Drago Parovel: Retrospective that does not exist

Anica's house
Slovenia 1976 
directed by 
Drago Parovel 
screenplay 
Drago Parovel
cinematography
Mile de Gleria
music
Drago Parovel in Iztok Jurančič (tudi poje)
editing
Drago Parovel
casts
Olga Kacjan
production
AGRFT, študijsko leto 1975/76
running time
13' 
Tv series (selection)

Conversations in Bed
radio play (premiere)

To find Drago Parovel, a man who in 1976 created the most beautiful Slovenian short film, Aničina hiša (Anica's House), one needs a really detailed map. 15 years ago, when the best Academy's films were screened in Kinoteka, I had not found him. That screening was in general somehow sad, as it was "live" that we realised that authors of the best films are gone. We knew that Žarko Lužnik and Borut Blažič were deceased, and some thought the same for Parovel. There were only a few that still knew him and each had its own story about Parovel's disappearance: that he had left the Academy and had vanished, that he had been kicked out of school because he had made the halls a mess with his dirty shoes, that he had gone to a farm and had not wanted to see anybody anymore, that he might no longer exist.

Now he has been incidentally found by Bratko Bibič, who recognised him in a master that was furnishing his house with stone and wood. On the eve of the meeting with Parovel in Izola, a programme will be organised at Labor, where visitors will be able to admire films as well as Parovel's mason's creation, while Silvan’s Cine School will present, with the help of Drago and his friends, a retrospective of Parovel's works that do not exist. Better said, a retrospective of his path, which was a lot less film-like than one would expect after the miraculous beginning, but no less picturesque, worth of the model Don Quixote. Although some chapters will reveal his visionary meditations on film and television (some fragments are preserved), a general feeling prevailed that a film as Parovel sees it is impossible to realise. Along came also life philosophy that there is no need to realise it, as it already exists in collective consciousness.

But still, when he speaks to you, a wish can be heard, or at least a possibility, that something more may one day be filmed: „My idea is the following: things must be simple, worldly and at the same time have their own dramaturgy. This is no longer dramaturgy: what's going on with the wealthy and the beautiful‘, it is the dramaturgy of the opposition that is topical now; for example fight for planet Earth, for equality, against religions, multinational companies, against all this shit. Dramaturgy can emerge, when an ordinary man sends to hell everything that they keep twiddling to us every day and demonstrates that he has his own thoughts, that he is not that stupid, that bad, that subordinate – but that from a free angle he can see everything that reaches him. It is there that new world opens. A film should also be a reflection of this. “

And so in the host of his houses of stone the only one that is finished in a film way is Anica's House. In his first film he had managed to accomplish what he later felt was unreachable: in purely cinematic language, as he had admired at David Lean, he stepped behind the eyelids, to the other side of the eyes, into the pure images of consciousness that in a dream-like manner roll in simple and perfect dramaturgy that cannot be reached later on with creative intention. He had not stepped in just any eyes – the eyes were the eyes of Olga Kacjan, in which everybody wanted to step at the time. „I'm not interested in technology of the virtual, as it will never reach the things that one has in his mind. “