In Memoriam: Remembering visionary filmmaker Vlatko Gilić
A master filmmaker’s legacy lives on.
Last week the great master of cinema, Vlatko Gilić decamped to cinema Pantheon. He was 92. After 1980, with the exception of a short film Montenegro’s Atos in 1986, he was no longer making movies and was teaching full time at the film school in Novi Sad where he passed his passion for moving images and his unique vision of what cinema – and art in general – can be at its best to generations of his students.
Gilić (born in Montenegro, he lived and worked in Belgrade and Novi Sad in Serbia,) is universally recognized as one of the select few cinema luminaries such as Tarkovsky, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa…as one of the 50 most significant directors in cinema history. And the only one from South East Europe to make that specific list.
His groundbreaking short films have no dialog at all. They speak in a visual language so unique, so powerful and defining of human existence that they remain embedded in our consciousness and memory forever, making a profound impact on our notions of self in a complex and incredible universe.
Gilić was both a cinema philosopher and cinema poet. He made a foundational film in 1971 about the human desire to extend life, One Day More. His slaughterhouse short In Continuo (1970) transcends the starkness of the environment in the same way that El Greco, or Picasso made their paintings speak beyond the silence of the brush. His lyrical Love (1972), with only a quiet and distant sound of the workmen wrenching steel beams on a construction site hit like the hurricane shattering layers of learned behavior to take us to the epicenter of our capacity to love.
Men of Gilić’s vision and mastery rarely fare too well in any era. He was so ahead of his time that his approach and what he wanted to do stood apart from everyone and everything else. He made two feature films, Backbone (1975), and Days of Dreams (1980). To say that both were commercial failures is an understatement, though both premiered at Cannes. The claustrophobic world of Backbone which prophesied a polluted and suffocating world, an enigmatic and haunting doom, did not earn Gilić any favors. He stood alone, keeping to himself, and perhaps he had already said too much in the few films he had made.
In 2012-2013, I teamed up with Adam Hyman of the Los Angeles Filmforum to organize the retrospective of Vlatko Gilić’s films. We were lucky that the Harvard Film Archive had bought the prints of his films and agreed to digitize them. Since then, the films of Vlatko Gilić have been touring the country, from the Pacific Film Archive to the National Gallery of Art, always inspiring new appreciations. These films are simply timeless, illuminating the human path with compassion and unparalleled understanding.
In 2024, his lifelong friend, multimedia artist Saša Pančić published a book of Gilić’s drawings. It is an homage to his prolific visual artistry which can be traced back to his beginnings as production designer in the early 1960s. Browse these images as we pay our respects to a man of integrity whose cinematic opus is one of the great artistic legacies from South East Europe that we are proud of.
Vera Mijojlic
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The Wrap’s article by Steve Pond
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