The Disintegration of Absolute Meaning through the Event of Sense: Vlado Škafar, A Girl and a Tree

The paper discusses Vlado Škafar’s fourth feature, which is difficult to define, for it opens up a new space in the indeterminacy between the cinematic apparatuses of fiction and documentary films. Proceeding from an analysis of the basic formal emphases of Škafar’s homage to women who have deeply marked his perception of the world, it examines the film’s close connection with Joni Zakonjšek’s paintings and the philosophical horizon of Jean-Luc Nancy’s film theory. We thus detect in the film one of the closest connections between representing the search for the sense of the world and the reflection on one’s responsibility in it. We define Škafar’s examination of the possibility of depicting the real, live presence of a human being in its passing to a purely symbolic image and the potential to create an abstract field of narration from tangible concrete substances as a poem about love and at the same time an essay on cinema on the edge between documentary realism and metaphysical meditation. This mode of existence beyond fiction and documentary is established as a unique form of experiential film that again and again offers the experience of one’s responsibility to the sense of the world.

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