Blue Rider

Original format: 16 mm

Gotovac is the most conceptual author of the early experimentalism in Croatia. In a film trilogy made in 1964 he gave each and every film a different initial treatment that he consistently conducted to the end, leaving to an accident to articulate the exact content of the frame. For instance, in Straight Line he sets up a continuous forward ride with railroad tracks visible in the frame, in Circle a spiral panorama from ground up to the sky taken from the top of the building. The middle part of the trilogy Blue Rider was imagined as camera movement randomly choosing its focus, with no other plans. Using this method he shot the interior of a Belgrade pub on a Saturday afternoon (while families are at home watching the Bonanza western series). For the first time he used the original integral soundtrack (from one of the Bonanza episodes). We can speak of truly radical documentarism in the direct cinema style (but without any contact with it either at that time or before that), having anthropological documentaristic value that pre-planned documentaries weren’t able to achieve.