Monologue on Split

Synopsis

Poet and architect Ivan Martinac (1938—2005), was the most influential author of Cine-club Split. During his studies in Belgrade in the early 1960s, he started to make “films of atmosphere” drawing on the spirit of existentialism and the poetics of indifference, but with a strong vision of underground film. At the same time he learned and perfected film editing, which was to become the cornerstone of his characteristic filmosophy. Martinac’s film theory led to the principle of editing in frame, According to it, the „splices“ between the frames bear more kinesthetic tension than the frames themselves. This theory found its fullest expression in Monologue on Split (1961-62), a poetic meditation on ephemerality of life articulated through „montage of atractions“. It was also a specific manifesto of Martinac's school of film, also recognizable by its „ennobled documentarism“, a cluster of motifs and iconography associated with the city of Split and the Mediterranean, as well as the unique „atmospheric bloc“ touchable in even mutually diversifed films made by Split authors.