Andrej Zdravic (1952), received his education in Ljubljana, Algiers and the USA. He began filmmaking in 1973, inspired by music, and studied film and sound at State University of New York/Buffalo (MA, 1980). He has created over 27 independent films and soundtracks which were featured in more than 100 one-man shows in the USA and Europe and retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris. He established a video department at the Exploratorium - Museum of Science and Art in San Francisco and authored an original video installation concept Time Horizon, a permanent exhibit in several museums and featured at World EXPO '98 in Lisbon. Currently, he is working on a new installation - Ocean Lava - for the Venice Biennial '99.
Zdravic is the recipient of several grants and awards - NEA, CAPS (USA), Film Fund and the Preseren Fund (Slovenia) and has lectured on filmmaking at various US universities. He works and lives in the USA and Slovenia.
One of my earliest films, WATERBED, shot on the Niagara River rapids, holds the basic premise of all my endeavors: to infuse the viewer with a life force, a shot of energy that would enter the bones and whirl up the spirits!
"[WATERBED] has sensuous, richly interpreted images of water rhythmically integrated." - Buffalo Evening News
1974, 16mm, color/so, 5.5m, $30
Filmed at the Ljubljana Clinical Center, Yugoslavia.
PHENIX is dedicated to my father Franjo, a plastic surgeon and holistic healer, because through him a new world of beauty and meaning opened up for me.
"I have never seen any of Zdravic's work before, but what I saw last Wednesday left me so intrigued that I am anxiously looking forward to seeing more of his work. I saw part of his surgery room film, shot in Yugoslavia; it has an extraordinary visual and emotional power." - Jonas Mekas, Anthology Film Archives
"As its title suggests, PHENIX expresses a commitment to life, to a reborn physicality. Zdravic engages the viewer of PHENIX in a transcendent journey from the physical to the metaphysical, from the horrific to the sublime." - Bruce Jenkins, Media Study, Buffalo
1975, 16mm, color/magnetic sound, 14m, $75
"BREATH consists of nothing more than shots of a newspaper blowing in the wind of empty New York streets. But Zdravic doesn't treat this subject with the wispy lyricism of Brakhage or Marie Menken. The newpaper is just a newspaper - a 'found object' a la Duchamp. The soundtrack, as in all Zdravic 's films, was recorded on the spot - its on/off click as each shot is taken making for musique concrete accompaniment." - David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
"What is most striking about Zdravic's work right now is a vivid sense of how the frame of the screen traps - and thus compresses and heightens - the energy of movement." - Amy Taubin, The Soho Weekly News
1976, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $40
The sound was recorded by Rob Yeo and mixed by Andrej Zdravic.
CARBON ARC is a document of a light sculpture performed in Buffalo, NY (June 1975) by Joe Panone. Three powerful carbon arc beams shoot into the night sky, smoke from the power generators mingles with moths in a frantic dance. Here and there, a person's face emerges from the dark.
1976, 16mm, b&w/so, 9m, $40
SUNHOPSOON was the name of a now-defunct vegetable store in New York's Chinatown. The rhythm of the words fit perfectly with my film.
SUNHOPSOON originates from having seen, one fine afternoon, light magically flickering on trees and bushes, realizing only later that this dance was being created by a passing freight train. I spent five months waiting and searching along the tracks for it to happen again. Persistence and activity generated the form of the film. The soundtrack is a collage of train rhythms and squeaks, but we never see the train itself.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $45
VIA SOUND is a string of vignettes from a trip to Italy and Yugoslavia. As the title implies, this film should be seen through listening. The Super 8 medium offered the exciting possibility of editing in-camera both sound and images simultaneously.
"There is a simple unpretentiousness here - a rarity in avant-garde - winning in its obviousness. With incredibly supple Super 8 sound equipment, Zdravic has found in the everyday world images of ravishing beauty that Kubrick, for all his Zeiss lenses and steadicams, can't match.
"Zdravic emerges as a talent of major proportions, and the form he has chosen to work in is once and for all snatched from its lowly 'home-movie' context. Zdravic shows that it can be a vital means of cinematic expression if intelligently used." - David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
Exhibition: 20 years of American 8mm and S8 films Retrospective, Anthology Film Archives, 1981
1978, S8mm, color/so, 24m, $75
DOM, meaning home in my native Slovenian, is my second direct-sound film, and is an amalgam of situations I have lived at various times - different rooms, buildings .... Through many moves I came to realize that "home" does not exist out there, but it is something we carry within ourselves.
Contains dramatic footage of a Broadway (NYC) building covered in icicles with ravaging fire inside the windows.
"DOM is an investigation of old buildings discovering visual wonders amid decay, with the added fillip of a sense of horror. We see no people, but Zdravic makes us sense presences. He has a keen feel for the uncanny - what French master director George Franju calls the insolite. Curious as it might seem, DOM is as unsettling as anything by Jacques Tourneur or Nicolas Roeg." - David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
1979, S8mm, color/so, 20m, $60
I sailed into Venezia on a rainy October day ... empty of people and mysterious, with water lapping at its doorsteps.
I have composed the soundtrack with sounds recorded in Venezia, and in San Francisco at the site of the Wave Organ - an acoustical sculpture built by Peter Richards.
"VENEZIA is a short film that reveals the limpid watery city and canals of Venice. Zdravic has an eye for the city's slimy green decay as a metaphor of metaphysical decadence." - Linda Gross, The Los Angeles Times
1981, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $40
A diary from a visit to Mount Vesuvius and the surrounding volcanic terrain of the Naples Bay. Some of the themes, steaming rocks, bubbling hot springs were developed later in RESTLESS.
"Quietly steaming, one feels the awesome underground forces within this slumbering giant." - Carmen Vigil, San Francisco Cinematheque
1981, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $30
Filmed in the cemetery of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, on November 1st - All Saint's Day, when the living pay tribute to the dead by striking a candle and observing a moment of silence.
"VSI SVETI is incandescently beautiful. The lights sparkling at the graveyard ceremony appear to be millions of burnished stars evoking the magic and mystery of ceremonies throughout the ages. The film's serenity provides its own comfort for the souls of the living as well as for their dead." - Linda Gross, The Los Angeles Times
1981, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $30
ANASTOMOSIS is a film about the human hand, as a magnificent instrument which not only assists us in everyday life, but also essentially determines our careers, our play, and our relation to the world.
ANASTOMOSIS weaves the lives of five people and the delicate reconstructive work of the microsurgeon into an accessible, aesthetically pleasing and slightly humorous experience.
"Like those paintings which record major events in the history of medicine, Andrej Zdravic's ANASTOMOSIS also celebrates an intervention. Here we see imagination reconstitute nature through technology. The process is complicated: cruel yet caring, beautiful and grotesque. The result - a hand, let us say, whose missing thumb is now a toe - is at one and the same time magnificent in its recovered grace and monstrous in its form. Looking at such an image, we must question all 'natural' sentiment and aesthetic givens, for Zdravic's film has shown us the deeper beauties of imperfection." - Dick Blau, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
1982, 16mm, color/so, 57m, $175
VHS Sale: $75 Home; $125 Other
Kres is a sparkling film of a fire that my father built on the river bank of Soca in Yugoslavia some years ago. It is an intimate film, celebrating our reunion and the magic of the fire. The flames are dancing in the night and radiant faces glow around them. A moment of joy and peace. The song is woven with natural sounds and a digital sample of my voice.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 5.5m, $40
AIRBORNE is an energetic journey set in the cockpit of the MD-82 jet airliner. It is a distillation of some 70 flights (120 hours) with my friend Captain Ipavec who flies for Adria Airways, a Ljubljana-based airline. The axis of the film is the relationship between the outside world - Yugoslavia and Western Europe - as framed by the cockpit windows, and the complex digital instrumentation that assists the aircraft guidance. The film takes the viewer through swift changes in flight and swishes through many weather conditions - wintery nights, blue heights, fog, rain and storm. ... The approaching landing strips at night reveal mysterious lights and configurations reminiscent of the cross. The soundtrack is an integral part of the visual rhythm and consists of electronically processed cockpit signals, pilot communications and such.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $40
Iceland, where this film was shot in 1985, is in a state of continuing creation which manifests itself in hot springs, steam eruptions and geysers. It is a magical land of vast expanses, strange rock formations, countless rivers, cascades and glaciers. Its skies are laden with moisture and its Northern latitude accounts for seemingly endless (spring) days marked by eerie twilights. This windswept and desolate earth paradoxically vents great heat and energy from its inner core. RESTLESS evokes some of the power of this young Earth.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $45
OCEAN BEAT is a vehicle for a personal exploration of the oceanic realm, of the music and philosophy that arise from the protagonism of ocean and coast, ocean and living organisms - plants, animals and man. Unburdened by the spoken word, the elemental power of OCEAN BEAT takes the viewer back to the boundless reaches of the inner world, a world of intuition and cellular intelligence. ... Filmed from 1980 to 1990 on California's Northern and Central coasts, in Alaska's Glacier Bay and on Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park. "Zdravic 's feature-length OCEAN BEAT fairly seethes with the intensity of his feelings. ... It takes up Zdravic 's ongoing fascination with the ocean as subject, both sui generis and as an unfettered metaphoric vehicle of artistic exploration. ... No one mood dominates, no one part of the landscape; there is no overall 'message,' but the power and variety of the sea itself, as a kind of conduit for the spirit's own workings." - Calvin Ahlgren, San Francisco Chronicle
"Zdravic , of course, has a poetic soul ... where there is no room for the so-called documentary style which tries to describe nature and its metamorphoses." - Bojan Stih, The Miraculous Games of Nature, Dnevnik, Ljubljana
1990, 16mm, color/so, 60m, $175
Production, script, camera, editing, sound recording and composition by Andrej Zdravic.
Through the liquid lens of crystalline water we perceive, perhaps for the first time, the magical underwater world of turquoise volumes, flying bubbles, pulsating sun membranes, dancing stones .... Four years in the making, RIVERGLASS is not a documentary about the river Socca. It is a poetic river ballet to the music of natural sounds.
RIVERGLASS is the result of the author's everlasting fascination with the forces of movement in nature that contain universal principles of life and a great potential for a new, different kind of narrative cinema. Socca flows in the Julian Alps, Slovenia. The author devised a special tool to capture the river from unique, as yet unseen perspectives.
Awards: Preseren Fund Award, Slovenia, 1999; Grand Prix, Third Int'l Festival of New Film & Video, Split '98; Best Art Video, First Slovenian Film Festival, 1998.
Note: Contains some material used in Secrets of Socca - Time Horizon installation. - A.Z.
1997, DVD or VHS, color/so, 41m, $70 Home; $325 Other
Includes: WATERBED, BREATH, SUNHOPSOON and VENEZIA
See film descriptions above.
1974-1981, VHS, b&w/color/so, 29m, $50 Home; $100 Other
Includes: AIRBORNE, KRES and RESTLESS See film descriptions above. We are living in a very special time. We are becoming aware that our beautiful planet is a living sensitive organism in which all is interconnected. The movements of air, fire, water ... all speak of the same basic energies which permeate the cells of our very bodies - the great wisdom of nature. My films exist outside of trends. They aim to awaken a renewed sense of who we are and what our actions ought to be in our troubled world.
1987, VHS, color/so, 12m, $50 Home; $100 Other