Screen Presence

Synthy sounds that wouldn’t be out of place in a ’70s giallo film menace a sunny Montenegrin coast. The morning tide laps the shore as an elegant, middle-aged woman scrawls strange glyphs into the sand with the aid of a tree branch. We see her stride up and down the beach in a white skirt suit and matching white heels. We see her stare intently at the horizon. Then she’s crouched down, legs crossed, finally ready to address the camera through giant blobular eyeglasses—a measured affectation that hints at her métier. She is an architect, and as a flashing chyron discloses, her name is Svetlana Kana Radević.

Anna Kats, a curator and PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, began her keynote at the Womxn in Design and Architecture Conference with a description of this very montage, which opens an hourlong 1980 documentary dedicated to Radević. The fact of its length and its production by a state broadcaster accorded a certain prominence to its subject, Montenegro’s first woman builder. (In translation, the title, Man Has But One Life, curiously elides the issue of ge…