PORTRAIT

Fadil Hadžić’s feature films

In Croatian cinema the feature films of Fadil Hadžic stand out first of all because of their number — he directed fourteen feature length films, and is currently making number fifteen. His work is characterized by heterogeneity and unevenness; he made some very good films, like Službeni položaj (Official Position), Tri sata za ljubav (Three Hours for Love) or Protest (The Protest), but also some very bad ones; some of his films were very successful, both with the critics and at festivals, like Novinar (The Journalist) or Službeni položaj (Official Position), others were considered by the critics to be complete failures; some were big hits like Divlji andeli (Wild Angels) or Desant na Drvar (Drvar Parachute Landing), and others could hardly interest any segment of audience. Hadžic’s films are heterogeneous both in terms of genre and theme. They range from the partisan war spectacle (Drvar Parachute Landing), war thriller Abeceda straha (The Alphabet of Fear) and detective story Druga strana medalje (The Reverse of the Medal), through historical film Sarajevski atentat (The Assassination in Sarajevo) and black film drama expressing criticism of society (The Protest), to experimenting with art film Idu dani (As Days Go By). The introduction is continued by analysis of all his films which follow, except the war film Konjuh planinom (Along the Konjuh Mountain). The author pays a special attention to Drvar Parachute Landing, which he sees, together with Kozara by Bulajic, as a key film for constituting the poetics of ’superpartisan’ subgenre, and to a group of films expressing criticism of society. The image of Hadžic as a director is primarily linked to those films, and the first among them is Official Position, which is at the same time his most successful film so far. It won Velika Zlatna arena award (Grand Prix) at Pula Film Festival in 1964 as the film of the year, and the author also rates it as the most successful of Hadžic’s films and also states that it starts many permanent motifs of his work (the role of investigating journalism in the society of ideology, a revolutionary puritan character who’s not understood, a motif of a discredited individual haunted by his own past). Similar to this film are The Protest, the film in which Hadžic was most inspired as director, poetically related to modernism, with several time levels and story telling perspectives; Three Hours for Love, whose easy-going tone stands apart from other films that express criticism of society; Lov na jelene (The Deer Hunt) and The Journalist made after a seven-year break in Hadžic’s directing career; and Ambasador (The Ambassador), a bourgeois family drama of a communist elite. A crime story Wild Angels shows connecting elements with this thematic circle, although it is an unexpected film in the context of Hadžic’s work. The author concludes that Hadžic is, in his most successful films, a lucid analyst of post-revolutionary society, who has in his social films illustrated the history of ’Titoism’ from the beginning of consumers’ society to moral destruction of the eighties, so his work depicts the defeat of the revolutionary generation and system.

Jurica Pavičić