Tomislav Gotovac

GLENN MILLER I. (HIGH SCHOOL PLAYGROUND I.)

GLENN MILLER I. ( SREDNJOŠKOLSKO IGRALIŠTE I.)

Hrvatska, 1977 , 45′

Glenn Miller I. (High School Playground I.) represents the pinnacle of Gotovac’s structural oeuvre, begun in the early 1960s. Like then, the starting point of the film was a preselected method, a conceptual inspiration – Glenn Miller’s unique sound, spiritual source – American cinema, and the most important performance ally – a device called ‘Pan mudri’, attached to a camera fixed on a car in a continuous circling around the track and field of a high school playground in Zagreb. While parallel headlights and vertical panning register the surrounding urban environment and boys on speeding bicycles, the soundtrack of Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) reminisces of some other cinematic riders and helps create a unique spiritual journey. I. L. Galeta was behind the wheel. (Diana Nenadić)

Tomislav Gotovac

(1937 – 2010 ) Born in Sombor, Vojvodina. In 1941 he moved with his parents to Zagreb, where he finished elementary school in Krajiška Street and the 5^th College Preparatory High School in Klaićeva Street. He lived in Zagreb from 1941 to 1967 and again from 1975 until his death on June 24, 2010. From 1955 to 1956 he studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb. He started working in photography in the late 1950s, and has been involved in experimental film and multimedia research since 1960. In 1954 he gave his first performance in Mostar, and in 1962 he made his first film in Zagreb. In 1964 he made his first collages. In 1967, as part of the Experimental Film Festival (GEFF) in Zagreb, he performed the first happening – Our happ. He made about twenty experimental films. At the end of 1967, at the age of thirty, he went to Belgrade where he enrolled the film directing programme at the Academy of Dramatic Arts.