.
- 2. The film shouldn’t last longer than three minutes and at one point the actors should quote Snoopy’s sentence from the Carl Schulz comic: “I miss Sonja Henie.” [Snoopy is in fact the credited writer of the film]
- 3. Directors are free to choose their actors.
Other than the unexplained Snoopy quotation, this isn’t dissimilar from Godina’s style in general, in a way it’s just asking each of these directors to see what they can do using the constraints Godina put upon himself. They were each given one roll of raw stock for the project and proceeded to make the film during the festival itself.
Does putting all of these cinematic minds together produce a work of genius? To be frank, no, not really. Each of the individual shorts tends to be bad in its own interesting way, from Paul Morrissey’s unnecessary sexuality to Makavejev’s weirdness for the sake of being weird. Perhaps sensing that the shorts aren’t, in fact, very good, Godina edited them all together so that things cross-cut in the same room. This creates a sort of weird flurry of mis-matching actions and events, all in the same space, but doesn’t lead to anything approximating watchability, and overall the film is a huge mess. An interesting mess (as far as I know this is Wiseman’s only non-documentary film, for instance), but a mess nonetheless and certainly less enjoyable than the rest of the films on the disc, even if it’s perhaps more of a draw given who was involved in making it. The most interesting part of the film is Milos Forman and Buck Henry’s parody of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun in which Forman played the injured soldier whose doctor realizes he can still communicate to the world … so he has the man’s wife and nurse perform a striptease. Godina also purportedly has a 100-minute cut of the movie.
It’s a sign of how strangely put together “I Miss Sonja Henie” really was that several of its participants have no memory of making the film. Milos Forman, for instance, was completely shocked that it existed when he attended a screening of the short in 2007, and described the film as, “a very beautiful, deep sophomoric joke.” If they need their memories rekindled, there’s an easy way to do this, though, with the film “The Making of Sonja Henie.” The documentary records how each director attacked the same essential problem and how different their styles really are, but ultimately it’s more just a supplement to the film it’s named after than a real film of its own.
After completing this film, Godina was more or less kept from directing again until 1980, at which point he purportedly lost some of his revolutionary spirit and worked on more conventional narrative features, though none of these have made their way to America either, so it’s impossible for me to judge. What films of his we do have, though, offer completely unique perspective on the period of social and political unrest that existed in Yugoslavia. Plus, unlike the usual negative stereotype for foreign art films, they’re a hell of a good time to watch.