Siesta

Michael Pansini (1926-2015) was among the most important personalities of the Croatian modernist cinema, deriving from its marginal amateur circles, a founder of GEFF (“festival of film researchers”, Zagreb 1963-1970), and the main ideologue of the “anti-film” movement in the 1960s. In his early amateur stage during the 1950s, as a member of the Zagreb Cine-club, he made poetic films characterized by existentialist reflections, such as the short documentary Siesta, where he began to chellenge the conventions of (documentary) filmmaking. Siesta paints the atmosphere of the afternoon leisure in the little Mediterranean town, using fragmented courtyard sights seen through the eyes of a girl who was leaned at one of the nearby windows. This film also demonstrates Pansini’s tendency to reduction of cinematic means of expression, which will come to the fore in his films from 1960s, and become the main point of reference in his anti-film programme.