PORTRAIT OF AN AUTHOR: ANTE BABAJA

Ante Babaja: The passive Hero of Croatian Film

Babaja’s longtime preoccupation with film as a form of artistic expression is readily recognizable in his opus, which means that he yearns to transform every factographic detail or literary antecedent into a uniquely filmic form of art that is impossible to apply to any other medium. In every one of his works, which are all different in their methodology and genre, he confronts the viewer and himself with some of the most formidable issues regarding human fate. It can be said of Babaja’s films that they bear witness to the author’s efforts to reveal the fundamental absurdity of living, before which we are all completely helpless.

In this manner, Body (1965) empirically and brutally portrays the body as a shell for the human spirit and being. Unraveling the enigma of the human face is the essence of some of his brilliant film impressions (Cabin, 1966, Waiting Room, 1975, Old Woman, 1976). His excellent documentary Can You Hear Me (1965) disturbingly bears witness to the effort to bring the meaning of language to the consciousness of deaf children.

Babaja best expressed his fundamental fatalism in his four feature films, which have undoubtedly already become Croatian film classics. Among them, Birch Tree (1967) is regarded as a masterpiece of what is considered the apex of Croatian film as a whole. Smells, Gold and Thyme (1971), has been described as a film about alienation, but it is rather a grand descent into pessimism and resignation as the life philosophy of the passive hero. Lost Homeland (1980) talks about the return to the point of departure, while The Stone Gates (1992) is the author’s own creative testament, in which all of the elements of his filmic thought and expression are present.

The Stone Gates can be considered a work which offers a synthesis of Babaja’s film art, which he most often used to express his life philosophy of resignation without tragedy in a superbly masterful manner.

Ivo Škrabalo