PORTRAIT OF THE FILM DIRECTOR: KRSTO PAPIĆ

Crows, rams and women: politics and power in Krsto Papić's Handcuffs

One of the rare Croatian film classics that was received with acclaim from the beginning, Krsto Papić's Hancuffs is characterized by huge cultural importance (because the Cominform theme), different interpretations (very often linked to the Serbian Black Wave), the connection to author's documentarist experiences and tendencies, success at theatres, controversial political reactions outside the then Socialist Republic of Croatia, international success, as well as strong connotations of the ancient tragedy, that is the connection between brutal rural incidents in Handcuffs and the ethos and the poetics of incidents and characterization in Greek tragedy. Apart from all these characteristics, the author also points to the symbols of modernity (the bicycle, the fountain pen, the rifle) and the unexpected prophetical dimension because the 1990s events revealed the durability of mental structures crucial to the period presented in the film and to all other periods in which the Dinarian cultural mentality has come to the foreground.

Jurica Pavičić