PORTRAIT OF AN AUTHOR: ANTE BABAJA

Lost Beauty: The Films of Ante Babaja

The key period in Ante Babaja’s film life happened in France, where he was an assistant to Becker, Christian-Jaque and Ciampi. The picturesque, eloquent spirit of his early short works reflects Babaja’s enthusiasm with film, and it places him shoulder to shoulder with his European contemporaries. After his return to Zagreb, Babaja, not inclined to direct confrontation with the political structures of the time, opted to portray the actual fates of people. This proved to be a much stronger critical argument than direct criticism. Social and cultural, instead of political, Babaja’s criticism penetrated much deeper and proved itself to be far more lasting than any type of political confrontation.

In his film The Emperors New Cloths, all he had to do was transfer an everyday story to the realm of Anderson’s fairytale in order to achieve the full freedom to dissect society from the inside. In Birch Tree, the village is a grandiose, rich and emerald landscape in the late fall. It is full of inhospitable mud, and, in its most extreme instance, can be experienced as a rotting corpse. Smells, Gold and Thyme, shot in black and white, is the story of a bleak and deserted Adriatic island during the winter, which dreams about its former glory and which does not have a future to believe in. Lost Homeland is a far reaching elegy to some of the more turbulent decades of Croatian history, the search for connections between generations, between different regimes, and the quest for a means for history to condemn and exonerate an individual. On a different note, The Stone Gates casts away every reality based on outward geography, replacing it with a city seen as a nonlinear, almost musical landscape.

Vladimir C. Sever