Dalibor Barić's Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus is showing exclusively on MUBI starting November 17, 2021 in the series Undiscovered.
Every homecoming, return, remembering, is like the attempt of reverse engineering. The feeling of retracing the same pathways, taking the same steps, investigating to validate its authenticity, giving another view of whatever it might be: a childhood, an inception.
So we're taking a different perspective, seeing what we missed the first time, what was all about, while we return on the same neural pathways into the private deep-time of our existence.
Why nostalgia, the past?
And how much of it is true anyway?
Do we invent it as we go along, backwards, like unreliable narrators?
Everyone’s buying into nostalgia, safe places, brighter and warmer when imagined. An unfathomable dimension that we claim happened. The ghost objects that once stood there and now remain in memories.
But the past also has an unpleasant, haunting presence of unresolved matters. It sometimes hovers in the corner of our being. We might see ourselves as trees, plants, possessing some stable, unchanging roots, belonging to the greater invisible narrative structure in time. Some kind of anchor and continuity in the unpredictable, chaotic stream of life.
So, in the beginning, there was a spark whose fire has burned ever since.
It burns a different kind of oxygen: emotional, meaningful oxygen. Our minds are real haunting polygons. So exposed and fragile. A subject matter for so many chilling stories. The mind from nowhere. From the Beyond. The tormented mind. Inner voice. The fictional self. Doppelganger. It seems like it doesn't come from the inside, from some imaginable inner core of one's being, but afar. It imposes its will on us, on a subliminal level. We don't know what it is, what it wants from us, but still, we obey that silent voice. It's like an extraterrestrial invasion. Similar to what Philip K. Dick experienced.
But that's only a small fraction of what neuroscience claims belongs to the brain. Amidst all our daily dramas, the brain is having its secret life. For thousand and thousand of years. The old reptilian brain wants you to fight or flight, feed, and reproduce. It doing the breathing routine, whether you want it or not; dolphins, on contrary, can stop their breathing voluntarily. Then there's a limbic part of the brain, dealing with emotions, memory, arousal, pain, and many other functions. And there's the neocortex, so called "educated brain" involved in higher-order brain function. Organized in cortical columns, structurally the same as in some other mammals, such as rodents, but only bigger. The neocortex is the organ of intelligence. With its totality, the brain reminds me of Fritz Lang's Metropolis epitaph, "Let the heart be the mediator between the mind and the hand."
The Brain: like the establishing shot of the city of Metropolis from the beginning of the movie, where its marvelous, grandeur complexity seems to move in unison and only when it dissolves to the close-up plan do we realize that it's not as harmonious as it seems. And yet, there is the "I" character, on the run, at the end of the rope, doing its "I" thing: I think. I'm typing these words. I got something to say. So, I was thinking, what if as a result of some kind of anthropological mutation, the human brain lost its natural ability of night-dreams.
Since the outer, waking world becomes saturated with fiction of all kinds, replete with dream content, the brain reduces its nocturnal activities to mere maintenance of the visual cortex. Simply to keep it in shape. The rudimentary dream forms like whack the weasel, or hook a donkey's tail. Pure drill! The brain no longer has to invent the fiction because it is already out there. Dreams. Oneiric. Unconsciousness. For a long time, the world of dreams that we possessed, not knowing how and why, was held as a kind of threshold, the last stronghold of human intimacy, where our soul freely bathes naked in the imaginary moonlight. But what if the subconscious is exhausted, that there is nothing left to mine from the depths of the mind? Nothing for psycho-speleologists ready to descend into the deepest corners of our subconscious. Every fantasy already described, all essential and less important nightmares staged, every conceivably unimaginable gesture made, a combination of symbols and randomness set. The depths of chance have dried up. Maybe this will be the subject worth exploring in one of my future films. But for now, I'm here to say a few words of my latest work. The real page turner!
In many ways, The Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus turned out to be my pivotal work to date. Completed nearly a month before the first lockdown followed by several earthquakes that had struck Croatia, the movie got its premiere in a somehow different world than it was when I started work on it. Furthermore, what came afterward had changed everything when the movie was shortlisted for the Academy Awards nominations 2021 in the animated feature category. From that moment, Accidental Luxuriance becomes a piece of top national news in Croatia, and the intensity of this hype lasted for the next two months of the announcement’s anticipation. I must add that this was all my producer’s idea, and I thought of it as a rather farfetched move. So I completely ignored it until the news of the movie being selected was officially announced.
It was a surreal experience with the occasional hilarious effect of a movie with a complicated title under the constant media coverage, TV appearances, interviews, public screenings, et cetera...
The movie’s even been on the repertoire of commercial cineplexes, which was unlikely, considering the fact it was an experimental small-budget collage movie with a nonlinear narrative that got under the wider spotlight of public curiosity thanks to its Oscar aura. Looking back, at all these circumstances surrounding the movie’s concealment and its aftermath, it seems to me now like a glitch, a brief temporal interference or breach with some parallel universe. I used to wonder why some directors don't watch their films once they finish them.
I haven’t watched the Accidental Luxuriance for a while, and even then, I saw it maybe a few times while it was screened before the audience. The first time out of curiosity and excitement, to finally see it on the big screen. I remember the uncanny atmosphere of the almost empty movie theater with the audience behind the masks. It was a chilling experience. After that, I rewatched the movie on a few occasions that required my presence as an author. I just watch through it. I can’t describe the psychology behind it; not that I’m disappointed with the results, on the contrary, but I felt some peculiar detachment, as if the movie was created by itself, as if possessed some autonomy that counted me out as a creator. It was not a bad thing, but rather some sense of relief to me. I’m not entitled to speak of creative urge in general, but only from my personal experience: working on Accidental Luxuriance has put me into some pocket universe, the world within the world. The one which goes along with real-life, everyday reality. The creative part of my work is very solitary by nature, just me thinking, writing, sitting in front of my computer. I have once compared this process to digging the tunnel with a small spoon.
Due to the limitation of my computer, I was only able to work and to preview the small pieces, scene by scene. Then again, I could work on the project in some spare time, usually a few hours at night. With all these limitations and constantly losing and finding the thread, most of the time it was frustrating, hard, and exhausting. Every time I sat by the computer I was confronted with a different film. Even that I had the whole movie inside my head, in the realization, my vision was constantly wiggling, warping. After I wrote the script the actors recorded the dialogues in the sound studio, so I started with a clean slate, having only the audio montage of the script. Sometimes, dissatisfied with the visual direction, I just added new layers which piled up upon each other until I get a desirable result. The movie project reassembled the medieval palimpsest. Some scenes looks finely executed with the collage technique, but some others will require a different visual approach.
If someone’s asked me back then why am I doing this and what do I intend with the movie, I couldn't find an answer. I had some vague notion of distant festivals after the film is finished, But at that time I was somehow fatigued and alienated by that idea. I didn’t have any plans. As I had finished Accidental Luxuriance, I was finally able to see the film as a whole and eventually adjust some technical issues. Even then, I didn’t want to bother anyone with the movie by asking them to see it, because all I can see was the fresh stitches and bruises of something that came out from my mind. I knew that I can’t and won't stop doing things, but I somehow get stuck in the gap between the early day’s unburdened excitement of sheer creation to the point where I was now wondering where do I go from here.
Between parenting and my commissioned work, I will be collecting, scribbling ideas and sentences into my phone, driven by the vague idea of making my next film. At that point, I was not a beginner in any sense, but I've been haunted by many personal demons, dilemmas, and fears. That drive to create is something inherent, essentially entwined with me, my consciousness and awareness. But with the lack of free time, the enjoyment of creating became a mania in which I had to constantly create something new to validate, confirm myself, as to give my existence meaning. It would affect my moods and my tolerance toward the outer reality. I disdained the mundane everyday level of life, repeated existential things, banal, shallow actions, talks, and everything. I was up to the throat in commercial work, animations, and music videos, which left me not enough time to develop something of my own, at least not on a same scale that I was dedicate to my commercial work. So this is where I discuss my inner demons. At that time, I was convinced that it was time for me to make something on a bigger scale, to show the world what I'm capable of and such. After failed attempts to make the feature film, I finally get a chance of doing this small budget experimental, whatever-I-wanted-it-to-be movie. Not completely satisfied with the fact that I was still operating within this same obscure drawer, that I have filled with too many short no-budget films, because I had been there done that, and I had bigger ambitions on my mind. In the light of that, the later Academy Award shortlisting came as an ironic twist of all that aspirations of mine. I guess it goes with the saying be careful what you wish for.
So as I said I'm glad to feel a detachment from this movie. That it stands alone for itself, unmarked with all these desires that preceded it. That’s what I'm glad of. This movie had set me free, not to wish anything but to create.
Through all this introduction, I didn’t say a word about the actual movie. Accidental Luxuriance is the movie that people love or dislike for the same reasons.
At some point, I became fatigued with explaining the movie, where I'd be repeating myself, feeling that I have to justify the "weirdness" of its content, or even contradict my previous statements like a berserk spokesperson lost in the echo chambers of thoughts.
An introspective self-interrogation. What is it all about? Is there a story or did you just make it up along the way? I don't know. I didn’t want to torment the audience with the piles of long-duration incomprehensible stuff. Neither do I want to be experimental for the sake of being experimental. These old tricks don't work today. It became just another tradition to work within this avant-garde, underground achievements, and its legacy. Surrealism too. Its insights became part of artistic confection and the broader commercial usage even back then in '40s.
I was never attracted to mainstream cinema in particular. I came to realize that I’m not into the movies that much. I watch them less and less. We are all to some degree aware of what it meant to create and produce a feature film, for example. Moviemaking is not easy, from the start to the end it requires a lot. It cost money. It is a mass media product. There are expectations, compromises, et cetera. Considering the contemporary dominance of streaming services and the popularity of TV shows, amidst all that the film as we know it echoes the epitaph of Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Sunset Boulevard. So, by creating the movie like Accidental Luxuriance one can avoid all of these problems. It's experimental, animated, punk DIY zine-meets-the-feature-film. My intention wasn't to create the vision of cinema or post-cinema in the age of shifting paradigms of the new media environment. I just wanted to make a film, and I have used the techniques, styles, and materials that I had at my disposal. What I had on my mind was to create audiovisual equivalent to the writing. For example, while reading a novel, the reader acts as a screen, she needs to synthesize, visualize what is written and the words are like camera (obscura).
In the same way, I gave only the sketch of the characters on screen, leaving the gaps to be filled. Or, when there is a car in the movie, it's not a specific vehicle, it's more the idea of the car, represented by the pictogram of a car, or as a diagram of the inner working of the machine and stuff. The movie's visual setting leans partly onto retro-modernist style and noir genre. The former refers to the symbolic death of visionary science fiction genre from the past, which once was concerned about the future (which was somehow canceled), and the latter would stands for the act of engaging into the fiction (reading, watching), similar to the crime investigation. The process of searching for the clues and connecting the plot, with this inner narrator's voice, the fictional "I" from the beginning of this introduction. But nothing is solved at the end, the crime remains unknown, a mystery. As the police inspector from the movie says, "it is important that your investigation ends with the question, rather then the answer," and "nothing that can be described, should ever be photographed."
That's all from me. Thank you for your patience and I hope you will enjoy the film. Thank you goodnight!
