Pottery-making at Veli Iž, nr. Zadar in North Dalmatia, Croatia 1988-90led Item

This film shows traditional potters on the island of Iž, near the city of Zadar in North Dalmatia, where there were still six active, resident potters working in the late 1980s and early '90s. All of the potters then active, who ranged in age from mid-60s to early 80s, carried on working partly out of habit and partly in order to supplement their pensions and other income derived from fishing, grapes and olives. The pots they produced, including cooking pots for the open fire but principally portable bread-ovens, were made with clay derived from a mainland source which by the 1980s had replaced a less-accessible source on the island. The clay was then mixed by foot with calcite found on the island which was crushed to a coarse powder by hammering and further reduced by grinding in a rotary quernstone mill. The pots were then made on hand-wheels set in stone bases, exclusively using ring-building and scraping techniques, and fired in bonfires fuelled with olive clippings and residual brushwood from animal fodder. After firing, most were sold by order to individual customers on the mainland but formerly, until at least the 1960s, the potters travelled by boat along the Dalmatian coast to sell or exchange their pots for grain and other basic foodstuffs. Pottery-making was probably established on the island in the 17th or 18th century by migrants from Ottoman parts of mainland Dalmatia, but persisted as an activity bringing economic gain to an island otherwise lacking means of subsistence other than fishing and subsistence farming based on olives, vines and small-scale stock husbandry. Before the second world war several dozen potters were active in a diverse economic system within which some worked alone, some in groups, while others were supplied with clay by bigger operators and produced unfired pots for them on a piece-rate system. The key to success in the pottery business was boat ownership, which was not universal but was, of course, a prerequisite for effective trade with other islands and the mainland. By the time this film was made all the potters worked individually or, in the case of Libero Sutlović & Marijan Sutlović, as a pair of brothers, and the daily arrival of a ferry meant that boat ownership, whilst still advantageous, was no longer essential for the limited continuing trade. The maker of this film, having first visited the potters there in 1984, began his pottery education on Iž and, with Predrag Petrović, a teacher from Zagreb who returned to the roots of his maternal grandfather every Summer, learnt from the nine practicing and former potters there in 1987. The potters active at the time were Libero Sutlović, Marijan Sutlović 'Jutrovic', Ivan Sutlović 'Gazda' (helped by his son, Drage), Ivan Vlahov, Romano Vlahov & Romano Vlahov (II), while retired potters also present were Blaž Sutlović, Mate Sutlović & Ivan Kuzmić. In 1988 Sasha Franklin and a crew of film makers from Northumbria University in Newcastle filmed there using 16mm and video, some of which is used here.