ABOUT

I discovered Franc Kranjc, a Slovenian director who was dogged in his creation of challenging and complicating work throughout his long life, via my interest in The Slovenian School - a group of philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists, based in Ljubljana, the capital city of the small European nation. I have read that Kranjc was a troubled man. He is said to have suffered from delusional paranoia, believing at times that he didn’t even exist. He was a mysterious recluse, never married, known only by reputation - the man was essentially a ghost. He struggled to connect with people, although was known within the filmmaking community of Eastern Europe as a brilliant director, who seemed to come to life only through the stories he created.

Kranjc was passionate about dialectical argumentation and ideology critique, but he found little fame when he was alive. Hailing from Ljubljana, he often interacted with The Slovenian School. Members would say that he attended salons and screenings in disguise. While the official cause of death is unknown, it is surmised that he died of complications resulting from Coronavirus, given his age and the date of his death.

He played with the same ideas that The Slovenian School dealt with, but explored them in artistic, rather than philosophical form. The scale and dynamism of his oeuvre was only discovered upon his death, which went largely unheralded. I thought, perhaps, that his work might finally have its day in the sun, as old systems of power shift and as the forms of ideological thinking that he was challenging become exposed and - at last - understood. Perhaps we might finally be able to accept and come to terms with the truth of what he was exploring.

I was lucky enough to be granted access to some of his footage and unfinished works. I decided to dedicate time during the pandemic to piecing together this and another film with the hope to make more in the future. Would it be possible to understand the ethos and ideas Kranjc was working with? Would these rebuilt films even hold together as compelling pieces of work in their own right?

The work of The Slovenian School at large is something I am really interested in. It has reinvigorated the ideas of historical thinkers, focusing in particular on reinterpreting the writings of Karl Marx through the tradition of German idealism, specifically the work of Hegel. A key motivation is to critique ideology and to promote dialectical thinking. So much of the commercialized or ‘mainstream’ creative work on offer for consumption by global audiences today is heavily ideological, supporting and often justifying the power structures that currently exist. We largely don’t and can’t recognize ideology when we see it, so much are we inculcated with systems of thought that maintain the status quo, even if - and perhaps especially if - they are actually detrimental to us. Because of market forces, ideological work is often not only foregrounded, but also lauded. Dialectics, on the other hand, confounds ideology. It explores how phenomena aren’t ever just one thing or another. Dialectically speaking, a position or idea generates its own opposition, which it initially takes to be external to itself. The truth lies in coming to understand that this external opposition is really part of the original position itself. In this way, dialectics complicates our relationship to powers that be, particularly those obfuscated within the market system. When we understand that any given position generates its own opposition, we can no longer just blindly accept things the way they are. In Kranjc’s film Outopia, he explores how Heaven and Hell are one and the same. A frantic pursuit of a heavenly utopia can often lead to something that at first seems better, but is ultimately just as grim.

In exploring the work of this school, I quickly became interested in the implications of ideology on artistic production. This led me to questions about the capital vs audience relationship and questions about what might happen to an artist if they are focused on dialectical truth in their work, rather than on the blind acceptance of contemporary ideology. To me, audiences desire contradiction: this is the very purpose of art. Capital, on the other hand, resists it. It might incorporate aesthetic complication into the market system, but deep dialectical work that challenges the very undercurrents of the status quo sits with capital like oil does with water.

All of this raises a number of questions. Given the cost of film production, how can this kind of vital work ever get made? What happens to all this exciting and provocative content even if it does? Would audiences ever be granted the privilege of being able to watch it?

These questions led me to the work of Franc Kranjc.

But the most fascinating thing about Franc Kranjc, of course, is that he is himself a work of fiction.