Brossa

One of the hundred film scripts never realised that Christian Janicot collected in his Anthologie du Cinéma Invisible (see alongside), was Foc al Cantir (Fire in the Jug) from 1948, by the Catalan poet Joan Brossa. Digna Sinke became fascinated by this experimental work and pored over the world of Brossa. The avant-gardist script of Foc al Cantir was written more or less clandestinely under the dictatorship of Franco, just after the Second World War. Brossa himself can no longer answer the question of why the film was never made: he died in 1998. His friends and his work had to provide the answer. In Brossa’s world, there were no precise boundaries between the various art forms. He was poet, visual artist and conjuror. He was convinced that everything can adopt another form: if you turn the letter A upside down, you see a goat’s head. The transformation of things always fascinated him; that’s why he loved both juggling and film. He regarded the illusion offered to him by art as a necessary precondition for life. Brossa is not just an artist’s portrait, but a quest to the value of friendship, art and mortality. (SdH)