SVE ILI NIŠTA / All or Nothing

Croatia
1968 / 10’30’’

Directed by :
Ivan Martinac

Written by:
Ivan Martinac

Producer:
Kino-klub Split, 1968

Cast:
Ranko Kursar, Jakša Fiamengo, Martin Crvelin, Filip Roje,
Ante Režić, Ivan Martinac

Distribution:
HRVATSKI FILMSKI SAVEZ
Croatian Film Clubs’ Association
Tuškanac 1,10000 Zagreb
Vera Robić-Škarica
vera@hfs.hr
tel: +385 1 48 48 771
fax: + 385 1 48 48 764
www.hfs.hr

All or Nothing, a paradigmatic underground film by Ivan Martinac made in 1968, assembles a range of innovative methods and traces of principles which can be found in his other films. Scenes of aggressive temporality and life-death are structured by four titles connecting five blocks of images of black Mediterranean, absence of speech and background noises, rhetoric of music (in this case vocal, East Virginia ballad) are encircled by two opposite blow-ups, two kinds of film penetration: slow motion of the crowd and collage of details in the epilogue. Both forms are depersonalizing and super-individual, just like the insisting on the backs of people’s heads, which is present in all of his films. The camera, sometimes completely static, sometimes ecstatic, catches two types of gestures: the similar gestus of a close community that knows it is being filmed and is made up of individual aesthetic gestures, and gestures of those who were really caught, gestus of others. A lack of story line and a pseudo-documentary shooting by using a hidden camera method result in an encountered story, choosing from the crowd, being with somebody and then a certain return and a deadlock, the photograph of death revolutionary Che Guevara: death as the last possibility of resistance.

Ivan Martinac, filmmaker, architect, poet, publicist is the key figure of the so called Split film school at Kino Klub Split and Croatian film underground, one of the founders of cinematheque Zlatna Vrata in Split. He is the author of 71 short films and one feature The House on the Sand (1984-1985). He published ten poetry collections, numerous essays, Movie Notebook and two “books of artists”: extraordinary movie artefact, reconstruction of Dreyer’s storyboard for The Death of Joan of Arc with the descriptions of key frames for each take, and his own monograph, personal “theory of cineaste”.