5 years ago

Croatian Contemporary Animation

Chris Keulemans 

The first three films in this extraordinary compilation hit us like a fist in the face. Their worldview blacker than black. Thunderous sound, swirling techniques, one macabre image after the other in dizzying speed. 

‘1000’ (Danijel Žeželj, 2014) races through a grainy, depressed city where the sun has refused to rise for years. The devil and a saint with halo clobber each other in the boxing ring. A woman dances in rage. When the sky does clear up, in the end, across the black skyline, it’s color is the most threatening kind of red. ‘Silencium’ (Marko Meštrović, Davor Međurečan, 2006) is the nightmare of the great Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža transformed into hellish images of a world that eats its lower class like a monster. Across the flickering screen, the faux-classic images shot through with flecks and dots, we hear: ‘The rich get heaven, the poor get noose.’ Below the gallows in the mist, human remains lie rotting in the snow. ‘Leviathan’ (Simon Bogojević Narath, 2016) is the final blow. A staggering epic of palaces turned to ruins, inhabited by crazed humanoids celebrating a victory, carrying everchanging banners and flags, before their heads are smashed in the most gruesome way underneath heavy blocks of stone – all of this screened on tv for the skeleton troops at the frontline. What was the battle about, who claimed the triumph? It doesn’t matter. Life will smash victors and victims alike and turn them all to dust. 

‘I wanted to show the monster of male-dominated violence that we have created,’ curator Antonija Veljačić explained afterwards. ‘These films have been screened at many festivals over the years, and they deserve to be seen again and again.’ But her personal favorite was the next one, ‘Dota’, a delicate geometry of the embroidered silk that women were expected to bring with them, acccording to the rituals of times gone by, to their arranged marriage.  

‘Dota’ (Petra Zlonoga, 2016) came as a relief after the thundering blows of the first three films. Accompanied by a woman’s voice singing a traditional song, we see only a female hand threading the diagonal, square and looping lines in the cloth she will take to the husband she has not met before.

The program ended with the sly domestic satire of ‘Life with Herman H. Rott’ (Chintis Lundgren, 2015), presented here maybe as proof that we really do need the female gaze after all those crazed, bloodthirsty, megalomaniac men that terrorized Croatia over the past century. If animation ever spoke truth to power, it was here, in these contemporary masterpieces. 

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