It was a day just like any other in spring or summer.
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
It was a day just like any other in spring or summer.
A car ride, filmed from inside the vehicle, the view straight ahead, through the windscreen, frontal, onto a non-descript landscape, then an industrial area, then a town full of gaps and ruins and skeleton frames and newly sprouted houses whose miens bespeak their hurried assemblage. But, above all: no sound, absolute silence; so if you do hear something it is probably someone breathing near you in the room.
The perspective remains constant for some time, though the point-of-view shot does in fact slightly change, as can be seen from the inactive windshield wipers; later, there will be views from the side of the car, side-views. Frontal views and side views alternate in accordance with the rhyme scheme F-S-F-S-F; and with every change of perspective the story, which unfolds on the bottom edge of the frame, also takes a turn, expands – though perhaps we only think the story has taken a turn because that is what is suggested by the change of perspective.
The story is about what happened, on one day, at roughly the same time, but in different areas of a city to three members of a family; it is about how they remember and how they put their memories into words for each other, and about how, subsequently, these experiences are then combined into a narrative – layered remembrolescences.
Drives, landscapes, and their relation to one another all play an important part in this; as does the question of how real or unreal reality and the passing of time and the places had felt in all this; at certain moments, the story strikes one as particularly credible, as when a word coincides with something seen on the screen – “wall”.
We are never told where this happened; from the manifold writings scattered throughout the film one may, however, infer that the events must have taken place in that part of the world that once went by the name of SFR Yugoslavia, or, more precisely: in one of the countries in which, for a long time, there was war; words like “firearms” and descriptions of war-like conditions would seem to corroborate this. So probably that is where it all occurred, if the story is true and not merely truthful. But then, maybe, it isn’t. If there were sound, the task of pin-pointing the story geographically would be made easier; yet that is precisely what is to be avoided. Just as it should not be easy to follow the text, the highly literate form of which calls for an equally high amount of attention. Captions – sometimes a single word, at other times up to three lines, filling a third of the frame.
It is exhilarating to see how graphic, how dramatic the sentence is rendered by this fracturing and the punctuation thereby necessitated, which turns certain phrases into figures of speech. Occasionally, linguistic expression conceals whatever there is that might be seen to such an extent that one can no longer make out the world behind the word: the story as letter/word/syntax fresco literally-pictorially blankets out the visible present. Some effort is required to once again see the landscape behind the language.
(Olaf Möller)
Translation: Thomas Brooks
A Drive On Memory Lane. Selma Doborac’ Es war ein Tag wie jeder andere im Frühling oder Sommer.
In Selma Doborac’ Kurzfilm Es war ein Tag wie jeder andere im Frühling oder Sommer. fährt man eine Strecke entlang, mit der eine Erinnerung an ein prägendes Ereignis während des Krieges in Bosnien im Jahr 1992 verbunden ist. Ein einziger Tag steht im Mittelpunkt des experimentellen Roadmovies, das im Wesentlichen von drei Erzählungen getragen wird, die als Texttitel durch den Film laufen: jener des Kindes, das von seinem Vater in der Hektik nach einem Bombenangriff zufällig aufgelesen wird, der seiner Mutter, die sich zur gleichen Zeit an einem anderen Ort befunden hat, und schließlich noch der seines Großvaters.
Erinnerung, umgesetzt als Revision, die um die Schichten weiß, die sich um das damalige Ereignis gelegt haben: Doborac fährt die Strecke in der Gegenwart ab; die Untertitel führen indes in die Vergangenheit, und schon diese sind voller Skepsis gegenüber dem Akt der Erinnerung – zu viel hat sich im Gedächtnis verfestigt, was nicht mehr wirklich überprüfbar ist.
Ist Erinnerung schon immer ein trügerisches Verfahren, da von inneren und äußeren Faktoren beeinträchtigt, so kann sie hier auf der bildlichen Ebene keinesfalls eindeutig bestätigt, verifiziert werden, doch sie lässt sich immerhin verorten: Die Landschaft, der man abwechselnd durch die Front- oder Seitenscheibe eines Autos ansichtig wird, geht, in der Tradition der Arbeiten von Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, mit den Texten eine Beziehung voller Mutmaßungen ein. Schon in der ersten Episode wird darauf verwiesen, dass der Ich-Erzähler „bestimmt nicht in der Lage“ sei, „die besagte Strecke und die ringsum liegenden Orte jemals wieder zu finden.“ Es ist eine Aussage, die der Film dann in mancher Hinsicht wieder überschreiben will. Die kleinen Landstraßen werden heute von Einfamilienhäusern gesäumt, auffällig viele, möglicherweise aufgrund finanzieller Engpässe ins Stocken geratene Rohbauten weisen darauf hin, dass sich dieser Landstrich in Veränderung befindet. Spuren des Krieges werden im zerstreuten Blick aus dem Autofenster allerdings nur indirekt manifest – es sei denn, man erhascht ein Bild im Vorbeifahren. Einmal, als von „Handfeuerwaffen“ zu lesen ist, die sich damals in vorbeifahrenden Autos befanden, treten die Einschusslöcher an den Fassaden eines Hauses ganz klar ins Auge.
Das dispersive Verhältnis zwischen Bild und Text – wobei jede Ebene für sich selbst bewusst ungenau bleibt – setzt sich im weiteren Verlauf des Filmes fort: Die kürzere Erzählung in der Mitte gilt der Mutter. Sie wurde offenbar mit Gewaltanwendung wegtransportiert, hat dann aber nur eine kürzere Distanz im Auto zurückgelegt, die ihr jedoch „ewig“ erschienen ist. Am sinnfälligsten wird diese Episode in einer Fahrt im Kreisverkehr zum Bild: Dieser kann genau so für das Im-Kreis-Fahren der Erinnerung wie für die Wiederholungsstruktur einer unaufgelösten Schockeinwirkung stehen. Auch die turbulente Geschichte des Großvaters, der von einer abrupten Bombendetonation vom gewohnten Ablauf seines Essenstransports abgehalten wurde, findet in der Fahrt durch den kleinstädtischen Alltag, vorbei an Einkaufsstraßen, Parks und Parkplätzen, Menschen auf Gehsteigen und wieder Häusern mit Einschusslöchern, zu keiner Auflösung. Am Ende gibt es widersprüchliche Auffassungen darüber, wo das Essen geblieben ist.
Selma Doborac’ Arbeit führt durch die Schichten der Erinnerung hindurch eben zu keiner Fundstelle, zu keinem Ausgangspunkt mehr zurück: Vielmehr leistet sie eine Vergegenwärtigung, die das Gedächtnis als subjektives Medium begreift, das die Vergangenheit wie eine Spur abfährt – on the road of uncertainties.
(Dominik Kamalzadeh)
A Drive On Memory Lane. Selma Doborac’s film It was a day just like any other in spring or summer.
In Selma Doborac’s short film It was a day just like any other in spring or summer. we are driving along a route that is fraught with memories of a crucial event that occurred during the war in Bosnia in 1992. The experimental road movie revolves around a single day evoked by three narratives told entirely through captions: the story of the child, who, in the bustle following a bomb attack, is picked up, quite haphazardly, by the father; that of the mother, who was in a different place at the time; and, finally, that of the grandfather.
Memory as a revisionary process cognizant of the layers that have accreted around the past event: while it is in the present that Doborac travels along the route, the text titles leading us back into the past evince a profoundly sceptical attitude towards remembrance – there is just too much that has accrued and hardened within memory without being susceptible of verification.
If there is always something ineluctably deceptive about memory, which is shaped by so many interior and exterior factors, then here, even though the visual data we receive do not verify or confirm the remembered events, memory is at least placed in a concrete geographical setting. Now through the windshield, now through the side window we see a landscape that, in the tradition of the works of Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, enters into relation with a text full of surmises.
As early as the first episode we are told that the first-person narrator would “surely [be] incapable of ever finding the aforementioned route and the surrounding sites again”, a statement that the film to a certain extent sets out to overwrite again. Today, the small country lanes are lined with family homes, and the remarkable number of houses that, maybe owing to financial straits, have got stuck at the skeleton stage gives evidence of a region undergoing change. To the distracted gaze out of the car window the traces of war manifest themselves only indirectly, except perhaps for an image briefly glimpsed in passing. At one point the text makes mention of firearms being transported in passing cars, and it is precisely at this point that we can clearly make out the bullet holes pock-marking the facade of a building.
This dispersive relation between image and text, with each of the two remaining purposely imprecise, informs the whole film. The middle part is devoted to the shorter narrative of the mother. Apparently she was pulled into a car by physical force and carried off but then we are told that while to her the ride had seemed to go on “forever” the distance covered was actually rather short. On the visual level, this episode finds striking expression in the traffic roundabout, which may be read as a pun on memory’s tendency to go in circles or, alternatively, as standing for the patterns of repetition resulting from an unresolved shock.
By the same token, the grandfather’s turbulent story of how a bomb explosion had prevented him from following his usual routine of bringing home the lunch does not find a resolution either, as the camera wends its way through the bustle of small town life, past shopping streets, parks, parking lots, pedestrians on sidewalks, and, again, houses sprayed with bullet holes. In the end, we are left with contradictory views about what happened to the food.
Selma Doborac’s work traverses the layers of memory without ever arriving at the site of find, the starting point: what she rather aims for is an act of making-present predicated on memory as a subjective medium that tracks the past as if it were following a trace – on the road of uncertainties.
(Dominik Kamalzadeh)
Translation: Thomas Brooks
Crossing Europe Filmfestival, Local Artist Award 2014. Jurybegründung. (Award)
Crossing Europe Film Festival, Local Artist Award 2014. Jury statement. (Award)
Es war ein Tag wie jeder andere im Frühling oder Sommer.
2012
Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina
17 min