FROM THE HISTORY OF CROATIAN CINEMA

The accident and its aftermath: Three Anas by Branko Bauer

This publicist essay deals with the film Three Anas by Branko Bauer (1959), shot in the Macedonian production in the period when filmmakers from Croatia were helping the establishment of cinemas in other Yugoslav republics (primarily Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia), but on locations in Zagreb and Belgrade. The film was received with extreme negativism, only to be later singled out as the predecessor of Serbian »black wave«, while more recently it reached the status of one of the most highly esteemed of Bauer’s films. In the context of the wider history of its making and reception (based on excerpts from the press of the period and Bauer’s interview from 1985), the text analyses causes for such reception of the film and its subsequent revaluation. The main argument is that the film presented a pessimistic catalogue and a cross section of the darkest social circles in the communist Yugoslavia of the 1950s (hence it was forbidden in Bosnia and Herzegovina) in the shape of a neorealist chronicle (the main character was for his resigned suffering often compared to Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D.), while the stiff and distanced acting of the main (amateur) actor is from today’s perspective seen as a consistent and conscious choice of the author. The move towards neorealism and compromising realist narration were heretic in the film and social-political context of the time, for which reasons the film was placed shoulder to shoulder to Branko Belan’s Concert (1954), in its pessimistic subverting of the ideological horizons of its time. Three Anas were particularly crucial because of the revelation of »backyards«, poverty and social margins, which had no place in the official, optimistic art of the period. Three Anas are measuring the equation between history and collectivism, showing how historical accident can poison the community in the long run. Today — with different historical experience, and additional historical accident on our collective backs — Three Anas are even more shockingly clear to us.

Jurica Pavičić