A durable formula.
Naked Island/Goli Otok
Tiha K. Gudac, 2014, Croatia
genre: personal
So many personal documentaries are not primarily, in the first instance, about the filmmaker. Rather the filmmaker explores a subject close to her or him: a family member or a possession. Naked Island fits this pattern, in which director Tiha K. Gudac investigates the history of her grandfather, who was punished in a labor camp on charges of political dissidence. She unconvers specifics about his incarceration but also the effect it had on him, his family, and his friends afterward. The documentary presents this investigation implicitly as an act of Croatia’s national reonciliation with its Yugoslav past, something that the break of independence and post-communism has both allowed and delayed.
Like many such investigations, this one turns back on herself. Her act of making the documentary brings to light her own emotional conflict with her family. It’s not so much as the broader historical question gets elided by the personal, but that there is a complimentarity, or at least the possibility of complimentarity between the historical trauma of the past and the personal experience of the present.
I sense that this approach is a common underpinning to personal docs, by giving both a narrative thrust to the film and by layering thematic ideas.