PORTRAIT
Jelena Rajković
A portrait of the recently
deceased young filmmaker Jelena Rajković. The main text
is supplemented by the list of her complete works on
film, and an interview with her close collaborator and
friend S. G. Pristaš about the two posthumous postproductions
of Jelena’s films.
Jelena Rajković did not see the final print of her documentary Krapina,
Afternoon (Krapina, poslijepodne) — the postproduction
was finished the very day she died (of cancer). Her last work, Zagorje,
Manor-House (Zagorje, dvorci), was edited and postproduced
posthumously by S. G. Pristaš. Krapina, Afternoon (1997)
has an intriguing relationship with her earlier medium feature Night
for Listening (1995). The fictional content of the feature
film was a breaking of a young disappointed veteran in a radio
station with a bomb. He requested to air his complaints about
the media treatment of a battleground event he took part in
(he was proclaimed dead along with his dead comrades, and the
whole event was hushed up).
The documentary Krapina, Afternoon was
about the similar event, about a breaking in the small
radio station of Radio Krapina by a veteran who felt completely
neglected and pushed aside by the society he fought for.
Fiction preceded faction, faction not knowing earlier fiction
(the real veteran in Krapina did not know about the Rajković’s
fiction film that was broadcast a day before his action).
Jelena Rajković learned about the event and in a discrete
manner made an interview film with the involved disc jockey,
policemen and social workers, and with the veteran himself.
There is a complex analysis of Rajković’s humanistic approach,
her style and personality traits, as well as the interpretation
of particular films made by her.
In a conclusion Krelja
states that Jelena approached the inverted war and postwar
times with self-assuredness, bravery and conscientious
professionalism. She showed pronounced inclinations towards
the most vital creative approach in Croatian cinema — the
intimate one, the one that discloses the burdened aspects
of human hidden life. Though playful and ambitious from
the point of view of directing, even at the beginning of
her authorial work, one could sense in her films »a woman’s
touch« — a subtle sensitivity and discrete compassion.
Petar Krelja |
