Gone is the Home Cinema Giant: Doyen Directed, Screenwriter
and Producer Vatroslav Mimica Dies
tportal.hr
By D.A.M. / Hina
2/16/2020
Croatian film doyen, film director,
screenwriter and producer, Vatroslav Mimica died on Saturday in Zagreb at the age of 97,
Croatian Radio and Television HRT reported on Sunday.
The great Croatian
cinematographer Vatroslav Mimica was born in 1923 in Omis. Croatian cinema
will remember it primarily for feature films such as' Prometheus from the
Island of Visevica ', the internationally acclaimed' Kai, I'll Kill You ','
Monday or Tuesday ',' Event ', and until' Peasant Revolt 'and' Banović
Strahinja '.
He studied at the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb and was a
participant in the anti-fascist movement in II. World War. He has
been on film since 1950, first as director of Jadran Film, of which he is one
of the artists. He made his feature film In the Storm (1952), and after
his second feature film, the comedy Jubilee Mr. Ikla (1955), devoted himself to
the cartoon. He is one of the founders of the Zagreb School of Cartoon. Initially,
he worked as a screenwriter (with Vladimir Tadej) on some of the first
successes of the Zagreb School of Cartoon (eg Premiere and On the Meadow of N.
Kostelac and Jimmy D. Vukotic's Cowboy - May 1957). In 1957, he directed
his first cartoon, Scarecrow, which won the Grand Prix in Venice
and is the first major international achievement of the Zagreb School. Soon
after other films Happy End (1958), The Inspector returned home, At the
Photographer (both 1959) and The Little Chronicle (1962).
These films - with a preoccupation with
contemporary topics (loneliness, alienation in the urban world) and modernity
and innovative expression (series of parallel color plans, collage inserting of
photo clips, inserting real objects into a picture) - won him awards at the
world's most renowned festivals (eg Venice, Annecy, Oberhausen, Bergamo, Edinburgh).
In 1963, Mimica returned to
feature film. Sometimes, repeating cartoon motifs and accepting among the
first modernist style and thematic elements in Croatia,
he directed the films Prometheus from the Island
of Viševica (1965, The Great Golden
Arena in Pula), Monday or Tuesday (1966, The
Great Golden Arena in Pula),
Kaja , I Will Kill You (1967). Afterwards, his approach becomes much more
academic (eg, the Event, 1969; Peasant Revolt, 1975; Banović Strahinja, 1981).
Vatroslav Mimica has received a number of
national and international awards for his artistic work in the field of cinema,
including the Vladimir Nazor Award for Lifetime Achievement (1986).
According to HRT in In memoriam
'Vatroslav Mimica has always been and remains attached to human destinies, the
humanist above all. Mimica devoted his entire life and creative oeuvre to
defending the humanistic values that he felt were forgotten and threatened by
modern great systems. Ever since he went to the partisans as a young man,
out of the need to fight the injustices of fascism, through all his
super-avant-garde cartoons, and - most importantly - through all his feature
films - he has always viewed the world primarily through the eyes of a
convinced humanist.
Vatroslav Mimica had a rare subtle sense of
injustice directed at the individual. The individual, not the systems, has
always been his central motive for talking. All his films are imbued with this
central idea. The individual and his human freedoms have always been at
the forefront of him, and so has he been in his private life. '
The departure of Vatroslav Mimica is an
irrevocable loss, not only for Croatian but also for European film.
MIMICA, Vatroslav
Born: 6/25/1923, Omis, Croatia,
Yugoslavia
Died: 2/15/2020, Zagreb, Croatia
Vatroslav Mimica’s
western – writer:
Cowboy Jimmy - 1957
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