Edition 24: 1–9 August, 2025

Golden Ages of Croatian Experimental Film

Focus

Fokus

Croatia
1967 — 7' / Black & White

1

Synopsis

When I pressed the shutter of Cameraflex starting with Focus, the name of my purpose was: Death.Focus is a film about simple Mediterranean death in the sun. Focus is a pure film.

Sentences left to us by I. Martinac contain more than a simple description of his first professionally produced film. They at the same time define Martinac’s entire filmography made in Split. Death was his most common theme, Mediterranean – his setting and stage, pure cinema – his aesthetic program. In genre terms, Focus is a film of fixation and atmosphere consisting of 96 shots and seven different planes. His key is in sensory pleasure, atmosphere created with magical connections of shots, collision of movement and stasis, light and symbolic blackness, silence and sound, and finally, ambient noise, human murmur and the ethereal Joan Baez singing of “sun, love and death”.

Director

Ivan Martinac