Yugoslav Short Films

Abstract

Contrary to the situation in most countries there is, in Yugoslavia, a place for the short film. This is not on television or in the art houses, but in theaters, showing along with the regular feature. demand is so great, and the quality so high, that it is not necessary to import shorts from abroad. industry makes only about 15 features a year, and therefore must import an average of 150-half of which are Americanbut this year it will make well over one thousand short films. categories are the same as in most countries: documentaries and educationals; children's pictures; the entertainment featurette, and the animated short. A difference is the grouping: there will be almost 900 documentaries; a dozen films for children; usually less than 52 newsreels; and only 20 cartoons. cartoons are best known abroad but the home audience is much more familiar with the documentaries. One distributor smiled and said: The cartoons? Oh, you must go abroad to see them. documentaries are ubiquitous thoughon the whole-better than those of most countries. One of the reasons is, I think, that the Yugoslavs had to develop their own style. Their feature film is sometimes indebted to foreign models (Renoir has had a beneficial influence; the average English or American all-talkie a pernicious one) but the short films have had no foreign mentors. One of the results is a kind of freedom. Yugoslavs have not seen Berlin and Rien que les Heures; they have never read Rotha or Grierson, and they do not know Night Mail from the Daily Mail. This freedom leads occasionally to home movies: ski-meets in Bled, poorly photographed; the life of the bald eagle in which most of the footage is spent in merely getting up the Macedonian mountains. And there is occasional commercialism: lovely Dubrovnik-and it is lovely-seen entirely through the watercolors of some moderately talented local artist. But, more often, the freedom from influence results in a style which is both simple and strong. Boatmen on the Drina (Sblavari na Brini, Bosna-film, Sarajevo), though in no way the best of recent documentaries, shows the approach. Given the subject, the life of the boatmen on a particularly unruly river, the director took numerous rides with them on their log rafts, trying to get the feel of the experience. He decided that he did not want the loggers dwarfed by the high canyon walls since he himself did not feel dwarfed, and so he cut out all overhead shots. He even left out the bridge at Videgrade, famous since its appearance in the Andric novel. bumpiness impressed him and so he increased the effect by hand-holding his camera. Nights on the river, the rafts either drifting along in the broader stretches or anchored in a cove off the rapids, impressed him and these he intercut in the most natural manner, alternating night and day until the mouth of the river was reached. When the sea was reached the film was ended-a documentary by no means great but consistently honest. Like most Yugoslav documentaries it was free of the omnipotence of a Dziga-Vertov, the cozy picturesqueness toward which the Kunst film