IT WAS A DAY JUST LIKE ANY OTHER IN SPRING OR SUMMER (AT/BA 2012, Selma Doborac)

Selma Doborac – IT WAS A DAY JUST LIKE ANY OTHER IN SPRING OR SUMMER.

AT/BA 2012, 17’, no dialogue, English language version

“In IT WAS A DAY JUST LIKE ANY OTHER IN SPRING OR SUMMER., the first-person narrator explores over the course of three brief episodes the experiences of four people, all of them related to one another; the events occurred during a bomb attack in war-time Bosnia in 1992. The story is told partly through descriptions of a remembered past inscribed into the filmic image in the form of a sequential textual trace, partly through a landscape that is featured in the memories as well as seen in the present, mediated by a mise-en-scène that attempts to find a visual structure, by means of continuous tracking shots, corresponding to the narrated past on location per se. From the constant back-and-forth between what is seen and what is read an experimental set-up of representation emerges, resulting, inevitably, in an unresolved overall picture, as the textual level not only occasionally constrains the visual level but sometimes, of its own accord, even obliterates it. While the titles in which layers of memory are couched (de)construct the notion of non-communicability, the landscape images encased in rides both en-title and give away the impossibility of making a likeness of (war-like) actions.” (Selma Doborac; Translation: Thomas Brooks)