By Hrvoje Turković
Crotia 1992-2007
The Infrastructures Of Documentary Cinema In Croatia Tradition
Croatia has a longstanding tradition of documentary film. As in other countries, first scenes taken in Croatia were documentary recordings of Croatian vistas made either by foreign cinematographers or by the local ones in the early 1900’s, when Croatian regions were for the most part within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Between the two world wars, when Croatia was a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, it was the documentary film – or “culture film”, as it was called – that achieved a semblance of production continuity and generic distinction, while feature films were produced very irregularly and rarely. Documentary production was mostly commissioned by state institutions, produced within subsidised institutions (as in the case of the School of National Health film section, where Sergej Gerasimov, an Ukrainian immigrant, acted as a notable director-cinematographer), or cultivated on an amateur level, by members of cinema clubs (in Zagreb, from 1928 on, where Maksimilijan Paspa was as a pronounced documentarian). During the Second World War, documentary production became programmatically stimulated by the puppet Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, constituted under the German-Italian occupation), and the trend continued in the postwar socialist Yugoslavia, when cinema became a part of planned cultural production, receiving a huge boost, almost entirely subsidised by the state. Although the majority of acclaim at the time went to feature film production, the documentary production remained the most prolific, measured both by titles produced yearly, and by the number of filmmakers involved. As in the rest of Yugoslavia, short film production in Croatia, especially in documentaries, was not only considered to be important for educational and propagandistic purposes, but also provided a semi-regular source of income for a majority of filmmakers, as well as a kind of professional and artistic training and testing ground for feature film production. During the sixties and seventies, thirty to fourty documentary films of different kinds were produced per year, and the generic documentary patterns (initiated between the world wars) became firmly established (e.g. cultural-historical presentations of regions and places; art subjects; poetic films; socio-critical films). Despite this huge variety of films labelled as “documentaries”, the leading criterion for evaluation of a documentary film’s achievement was the idea of “artistic documentary” as a distinctive type (or aspect) of documentary cinema, an idea cultivated within the filmmaking community itself, and by film critics and theorists. A number of anthological works were created in the four ensuing decades (e.g. LJUDI S NERETVE / PEOPLE FROM NERETVA, d. Obrad Gluščević, 1966; CRNE VODE / BLACK WATERS, d.: Rudolf Sremec, 1949; LJUDI NA TOČKOVIMA / PEOPLE ON WHEELS, d.: Rudolf Sremec, 1964; KLESARI / STONECUTTERS, d.: Eduard Galić, 1968; OD TRI DO 22 / FROM 3 A.M. TO 10 P.M., d.: Krešo Golik, 1966; MALA SEOSKA PRIREDBA / LITTLE VILLAGE PERFORMANCE, d.: Krsto Papić, 1971; DRUGE / FRIENDS, d.: Zoran Tadić, 1972; POVRATAK / THE RETURN, d.: Petar Krelja, 1975), and a number of filmmakers excelled as documentarians (e.g. Branko Marjanović, Obrad Gluščević, Rudolf Sremec, Branko Belan, Eduard Galić, Krešo Golik, Ante Babaja, Krsto Papić, Zoran Tadić, Petar Krelja, Branko Lentić).
The Main Outlines...
Of The Contemporary Situation (1992-2007)
The dissociation of Croatia from the Yugoslav Federation, and the establishment of the autonomous Republic of Croatia, accompanied by the problems of transition and the ensuing war over Croatia, generated a number of initial disadvantages for the culture as a whole, and specifically for the documentary film production.
There was, for one thing, a recession of documentary film production inherited from the eighties – in mid-eighties the production rate had fallen to around 10 documentary films per year (not counting documentary promo films), due to the economic crisis of the final years of Yugoslavia. [1]
The new situation was no better. Though the state cultural subsidy system survived the political and economic transition from socialism to capitalism (simply allocated now to the Ministry of Culture, instead of the previous separate institution of the Cultural Fund), it suffered heavy reductions due to the war and the postwar economic recession. The state subsidy somehow managed to maintain the prestigious feature film production on the pre-independence level, even increasing it a little (to five films per year, compared to the previous average of four films), but the support for the short film productions was heavily reduced, though it was still maintained in the first half of the nineties.
But, unhappily, the state support for documentary film production ceased almost entirely in the second half of the nineties. At that time, the recently-appointed Film Commissioner for the Ministry of Culture (filmmaker Antun Vrdoljak, previously the head of the national broadcaster, the Hrvatska radiotelevizija / Croatian Radio-Television [HRT]) believed that documentary cinema was an atavism, as the documentary production was entirely a TV affair, so he eliminated documentary as a category subsidised by the Ministry of Culture, while subventions for feature film and animation production were preserved. Still, Vrdoljak supported certain projects concerned with documentation of the national “cultural monuments” – and destruction of those monuments in wartime – primarily for archival purposes. In addition, he also supported some six documentary films that dealt with the themes he considered to be of “national importance” between 1996 and 1999.
With the political upheaval of 2000 – after the HDZ (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica / Croatian Democratic Union), which governed Croatia in the first decade of independence, lost the elections in late 1999, and the SDP (Socijalno demokratska partija / Social Democratic Party) formed the new government – documentary film was reintroduced as a category in the Ministry of Culture’s film subvention programme, with the addition of a new category of experimental film and video, which occasionally encompassed documentary-based films as well. Between 2000 and 2006, an average of 11 films per year were subsidised by the Ministry of Culture (101 film in total); and an average of about 280,000 € per year was invested into the subsidy for documentary films. This reintroduced subvention opportunity stimulated a number of small film and video production companies to tackle documentary production on a more regular basis, increasing production of ambitious documentaries unrelated to television programming.
Filmmakers’ continuous public demands to create and put into practice a new law on cinema were finally met at the end of July 2007, when a new law on audiovisual activities was passed.[2] Under this legislation, the Hrvatski audiovizualni centar / Croatian Audiovisual Center is to be instituted (a kind of a Cinema Fund, or Institute, semi-independent from the Ministry of Culture), with the mandate to take over the issues of the national cinema and subsidy distribution in 2008.
In the late nineties, the Cultural Council of the City of Zagreb began granting film subventions on a more regular basis then previously. Zagreb, being the main – at times, the only – film production centre in Croatia, considered film production to be one of the town’s cultural distinctions. The introduced subvention contributed significantly to the documentary production from 1998 on. The City of Zagreb subventions were occasionally large enough to fully fund a film, but frequently they just added support to the Ministry of Culture subsidy, enabling projects that received only partial Ministry funding to be completed. The number of documentaries that received subvention by Zagreb’s Cultural Council rose from six to eight per year between 1998 and 2001 to an average of 17 per year between 2002 and 2007.[3] Between 2000 and 2006, the Cultural Council invested around 150,000 € per year into the subvention of documentary film production, while the subvention total increased from about 3,400 € in 2000, to about 200,000 € in 2005.
Although there are very few filmmakers who haven’t done at least some documentary work, only a limited number are permanently dedicated to documentaries. Among them is Petar Krelja, a doyen of Croatian documentary cinema, and its most prolific filmmaker, having made some 200 documentaries by 2007; there are also Biljana Čakić-Veselič, Damir Čučić, Branko Ištvančić, Hrvoje Mabić, Zrinka Katarina Matijević-Veličan, Nenad Puhovski, Tomislav Žaja, Nebojša Slijepčević, and others. Some permanent documentary filmmakers have been almost exclusively affiliated with the documentary department of the HRT (like Krelja, but also “insiders” like Željko Belić, Jasmina Božinovska-Živalj, Vladimir Fulgozi, Tomislav Mršić, Ljiljana Šišmanović, Vlatka Vorkapić, Dražen Žarković, Bogdan Žižić etc). But some of the best documentaries were made by the “occasional” documentary filmmakers who comprise the most numerous category. Namely, documentary production has traditionally been an almost obligatory professional “phase” in reaching feature film production. Thus, many young filmmakers made ambitious starts in documentary filmmaking, only to abandon it upon reaching feature film production, or to return to it only rarely afterwards.
Quite different from the feature film production, where the only female director active in the observed period has been Snježana Tribuson, the short film production has been more gender-balanced in the period between 1992 and 2006. Some of the more prominent female documentary directors are Jasmina Božinovska-Živalj, Gordana Brzović, Dana Budisavljević, Biljana Čakić-Veselič, Ana Hušman, Sanja Iveković, Ljubica Janković-Lazarić, Ivona Juka, Kristina Leko, Zrinka Katarina Matijević-Veličan, Lala Raščić, Rada Šešić, Ljiljana Šišmanović, Vlatka Vorkapić, Jasna Zastavniković, and the late Jelena Rajković. They made a number of top documentary films, often recognised by festival awards.
The vast majority of all of these documentary filmmakers are based in Croatia, with only a few working abroad.
In the former Yugoslavia, the standard length of documentaries, as with short films in general, was 10-15 minutes. Until the late sixties, it was the law that a theatrical show had to contain a short film besides the featured one, the shorts forming the introductory part of a theatrical bill; 15 minutes was the maximum length that could fill the two-hour screening slot. A Constitutional Court decision at the end of the sixties dismissed this law as anti-constitutional. As a consequence, theatres in former Yugoslavia almost entirely abandoned the practice of combining short and feature films. However, short films maintained the standard length of 10-15 minutes for another decade. Eventually, due to the length of TV broadcasting slots (20-50 minutes), the general transition to video and its incomparably cheaper production process, and the lack of fixed festival requirements for length, short films, including documentaries, became of widely varying durations, but mostly between 20 and 50 minutes. Recently, inspired by the international festival, media and distribution success of Michael Moore’s feature documentaries, which initiated an international interest in feature length documentaries, some 10 feature-length documentary films were made in the new millenium (the first was NOVO, NOVO VRIJEME / CROATIA 2000 [WHO WANTS TO BE A PRESIDENT], d.: Rajko Grlić, Igor Mirković, 2001; there followed DAN POD SUNCEM / A DAY UNDER THE SUN, d.: Vlado Zrnić, Quadrum, 2001; SRETNO DIJETE / LUCKY CHILD, d.: Igor Mirković, 2003; SVE O EVI / ALL ABOUT EVA, d.: Silvestar Kolbas, 2003; PEŠČENOPOLIS, d.: Zrinka Katarina Matijević-Veličan, 2003; LORA, SVJEDOČANSTVA / LORA, TESTIMONIES, d.: Nenad Puhovski, 2004; ŠTO SA SOBOM PREKO DANA / FACING THE DAY, d.: Ivona Juka, 2005; POVRATAK MRTVOG ČOVJEKA / DEAD MAN WALKING, d.: Petar Orešković, 2006; DOBRO JUTRO / GOOD MORNING, d: Ante Babaja, 2006; DAN NEZAVISNOSTI RADIJA 101 / RADIO 101 INDEPENDENCE DAY, d.: Vinko Brešan, 2007).
The loss of regular theatrical presentation after the Constitutional Court decision has placed short films in a more marginal public position than before. Short film festivals in the country and abroad have offered the only “regular” screening opportunities, though only once or several times a year. In the former Yugoslavia, documentary films were presented at the dedicated national festival of short film in Belgrade, with a repeat showing in Zagreb. After the Croatian independence, the Dani hrvatskog filma / Days of Croatian Film were established as a national short- and medium-length film festival in 1992, where documentary films have had their own section and awards. With the recent rise of festivals in Croatia – in 2006, there have been more then 15 – the festival opportunities to present a documentary work have multiplied. Aside from the Days of Croatian Film, the ZagrebDox Film Festival, dedicated to documentaries, was founded in 2004 by Nenad Puhovski, who also heads Factum, the first independent documentary production company. Almost at the same time, although still unnoticed by media, the Liburnia Film Festival of the national documentary production was established in Ičići, near Rijeka. However, there are several international film festivals with documentary competition sections (the Motovun Film Festival, the Zagreb Film Festival, the Tabor International Short Film Festival, and the International Festival of New Film, Split).
Television became another venue of presentation for cinematic documentaries, but with an uneven editorial policy (in some periods, no non-television documentaries were broadcast). But, in the long run, the HRT has had a pretty consistent policy of buying rights to broadcast a certain number of independently-produced documentaries, which lead to a considerable number of non-television documentaries appearing on the HRT channels during the observed period. And another recent, but still limited, option is to use noncommercial venues (cinema clubs, repertory cinemas like Kino Tuškanac in Zagreb or Zlatna Vrata in Split, multimedia or general cultural centers etc.) for a single or collective presentation of documentary works.
Due to the limited presence of documentary film in public, documentary films and documentary filmmakers have been only occasionally reviewed and portrayed in a small number of newspapers and magazines, usually in the wake of some film festival. However, two Croatian film journals, Hrvatski filmski ljetopis / Croatian Cinema Chronicle and Zapis / Record have been regularly reviewing documentary films presented at film festivals and special screenings, portraying makers of documentary films, and publishing essays and studies on documentary film.
In spite of the many disadvantages of the new situation, if we take into account the selection of TV-produced documentaries that has been presented outside of television programming, plus the subsidised documentary works, and independent and personal ones produced since the nineties, the average production of filmographically tallied documentaries (by Majcen’s filmography, see footnote 2) oscillated around 30 films per year, which made the period one of the most productive in the history of Croatian documentary film.
[1] The filmographic tallying of documentary film has not been consistent in different periods, nor equally exhaustive (or selective). It was performed with differing criteria, so the numbers mentioned throughout this text have to be taken with a measure of scepticism, as a gross approximation only. The biggest problem has recently been presented by the inclusion of TV programmes among independent documentaries – filmographic tallying of the HRT-produced documentaries has depended on an inconsistently selective participation of TV documentary programmes in festivals and special non-TV screenings, with their numbers wildly oscillating from year to year. My counts rely on the Filmografija jugoslovenskog filma (Filmography of Yugoslav Film; Beograd: Institut za film) for productions before 1985, and on Vjekoslav Majcen’s filmography in H. Turković, V. Majcen, Hrvatska kinematografija (Croatian Cinema, Zagreb: Ministarstvo kulture, Hrvatski filmski savez, 2003) for the filmography between 1991 and 2002. Other filmographic data was taken from the catalogues of the national festival of short films – Days of Croatian Film (Dani hrvatskog filma). Counts of films produced within individual production companies are based on their own databases available on the Internet. Another source of information about the films mentioned in this overview can be found in the database of www.film.hr (pages on documentary film production – http://www.film.hr/bazafilm_filmlistkategorija.php?katx=6&PHPSESSID=dfbba6427f87ea8dcd9b64f1594fc518, in Croatian language; and biographies and filmographies of individual filmmakers can be found by the search engine ‘POTRAŽI OSOBU’ at the same site).
[2] (Zakon o audiovizualnim djelatnostima, http://www.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeno/2007/2398.htm)
[3] In total, there were 126 subsidised films between 1998 and 2007, although more than half of those were still in production in August 2007, at the time this text was finalised.
Individual Production Sources (1992-2007)
Although the independent documentary film production during the non-subvention period after 1992 had been reduced, it has not stopped entirely.
At first, the decision to eliminate the category of documentary film from the state subvention roster seemed to be followed by an actual confirmation of the belief that documentary production would be entirely overtaken by television. The HRT, state-controlled at the time, and the only TV station to broadcast nationally, did actually take over the main thrust of documentary production in the second half of the nineties. It had a huge documentary broadcasting output of a very varied nature and origin,[4] with much imported programming. But, actually, an established production principle within the Croatian Television [5] was to cultivate a “pure documentary” genre (i.e. single, non-serial works in the “artistic documentary” mode). Individual documentary ideas, both by the established filmmakers and the upcoming ones, were commissioned, and “auteur” works produced. In the second half of the nineties, with no competition from the film industry, the documentaries produced by the HRT became quite important in the cinema culture. Most filmmakers inclined to documentary work turned to the HRT during this period of a lack of public subventions. As registered in Majcen’s filmography, the HRT documentaries comprise more than half of the total annual documentary production between 1992 and 2000. The HRT documentaries were not only predominant in quantity, but also excelled in quality, and were frequently awarded at the Days of Croatian Film, e.g. NA SPOREDNOM KOLOSIJEKU / AT THE RAILWAY SIDING, d.: Petar Kelja, 1992); HODNIK / THE CORRIDOR, d.: Vinko Brešan, 1994; MIRILA; d.: Vlado Zrnić, 1997; PLAŠITELJ KORMORANA / THE CORMORANT SCARECROW, d.: Branko Ištvančić, 1998; ŠALTER / THE COUNTER, d.: Dražen Žarković, 2001; BIL JIDNON / ONCE UPON A TIME, d.: Hrvoje Hribar, 2002. Apart from an extensive in-house production, the HRT has regularly presented the leading international documentary series.
At the end of the nineties and in the first years of the 2000’s, two new national stations (Nova TV and RTL Croatia) appeared alongside a number of regional stations, but they mostly eschewed having their own documentary production. Occasionally, they have produced a few autonomous documentary reportages, although they have mostly broadcast imported documentary programmes.
But, in spite of the state subvention absence in the second half of the nineties, some cinema-based production sources came to prominence during this period, compensating for it, to a point. Most have been independent of TV production, but some were established in cooperation with the HRT.
One notable production resource during the nineties was the documentary output of the national film school, the Akademija dramske umjetnosti / Academy of Dramatic Art. The Film Department was established at the then-Academy of Theatrical Art in 1967. In the nineties, some four to six documentary films have been produced per year, with some eight documentary etudes per year within the Film Direction curriculum. Better student works were occasionally sent to the national and international festivals. Some of these films were awarded, and some gained recognition (e.g. NEBO POD OSIJEKOM / THE SKY BELOW OSIJEK, d.: Zvonimir Jurić, 1996; IME MAJKE: NARANČA / MOTHER’S NAME: ORANGE, d.: Jasna Zastavniković, 1996; METROPOLA / METROPOLIS, d.: Tomislav Rukavina, Stanislav Tomić, Dalibor Matanić, DVOBOJ / DUEL, d.: Zrinka Katarina Matijević-Veličan, 1999; UVOZNE VRANE / IMPORTED CROWS, d.: Goran Dević, 2004; UBIL BUM TE / I WILL KILL YOU!, d.: Nikola Strašek, 2007).
Now, the regular influx of film students into television production and the cinema industry implied that the idea of the “art documentary” which was cultivated within the study would be pressed upon television programming, and also on film producers even in the time of the lack of the state support. Young film graduates eventually became the main creators of prominent documentary films within the newly established, documentary-oriented independent production companies, as well as within the HRT documentary production.
Actually, the most important fresh source of documentary production in the late nineties and the early 2000’s was Factum, a company specialised in documentary production. Nenad Puhovski, a documentary filmmaker and a professor at the Academy of Dramatic Art, established it in 1996, producing its first film in 1998. This completely independent company was initially based on the subventions of the Open Society Institute Croatia and the Soros Documentary Fund, and, occasionally, on other funding from abroad. From the outset, it was oriented toward committed, socially and politically critical (“opposition”) and human-rights-promoting films, while continuing the “art documentary”, “auteuristic” line of documentary filmmaking, often lacking any trace of an overt political stance. Factum gave opportunities not only to talented film students to continue their documentary work outside the Academy, but also attracted filmmakers from other venues to do documentary work, cooperating with a high percentage of female directors.[6] The films immediately gained recognition at the Days of Croatian Film (e.g. PITKA VODA I SLOBODA III / DRINKING WATER AND FREEDOM III, d.: Rajko Grlić, 1999; BAG, d.: Stanislav Tomić, Dalibor Matanić, Tomislav Rukavina, 1999; GODINE HRĐE / THE YEARS OF RUST, d.: Andrej Korovljev, 2000; DEČKO KOJEM SE ŽURILO / THE BOY WHO RUSHED, d.: Biljana Čakić-Veselič, 2001; ŽIVOT NA SVJEŽEM ZRAKU / LIFE IN FRESH AIR, d.: Danko Volarić, 2002; SVE O EVI / ALL ABOUT EVA; SVE PET / EVERYTHING’S FINE, d.: Dana Budisavljević, 2003). Some of them raised strong political controversies ( GRAHAM I JA / GRAHAM AND ME, d.: Nenad Puhovski, 1998; OLUJA NAD KRAJINOM / OPERATION STORM, d.: Božidar Knežević, 2001; PAVILJON 22 / PAVILLON 22, d.: Nenad Puhovski, 2002; LORA, SVJEDOČANSTVA / LORA, TESTIMONIES). The Factum films also participated in more than 70 festivals around the world by 2006. Factum also initiated and currently runs the well-conceived, excellently-attended international documentary film festival ZagrebDox, which started in 2004.
The most innovative documentary project was conceived by Fade In, a, to quote the company’s website, “non-profit organisation functioning as a production studio”. It was established by the young filmmakers Hrvoje Mabić and Nebojša Slijepčević in 2000. By mid-2007, they and some other Academy graduates and students (mostly the directors Robert Orhel and Miroslav Sikavica), as well as cinematographers Almir Fakić, Goran Legović and Jasenko Rasol, in cooperation with a number of researchers, have produced more then 90 documentary films in a series called DIREKT / DIRECT. The series was made under contract with the HRT, which broadcast their films monthly. The series was conceived as presentation of young people’s testimonies on a variety of topics of everyday relevance, using a direct cinema approach, usually featuring three separate interview subjects dealing with the same topic in a particular film. Featuring an impressive visual and editing style, and achieving highly spontaneous testimonies, the films became a model of the highest production standard for the TV documentary series, in spite of the severe production restrictions enforced by the contract. Fade In won several awards for some of their annual productions, and the individual films from the series were presented at domestic and foreign film festivals. They also produced around 13 documentary films apart from the series, among them some educational and experimental works.
As early as the sixties it was quite an easy thing to launch a new production company in order to use the state subsidy for film that passed the evaluation process, and the transition situation in the nineties gave impetus to quite a number of individuals to launch their own companies, sometimes just to make one or two films. Some of these new companies produced documentary films as well. Most of these companies were short-lived, and the frequency of appearance and disappearance of small film and video companies was quite high in the nineties. Gral Film was the only company that started out in 1993 and kept producing documentaries on an almost yearly basis during the nineties and onwards, for a total of 22 films between 1993 and early 2007, twelve of which were directed by the company owner and producer, Tomislav Žaja.
However, the renewed subvention situation gave new impetus to several existing companies and “production societies” to enter a regular documentary production, among them the Hrvatski filmski Savez / Croatian Film Clubs’ Association (HFS), which already had a special position in the Croatian cinema, having been founded in 1956. As an association of amateur film clubs, it had quite a massive production of around 120 short films per year in the nineties and onwards. The HFS stimulated, monitored and archived the production of its members and co-organized yearly reviews of amateur filmmaking. Actually, documentary was a predominant category of films made within film clubs. This pointed to a vast but neglected field of documentary production, mostly below professional standard, but occasionally with remarkable achievements, entering a competition even of non-amateur festivals, and with valuable documentation coverage. After the reentry of the state subvention for documentary and experimental cinema, HFS started its own professionally profiled production of experimental and documentary films. Between 2000 and the summer of 2007, some 20 documentary films, plus a number of films produced under the category of experimental film but with an emphasized documentary profile, have been produced.[7]
Connected with the fuzzy boundary between experimental and documentary film is a rich video-art production, sometimes connected with the cinema scene (experimental film), and sometimes with the art scene. Actually, many video art works can be considered a substantial contribution to the documentary genre and in many cases filmmakers produced them themselves (e.g. films by Ana Hušman, Milan Bukovac, Lala Raščić, Tina Gverović, Vedran Šamanović, Renata Poljak).
Such marginal and institutionally multi-regulated and entirely non-regulated status of documentary production and public presentation has obviously stimulated wildly various ways of survival of this genre in Croatia.
[4] E.g. 820 hours of broadcast in 1996, according to the Godišnjak HRT 1996 (HRT Annual 1996), Hrvatska radiotelevizija, Zagreb 1997.
[5] Established before Croatia's independence, when the HRT was trading under the name “TV Zagreb”.
[6] After the first production in 1998 (GRAHAM I JA / GRAHAM AND ME, directed by Puhovski himself), eleven films were made in 1999. In the following years, they continued with an average output of slightly more than five films per year between 1999 and 2006, for a total of 44 titles.
[7] E.g. experimental/documentary works by Damir Čučić, Ivan Faktor, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Tomislav Gotovac, Zdravko Mustać, Željko Radivoj, Vedran. Šamanović etc.; cf. HFS’s production website: http://www.hfs.hr/hfs/trazi1_e.asp?qq=documentary&qtip=6&Image27.x=88&Image27.y=7.
Conceptual and Thematic Profiles
The complex conditions of the recent Croatian documentary production have led to the appearance of an intriguing variety of thematic and stylistic choices. But this constant variety has not precluded periodic thematic and stylistic trends.
One of the most pervasive and permanent documentary topics since the nineties has been the war in Croatia and neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina of the early 1990’s. A full half of all the tallied documentaries in 1992 dealt with war topics, and in virtually every following year there have been a number of documentaries dealing with war-related issues. As the war generated a general psychosocial trauma in the population, it was felt that filmmakers almost had a duty to deal with those issues. Many of the documentaries produced by the HRT, but also by all other producers, including amateurs, were propagandistically intoned, exclusively describing the atrocities committed by the Serbian and Yugoslav rebels and aggressors (ŠEST SEKUNDI ZA ŽIVOT / SIX SECONDS FOR LIFE, d.: Branko Schmidt, 1992; or the amateur film VRIJEME RATA / TIME OF WAR, d.: Mladen Krstanović, 1992), giving testimonies on the destructive consequences of the war (NECROPOLIS CROATICA, d.: Mladen Lučić and Pavle Vranjican, 1993; SPALJENA ZEMLJA / SCORCHED EARTH, d.: Pavle Vranjican, 1993), praising the constitution of the Croatian army and the courage of the Croatian defenders (HRVATSKA PUŠKA NA HRVATSKOM RAMENU / CROATIAN RIFLES ON CROATIAN SHOULDERS, d.: Mladen Trnski, 1993) and giving praise to Croatian wartime leaders (the first Croatian president, Franjo Tuđman, in DR. FRANJO TUĐMAN: IMAMO HRVATSKU, I-II / DR. FRANJO TUĐMAN: WE HAVE CROATIA, PARTS I-II, d.: Obrad Kosovac, 1992, or the head of the Army, Janko Bobetko, in SUDBINE: JANKO BOBETKO / DESTINIES: JANKO BOBETKO, d.: Miroslav Mikuljan, 1992).
However, certain films managed to capture with empathy an individual, personal, but at the same time universal side of the distressing situation. There were some good documentaries that described a non-combat – “free time” – concerns of Croatian soldiers on the frontline (HOTEL SUNJA / THE SUNJA HOTEL, d.: Ivan Salaj, 1992), gave an impressionistic, poetic overview of both the nice and the gruesome sides of the country during the war (MOZART 1991, d.: Krasimir Gančev, 1992), or dealt with the subject matter more experimentally (DAS LIED IST AUS, d.: Ivan Faktor, 2002, about the war situation in Osijek). There was also a number of highly suggestive films dealing with the traumatic situation of war refugees, but also pointing out personal solutions that some of them came up with (such as a number of films by Petar Krelja – NA SPOREDNOM KOLOSIJEKU / AT THE RAILWAY SIDING; ZORAN ŠIPOŠ I NJEGOVA JASNA / ZORAN ŠIPOŠ AND HIS JASNA, 1992; SUZANIN OSMIJEH / SUZANA’S SMILE, 1993; KUKURUZNI PUT / THE MAIZE ROUTE, 1993; EVINA KLASA / EVA’S CLASS, 1996, AMERIČKI SAN / AMERICAN DREAM, 1998, and works by other directors, like ODRASTANJE GENERACIJE “V” / THE GROWING UP OF GENERATION “V”, d.: Nebojša Slijepčević, 2003). There were also a number of valuable films about the vastly different consequences of war, such as an exquisite work with a uniquely tragicomedic approach among the many films that dealt with the search for persons lost in the war - Čakić-Veselič’s DEČKO KOJEM SE ŽURILO / THE BOY WHO RUSHED, Neven Hitrec’s DVORANA / THE HALL, 1993 about the fate of a resort for the handicapped in wartime, or Mladen Dizdar’s NE PRILAZI / DO NOT COME CLOSE, 2003 about minefields and the country people’s unique way of clearing them. Some films dealt with the post-traumatic stress disorder of the war veterans (KRAPINA, POSLIJEPODNE / RADIO KRAPINA, d.: Jelena Rajković, 1997, and the recent PANJ PUN OLOVA / BAD BLUE BOYS, d.: Branko Schmidt, 2007). There were also a few films that described the postwar depression among the young, like the suggestive NEBO POD OSIJEKOM / THE SKY BELOW OSIJEK.
Eventually, there also appeared a number of daring, critical documentaries that dealt with retaliation atrocities committed by the Croatian side. Most of those were produced by Factum, as already mentioned in the paragraph on the company. Some of them, recently screened on the HRT and discussed in a special political talk show, came under attack by certain war veteran organisations.
Additionally, traditional documentary topics not related to the war have been maintained throughout this time. There were films that dealt with the new unemployment crisis, like ČETVRTA SMJENA / THE FOURTH SHIFT (d.: Damir Čučić, 1999), about the people in their fifties who lost their jobs in the process of transition without any chance of reemployment, or GODINE HRĐE / THE YEARS OF RUST, about shipyard workers. Another dominant topic were the bureaucratic situations people are faced with (ŠALTER / SHELTER), intra-family problems (DVOBOJ / DUEL, about a mother forcing meals on the child, and the child’s evasions), and the intricacies of local politics as a reflection of the global situation (ŽIVOT NA SVJEŽEM ZRAKU / LIFE IN FRESH AIR). An almost systematic, or at least quite exhaustive, overview of the very diverse issues faced by the young people in the contemporary Croatia, mostly in urban environments, has been provided by the TV series DIRECT.
Alongside this variety of topics, there has been a continuation of some traditional thematic concerns of documentary filmmaking. One constant trend, perhaps more emphasized in the contemporary production than in the socialist period, consisted in a sympathetic presentation of the life and daily problems of Coatia’s minority groups. It hails from the traditional documentary concern with the fates that are interestingly different from the predominant (“normal”) ones. A number of films dealt with the situation of the physically or mentally handicapped (MOJ BRAT ANTE / MY BROTHER ANTE, d.: Petar Krelja, 1998; OBIČNI LJUDI / COMMON PEOPLE, d.: Nebojša Slijepčević, 2005). Some memorable films spotlighted the situation of the neglected elderly people (KREŠO, d.: Ana Trkulja, Ana Blažić, Ines Samardžija, Marijana Brekalo, 2003, and the exquisite ZABORAVLJENI / THE FORGOTTEN, d.: Damir Čučić, 2002) or “forgotten” small islands and their old inhabitants, like ŠALA NIJE NA LINIJI 310 / NO JOKES ON LINE 310 (d.: Tomislav Mršić, 2001). There has been a considerable number of films dealing with people under criminal prosecution, most remarkable UBIL BUM TE / I WILL KILL YOU, about a group of youngsters waiting to be sentenced for the kiling of a drug dealer, and ŠTO SA SOBOM PREKO DANA / FACING THE DAY, about prison inmates who participate in a publicly successful theatrical show. Queer issues were touched on too, e.g. in Hrvoje Mabić’s GAY PRIDE – ZAGREB 2002 (2002), SAVRŠENO DRUŠTVO / A PERFECT SOCIETY (2004) and QUEER (2007), as part of the DIRECT TV series. In SVE PET / EVERYTHING'S FINE, Dana Budisavljević portrays the life of a formerly enslaved prostitute. A number of films deal with ethnic minorities, e.g. gypsies (CIGANI U ŽITU / GYPSIES IN THE RYE, d.: Jasmina Božinovska-Živalj, 2002; DOBRODOŠAO KUČI, BRATE / WELCOME HOME, BROTHER, d.: Ivona Juka, 2005), foreign exiles in Croatia (e.g. KRIZA HAIDARI / THE HAIDARI CRISIS, d.: Tomislav Žaja, 2006), runaway children living at the Zagreb railway station (SNOVI NA PERONU DJETINJSTVA / DREAMS FROM THE RAILWAY STATION, d.: Silvio Mirošničenko, 2002), or a number of films on young delinquents by Jasmina Božinovska-Živalj.
Since films on art and artists have traditionally been considered a “culturally respectful” topic, they have been permanently supported by subsidies, having their own production continuity within the HRT (as short, regular TV-EXHIBITION vignettes, but also as 30’-50’ documentary programmes). Some documentary filmmakers specialised in art films, like Bogdan Žižić or the late Radovan Ivančević, while others regularly created TV-EXHIBITION episodes, or longer films, like Petar Krelja. Mostly done as a kind of documentation on artists, their work and retrospective exhibitions, these films mostly treated their subjects in a conventional manner – either educational or poetical. Only a few are outstanding, although a number of decent films were made in that genre within the observed period. A number of films made in collaboration between filmmaker Željko Radivoj and the prominent experimental filmmaker and performing artist Tomislav Gotovac, a.k.a. Antonio G. Lauer, are an exception. Their one-shot-films, or films made of long, continuous shots, show some of Gotovac’s performances (e.g. CESAR FRANCK – WOLF VOSTELL, 2005), his testimonies about his historical performances (RUBIKON, one-shot film, 2001), and his meditation on art and politics (PRAZNIK RADA / LABOUR DAY, 2001), notably differing from the conventional format of art-film. Films on art were not limited to fine art (though it prevailed), dealing also with architecture, musicians (e.g. films by Bruno Gamulin, Petar Krelja, Dražen Siriščević), theatrical troupes and shows, dance performances, poets, history of Croatian film (mostly by Mladen Juran and Zlatko Sudović), art institutions, and interesting methods of art education.
The films on art were only one branch of the wider, less-defined documentary tradition connected with the “national self-esteem”, concerned with documenting the “national treasures” and “national heirlooms”: ethnographic traditions, cultural histories of the Croatian regions and towns, “natural beauties” or the specifics of the Croatian landscape, flora and fauna. There is no label to encompass this line of work in today’s living Croatian language, but before the Second Word War there was the label of German origin which pointed precisely to this kind of films, “kultur-filmen” – “culture films”. Being a ritualistic genre of an almost “obligatory” presence both in the HRT and cinema production, the films of this type were produced on a regular basis and quite prolifically, most of them in a conventional style similar to the films on art. Nevertheless, some have been remarkably creative, like a series of ethnographic films by Vlatka Vorkapić (POGAČICA, ROČELICA, MENDULICA / PAG LACE-MAKING TECHNIQUES, 1996; DEDEK, BATEK, BAKICA / GRANDPA, BATEK, GRANNY, 1999), or a number of poetic documentaries on environmental beauties. The production of this kind of films has helped many directors to survive professionally.
Stylistic Profiles
The predominance of the television format has led to a stylistic compositional stereotype, a kind of a ‘Big Mac’ construction: a slice of verbal testimony, a slice of environmental (non-testimonial, contextual, observational) vistas with musical underscore, and a reiteration of this bi-segmental structure to the end of the film. The structure has been particularly well suited to the documentary genre of reportage, where verbal testimonials are the main content of a film, but it can be found across different documentary genres. The fact is that a number of “pure” testimony documentaries (in the style of direct cinema, or cinéma vérité) have been made in the manner, mostly within the HRT production, but also in television-independent productions. The effectiveness of this pattern depends highly on the level of interest within the verbal exposition, and on the expressiveness of the manner of a character’s exposition, depending also on the timing and the choice of the supporting landscape “intermissions”. Some impressive films were made within the style, e.g. ZORAN ŠIPOŠ I NJEGOVA JASNA / ZORAN ŠIPOŠ AND HIS JASNA and MOJ BRANT ANTE / MY BROTHER ANTE; variations on this style are the award-winning ŠTO SA SOBOM PREKO DANA / FACING THE DAY and ŽIVOT NA SVJEŽEM ZRAKU / LIFE IN FRESH AIR. But, in many cases, this routine compositional solution has been quite tiring when viewed out of the flow of the TV programming.
Observational documentaries in which the spectator has been “planted” inside the scene as an “unobserved observer”, and with no interview testimonials or voice-overs, have a long tradition in the Croatian documentary production. Some of the best films in the observed period were done in this style, e. g. NA SPOREDNOM KOLOSIJEKU / AT THE RAILWAY SIDING, DVOBOJ / DUEL, ŠALTER / SHELTER, ZABORAVLJENI / THE FORGOTTEN, and LA STRADA (d.: Damir Čučić, 2004), BUNARMAN / THE WELL MAN (d.: Brano Ištvančić, 2003); ČUVAR TEGLJAČA / THE BARGE KEEPER (2003) by Silvio Mirošničenko and DOBRO JUTRO / GOOD MORNING.
There is a significant tradition of poetic documentary in Croatian cinema, even more extensively present today then during its peak period in the sixties. Though the Croatian film criticism does not recognize it as a distinct genre, it is clearly distinguished by its emphasized pictorials, rhythmically-timed associative structure, and almost obligatory musical underscore. Frequently, these kind of films are crossovers to experimental films, and they actually do belong to the important sub-genre of experimental filmmaking. A number of fine films have been done in this style of discourse, like MIRILA and DAN POD SUNCEM / A DAY UNDER THE SUN; ARABESKA / ARABESQUE (d.: Damir Čučić, 2004); ENDART I – IV (d.: Ivan Ladislav Galeta, 2000-2004) and PARK (d.: Saša Ban, 2005).
Traditionally present in a similar way, though generally unrecognised as a subgenre of documentary films, are what I call ludic films. These are documentaries that present their subject matter in an ironic or jocular manner, sometimes emphasizing the comic aspects of the observed situation. A number of excellent films were done in this style, like HODNIK / THE CORRIDOR by Vinko Brešan, whose following feature films (HOW THE WAR STARTED ON MY ISLAND / KAKO JE POČEO RAT NA MOM OTOKU, 1996; MARŠAL / MARSHAL, 1999) feature a similar kind of humour, and IME MAJKE: NARANČA / MOTHER'S NAME: ORANGE, PLAŠITELJ KORMORANA / THE CORMORANT SCARECROW, UMOBOLIZAM I NEUROLOGIJA / INSANITY AND NEUROLOGY (d.: Daniel Kušan, 1998), PITKA VODA I SLOBODA III / DRINKING WATER AND FREEDOM III, BAG, TERRA ROZA / THINK PINK (d.: Aldo Tardozzi, 2001), the pseudo-documentary BIL JIDNON, ŽIVOT NA SVJEŽEM ZRAKU / LIFE IN FRESH AIR, OD JUTRA DO MRAKA / FROM MORNING TILL EVENING (d.: Dražen Žarković, 2005), or POVRATAK MRTVOG ČOVJEKA / DEAD MAN WALKING.
Most of the documentary approaches mentioned here have basically been a part of the tradition of documentary filmmaking in Croatia. But one type of documentary approach became a pronounced trend in the today’s production – personal expository films, films in which the filmmaker, mostly through voice-over or highly personalised points of view, delivers some of hers or his momentary personal experiences, thoughts, or dilemmas on certain issues of their personal life and/or the more general situation they are caught in. Although even this personal approach has its predecessors in the Croatian tradition of experimental film and video art (e.g. experimental films by Ivan Martinac and Tomislav Gotovac, or video art by Sanja Iveković, and Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatić), and in rare professional works (for an early anticipation of this trend, see DOLI – KHROTINE MOGA DJETINSTVA / DOLI – THE FRAGMENTS OF MY CHILDHOOD, d.: Zrinko Ogresta, 1992), it is now present more widely and more pronouncedly both in personal video art and within the mainstream production. Among experimental and video art productions, such personal expository films with autobiographical touches are more likely to be found among female filmmakers – like NEŠTO OSOBNO / SOMETHING PERSONAL (d.: Tomislava Vereš, 1997); 17 STORIES (d.: Lala Raščić, 2001) or KUĆA / THE HOUSE (d.: Ana Hušman, 2003) – although some male filmmakers take the approach as well (e.g. PISMO / THE LETTER, d.: Ladislav Galeta, 1995; POVRATAK MRTVOG ČOVJEKA / DEAD MAN WALKING). But ever since Nenad Puhovski’s controversial, personally intoned GRAHAM I JA / GRAHAM AND ME, where the director compares chapters from his own life with the biography of an Englishman suicide protestor, stimulated a discussion about the “legitimacy” of a personal approach in documentary film, a number of mainstream documentary production films have favored the approach irrespectably of the filmmaker’s gender – e.g. DEČKO KOJEM SE ŽURILO / THE BOY WHO RUSHED, SRETNO DIJETE / LUCKY CHILD, about the director's experience with new wave music in Croatia, SVE O EVI, about the director-cinematographer’s wife striving to give birth, POLUSESTRA (HALF-SISTER, d.: Ljiljana Šišmanović, 2006), about the filmmaker searching for her unknown half-sister, and DOBRO JUTRO / GOOD MORNING, about the life of the elderly filmmaker in an home for senior citizens.
Conclusion
Watching the majority of the yearly documentary production in Croatia can be a very disheartening experience – at least for the selectors of the Days of Croatian Film or the national revue of amateur films, or, in turn, for the regular audience member at the Days of Croatian Film, since there are always a number of terrible films, and a host of mediocre or/and boringly routine ones.
But a more encompassing view of a larger section of the recent history of Croatian documentary cinema, filtering only those films that dealt with interesting topics in an interesting-enough manner, and those that were evaluated as good and excellent by festival juries and critics, can lead to a high level of satisfaction with a number of quality films and their thematic and stylistic variety.
Happily enough, there is a core of respected and dedicated documentary filmmakers who produce documentaries on a regular basis, and a constant influx of young, ambitious filmmakers with intriguing and sometimes exciting contributions. Though for many filmmakers documentary film is just a phase in their career, there are also occasional fine contributions by the experienced ones, those who mostly pursue the feature film format (like the Croatian classic Ante Babaja, and the renowned filmmakers like Vinko Brešan, Rajko Grlić, Zrinko Ogresta, or Branko Schmidt.)
But also, importantly, the subvention and presentation opportunities are, generally speaking, not particularly adverse. True, they are quite restricted, dispersed, and often insufficient, but they do exist, and they are likely to be continued in the foreseeable future.
There is an obvious vitality to the documentary film production in Croatia.
Hrvoje Turković Biography
Hrvoje Turković (Zagreb, Croatia, 4.11. 1943) is a professor at the Academy of Dramatic Arts (Akademija dramske umjetnosti), Zagreb. Holds degrees in Philosophy and Sociology, Zagreb University (BA); M.A. in Cinema Studies, NYU, New York City; Ph.D. in Philology, Zagreb University. He teaches the Theory of Editing, Types of Film Discourse, and Film Analysis at the Academy of Dramatic Art, Zagreb, and various topics at the postgraduate cinema study at Philosophy Faculty (Filozofski fakultet), Zagreb. Since 1965, he has published film and TV criticism, essays and studies, collected in a number of books. (For a selected bibliography of his books and papers see http://bib.irb.hr/lista-radova?autor=99715) He is the supervising editor of the academic film magazine Croatian Cinema Chronicle (Hrvatski filmski ljetopis, www.hfs.hr), the president of Croatian Film Club’s Association, and a member of the Croatian ASIFA.
