FROM THE HISTORY OF CROATIAN CINEMA

Return to chaos (Personal reading of Branko Belan’s Film Syntax and Poetics)

Out of all Croatian film directors who went outside the scopes of their primary vocation — film directing — Branko Belan asserts himself as possibly the most versatile filmmaker in Croatia. Belan created a reverse order of film creation — he left a huge directorial mark in the formative years of Croatian film, in the 1950s, and later for various reasons turned to literature, screenplays, film theory, science, and education of future film generations with only incidental directorial work which was far from the feature-length film (that was more of a decision made by film authorities). The fact is that Belan left the least in the genre that the public mostly attributes to him, the feature-length film (he directed one of the most important films Koncert in 1954, considered a classic today, and only one more, Pod sumnjom in 1956). At the beginning of the 1960s Belan appears as a prose-author of different genres, and as an author of non-fictional books on film in Croatian language — Screenplay, What and How in 1960, Film Splendour and Misery in 1966, and a book about editing theories, subject-matter of this analysis, Film Syntax and Poetics in 1979. Belan’s book, as a compilation of historical approach to film editing and film editing theory, is a continuation of then frequent translations of foreign authors (Mitry, Bazin, Plazewski, Metz, Burch, and especially Pasolini). Considering film to be a system of communication, thus putting it at the level of language, Belan clearly sided with those theories that tried to compare written and spoken language with what was considered to be a film language. The article explains Belan’s concepts in detail, in the order of the chapters of his book, but it also comments on its composition (i.e. intentional »chaos« and fragmentation, and structure of the book as the series of quotations), which largely disables the reception of Belan’s study. The author concludes that Belan’s book — in accordance with a specific position that Belan always had — possesses primarily a performative character.

Slaven Zečević