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Serbian director Puriša Đorđević has died

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versatile creator, director, screenwriter and writer

At the age of 98, one of the most prominent Yugoslav and Serbian filmmakers, Mladomir Puriša Đorđević, director of films such as Dream, Morning, Podne and Trainer, lost his battle with illness in Belgrade.

Đorđević established himself internationally as one of the followers of the esteemed Belgrade film school (although he was never a student) and as one of the most important actors of the new Yugoslav film of the 1960s and 1970s, or the slightly later black wave. He has created many documentaries and feature films, among which quite a few are low-budget.



Đorđević was born on May 6, 1924. He spent his childhood and youth in his native Čaček, where, in addition to reading Chekhov and coaching football, he regularly visited the cinema as a real school student.

During the war, he joined an unarmed partisan unit that controlled trains. Her capture was followed by a transfer from prison to prison until the end of the whirlwind of war, after which he returned to his birthplace. He first got a job there as a journalist and was soon filming news reports.

In 1947, he became the editor of film news, and later turned to directing documentaries. He left an oeuvre of about 70 film works, 20 feature films and more than 50 short feature films and documentaries.

His opus belongs to the chapter of the new film, which brought an explosion of the subject on many levels and marked the beginning of far-reaching changes. He made several short documentaries, among them Dekle z slačnice (Devojka sa slavnne strane, 1958), On (1961), Mati, sin, vnuk, nukinja (Majka, son, unuk, unuka, 1965). In these creations, the beginnings of his author’s style could already be detected, which includes a lyrically intoned treatment of war themes with a focus on youthful enthusiasm in the face of death.


Morning (Puriša Djordjević).  Photo: Liffe

Đorđević distanced himself from the usual “party narrative” already with his early films, and he investigated the war theme through a subtle prism in his four feature films – Dekle (Devojka, 1965), Sanje (Dream, 1966), Morning (1967) and Half Day (Noon, 1968). All three are connected by the director’s unique authorial expression, based primarily on the dramaturgy of montage-linked fragments. As he himself said, these four films “just flew out of him”.


Ljubiša Samardžić and Mladomir Puriša Đorđević on the set of the film Stormy afternoons in 1968. Photo: Slovenska kinoteka

Instead of a love letter, he wrote the script for Dekle in one night as early as 1958, while he shot Jutra, for example, in one week. Thus, after Deklet, in which the subjective experience of war is drawn through the story of a girl, a soldier, a photographer and a German officer, comes Jutra, a modernistic fragmented story of individuals of a partisan detachment, which takes place on the last day of the war and the first day of peace in the author’s native Čaček.

For Jutra, which talks about the dark shadows of war and is at the same time an ode to the vitality of youth, as it is imbued with ludic-poetic metatextual, intertextual and intermedial elements, it received the golden arena for direction and screenplay at the Pula Film Festival. He also tried his hand as an actor and appeared in the film South Southeast (2005).

Along with the film, he also devoted himself to writing and signed ten novels and more than a hundred stories. A few months ago, the director started the film adaptation of Branimir Šćepanović’s novel Usta puna zemlje, but he did not complete the project.

In 1960, he married Milena Dravičwith whom they later divorced.

Source: Rtvslo

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