Not Even Once (2016, HD Video, 2'44'')
Language: Croatian (English subtitles)
A Poetical Digital Story by Tina Bikic
Credits
Filmed, Written, Narrated, Directed and Edited by Tina Bikic
Music
The Girl from Ipanema (cover), performed by Tina Bikic
Space
Filmed at various locations, Island Korčula, Pelješac Peninsula, Croatia
Production
Korčula Cross Media & Pelješac Youth Academy, Croatia
NOT EVEN ONCE
ABOUT
2.1 Personal cinema and authenticity in storytelling
2.6 Narrator’s voice as a new character in the story
2.7 Spaces as narrative agents
3.2 Solo authorship in PDS as artistic position
About
Not Even Once is a poetic reflection created as part of the artist's research into the social and artistic potential of shared spaces, and the shifting relationship between margin and center. Its inspiration lies in the place of her childhood, which has always been both periphery and center: familiar, yet alienated; intimate, yet foreign in her attempt to belong. It reimagines how we might live differently within these spaces, seeing them not only as geographies, but also as personal encounters through which we recreate our ways of belonging.
Through film, storytelling, and memory, Not Even Once meditates on belonging and social expectations. What begins as a personal confession expands into a reflection on how memory is reconstructed through image, voice and sound. The poetic narrative interweaves a short autobiographical element with the visual of architecture of an isolated peninsula. Colored by longing, it sings with melancholy: in all the languages of the world, we are equally lonely.
Process and Methods
This work was created during a residency, where the process did not begin with writing, but with an affective response to architecture and space. This reversed methodology, first absorbing images, then writing, enabled me to experiment with how space resonates with memory. I chose to film video footage and photographs in a cold palette of blue tones, through which I expressed my own sense of distance and melancholy, in contrast to the warm tones in which the peninsula is usually depicted in collective memory.
The film is constructed through a combination of photographs and static shots, a choice inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Such a structure allowed me to create a sense of temporal flow through narration and sound. The images of the island have no direct connection to the story itself, except in how the space affectively resonated in me, evoking a return to personal memories. In this way, memory is reconstructed in a new cinematic space, where narrative and images do not serve as illustrations of one another.
I assume the roles of writer, narrator, cinematographer, editor, and singer, emphasizing a conscious act of creating my own artistic space of belonging. With my own voice I shape the narrative, without mixing it with existing environmental sounds, an artistic decision through which I intensify the theme of solitude. By singing at the beginning and end of the film, I introduce an atmosphere in which I sing it into being, coloring it and reshaping it once again, closer to the reality I had imagined. Remembering everything in blue, everything in blue.
Reflection and Context
In creating Not Even Once, I realized how poetical approach to digital storytelling can serve both as a method and as a form: a way of transforming personal memory into an imaginative shared space. My memories, woven into the architecture of a familiar place, are not only visual. They also carry ingrained, often impenetrable attitudes, opinions, and roles of the peninsula, a place that is not only geographically isolated, but historically closed toward the new and the different.
The irony of the title Not Even Once reflects the social expectations that are often imposed on us, as well as my personal resistance to them. At the center of the work is a memory that encompasses a broader context of the female role and self-realization, imagined as complete only within community, marriage, and parenthood. A woman’s identity, though multilayered and changeable, is thus imagined under one strict condition: to be with someone. The solitary and isolated island did not allow her otherwise.
Taking on multiple roles in the process of creating this artistic work became for me an act of seeking completeness through art, but also an act of resistance to entrenched attitudes. This work is therefore a sociological critique, where I explore the female role as a multitude of dimensions while opening the breadth of the peninsula's architecture through artistic creation. To find myself in there, to make it briefly my own, to belong.
Screenings
2018 Unseen, Mini Film Festival, Cavtat, Croatia
2016 Artist in Residency within program: DigitalExchangeCroatia01
Life is slow on the peninsula. I live on the internet.
-EXCERPT FROM NOT EVEN ONCE
Not Even Once
Written and Narrated by Tina Bikic
When my grandmother was dying I showed her a photo of my ex boyfriend and lied I am getting married. When she saw a picture she proudly exclaimed: Damn girl, you are so lucky! In 2014 my grandmother has died, in 2015 my relationship was over.
