Cut-Ups: First Blood

This essay calls attention to some rich but rarely explored 1980s cultural and theoretical junctures. The essay analyzes the form and production history of How We Cut Up and Flipped Rambo (Miroslav Petrović and Miloš Savić, 1988), an experimental short by two amateur filmmakers. Using a custom-made machine designed to cut 35 mm film into 3 strips of 8 mm film, the Yugoslav amateurs developed a fully automated, impersonal mode of found footage filmmaking. Much ideologically variegated activity occurred in the realm of film culture in this politically turbulent period in Yugoslavia. On the one hand, a young generation of local auteurist critics emerged, who enthusiastically promoted the most reactionary currents in the New Hollywood. On the other, a wave of politically reflexive experimental films also appeared. Attentive to this multifaceted context, my analysis will consider how Petrović and Savić’s How We Cut Up and Flipped Rambo inimitably destabilized the ideological-representational codes of the’80s Hollywood. The paper will explore the ideological implications of this transformation of Rambo, an icon of hyper-machismo, patriotism, and right-wing ressentiment, into a “dehumanized” kinetic spectacle of flickering, disjointed, and barely legible images.