PORTRAIT OF FILM DIRECTOR: ZORAN TADIĆ

My six films with Tadić

In the text written especially for this issue of the Croatian Film Chronicle, the author of the text — esteemed Croatian literary scholar (teaching at Department for Comparative Literature) and one of the leading contemporary novelists — recalls his cooperation with Zoran Tadić on six occasions, writing screenplays for six of his films. In the introduction, he explains the circumstances that led to their friendship (student newspaper and demonstrations), and then recalls the context in which he created his classical short story The Good Spirit of Zagreb, and Tadić’s unfinished long feature debut Spring Will Be Ours, for which Pavličić wrote several scenes. He proceeds to describe how in 1981 Tadić managed to persuade Zagreb television to do a low budget adaptation of Pavličić’s short story The Good Spirit of Zagreb. The screenplay for the film was written by Pavličić, guided by Tadić’s suggestions about the dramaturgy of film and shifts from the original novel, and the film was shot with his friends, actors in the house of the esteemed Croatian film scholar Hrvoje Turković, situated in the part of town designated for demolition. When the film was finished, they realized that the material was so good; it had to be screened in cinemas. They found a distributor who changed the title to The Rhythm of Crime — and it became the most important Croatian film of the 1980s. The film marked the beginning of Tadić’s decade, in the course of which he shot seven motion pictures, five of them with Pavličić (The Third Key, The Dream of the Rump, The Condemned, The Eagle, The Third Woman). Pavličić finishes with a review of these films, the result of the two authors’ set routine whose final outcome was a recognizable corpus of Tadić’s generic works with the emphasis on crime based on screenplays by the most popular domestic author of crime novels.

Pavao Pavličić