OTHER (film)

I always wondered who “they” were when we talked about social issues or politics, about “the system”. We still talk like this, all of us. “They”- the people in power? Or “they” - the people who are spatially distant? Or, “they” - the people who we don’t understand? Or, “they” - the people of another time? They - the others. In all cases they don’t know something we know, we have something revealing to say about them. I can't stop wondering - how far in any terms (spatial, temporal, material status) we must be to consider us here distant enough to say they are somewhere there, out of reach. We don't know each other. Or, we draw a line between each other. We close our circle and everyone left out is the other one. As I watch them unfold, I admit, I don't know them. Are they we? It all depends on how I identify myself - as a nation, as all of people, as the people who live now - where is(n’t) my border?

A structural film that uses found footage as experimental autoethnography. In long-form - ongoing and fluid (keeps changing). I'm interested in the Other within, banality as minority and the artist as ethnographer/historian. I use the concept of the ethnographic "Other" to define that part in ourselves that is involuntarily grounding our beliefs, habits and ways of acting in culture and social mentality, but which has been so deeply taken for granted that it became estranged from our own selves. That part in ourselves we don't know why it acts how it acts, because it takes our act as a norm. When observed, the most banal situations become strange, or, a container of the socio-cultural essence. Banality is a minority in the sense that it is the least observed source of understanding. Something that can' t be learned, just lived. It is less about what you do, but more about how it is performed. One way to explore this are gestures and automatisms of the body:

"Gesture is the name of this intersection between life and art, act and power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis. The gesture is neither use value nor exchange value, neither biographic experience nor impersonal event: it is the other side of the commodity that lets the “crystals of this common social substance” sink into the situation." (Giorgio Agamben)

Another way to observe this is taking the "particular" to conclude something about the "general", and then going back to reflecting that "general" in the particular (aka ourselves). It literally means, from a concrete individual (with name and surname) to a specific society as a whole (define, mentality), then back to reflecting into ourselves the parts that are deeply rooted in this mentality (they always are, even if we don't like to think that). And there are many other ways to emerge.

Two predominant structural elements of this film are re-shot home movies and randomly-caught public conversations, both (still) self-collected. Those deconstructed documents are put in seemingly random, sometimes self-reflexive correlations which explore a diary-style relation to ethnographic and historic vision that doesn't aim at storytelling, but goes down to question the ontology of the image itself, as well as preconceived concepts of history. It's division in 4 parts signifies the concepts of these correlations: content with image structure, landscape / territory with (non)identity / gestures, image content with voice-over content, observation with contemplation on the medium.

Due to the (auto)ethnographic character or allusion, those elements had to be from/in Croatia/ex-Yugoslavia (because that is where I am from). For the purpose of this film, it is irrelevant, though (it can be done on any culture because it is based on concept rather than content). That also means the film is personal, above all (a person is choosing, navigating, expressing, stating, which is true for any author film). Aligning to that, there is a progressive revelation of the personal, as well as the method. The film is structured as a nonlinear, growing rhizomatic system with variable length. It's elements possess the possibility of being rearranged, put into space, installed in various contexts and brought to interaction with found nature or found objects.

An article of my theoretical research behind the film is published in the journal "Imago. Studi di cinema e media" n. 24/2021 – edited by Rossella Catanese and Giacomo Ravesi. Focus of the issue: Found Footage Experience. Practices of cinematic re-use and forms of contemporary film. https://www.bulzoni.it/it/catalogo/imago-24.html Please contact maja.rezoug@gmail.com for more info. I am publishing a book titled OTHER in early 2023 with Atlas Projectos as the beginning of an archive of the collected public conversations (field recordings), obviously closely knitted to the film.