REACTIONS

Film Can Is Not Completely Empty

(In Response to Enes Midžić’s article Coronation of Serbian King and The Port of Šibenik: An Archaeological Exploration of an Empty Film Can)

The article is written in response to Enes Midžić’s paper Coronation of Serbian King and The Port of Šibenik: An Archaeological Exploration of an Empty Film Can, published in the last issue of the Croatian Cinema Chronicle. In that text Midžić brought out some data from the Serbian press which were not detected in the Croatian film studies, according to which the oldest motion picture made in Croatia, The Port of Šibenik by Stanislaw Noworyta (1904) is actually attributed to British cameraman Frank Mottershaw and it is detected as being the fragment of his more comprehensive film The Coronation of King Peter I of Serbia and a Ride through Serbia, Novi Pazar, Montenegro and Dalmatia.

Since the author of both attributions is Kosanović, distinguished Serbian early film historian for the area of former Yugoslavia, he comments and makes remarks on the history of wrong attribution, as well as on the way the film stock and its fragments moved after WWII until its recent restoration in original form (2004). The author also brings new archive materials and sources about Mottershaw and his stay in Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia in 1904.

Dejan Kosanović