FROM THE HISTORY OF CROATIAN CINEMA

From theory to art and back: stop watch in the hands of Ivan Ladislav Galeta

The structuralism and its contributions to the theory of art, the poetics of the American structural film of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Galeta’s experimental films and art projects make up three separate fields that the author of this text will try to combine by pointing out their common features. The analysis based on the specific understanding of the structure of art work, the distinctive film language of Snow, Sharits, Warhole and other American experimental artists, as well as the idiosyncratic director’s handwriting of Ivan Ladislav Galeta, reveal a common view on the nature of film, or any other work of art, which is in the centre of this paper. Trying to link different theoretical and film schools, we will resort to the Adams P. Sitney's book Visionary Film: the American Avant-garde, the pioneer work in the field of American experimental film since it first introduces the“genres” of experimental film and tries to define them. The paper centres on the analysis of Ivan Ladislav Galeta’s work and its place within the framework of structural film, with a special emphasis on three films from the 1980s: PiRâMìdas 1972-1984, Water Pulu 1869 1896 and Wal(l)zen.

Petar Sarjanović