PORTRAIT
A Collage Portrait: Zrinko Ogresta
Zrinko Ogresta’s filmic reality is full
of warmth toward the image, and especially toward the film
hero who appears to be painfully real, since Ogresta does
deal with serious and difficult subjects, various problems
with the psyches of individuals and social conditioning.
Led by the principle of »less is more«, Ogresta focuses
on the feelings of the hero, and this reduction of feelings
consists of the minimizing of the expressed emotions of
the character, in his shutting himself up within himself.
These characteristics were already evident in the protagonists
of his academic films (Emergency Exit and Would
You Like Some Tea?), and they can be identified at
the dramaturgic foundation for his feature trilogy (Shards,
Washed Out, Red Dust). Ogresta does not direct easily
likeable films. He seems to adore the gloomy tones with
which he suggest loneliness, sorrow, abandonment...
If we look chronologically, and if we accept his three
feature films as a trilogy, it is interesting to observe
that in his second film (Washed Out), Ogresta
speaks about the present of pressured individuals, while
in his first film (Shards)
and his third (Red Dust), he encompasses a broader
timeframe of several years in which he throws in facts
that are not directly relevant to the life of his hero,
but that do however exert an influence on him. In the process
of creating a linear social dramaturgy that incorporates
a broad period of time, the director offers a hermetic
variety of events that can be easily recognized on a global
scale, and that, when delved into deeper, open up numerous
issues.
More accurately, after he completed his registration
of Jagoda’s (Washed Out)
mental state, his interest became more focused on finding
the social context which produced Jagoda herself, and which
was inherited from Shards. In
this sense, we can speak globally about a trilogy which,
when compared to the remainder of Croatian feature films
in the nineties, is the most contemporary and most complex
witness to our national identity.
Jasna Posarić |
