Hrvoje Horvatic died at the end of 1997. This film/videomaker from former Yugoslavia worked for the last ten years of his life with his close partner, the visual artist Breda Beban, on a revelatory œuvre that includes television documentaries and installations as well as videos. The World Wide Video Festival is paying homage to this filmmaker who died much too young with a retrospective of his work with Breda Beban. As the story goes, it all started in the mid-eighties when Hrvoje Horvatic attended a performance of painter and visual artist Breda Beban in Zagreb and wanted to record the performance on tape. The story doesn't say whether he was successful in that. But the first videos they worked on together quickly saw the day of light. Videos that immediately demonstrated that the makers are not interested in what is popular, but make their own aesthetic plan, one inspired more by film, Byzantine painting and philosophy than by what is happening in the field of video art itself. There could be no greater contrast between videos like 'Bless my Hands'(1986), 'All our Secrets are Contained in an Image' and 'Taking on a Name' (both from '87) and those being shown in galleries and at video festivals in the same period. While most video artists in that period were bent on breaking the power of the image – by using numerous technical means to manipulate it – Beban and Horvatic had unconditional (but never naïve) trust in the power of the image. In their work you saw no distorted or computer-animated images tumbling about and through each other, but rather long, slow shots held to the extreme by an almost static camera, of performance-like rituals. Whoever sees these early videos by Beban and Horvatic understands – 'feels' is perhaps a better word – that image for them, as it was for the Byzantine icon painters, is primarily a medium, an intermediary, a membrane between that which is, but is not visible. What the individual images mean is less important than the associations they evoke. In interviews at the time Beban and Horvatic borrowed the image of the desert from the Russian painter Malevich and used it to show their feelings. The desert as a space that forces you to release all known forms and become empty and then in this emptiness learn to look anew with sharper eyes and so find new forms. This open and vulnerable view also marks the next work by Beban and Horvatic, which, accordingly, is never predictable or slack, but always surprises anew. Take 'Geography', a video from 1989 that ushers in a new phase in the work of the duo. In the use of time and in the portraits of people (thus becoming 'model', rather than 'actor') continuity with their earlier work is still felt, but whereas the earlier videos seem to take place in a closed, or rather, self-chosen universe, after 'For You and Me in Them to be One' (from 1988) they force their way more and more into the public world. The documentary element becomes stronger, the symbolic gives way to the concrete and the individual. The way the camera is used (and even the lens) emphasizes the suggestion that their videos after 'Geography' have more and more to do with the public world. Not odd of course if you remember that 'Geography' was made when Yugoslavia was just starting to reveal its cracks. If you now look at that beautiful head of a man in 'Geography', you cannot fail to see in all its wrinkles the foreshadowing of the tragedy which would soon hit the world. With 'Geography', mourning and loss make their permanent entrance into the work of Beban and Horvatic. 'Geography' was the last work they made in Yugoslavia. In 1991 they left their homeland and took up residence in London. There, they first made two short tapes, 'For Tara' (1991) and 'The Lifeline Letter' (1992), before starting on their longest work as yet, 'The Left Hand Should Know'(1992). This video again marks a turning point. For it adds yet a third layer to the already existing poetic and documentary layers: a narrative layer. After 'The Left Hand…' Beban and Horvatic experiment with narrative forms to find one that translates traditional narrative into a form they can work with. In the exquisite and moving 'Absence, She Said' from 1994, this fragmentation is already somewhat less, and in 'Hand on the Shoulder' from 1997, the poetic, the documentary and the narrative flow together smoothly. This film, about the war in former Yugoslavia and its consequences, appears to set out a new plan for the future. It could not however, evolve further than the amazing video clip Beban and Horvatic made somewhat later in the same year, 'Jason's Dream of the Present'.
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'Bless my hands'
1986, 11 min, colour, mono sound, V8 and U-matic
Produced by Film Val and Beban & Horvatic, YU
'She, four things'
1986, 20 min, colour, mono sound, 1”and 16mm film
Produced by TV Beograd and Beban & Horvatic, YU
'All secrets are contained in an image'
1987, 10 min, colour/b&w, mono sound, 1” and 16mm film
Produced by TV Skopje and Beban & Horvatic, YU
'Talking on a name'
1987, 25 min, colour, mono sound, U-matic High B
Produced by TV Skopje, YU
'For you in me and me in them to be one'
1988, 30 min, colour/b&w, mono sound, U-matic High B and 1”
Produced by Beban & Horvatic in association with TV Beograd, YU
'Geography'
1989, 9 min, colour, mono sound, BetacamSP
Produced by Video Colony Ohrid, TV Skopje, YU
'For Tara'
1991, 4 min, colour, stereo sound, BetacamSP
Produced by Beban & Horvatic in association with Studio 5, Zagreb and Momentum London, YU/UK
'The left hand should know'
1992, 43 min, colour, stereo sound, BetacamSP and 35mm film Funded by Arts Council of England, Channel 4
Beban & Horvatic Productions in assocation with Frontline TVS, London, UK
'Absence'
1994, 15 min, colour/b & w, sterio sound, BetacamSP and 35mm film Funded by Arts Council of England & Ontario Arts Council
Beban & Horvatic Productions, UK & Canada
'Hand on the shoulder'
1997, 42 min, black & white, sound, 16mm film & Beta SP Funded by Arts Council England, Channel 4 & Ontario Arts Council
Beban & Horvatic Productions, UK & Canada
'Jason's dream'
1997, 10 min, colour, 16mm film Funded by London Production Fund, Carlton VT & LAB
Beban & Horvatic Productions, UK
– Mieke Bernink
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Breda Beban ° 1952, Novi Sad (Yugoslavia )
Lives and works in London (UK)
Hrvoje Horvatic ° 1958, Rijeka (Yugoslavia) – 1997, London (UK)
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