MONDAY OR TUESDAY

Director: Vatroslav Mimica

Country: Jugoslavia

Year: 1966

Duration: 77 min

Languages: serbokroaatti / tekstitetty englanniksi

Original name: Ponedjeljak ili utorak

Category: , , ,

Monday or Tuesday is not the first time that Vatroslav Mimica is experimenting with a stream of consciousness narrative – but never before and never again would he get as formally brazen as here. The simplicity of the storyline helps: a day in the life of an average intellectual worker, journalist Marko. He does mundane things while remembering his past and imagining his future, not to mention other thoughts that come to his mind, sudden observations he makes, other people’s histories he starts to remember-imagine, etc.

Visually, it’s a feast if one likes films that are willfully all over the place with their technical means – different stocks get used, documentary material but also animations inserted into the flow, etc. Reality, here, is not of one piece but a mad patchwork of possibilities. All with a quietly Kafkaesque undertow of human existence being above all something of a trap, made to look bright and shiny by lots of New Wave verve – in the same way as in so many other films of Mimica, stylistic abstractions ranging from almost abstract sets to offbeat styles of animation defy common notions of realism as what we see when we look out of the window. Reality is what we see when we dream – while our daily life… who knows.

Olaf Möller