Michael Benson proves with this film that he has a perfect grasp of the aestheticization of politics as well as of myth- creation within totalitarian systems... Predictions of Fire skillfully exchanges archival, reportorial and also fictional scenes, which together make a new story. It places the NSK movement within a historical framework -- something which didn't happen for any other of the artistic avant gardes... Predictions of Fire doesn't for a moment try to hide what it's all about: how to fascinate with manipulation.

On Friday the Film Art Fest faced us with the "politics of image", based on the very premise that an image is politics. The modernistic formula, as once defined by Jean-Luc Godard, reads "not a real image, but the image itself", where the real images are supposed to be those translating certain ideological and cultural clich,s, whereas in "juste une image" it is about being only one image, one side, trying to watch, regardless of other images. It seems NSK aesthetics reversed the formula; i.e., for this aesthetic one image is already the real image, or one made of other images, "mounted" into artistic and above all, political ideologies. However, the documentary of American journalist and cineaste Michael Benson tried -- and successfully enough -- to show something else as well: how NSK, in mixing fascist and communist imagery, with the effect of a "return of the repressed", played the role of a "catalyst" within the well- known events in Communist Europe, and in particular in the Balkans. In brief it is, so to speak, a "historical" view of NSK in which this phenomenon is itself seen as a matter of history -- which means NSK is no longer a "question on the scene", the answer to which should be found by ourselves. In some way, we could say, Slovenia got, with Predictions of Fire, Kusterica's Underground.

On Friday, October 20th, the documentary Predictions of Fire, a co-production of TV Slovenia and Kinetikon Pictures of New York, was premiered; the last shots of the 90-minute film were accompanied by the spontaneous applause of the audience. Predictions of Fire will for sure be one of the most-watched of documentaries about any Slovene art movement, not only in Slovenia but, especially, abroad. The director is Michael Benson; as a foreigner and author(ity), he is in the unenviable role of outsider on one side and documentarist and interpreter on the other. He assembles the workings of NSK and also uses them to put together a comprehensive picture of the workings of totalitarian systems in the whole of Europe. The West European and American mind will get a clear picture of the phenomenon: how is it possible, the position of Slovenia in ex- Yugoslavia? Predictions of Fire is an informative and watchable documentary about art, politics and war because it puts NSK in a historical and geographical frame, untainted by "patriotic" pathos. We're used to such pathos; we've seen it in other Slovene documentaries (do you remember Bravo, the one-hour TV documentary about Laibach produced in 1993, which pretentiously polemicizes with the group while simply compiling different pre-existing documentary shots?). The reason why you watch this film to the end is not only the magic of seeing the newest image of Slovenian history through the prism of NSK, but the imaginative use of film language with intellectual charm.

The film is as efficient as every NSK performance has been...The documentary is a skillful and witty interweaving of Slovenian history within the fabric of a Western European historical background, and it threads some of the important NSK performances through, well-accompanied by striking NSK music and texts.

Predictions of Fire is without a doubt one of the most persuasive -- and not the least, the most watchable -- contributions to the history of the Slovene 20th century, at least in the genre of tele-documentaries. With this film Michael Benson undoubtedly proved (once again) that the gaze of an outsider has precious advantages.

The central quality of the film is that it is multifaceted, but it clearly and understandibly illuminates the theoretical background of NSK (and NSK's taking over of the mechanisms and symbols of power in order to reveal this power). In conformity with the NSK principle, Predictions of Fire's filmic images of the history of NSK and the history of Slovenia are themselves questioned as constructs based on the selection of certain events and their mythologization.