The Poetics of Concealment: Oroslan

The article examines Oroslan (2019), the recent feature film by Slovenian director Matjaž Ivanišin, whose oeuvre encompasses both documentary and fiction films, yet is at its most intriguing when the two representational modes intersect. One such felicitous hybrid is Oroslan, a film that, through consistent cloaking and visual disguising and by withholding crucial narrative information, manages to engender the conditions for a unique filmic experience. Its audience, as this essay argues, must actively think and work to interconnect various pieces of data, anecdotes, and storytelling, so as to form a legible narrative. Distancing, disguising, delaying: the article attempts to demonstrate that these are the three central manoeuvres of Ivanišin’s aesthetics and poetics of concealment.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!