Pottery-making at Kaluđerovac in Lika, Croatia 1990 RJC film1 скачать в хорошем качестве

Pottery-making at Kaluđerovac in Lika, Croatia 1990 RJC film1

This film was made in the year 1990, just before the wars of 1991-5, when Franjo Arbanas of Kaluđerovac was the last practicing potter in a region where scores, or even hundreds of potters had been active a century earlier. In addition to Franjo, a number of other former potters in the area, including Mate Crnković at Kaluđerovac and Grga Župan at Oteš, on the other side of the Lika river, were also interviewed and persuaded to demonstrate their working methods. This led to the revelation that, although the pots made on either side of the Lika river were similar, both the form of hand-wheel and techniques of forming differed somewhat, suggesting that they may have had different origins. At Kaluđerovac the form of wheel used was non-composite, made from quartered pear-wood and sitting on a pivot set in a wooden base. The rotational qualities of this wheel were good, allowing it to be used for throwing, which is how small pots were made, or ‘coil-throwing’ for the majority of medium-sized and larger pots. The variety of pots produced was traditionally rather larger than anywhere except in Central Bosnia, perhaps reflecting the diverse customer base supplied by the Lika potters who travelled west into Bosnia, south and south-east to Dalmatia and northwards towards Karlovac, Zagreb and the Slovenian border. At the time of filming the pottery made by Franjo Arbanas, assisted by his wife Ana, was tempered with a relatively low proportion of ground calcite and fired in a single-chambered kiln. Earlier, well within the working lifetime of Franjo, this had been the only location of hand-wheel potters in former-Yugoslavia where glazed-wares were produced on a regular basis and, although the practice had been abandoned by the time of this filming, a mill for grinding the lead oxide used as glaze material was still present in one of the barns, along with another (seen in working mode in the film) for grinding calcite. Thus, the potters of Lika produced at least two fabrics – both with variants based on proportions of inclusions - one calcite-tempered for wares such as bread-ovens and jar-shaped cooking jars intended for use on the hearth, another sand-tempered for storage and food preparation vessels. The film shows pottery-making practiced in the context of subsistence farming economy, with its farm animals, strip fields and plum orchards, as well as a visiting chair-maker from elsewhere in Lika who sought overnight shelter as part of a reciprocal system between travelling craftsmen. Franjo Arbanas died as the last potter of Lika soon after the 1991-5 war and his wife survived him by only a few years, by which time his house had been pulled down and kiln destroyed, leaving no trace of the craft activity that had played such a dominant role in village life and the rural economy of Lika for three centuries or more.