Friday 1 April 2016

Split Log 01

Arriving in Split as a self-appointed ‘failed-filmmaker-turned-guru’, I am to undertake a residency at the city’s historic Kino Klub, absorb the artistic and pedagogic technique of the ‘Split school’, and feed back into the loop with a series of workshops drawing on the Institute’s research and my recent studies at film.factory in Sarajevo (just 150 miles east from here). I will also mount some kind of film/video production inspired by or perhaps merely as a distraction from my quasi-academic work.

Secretly, it’s also a mission to make sense of a lot of fragments, scraps, vacuums and glitches that have accumulated in my already-ragged knowledge over the past couple of years and left me feeling more lost than ever. Combined with my pre-existing specialism in misplaced, damaged and impossible films, and a critical exoticism/guilty fetishism for the severity of socialist institutional nomenclature, the project has been christened as the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.

Seduced by a stray quote from the Klub’s foremost historical figure, Ivan Martinac, I intend to spend the month on the (figurative) beach in a mood of “near insane contemplation”, knitting together some of those fragments into a workable comfort blanket with which to warm myself and those who would join me for breezy Split evenings and British winters to come. Perhaps I will remember to document my progress here.

I have also begun scribbling about some of the variously obscure/classic regional films I'm watching on Letterboxd. I'll try to pin them up here too.




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