FROM THE HISTORY OF CROATIAN CINEMA

Coronation of Serbian King and The Port of Šibenik: An Archeological Exploration of an Empty Film Can

The change of the attribution of Croatia’s oldest known film recording, The Port of Šibenik, 1904 — which had been attributed to Stanislaw Noworyta (1880-1963) from the late 1970s and in the book Filmovi u Hrvatskoj kinoteci pri Hrvatskom državnom arhivu (The Films in Croatian State Archive — Croatian Cinematheque, Zagreb 2003) it was attributed to the British cameraman Frank S. Mottershaw (1882-1930) by the intervention of Dejan Kosanović, Belgrade early film historian for the area of former Yugoslavia — has passed almost unnoticed by Croatian film scholars. The text author engaged in the exploration of sources of this change and in search of »a lost frame« — the frame that was not part of the film’s description in the Croatian Cinematheque 2003 catalogue nor included in the film Living Photographs (Živuće fotografije) by Mladen Juran (1983), but it was part of the version of The Port of Šibenik shown by the national television in 1995 (!). This was an indicator that there was more than one version of this film.

The text author established that a restored copy of the oldest film material from Serbia, filmed by Mottershaw himself during his travel through Serbia accompanying Arnold Muir Wilson, the honorary Serbian consul in Sheffield, was shown in 2004 in Serbia. This was the film The Coronation of King Peter I of Serbia and a Ride through Serbia, Novi-Bazar, Montenegro and Dalmatia from 1904 and it lasted almost an hour. Precisely in this film familiar frames appear, a few minutes long, and until now considered an independent recording, The Port of Šibenik which was by mistake — probably found separated from the rest of the film about thirty years ago in Yugoslav Film Archives in Belgrade (and the coronation film was constructed from several sources) — attributed as an independent film recording.

Enes Midžić