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If there's one thing I'm known for concerning entertainment, it's my fascination with hidden gems. It's that fascination that lead me to search for good ex-yugoslavian films, and inevitably brought about a question: if England has Hitchcock and Italy has Fellini, who do we have? I've searched high and low, and found one obvious answer to that question. Our best director is Vatroslav Mimica.
A one-of-a-kind director, even on a global scale, there's so many noteworthy things about him that it makes your head spin. He excelled in animation as well as live action, and is one of the founders of the Zagreb school of animation. While most of his animated shorts aren't available on the internet, those that are give off a sense of distinct individuality in no way weaker than that of Ralph Bakshi or Yuri Norstein. His style was modernist, in both live action and animation, but what sets him apart from the typical modernist, especially his serbian contemporaries, is his dignity and sincerity. He's not a whiner, a misanthrope or an edgelord. The negativity in his films isn't fueled by butthurt, it's fueled by his own miserable experiences combined with his love for his fellow man. You could call him the exact opposite of a misanthrope.
He was born in 1923, and died only in february of 2020, meaning he lived so long he saw both the rise of Benito Mussolini and the outbreak of the coronavirus. He served as a medic for the partisan army in world war 2, an experience which would influence his entire opus. Later he got into the filmmaking business just as an excuse to get out of the army, starting off in the innocent days of our cinema, the 50's, with his modernist tendencies beginning to show soon after he got into animation. His return to live action cinema in the mid 60's was marked by the ''Modernist trilogy'', after which he began to return to more traditional storytelling while retaining his typical themes of isolation, human brutality, and misfortune. His final film was in 1981, after which he spent the remaining 39 years of his life in retirement.
His work was generally negatively recieved upon release, but it eventually grew on everyone. Myself included, as I still regret not including any of his films in my top 10 ex-yu movie list. He is thought to have been ''too ahead of his time''. Which is sort of true, that type of discontinued storytelling and anxious tone was unheard of in 50's and early 60's Yugoslavia, and besides, Serbia wouldn't lower the bar for modernist filmmaking until the late 60's.
There's a story related to the premiere of his film Seljačka Buna (Anno Domini 1573 in English) which shows how much of an alpha he was. In 1975, Yugoslavia had a film submitted for a festival in Italy - which wasn't Seljačka Buna - but Mimica smuggled his film in by mislabeling the canister. He got crap for it back home, sure, but the people at the festival loved it, one of those people being none other than Akira Kurosawa. This event went down in history as the biggest case of ''senpai noticed me'' in Croatian history.
Well, in truth, it's not as well-known as it deserves to be, but it does help prove Mimica's opinion that Croatian films are in no way inferior to everyone else's, but we just lack the lobbying power to bring them to the rest of the world. I both agree and disagree with that, I wouldn't say we're as good as russians, but our cinema is horribly misrepresented, even within our own country. We put hacks like Dalibor Matanić and Vinko Brešan into the public eye, and as a result, a lot of people here unironically think serbian films are superior to ours.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not shilling Mimica out of cringy patriotism, I'm shilling him because, despite a few blunders, his high points make him genuinely deserving of being placed in the same category as Fellini, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, and Zeman. The ''great European masters'', if you will. Throughout the next few days, I will rank all of his films from worst to best.
A one-of-a-kind director, even on a global scale, there's so many noteworthy things about him that it makes your head spin. He excelled in animation as well as live action, and is one of the founders of the Zagreb school of animation. While most of his animated shorts aren't available on the internet, those that are give off a sense of distinct individuality in no way weaker than that of Ralph Bakshi or Yuri Norstein. His style was modernist, in both live action and animation, but what sets him apart from the typical modernist, especially his serbian contemporaries, is his dignity and sincerity. He's not a whiner, a misanthrope or an edgelord. The negativity in his films isn't fueled by butthurt, it's fueled by his own miserable experiences combined with his love for his fellow man. You could call him the exact opposite of a misanthrope.
He was born in 1923, and died only in february of 2020, meaning he lived so long he saw both the rise of Benito Mussolini and the outbreak of the coronavirus. He served as a medic for the partisan army in world war 2, an experience which would influence his entire opus. Later he got into the filmmaking business just as an excuse to get out of the army, starting off in the innocent days of our cinema, the 50's, with his modernist tendencies beginning to show soon after he got into animation. His return to live action cinema in the mid 60's was marked by the ''Modernist trilogy'', after which he began to return to more traditional storytelling while retaining his typical themes of isolation, human brutality, and misfortune. His final film was in 1981, after which he spent the remaining 39 years of his life in retirement.
His work was generally negatively recieved upon release, but it eventually grew on everyone. Myself included, as I still regret not including any of his films in my top 10 ex-yu movie list. He is thought to have been ''too ahead of his time''. Which is sort of true, that type of discontinued storytelling and anxious tone was unheard of in 50's and early 60's Yugoslavia, and besides, Serbia wouldn't lower the bar for modernist filmmaking until the late 60's.
There's a story related to the premiere of his film Seljačka Buna (Anno Domini 1573 in English) which shows how much of an alpha he was. In 1975, Yugoslavia had a film submitted for a festival in Italy - which wasn't Seljačka Buna - but Mimica smuggled his film in by mislabeling the canister. He got crap for it back home, sure, but the people at the festival loved it, one of those people being none other than Akira Kurosawa. This event went down in history as the biggest case of ''senpai noticed me'' in Croatian history.
Well, in truth, it's not as well-known as it deserves to be, but it does help prove Mimica's opinion that Croatian films are in no way inferior to everyone else's, but we just lack the lobbying power to bring them to the rest of the world. I both agree and disagree with that, I wouldn't say we're as good as russians, but our cinema is horribly misrepresented, even within our own country. We put hacks like Dalibor Matanić and Vinko Brešan into the public eye, and as a result, a lot of people here unironically think serbian films are superior to ours.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not shilling Mimica out of cringy patriotism, I'm shilling him because, despite a few blunders, his high points make him genuinely deserving of being placed in the same category as Fellini, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, and Zeman. The ''great European masters'', if you will. Throughout the next few days, I will rank all of his films from worst to best.
Last edited by Tramuzgan; 11-14-20 at 08:35 AM.
