Split Log 9

Preparations gather pace towards the production of an artist's video in response to my residency at Kino Klub Split: baffled by words, feelings, ellipses, images and impressions, I've penned a pseudo-screenplay about a desperate videophile of the future, roaming the abandoned city in search of off-line VHS footage with which to soothe her prosthetic eyes - whose license has expired, making them criminally allergic to internet.

Recce and casting: our cyborg video hunter will be played by fabulously noir-voiced Edita Momić.

Split Log 8

Two artists doing very different but very good work here in Split are (Kino Klub tech person) Marin Tudor and Hrvoje Cokarić.

Tudor is inspiring for his irrepressible enthusiasm for everything. Introduced to me as an 'actor', all this really seems to mean is that he studied acting and now uses his body as tool, object and subject for a range of freely associative and rarely completed projects - inhabiting an abandoned display case outside Split's United Colours of Benetton, sitting Stylites-style half-way up a wall, creating suites of furniture from discarded plastic coffee spoons, tinkering with this or that to see what it could really do. In some ways he reminds me of Richard Widmark's existentially-stranded Harry Fabian in Night & The City, the description of whom as an 'artist without an art' I return to again and again; except that Tudor is an artist with too much art, a co-puppy frustrated by his inability to get things finished, because there's always something else to do, and never a good reason to apply the brakes. I toast you, Marin Tudor (Marin, tu dor!). He is also more than adept with a projector, creating living slides from chemicals and whatever else he finds; he will come on board as projectionist and smoketographer for my forthcoming video shoot.

Cokarić, he of the robotic Dalmation donkeys, is doing his bit for donkey preservation: meeting him on a tour of the mostly (thankfully) defunct local zoo, up in the Marjan hills, he explains that the particular lineage of asses in this part of Croatia has a noble history but faces its end having been out-evolved by the motor car. With a depth of artistic and ecological insight that is surely not lost on these wise creatures themselves (reader, you are encouraged to delve further hereabouts), Mr Cokarić is working on developing the surviving donkeys - and, hopefully, their manifold descendants - into a super-breed of mountain-climbing video edit suites, generating their own power in the unconnected wilderness, and carrying all a nomadic filmmaker requires to produce artist's moving image on the go (one of the donkeys is named “Marina Abramović”). The Chthulucene will be televised! It would be wonderful to establish an itinerant art residency on a donkey's back, it's only a shame I don't have the time - as my Kino Klub residency draws towards its end - to further explore the blurry lines between amateur, industrial and avant-garde in the context of these gloomy cyborg editing stations.

Hrvoje Cokarić: the carrot and the memory stick.

Kino Klub's Sunčica Fradelić horsing around with a 16mm Bolex.

Split Log 7

Out to shoot the wind, but the rain stole the show. The elements make for a flaneur's shot list: the shape of the city mutates when you're hunting for meteorological rather than economic or social currents. Split is full of - almost structured around - strange dead spaces, squares that no-one gathers on, paths that are crossed only laterally, semi-abandoned brutalist playgrounds, idealistically composed but lifeless would-be social spaces. There's another movie in there, or perhaps an opera of echoes; but for now, we follow the wind.

Split Log 6

Mihovil Pansini called his Zagreb ‘anti-films’ a “visual acoustic phenomenon” but it is the middle word that best evokes the feeling, of vibrations on air, of an architectural space to be filled, of an in-between rather than a finite surface. His opposite number on the coast, Ivan Martinac, regarded his own pictures as “films of state”, pyschogeofilmic distillations of a/the “shared otherworldliness” of Split on small format stock. Despite my narratively-oriented work, I feel closer thus far to these Croatians than the distant Belgrade Klub with all their ‘plot’ and “unembellished reality”. It is not so much that I have lost the plot, as that it has dissolved: in the spirit of Martinac and Pansini, hoovering up their images with scant regard for causality, and in unnerving contrast to my infamous Nexus residency in which I literally pre-scripted every minute of the whole three month trial, I have drifted these weeks, absorbing information and experience like a sponge, releasing pungent drips when squeezed by the participants of the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.

The workshops have progressed well: the participants are broadminded, self-determined and curious, with a healthy dose of dissidence. Despite labelling this inaugural program UPV’s ‘Alpha Semester’, though, it remains very much a beta proposition: I am as yet unsatisified with both form and content, but these are early tests that need to be made, the felling of outlying trees (with attendant squirrel carnage) necessary to get our tractors to the rich bounty at the heart of the forest. We have, I believe, struck a nice balance of my meaningless English-language blather prompting homework assignments of serious enquiry inspired by mis- and partial-understandings of the obscure words and unstable theories asserted in class by a professor who must, above all else, profess to be a terrible speaker.

The Institute’s enemies will be bitter to hear it’s going so well that we have decided to extend my time at the Kino Klub for a few extra weeks. Research into the culture and history of the Kino Klubs, combined with preparing the workshops, has eaten into the time that I had hoped to devote to putting a new video together. Inspired by those historic enclaves of young (mostly) men, engaged in their ideas and their surroundings, creating and solving their own artistic problems, entitled, imprisoned and inspired, I hope I can work something out with their (mixed) spiritual descendents. As a pack-dog, a member of one official, one unannounced, and thirteen secret artist collectives, anyway, it is an unpassable opportunity to hole up in a Klub of huge cultural importance for a few weeks, to steal and to leak esoteric techniques and forge some irreverent tribute to the Yugoslavian ‘amateurs’ who changed the direction of Balkan film and art. I hope to warm up the sensors in the first couple of weeks of May.

Gastrodimensional cake-chart illustrating total of work yet to be achieved.

Split Log 05

The birds are chirping, although there’s no sign yet of the sun. I envy them their circadian rhythms, behaviour as secret information. I have become convinced that my own rhythms have become faulty, my feelings – which perhaps I should have left at home – ebbing and flowing with the unpredictability of the capricious Dalmation winds. Meanwhile, my information sources are wholly orthodox: books, videos, the internet, the flawed recollections of other people. They are reforming as quivering inaccuracies in my mind and, occasionally, as words on the internet or out of my mouth.

Saturday, we officially – but without ceremony – inaugurated the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic at Kino Klub Split (a temporary lodging for a roaming academy). The opening lecture, titled Mythology of the Self, seemed to be well-received by our historic initial cohort. It was a relief just to get through the damned thing without running out of things to say or being assaulted or, worse, called-out. I hope it was of some use, but in developing a total filmmaking education program (indeed, it is billed as a radical de-programming reprogramming program) this first lecture can only be regarded as the damping of the nib. It was far too factual, if my opinions were admirably smeared into the raw information, and with too many references to the ‘real world’. In preparing (destroying) a limited edition .pdf of notes for participants to take away with them, I began to find a greater poetry in omission and deliberate obfuscation; words, as some wise old chap once said, are given to us to hide our true meaning. I’m running an artist’s workshop, not a cooking show.

My own studies, however, focussing presently on the Kino Klub movement, are drawn into a peculiar dichotomy of word and sound-image: the Klubs’ golden era, the hub of their collective thematic resonances, was half a century ago; the movies of the time are largely wordless, but are explained in a tornado of written manifestoes, articles and histories which variously overlap, correct and contradict each other. It’s most inspiring, all this writing, and a curious analogue to what would have been the equivalent had I ‘been there’ – conversation, both languid (lazy young revolutionaries pushing ideas around with twigs on the beaches of Split) and quasi-diplomatic (the minuted, numbered and catalogued ‘discussions’ of Zagreb’s smoky projector rooms). Of course, I wouldn’t have understood a word if I’d ‘been there’. Maybe that would have engendered a more appropriate feeling. Certainly, I’m enjoying (and understanding) the films more on a collective level, starting to feel I know the filmmakers (which I never will) better than I know the films (which I have watched repeatedly). Projections…

Your corrections are welcomed in the Comments box.

Split Log 04

Dazzled by words and light, unable to form the former or comprehend the latter, for now a synthesis of both in the precisely 11,000 as-yet unphotoshopped words below. Logging with words-words is proving somehow unnatural for now. Embiggen for detail.

Split Log 03

Scouting for locations, feelings, in Omiš.

Split Log 02

The first Friday night at Kino Klub brings a screening of Duet for Cannibals, Susan Sontag’s take on the daftness of politicians and activists alike, starring a young Martin Freeman.

Afterwards, we discuss the movie (a Bunuelian Godard spoof?) with Kino Klub director Sunčica Fradelić. A bottle of slivovitsa is brought through from a smoky backroom where local musician and Kino Klub member Karlo Silic is routinely thrashing his colleagues at some esoteric card game. Such is the dynamic social tension that pulses beneath the surface of the Klub today. I am introduced to their pet Super 8 camera (just when I thought I got out of Super 8) and the possibility of 16mm is also dangled enticingly in front of my slivovitsa-reddened eyes.

Saturday is spent flipping through archive DVDs, reading up, wandering through Split: two millennia of settlement, obsessively traced on film by the Klub’s camera-clutching flaneurs who – as my meagre research so far suggests – preferred the body of the polis to cinegraphic contemplation of their own flesh.

Split presents itself as a languid port town in which countless concrete people-boxes have sprouted from beneath the extended back yard of the Diocletian Palace, the still-inhabited stone labyrinth which remains the social hub of the area today. Diocletian was the first Roman Emperor to voluntarily retire, and the people of Split have prided themselves on their laziness ever since. Beyond the palace walls, leather jackets and torn jeans form a triumvirate of distressed patinas with the ubiquitous concrete, and tiny dogs are de rigueur, perhaps as a device to draw attention towards the owners’ footwear, which is universally excellent.

The filmmakers of the Yugoslavian region didn’t get around to making their first feature until 1941. The first Tito-sponsored amateur film clubs popped up as classical Hollywood faltered and Cassavetes itched, the key second generation of the Split chapter emerging as new waves began to roll in Europe and elsewhere. The Klubs thus form a unique node between a very brief classical cinema, and both the cinematic and 'fine' art developments to come (perhaps best exemplified through the legendary figure of Zagreb's Tomislav Gotovac, who was muddled up both with the cinematic 'Black Wave' of the 60s/70s and the art scene over the half-century before his death in 2010).

My early impressions of the early Kino Klub Split filmmakers are of an equipe of antagonistic (not angry), curious (not academic) men (not women) with a self-imposed mission that I am not yet at liberty to disclose. As one band of curators points out, these filmmakers have been categorized under a number of overlapping terms – amateur, experimental, avant-garde, anti-film (mostly their Zagreb cousins), alternative film (Belgrade) – precluding, at least until much more recently, the label of ‘video artists’ because video (and possibly artist) is a dirty word. It is curious, then, to work with the club today, when everyone’s packing video, everyone’s an artist, and the former terms have lost their pungency.

Except, perhaps, for that of amateur, a word that adds legitimacy/democracy to the efforts of the casual masses and pride to the enthusiasts. I’ll continue in that spirit, as a kind of enthusiastic sponge, to be wrung out on film before the end of the month.