Cinema
Samac
Vatroslav Mimica · 1958
Synopsis
An office worker, alone, struggles in a world of machines and ceaselessly moving surfaces, where the characters are geometric flat shapes sliding over planes of colour and photographic cut-outs. Everything that remains to him of the intimate, love, desires, dreams, seems threatened by the machinery around him, and the film moves from the office and the city to what is at play within him, even into a dream. There is no dialogue.
Context
Produced by Zagreb film from a script by the director and Vladimir Tadej, with music by Kurt Grieder, it runs thirteen minutes. It was one of the seven Croatian animated films shown at Cannes in 1958, a presentation that brought the Zagreb school to notice, and Mimica had to smuggle it in. Critics regard it as the first frankly modernist film of that school: it introduces modern pictorial and graphic values into Yugoslav animation and gives up descriptive narrative to depict feelings. Mimica, who did not draw, worked with the draughtsman Aleksandar Marks and the animator Vladimir Jutriša.
Who it is for
Thirteen minutes of colour animation, without dialogue, in a modern graphic style and without descriptive narrative.
Prizes and reception
First prize for direction at Pula, grand prize at Venice, the first foreign award for Zagreb animation; diploma of honour at Edinburgh in 1959.
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