FROM THE HISTORY OF CROATIAN CINEMA

Films by Ivan Martinac: Tactility in Splices

The author examines the basic elements of the historic, theoretic and aesthetic context of Ivan Martinac’s work by determining links between his short films from the 1960s and his only feature film Kuća na pijesku, 1984-85. (House on Sand). Martinac’s film images pulse in the links between alive and un-alive, external and internal, visible and invisible: life scenes freeze up and the vividness of the world of objects grows stronger. Short circuits occur in the linking parts: »huge part of the film is the linking part — link between two takes that is not visible. There is more kinetic charge in these links than in the takes« (Martinac). Martinac’s films were created simultaneously with world modernist tendencies of the narrative and non-narrative film, together with differently called tendencies of the neo-avant-garde and experimental films, from the structural to the lyrical film. Secret predecessors of his films’ metaphysics are to be found in the theories of visualism and miraculism of the historic avant-gardes. There is an obvious connection with the films of state, repressed narration, in which »a man is a thing that watches and is seen«, and his films are particularly close to the sentiment of the American underground film. This is what Martinac in his films calls the predominant state of alienation, lack of desire to achieve something. In Martinac’s films desire is disclosed as a pure satisfaction in film making. The feeling of non-verbal closeness, which is evident in Martinac’s films through constant faces of film makers and friends, arises from a community called the Split film community or »the Split school«. In his short films the director’s presence is obvious; personal film script has taken hold of all expressive techniques. All his films deal with the film. The reality is made extraordinary through the film structure, extensive use of signs, lack of speech and sounds and the rhetoric quality of music. A lack of story-line and a pseudo-documentary shooting by using a hidden camera method of those who are aware of it and those who are not, results in an encountered story, choosing faces from the crowd, being with them or making them alive, and then a certain return or a deadlock. This understands a framed structure, motif of a rondo, a cyclic form: we are always dealing with a circle. The camera, sometimes completely static, sometimes ecstatic, catches two types of gestures: on the one hand, the gestus of a close community that knows it is being shot and is made up of individual aesthetic gestures, the posture of a body in waiting, what precedes and what follows the action; on the other hand, gestures of those who were really »caught«, those who do not know they are going to be shot, the gestus of the surrounding people. The images of still life generate still time, Martinac’s films are rich in images of aggressive temporality and contemplation. Exciting turnovers, shock cuts, sudden changes of rhythm are linked with a visual and audio seriality: contrasting, linking, and going back to an always different same thing.
Kuća na pijesku is based on numerous overlapping motifs and several leitmotifs. In its exposition it introduces the key doubling: the motif of the double. Silence and hiding of speakers keeps repeating in the film so many times that it becomes a »compulsive« method. The characters are silent and when they talk we do not see their faces. This voice detachment from frames edges makes the contents of the consciousness detached from the person who articulates it at a given moment. Their interior is represented by an external and invisible part, »a blind field«, black hole, who knows whose voice, coming from nowhere. Oneiric, phantasmal world of Martinac’s film linked the claustrophobic vertical and horizontal city and house architecture with different layers of reality and psyche. This private, public and internal labyrinth is made up of different puzzles, signs, allegories, parables, withheld answers. His alienated modern man goes to the desert out of the frame and turns off the light. However, Martinac did not create an Antonionian film of the Mediterranean neo-realism (or deprivation) of the soul. By evoking a myth — or even »the myth of eternal return« — by tackling basic feelings of fear, anxiety, with the central motif of a Doppelgänger, a fragmented character and a fragmented world, Martinac created a film of the Mediterranean expressionism of the soul. He does this by »leaving the world of objects realistic and ordinary, not changing it in any detail, but he veils it in a shadow of a big secret which arises from the deepest human chasms« (Martinac). What contributes to this is the link with the Kafkian Un-real perceived as Real, as well as the text politics: death as the last possibility of resistance, or of no resistance.

Tanja Vrvilo