BOOK REVIEWS

Lucidly read fragments: from real to virtual history of film

Ante Peterlić, 2005, Déjà-vu: zapisi o prošlosti filma, Zagreb: Matica hrvatska

A review of the new book by the most eminent Croatian film scholar and editor of the two volume Film Encyclopaedia of the Lexicographic institute Miroslav Krleža. In the book Déjà-vu Peterlić collected his columns published in the cultural magazine Vijenac. The texts were occasioned by »older« themes in the history of film (retrospectives in Zagreb’s Film Centre, films shown on television, deaths of actors), which are listed chronologically — not in the order of publication, but in the historical order of the filmmakers and films in question.

The actual occasion serves as an incentive to comment on the wider phenomenon, write about its prehistory, birth and evolution, compare it to similar and contemporary phenomena, not only in film, but also literature and the other arts, and finally, to find some firm standpoint or philosophical substance that makes the issue worthy of repeated viewing, reading, and analysis. This is not yet another collection of journalistic texts, but a rounded whole the fragmented texts of which continually discuss film history. Written as feuilletons, the texts always begin with a segment, expanding the analysis of a particular phenomenon and ultimately coming to wider conclusions about a particular author’s oeuvre or a national cinema — thus shaping a kind of a history of cinema.

Diana Nenadić