Program diary IV: Reflexes

On Thursday 29. 9. at 18:00 h first day festival program unfolds: join us for the Reflexes, a selection of Croatian films, meet the authors and have a great read - Danijel Brlas delved into these films on spaces. 

Liminal worlds built out of garbage, a humanoid anthill, a schizoid excerpt from the chronicle of urban development and an epic battle between island flora and inexorable wind… All these might not paint a clear picture of what you can expect from this year’s Croatian experimental film programme, Reflexes. Perhaps only a rough-cut instruction, or an impression remaining after watching these four titles. Each of the titles in a specific way deals with our perception of space or – in the case of Miranda Herceg’s First Gasp – space’s perception of us. As static scenes pile up, informational and narrative function of space are depleted. As people emerge and fill the frame, an anthill-space or, more accurately, a bestiary slowly begins to appear. Fleshy appearances continue to double in reflections, appear and disappear, existing only as a collective or transient individual spatial installations. The impression of voyeurism is present throughout the entire film, but the question remains to whom it could be ascribed. André Bazin spoke of the democracy of uninterrupted image, which gives the viewer a chance to choose what they want to watch. Theory of film perception has made a significant progress since then, so we now know that the viewer will watch what their attention is drawn to inside the frame. But what if the frame does not have a specific point of interest? Who is then this mysterious observer? Judging by the tense soundtrack, their intentions are surely not kind. Or the role of the observer here possessed the space itself. Galleries, corridors and underpasses anticipate their human termites, catching them as they pass by and reshaping them into a living image of a small urban terrarium. However, every idea of a landscape, claims Ana Hušman, has nothing to do with nature. When we think about landscape, we work only with a subjective mental image. Is this what the space in Miranda’s film does, as well, when it perceives us only as elements in a fidgety mass? Or is it only how we imagine it imagining us?

Hušman’s Almost Nothing emerged in a process of a sort of bio-sonic mapping of space – more specifically, by recording the sound resistance of plants against the wind on different locations across the island of Korčula. By using time-lapse (compressing time by sequencing images in predetermined intervals), Hušman is imbuing her static images with kinetic charge, but she leaves the sound image – where the real ‘drama’ actually takes place – uninterrupted. This clash creates an impression not so much related to the transience of time, but rather to monotony – something like an audiovisual depiction of geological time, taking place in a block of time so large that we cannot clearly perceive with our human capabilities.

As the father of modern geology James Hutton says, “If we have never found the signs of the beginning, we cannot predict the end.” On the other hand, could we predict it if we do know the beginning? This is the question Darko Fritz deals with in his Zagreb Confidential – Imaginary Futures, a portrayal of the specific plan and realisation of the expansion of title city. Fritz compresses 50 years of urban planning into a single plan, adorning it with different digital filters – archive images, aerial shots, Google Earth, 3D modelling, algorithmic editing – to create an uninterrupted flow, despite the general impression of sketchiness and fragmentariness. The result is a fascinating audiovisual hot-pot approaching urban expansion as a natural process, while the human element is evidenced in being unfinished and unaccomplished. It begins with a utopian vision of modern urban planning, with a vision, ambition, spirit of construction and progress – but does this guarantee a constructive and complete ending? Whoever once got lost in the absurd wastelands of New Zagreb will approach this matter with a healthy dose of scepticism.

The film that takes us the furthest is an internalised fable, declaratively set “between a fairy tale and documentary”. All Still Orbit by our this year’s jury member Dane Komljen, co-created with James Lattimer, is technically set in Brasilia, but takes place someplace else, in the imagery of the Italian saint Don Bosco, based on which the city was built. The saint’s visions intertwine with the parallel construction of another city near Brasilia, built without a plan and a blueprint, a city built by poor workers for their families out of surpluses and waste. The evolution of this town unfortunately cannot be mapped like New Zagreb, because it was flooded soon after the making of its megalopolis doppelgänger, but it was transferred to another creative imagery as a symbol of a possible place, a place where people can roam heedlessly like beasts in terrariums, or simply sit like houseplants and resist the wind – alone, but together.

Danijel Brlas