INTERPRETATIONS

Endart — or: sweet triumph of Croatian ’other’ film

The very end of the shortest month of this leap year, February 2004, marked the multimedia triumph of Croatian experimental film and video. Namely, on February 27 and 28, in Millennium Film Workshop Inc. — New York institution situated in the centre of Manhattan, Ivan Paić from Multimedia centre of the Students’ centre in Zagreb screened the program ’Newest Croatian video and experimental film.’ In three programs, or in other words, almost four screening hours, he featured mere cr#me de la cr#me of Croatian new-media alternative. Almost at the same time, on February 29, in Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris, owner of a recently published monograph, Tomislav Gotovac, exhibited his multimedia happening. At the closing of the exhibition ’Ailleurs ici’, Gotovac presented himself with a program consisting of three parts: the first was a performance dedicated to jazz in general, and famous singer Billie Holiday in particular, which was followed by the screening of his films Morning of a Faun and other works from the sixties, and concluded by refreshed classical works from the turn of the millennium, Glenn Miller 2000; in short, Gotovac disclosed his personal archives to the visitors of the museum. At the same time, in Zagreb, Ivan Ladislav Galeta for the first time presented his apparently unfinished whole of his work in progress, Endart No 4. Endart by I. L. Galeta is part of the project V.I.R.á.G., which is actually a work in progress based on eighteen letters (that is to say, nineteen, because the first and the last letter merge into one creating a closed circle) of the first accentuated sentence of the novel Ulysses: ’Introibo ad altare Dei’. Eighteen letters correspond to eighteen chapters of Ulysses, while the ’closed circle’ lies at the foundation of The Finnegan Wake. Each letter represents a title of one scene, figuring as an independent micro unit, some sort of a fractal, at the same time reflecting and forming the structure of the whole. The final project consists of eighteen video-film scenes intermitted with eighteen letters of the above-mentioned mystical sentence. Galeta’s stories are dealing with gardening, earth, and traditional practices — referring to various phenomena such as pushing a wheelbarrow, raking and scything... or tomato picking, weeding, fetching water from well, piling logs. Visually attractive, with independent associative, specially processed sound background, the scenes assume metaphysical dimensions with dreamlike implications.

Marijan Krivak