The concept of ‘Slon Eye’ revolves around the idea of exploring an area when there is no possibility to physically do so. The director, who is virtually connected with a collaborating cinematographer on location, navigates and documents his interests but through the eyes and lens of his collaborator. With dominating technical, language and distance barriers, all these factors helped build a poetic audio-visual relationship between the author, the cinematographer, the village of Slon and its inhabitants. In the film, this is depicted through the intentional deconstruction of sound, speech and image in the form of a collage, along with symbolical compositions of village ambience details and digitally manipulated wide public shots.
ARTWORK
SLON EYE
Toni Mijač (Croatia, 1988)
Cinematography by Vlad Dinu
Slon Eye, 2020
Short Movie
12’07
In his work, the Croatian artist and film director Toni Mijač investigates the myriad types of communication in everyday life, body language and various traditions, by collecting details that become working materials for the various stages of his projects.
Mijač conditioned by the pandemic, did his residence on-line with the META Cultural Foundation. He worked virtually with the local artist Vlad Dinu and faced linguistic, geographical and technical barriers, which contributed to the construction of audio-visual relational poetics between him, the local artist and the community of residents of the village.
In the film Slon Eye, the impossibility of exploring physically the place, is represented with an intentional deconstruction of sound, speech and image, in the form of a collage, put together with symbolic compositions of details from the village and lots of digitally manipulated public footage.
The film is edited in a cut-up style, enhancing the linguistic disconnection between the Mijač and the residents of Slon.
