Rijeka '97

The Cinema Out of Sight

A review article of the annual festival of amateur video and filmmaking. Some global features of non-professional filmmaking are discussed, and individual achievements assessed.

Next to professional cinema, there is a prolific and sometimes extremely valuable non-professional, amateur production of films and videos in Croatia. Mostly out of public sight, this branch of cinema is, from a production standpoint, the most accessible and it is open to anyone. It is practiced and shared within families, by neighbors and peers. It is produced by school children, students, and adults, some of it privately, some of it within numerous regional cinema clubs. The Review is traditionally a festival of the artistically ambitious branch of amateur cinema. All sorts of videos and some films were presented at the Review this year: a number of short feature videos in all genres (comedies, melodramas, crime-stories, fantasy films, poetic meditations), made with valuable ideas, some with good partial solutions, but mostly of limited general impact. There were some acceptable music videos, a number of disoriented documentaries indulgently conceived and realised, and three animated films, one of them just a dilettante attempt, but one of the highest level (Sun, Salt and Sea, a suggestive, poetic animation by Daniel Šuljić).

The most powerful and valuable type of film present at the Review is the experimental (avant-garde) film/video. It has a long tradition in Croatia (from the end of fifties onward), and the non-professional milieu in Croatia is both sensitive and protective of this kind of film-/videomaking. Both by the Review audience reaction and by the jury awards, a number of films of remarkable quality are singled out: Emit by Ana Šimičić (a meditative, chamber piece), Something personal by Milan Bukovac (fragments of a manuscript texturally and rhythmically mutated), Convergence by Vladislav Knežević (a techno piece of suggestive plastic visuals and music imagery), Something personal by Tomislava Vereš (successive stills of an interior with the authors in it with voiceover personal narration), Cage +-= by Marko Raos (a documentary observation piece of the city environment), Praessentia by Alan Soldo (a meditation based on a conceptual performance piece) and It Could Be in any Way by Vedran Šamanović (a contrasting succession of static shots of a static character standing in the middle of a dynamic street environment).

Hrvoje Turković