BOOKS

Dražen Movre: From the seventh Row left

The editor of the posthumously printed collection of Dražen Movre’s film reviews Diana Nenadić organized Movre’s saved texts chronologically by dividing the book entitled after Movre’s film column in the Glas Slavonije into two parts. The first, contains reviews from the Glas Slavonije from the year 1973 to 1975, while the second contains reviews published in Vijenac between the years1995 and 1997. An excellent preface with a detailed analytical description of Movre’s reviews, his outlook, attitudes and procedures was written by Hrvoje Turković. This text almost completely covers all qualities of Movre’s writing about film, his observations and thoughts, so that almost nothing could be add to it.

Like Vladimir Vuković, whose book of collected reviews was also posthumously published at the beginning of the nineties, Dražen Movre was a writer of so called literary style, which was in his case quite picturesque, namely, he would often retell content of a film. However, for Movre, retelling content as well as an inclination towards expressing his own impressions is not an alibi for arbitrariness or using empty phrases, but it enables lucid insights. Sometimes he even fascinates by drawing attention to what is usually considered unimportant or marginal.
The thing that was particualrly interesting for me in Dražen Movre’s texts was his occasional inclination towards incidental polemics with unnamed fellow critics, rarely direct, more often implicit. Another interesting Dražen Movre’s trait was his political oppositionism. In the texts published in Vijenac it was striking and open, but more interesting was the one in the Glas Slavonije from the time after the mass national movement in Croatia at the beginning of seventies, when Movre expressed so much explicit universal antimilitary spirit that it was completely clear that neither current Yugoslav political and military leadership, nor governing caste were spared.

Political opposition of Dražen Movre can be connected with some kind of film critic oppositionism. Unlike Hitchcock’s fans (hičkokovci) or even more unlike the critics of Film magazine (filmovci), and according to his belief that film as an art was mostly spoilt by Hollywood industrial spirit, he was not a great fan of the classical period of Hollywood films. Therefore, during his »Slavonian period« he was very critical even of indisputable authorities such as Hitchcock. It is possible that this had certain impact on the fact that a critic of such potential as Movre showed in the Glas Slavonije stayed completely outside the circle of critics that wrote for Film and other magazines, although his writing was superior to a large number of Film contributors. One should also emphasize that Movre’s texts in the Glas Slavonije were written for a specific purpose. They were articles for a daily newspaper, but these daily newspaper reviews were anthological achievements and they certainly excel contemporary film criticism daily production.

Damir Radić