Unencumbered by a professional education and open to new ideas, Vladimir Petek (b. 1940) was energetically exploring in the 1960s what film could do as a medium if used in nonstandard ways. In his early works, the obsession with the medium was connected to his youthful delight with female beauty, and Petek created some of the most striking portrait films in Croatian cinema, which might be seen as the more filmically inventive cousins of the Screen Tests that Andy Warhol started doing in 1964 to explore film’s seemingly innate ability to turn almost anyone into a "star." Encounter offers a portrait of a woman (Ksenija Filipović, his then-girlfriend) whose face becomes mysterious, desirable, and endlessly captivating on film, all the more so because of Petek’s various interventions in the film stock.

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