Once, to paraphrase the motto of Melville’s film Samuraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), I said that a film author is the loneliest creature in the world besides maybe the white tiger… and in spite of a premonition (that William Blake also had) that all earthly authors are “just secretaries of supernatural entities” (Ivan Martinac wrote in Split on Ash Wednesday, February 28, 2001)



In one place in his monograph, Ivan Martinac (Split, 1938 - Split, 2005) describes how, when he was a student of architecture in Belgrade and started to make his first films, people teased him by saying that he was not a typical guy from Split. A typical guy from Split (meaning: from the Mediterranean), he was then told, does not make films. However, this comment did not discourage Martinac. Quite the opposite, as an author/ screenwriter, director and editor and sometimes cinematographer in his hometown he made more than fifty short films. As a keen lover of film editing he often helped in the editing of his friends’ films. He showed an impressive amount of stamina as an author also in his only feature film The House on the Sand (1984-85). Throughout his life, he never stopped thinking, talking or writing about film. Thanks to his fruitfulness as a film author, lucidity and artistic “nagging” that enchanted generations of young future film authors that gathered Cinema Club Split, a small alternative circle of people even used the name “Split school of film”.


Even though he mainly remained a mystery, Martinac managed, because of his own work and his followers who looked up to him as if he were a God or at least respected him, to prove that the Mediterranean film circle is an integral part of Croatian cinema such as the one that is more culturally appreciated, the middle European. In fact, he managed to do more than that because if we characterized his work as Mediterranean we would make a great mistake with this most dogmatic and subjective film opus to have been created in our country. Nowhere but in his films has Martinac’s hometown Split been portrayed as much due to the fact that he was rarely absent from it (only during his studies in Zagreb and Belgrade). And nowhere other than through his photographic lens has Split shown so many of it faces: sunny and rainy, happy and melancholy, dynamic and meditative, transient and eternal… However, the truth is that Martinac spent much fewer words (but not pictures) on Split than on film itself. He was primarily interested in the secret of “real”, “true” film and only after that, in all that caters to the idea of a celluloid artifact that is not poisoned by the banal joys of narration, which in the end neutralizes the triviality of reality and everyday life. The seductively photogenic town, this “atelier Diocletian”, as he referred to Split in one of his films, served the purpose of a lively stage whose main actor is the passage of time personified by the author’s family and friends and himself. Martinac made sure that these ephemeral fragments got a higher meaning. What is passing for the author becomes meaningful for him only if he placed it in a “slide” (or a “square”), the holy scripture of film language and incorporated in the new “organism” that would eventually become a conception of eternity.

(Diana Nenadić)



I am a poet both when I write poetry and when I direct films, because in both cases, even though I use different languages, I apply a morphological form, which, certainly, does not mean that a monologue can function as a dialogue. With poetry you get closer to people. More than with anything else. (Ivan Martinac)