Dalibor Baric - The mind from nowhere
9:23, 2010Narrative leads to the dead-end. Film is a collage, built upon various movie clichés; behind all the cut-ups, it vaguely suggesting the storyline of woman who is haunted by thoughts about her late husband/lover dead soldier; a seance and of diabolical, manipulative medium. Melodrama is interwoven with images of violence, war and mass destruction creating surreal and an absurd atmosphere (although it could be happening simultaneously but at different places).
DirectorDalibor Baric
CountryCroatiaEdition2010 Compilation program (2006 2014) 2/3
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Who is Dalibor Baric?
Dalibor Baric (1974) lives and work in Zagreb. He makes short films out of ectoplasmic sensations enfolded in discarded, feeble snake skin of fashion magazines. A voyeur of reality, he uses film as a rear-view mirror (in a cinema, like in Plato’s cave, light is coming from behind) and reality as the ultimate public domain film.
What is your film about?
"The mind from nowhere" sounds like vintage twilight zone episode. I had this title after JG Ballard his story "The wind from nowhere" which is about cataclysmic hurricane wind, so if you rotate letter "w" in "wind", you got a word "mind".
So that reminded me of I-Ching, Hexagram 61 (also central motive in Philip Dick’s the man in the high castle), inner truth which says: "The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves". In film, there’s a beserked hurricane mind that manifest itself as the stream of consciousness by rushing through images, characters and movie clichés.
Basically, the film came from the title, so it was built from the scratch. I wasn’t concerned with a story, idea or plot. Usually, I got the "starting impulse", some "go-feel", and during the process it begins to unwrap and make sense.
That’s the most exciting and interesting part of it. Not that I’m trying to mystify the process, but it like handling the tarot cards or puzzles. There’s a certain calculations, but only after the structure become visible and then one thing lead to another in associative blocks.
At the beginning of the film, there’s a photograph of Issidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont; whose famous definition of beauty was: "the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella"!
And only by chance, several decades after his death, a copy of his Les Chants de Maldoror was discovered out of obscurity by the surrealists who praised him as a direct precursor to Surrealism.
This could also signify "Mind from nowhere" which influenced many like Breton, Ernst, Dali, Kenneth Anger of even Guy Debord (thesis of plagiarism as a necessity).
How did you start with film?
I didn’t have any educational background in art of film. First job was in a classic animation studio, and then came computers so I was involved in cg, post production..tv ads..which I never liked but good side is that you learn lot of technical stuff
And executions through constant repetition of work.
Could you explain how you work?
Most of my daily time i think, observe, gathering all kind of stimuli and then I go to my "secret laboratory" and create. I also make music for my films, so most of time it begins with music which already had an atmosphere or some intention, music/sound becomes a "second director". It gives me sense of rhythm what is most important to me is reality and our notion of reality. Its the ultimate enigma which contains everything and you can’t compare it with anything, there’s no other, some outer reality (known to us) to be exchanged with.
I think that I’m a camera, an observer, that I’ve got a blackbox recorder inside me which records all my sensory experience.
Where do you get your ideas or inspiration from?
From everywhere - outside world, myself, books, internet, music, comics, sf, b-movies, BBC radiophonic workshop, 70’s, William S Burroughs, David Cronenberg, My bloody valentine, Zoran Rosko, Douglas Sirk, JG Ballard, Remedios Varo, Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, Brian Wilson, Hannah Hoch, The phantom stranger, Barbara Steele, Emergence theory, Ectoplasmic manifestations, White noise-electric storm in hell, Space patrol, Dr strange, Chris Markerandrei Tarkovski, Stereolab, Raymond Scott, Kenneth Anger ..
How does title relate to the work and how do you find a fitting title?
For me title is important almost as the film itself..I adore For me title is important almost as the film itself..I adore titles with a dash of old sf suspense/drama in it, like the ticket that exploded or I Walked with a Zombie, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said ...etc...
How does content relate to the form of your work?
I’m always interested in a new approaches and visual styles. I’m not quite sure whether I use content as a form and otherwise..what is consistent in my films is this forged look of old film, with damages, scratches and jilting it’s a awareness/reminder of medium itself and of the idea of simulacra. For example, these footages I use, from youtube or public domain movies, even if once they were on film tracks; now on internet they are digitalised but their old analogue artefacts remains. Mpg compressions and lowering the resolution adding a new, digital, artefacts, so these films going further towards decay. Image is falling to the threshold of representation and becomes something of ghostlike manifestation. Today in the age of high definition demands I find it as a some kind of statement about the things we take for granted, about the past, memory, the question of authenticity (do android dreams of electric sheep?).
So to conclude, my films even on hi-res still got these low-res look.
How do you finance your projects?
Self-financed. But so far they are not expensive at all :)
What are you working on now?
Some experimental comics, drawings, a script for a short movie.
< overview
< Artists interviews
CountryCroatiaEdition2010 Compilation program (2006 2014) 2/3
< overview
Interview
Dalibor Baric (1974) lives and work in Zagreb. He makes short films out of ectoplasmic sensations enfolded in discarded, feeble snake skin of fashion magazines. A voyeur of reality, he uses film as a rear-view mirror (in a cinema, like in Plato’s cave, light is coming from behind) and reality as the ultimate public domain film.
What is your film about?
"The mind from nowhere" sounds like vintage twilight zone episode. I had this title after JG Ballard his story "The wind from nowhere" which is about cataclysmic hurricane wind, so if you rotate letter "w" in "wind", you got a word "mind".
So that reminded me of I-Ching, Hexagram 61 (also central motive in Philip Dick’s the man in the high castle), inner truth which says: "The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves". In film, there’s a beserked hurricane mind that manifest itself as the stream of consciousness by rushing through images, characters and movie clichés.
Basically, the film came from the title, so it was built from the scratch. I wasn’t concerned with a story, idea or plot. Usually, I got the "starting impulse", some "go-feel", and during the process it begins to unwrap and make sense.
That’s the most exciting and interesting part of it. Not that I’m trying to mystify the process, but it like handling the tarot cards or puzzles. There’s a certain calculations, but only after the structure become visible and then one thing lead to another in associative blocks.
At the beginning of the film, there’s a photograph of Issidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont; whose famous definition of beauty was: "the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella"!
And only by chance, several decades after his death, a copy of his Les Chants de Maldoror was discovered out of obscurity by the surrealists who praised him as a direct precursor to Surrealism.
This could also signify "Mind from nowhere" which influenced many like Breton, Ernst, Dali, Kenneth Anger of even Guy Debord (thesis of plagiarism as a necessity).
How did you start with film?
I didn’t have any educational background in art of film. First job was in a classic animation studio, and then came computers so I was involved in cg, post production..tv ads..which I never liked but good side is that you learn lot of technical stuff
And executions through constant repetition of work.
Could you explain how you work?
Most of my daily time i think, observe, gathering all kind of stimuli and then I go to my "secret laboratory" and create. I also make music for my films, so most of time it begins with music which already had an atmosphere or some intention, music/sound becomes a "second director". It gives me sense of rhythm what is most important to me is reality and our notion of reality. Its the ultimate enigma which contains everything and you can’t compare it with anything, there’s no other, some outer reality (known to us) to be exchanged with.
I think that I’m a camera, an observer, that I’ve got a blackbox recorder inside me which records all my sensory experience.
Where do you get your ideas or inspiration from?
From everywhere - outside world, myself, books, internet, music, comics, sf, b-movies, BBC radiophonic workshop, 70’s, William S Burroughs, David Cronenberg, My bloody valentine, Zoran Rosko, Douglas Sirk, JG Ballard, Remedios Varo, Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, Brian Wilson, Hannah Hoch, The phantom stranger, Barbara Steele, Emergence theory, Ectoplasmic manifestations, White noise-electric storm in hell, Space patrol, Dr strange, Chris Markerandrei Tarkovski, Stereolab, Raymond Scott, Kenneth Anger ..
How does title relate to the work and how do you find a fitting title?
For me title is important almost as the film itself..I adore For me title is important almost as the film itself..I adore titles with a dash of old sf suspense/drama in it, like the ticket that exploded or I Walked with a Zombie, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said ...etc...
How does content relate to the form of your work?
I’m always interested in a new approaches and visual styles. I’m not quite sure whether I use content as a form and otherwise..what is consistent in my films is this forged look of old film, with damages, scratches and jilting it’s a awareness/reminder of medium itself and of the idea of simulacra. For example, these footages I use, from youtube or public domain movies, even if once they were on film tracks; now on internet they are digitalised but their old analogue artefacts remains. Mpg compressions and lowering the resolution adding a new, digital, artefacts, so these films going further towards decay. Image is falling to the threshold of representation and becomes something of ghostlike manifestation. Today in the age of high definition demands I find it as a some kind of statement about the things we take for granted, about the past, memory, the question of authenticity (do android dreams of electric sheep?).
So to conclude, my films even on hi-res still got these low-res look.
How do you finance your projects?
Self-financed. But so far they are not expensive at all :)
What are you working on now?
Some experimental comics, drawings, a script for a short movie.
< overview
