About this Item
Belgrade: "Avala-film", 1963. Quarto (29.5 × 20.5 cm). Original half-cloth over marbled boards; 220 leaves of typescript to rectos, with over 400 vintage gelatin silver prints attached to leaves with paperclips. Manuscript notes and sketches to versos and throughout. Boards scuffed, corners bumped; else about good or better. Unique working copy of an original shooting script for the film "Attack on Drvar" (Desant na Drvar, 1963), made by one of the most prolific Yugoslav directors of stage and screen, Fadil Had?i? (1922-2011), co-written with a leading figure of the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde, Bora ?osi? (b. 1932). The volume was likely assembled by Had?i? himself, and includes the text of the screenplay, a breakdown of 583 takes, notes on camera angles, movement of the camera and actors, as well as over 400 photographs capturing individual shots, providing a step-by-step roadmap for the shooting. The film dramatizes a major assault of the German forces on Drvar, the headquarters of Yugoslav Partisan resistance with Tito in command, carried out in May 1944. For Had?i? this was a second feature film, following his debut feature "The Alphabet of Fear" (1961). A graduate of the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts (in painting), Had?i? started out in animation, writing his first screenplay for the critically acclaimed animated film "The Enchanted Castle in Dudinci" (Za?arani dvorac u duduncima, 1952). He would go on to write and direct over a dozen films, with the "system critique" films "Protest" (1967) and "Novinar" (1979), earning him the title of Best Director at the Pula Film Festival of Yugoslavian films. In the 1980s, Had?i? would move away from film, toward writing and directing for the stage. For the writer and journalist Bora ?osi?, this was the debut screenplay. Born in Zagreb, ?osi? studied Philosophy in Belgrade, finding work in more lucrative screenwriting while translating the Russian Futurists and researching historical avant-gardes in Yugoslavia as a passion project. ?osi? also edited independent journals throughout the 1960s for which he produced experimental writing. In 1969-1970, he published the mixed media journal "Rok" which was "both an art magazine and a work of art". Art historian Mi?ko ?uvakovi? writes: "In the theoretical sense and in terms of concept, Rok was the pinnacle of the Belgrade neo-avant-garde, joining together, within the integral context of a magazine, experiments in literature, essay, poetry, painting, and music, referencing the international strategies of neo-Dada and Fluxus" (See Dubravka Djuri? and Mi?ko ?uvakovi? eds. Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, p. 28). The volume "Mixed Media" (1970), a kind of an artist book, became a culmination of his work on "Rok". His screenwriting work and his interest in the avant-gardes intersected in the 1973 project "Crazy dictionary" (Ludi re?nik), a satirical and absurdist TV series which used puppets.
Seller Inventory # 55593
Contact seller
Report this item
