New Crotian Documentary Film, 1992-2007

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New Crotian Documentary Film, 1992-2007

By Hrvoje Turković

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][3]<!--[endif]--> 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.

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.