Nikola Tanhofer (1926-1998)

A Nostalgic Shooting Script from 1945 or How I Got My Feet Wet for the First Time

The text is a nostalgic autobiographical recollection written for this magazine by distinguished university professor, director and cinematographer Nikola Tanhofer just before his death.

In a refined literary style, the author presents us with the first day of his first professional location assignment — a propaganda film in a village near Zagreb. The event triggers — in the manner of cinematic flashbacks — scraps of personal memories of his family, events from his childhood, his high school graduation, his »initiation« into the communist party, his first cinema-related job on the Film Board (the first central cinematic organization in the newly established socialist state), and some of his memorable cinema-viewing experiences. Interspersed with these recollections of events are a series of vivid portraits of different people, among whom are important personalities of the Croatian cinema.

Nikola Tanhofer