A Record of Landscape Without Prehistory

Film synopsis

A visual story that invokes the experience of forgetting, filmed in a desolated socialist children’s health resort in the coastal town of Krvavica, Croatia.

The title is borrowed from a poem by the Yugoslav surrealist and revolutionary poet Oskar Davičo, which is an attempt to record the inner images left without music and sonority. The poet invokes words and terms that he forgets because he suffers from aphasia.

A Record of Landscape without Prehistory indirectly relies on Davičo’s poetry, linking it to the lost future of a site on the Adriatic coast. An epistolary narrative based on documents – postcards from summer vacations, is placed at the site and told in a repetitive time circle. A circle, which is always a new subtraction in the medium of recording, is forgetting. This forgetting is not forgotten but desired since the medium itself records (digital), communicates (magnetic) and exposes (analog) human inability to preserve the memories and history.

Info box

Title: A Record of Landscape Without Prehistory

Length: 14 min

Country of Origin: Serbia

Completion Year: 2020

Director: Doplgenger

Film stills

About the director

Doplgenger is an artist duo Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran from Belgrade. The work of Doplgenger deals with relation between art and politics through exploring the regimes of moving images and modes of its reception. They rely on the tradition of experimental film and video and through some of the actions of these traditions intervene on the existing media products or produce in the expanded cinema forms. Although their main media is moving image, their work is realised through the text, installations, performances, lectures and discussions. 

The works of Doplgenger is in public collections, have been been shown internationally at art institutions and film festivals. Ilić and Prostran coedited the publication “Amateurs for Film”(Beograd, 2017). Doplgenger is a recipient of art scholarships, and artist residencies, festivals’ awards and Politika Award “Vladislav Ribnikar”.

en_USEnglish (United States)