On Friday 24 July, Rakov Jarak played host to the book launch of the joint project by cult directors Rajko Grlić and Goran Marković – a collection of five decades of letters, previously published on the Velike priče portal and recently bound and published by Telegram.
Did You Film This? drew a full house, as one might expect since Grlić and Marković, the respective directorial emblems of Zagreb and Belgrade, are canonical graduates of the Prague Film School, known for films that combine excellent screenwriting and abundant humour with an unflinching willingness to address the social, cultural, and political aberrations in the region.
The collection accordingly gathers more than half a century of candid, warm correspondence between two of the region’s leading intellectuals on the enduring themes of their lives and work: cinema, the durability of friendship, departures and returns, politics, society, ageing, and memory.
In conversation with Silvana Menđušić and Velike priče portal editor Veljko Lalić, Grlić and Marković spoke not only about the themes in the collection, but about the intellectual and social impulses behind their respective approaches to filmmaking.
As their filmographies already suggest, both agreed that they make films about what they know and can portray with authenticity – the fact Marković used to ironically expound on his aversion to genre formulas in westerns and crime thrillers.
Despite more than 30 years of living and working in Ohio, in Grlić’s case, the same principle accounts for the fact that his films have always been built around the specific sociopolitical circumstances of Yugoslavia and Croatia.
As “witnesses to their time” – the phrase used on the cover of this volume – they described the political situation in today’s Serbia as worse than Croatia’s corruption and party monopolism. Speaking freely, Marković likened the Serbian president and former prime minister to a juvenile delinquent who steals in order to buy the affection he is incapable of earning.
Their reflections faithfully captured the character of this volume of collected letters, which address wars, family wounds, student uprisings, and immortal regimes with equal measures of tenderness and unflinching honesty.
Discussing the scenes he had been forced to cut from his films and his collaborations with screenwriters, Marković recalled with dry wit the instance when he was pressured to cut 40 minutes of the best scenes from Special Education to appease the audience tastes of the late 1970s.
Grlić then affirmed the value of constructive criticism and cautioned against the prevalence of egotism in the film industry. Both directors located the essence of their work in storytelling – a craft equally present in their letters about lost friends and family traumas.
Marković closed with a self-deprecating announcement of his forthcoming turn to non-narrative film, while Grlić ended the conversation by reflecting on the importance of good, honest stories for holding countries, industries, and illusions to account, and for the sake of intellectual life of cinema.
