FROM THE HISTORY OD CROATIAN CINEMA

Film modernism in ideological and populist context

Although populist effectiveness of film was highly esteemed and classical style of presentation favourized, romantic and elitist ideas were also present in the socialist and populist context. Under the influence of western establishment of modernism in different art forms, and with liberalist "indulgencies" in the socialist system, in late fifties and particularly in the sixties, a radical "artistic" programme was self-confidently introduced – in the Zagreb School of Animation, in the cinema club environment and its experimentalist (anti-film) movement, and finally in the idea of the "author film" in the dominant film industry. Personal and programmatic modernist elitism emerged as a resistance to dominant populism and all that supported it.

Hrvoje Turković