DISCUSSING BOOKS

Cinema and cultural policy

Since the research of the ’situation in the field’ is an important prerequisite for forming cultural policy, the book by Hrvoje Turkovic and Vjekoslav Majcen is extremely important, and additionally it has been published by the suitable publisher (Ministry of Culture), as the forth book in a book collection Cultural development. Since the film and its financing is generally talked about in public on a level of clichés and prejudice, this extraordinary (and sporadic) research project can have a thorough social function because it gives relentless and precise facts (the number of cinemas, books about film, technical equipment, films that are made, Film archives, funds invested by the Ministry of Culture and the City of Zagreb into cinematography...). The public will probably be particularly intrigued by Turkovic’s study on historical traits of Croatian film making, in which the typical questions (or prejudice) that can be seen in public reviews on film an film making are addressed one by one, and the author of the analysis follows up with these problems, emphasizing a difficult position the film has on the market and in the context of culture sponsored by the government, where there is a bias against film and its cost. For example, theaters receive more endowments than film, and though the response of national and foreign audiences, critics and festival juries are not better at all, theatre has a strong institutionally verified position.

Nikica Gilić