Mladomir Puriša Đorđević (1924–2022)

Mladomir Puriša Đorđević is a great director whose career spanned the last eight decades of cinema and who created some of its most challenging, experimental, and satirical films, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. Already shooting his first documentaries after the Second World War, Đorđević came to prominence with the advent of the Yugoslav Black Wave and in his time directed 20 features and more than 50 short and documentary films. Political subjects with a modernist twist, a blend of monochrome and colour photography, socialist iconography, star actors, archival footage, historical re-enactments, and fourth-wall breaks are regular features of Puriša’s signature style.Footnote¹ His films offer fascinating confrontations with war but not interested in triggers, Đorđević looks for its causes. He is equally interested in history but for him historical figures and events are secondary and people primary. He concretizes the local, granular, intimate effects of history on people’s everyday lives and yet in a poetic way goes beyond to voice the moral questions that lie within.

Born in 1924 in Čačak, a town to which he would pay good tribute in his films, Đorđević became a member of the youth branch of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and joined the partisans during the Second World War. After liberation, he became a journalist in the esteemed Belgrade daily Politika and in 1947 editor for Filmske Novosti, the newsreel production house known for capturing all aspects of socio-political and cultural life in Yugoslavia and for which he directed his first films. Đorđević’s feature debut came with the film A Child of the Community (1953) in which his love of local communities meets a playful comedy of errors full of the literary flair inherited from Branislav Nušić, from whose novel the film is adapted. Satire is counterpointed by more illicit subject matter in his next work For Two Little Grapes (1955), a co-production with Greece, which sees an affair between a young farmer and the daughter of the local landlord.

The two films that follow are The First Citizen of a Small Town (1961) and Summer is to Blame for Everything (1961), connected by the presence of the comedian Mija Aleksić and accompanied in turn by wonderful leading ladies Jelena Žigon and Milena Dravić, reveal the director as a sensitive chronicler of small-town Serbia. Dravić shines with rare talent and beauty and would come to be the most prominent actress in Đorđević’s body of work. A sharp turn and almost total break with convention comes with The Girl (1965), a film that takes the form of a diary written like a stream of consciousness and forms the first part of the director’s war ‘tetralogy’ (Batinić Citation2015, 242). The film features Milena Dravić and Ljubiša Samardžić, a duo who subsequently starred in many films together and would become a much-loved romantic ensemble in Yugoslav cinema. A young girl falling in love with a partisan gives way to a powerful reflection on human nature. An unexpectedly breath-taking sequence shows German soldiers sitting at the front. War is suspended, people speak to one another, friends to enemies, and past to present before the camera. In a meta-cinematic gesture, it captures an eternal perspective, where enemies do not exist.

The dimension of the eternal is at the heart of Đorđević’s next film The Dream (1966), nominated for the Golden Bear in Berlin, which focuses on young people in 1941 who dream of the time when liberation will come. Blending modernity and tradition, it features an unforgettable sequence that rings close to Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece made in the same year, as the Cross of Christ is carried up the mountain. The third and most well-known part of the tetralogy, Morning (1967), a landmark of the Black Wave and Golden Lion contender and Winner of the Volpi Cup for Best Actor (Samardžić) at the Venice Biennale, picks up where the last film left off: the first days of liberation. The image of the woman becomes central in a critical reflection on the struggle that freedom brings and, if Tarkovsky said he aimed to place the person back in the historical process, then Đorđević does this quite literally. Đorđević concludes his tetralogy with Noon (1968), a lyrical portrait of people’s lives in Belgrade on the eve of the Tito-Stalin split of 1948. Arguably the director’s finest work, the film is also one of the greatest cinematic tributes to the acting profession, best epitomized as a movement of boundaries in the closing moments of the film when the characters bow to the camera after physically taking off the border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

The 1970s present an interesting turn for the filmmaker who brings his eclectic spin on the cycling partisans in The Cyclists (1970) and the chamber adaptation of Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog in Rain (1972). The launch of FEST Belgrade International Film Festival in 1971 saw the production of I Miss Sonia Henie (1971), prompted by Karpo Godina as a short experimental film shot inside a hotel room and composed of episodes directed by Đorđević, Godina, Dušan Makavejev, Paul Morrissey, Miloš Forman, Frederick Wiseman, Buck Henry, and Tinto Brass. In contrast to a continuous dedication to experimentation, Pavle Pavlović (1975) is one of Đorđević’s most beautiful colour films and portrays a steel worker who, after opening up about the conditions in the factories, becomes a television sensation. Featuring an outstanding performance by Bekim Fehmiu, the film is a critical work about the place of workers in society and is a good companion to Hungarian and Polish films of the era.

However, nothing will prepare you for The Coach (1978) which may be the director’s most remarkable film simply because it is an anomaly. What starts off as a sports film becomes a reflection on intimate human relationships and the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary life. The film is a good reminder of why Đorđević is one of the most fascinating directors in world cinema to use music for the purposes of subversion. His soundscape transcends classical Russian symphonies, Nazi marches, and Yugoslav partisan songs all the way through to Serbian folk music, children’s lullabies, and Ennio Morricone ballads (discover Đorđević’s The Coach and you will never watch Italian genre films or Tarantino’s Kill Bill the same way again).

Following a portrait of the Roma in Eight Kilos of Happiness (1980), the next decades saw the director’s gradual withdrawal from features and a return to the short form as well as television. However, a significant triumph can be found in Skerco (1994), a monochrome experimental work assembled from unrealised material originally shot by the director over two decades earlier, which is a powerful premonition of war that speaks deeply to the state of a country in collapse during the 1990s. His last film, shot at the age of 98, released posthumously and Winner of the Best Picture Award at FEST, Mouth Full of Earth (2023) is perhaps appropriately a necessary reflection on life and death and brings the director’s concerns with anti-fascism, civilization, and freedom full circle.

Though not immediately noticeable, upon closer inspection one uncovers an underlying tension between reactionary scepticism and sincere faith in Mladomir Puriša Đorđević’s work. While it is all too easy to ascribe this to socialism, Đorđević outdoes himself once again: his characters represent people out of time. They serve to remind others of the value of their soul in the circumstances when they are asked to sell off everything, namely themselves. In The Girl the voice of Milena Dravić in highly surreal fashion calls for love in the midst of a ravaged battlefield. An aging man in The Dream reminds us that in his time they used to sing the hymn to Saint Sava. While attacks on the Church in socialist Yugoslavia were common, the hymn to Saint Sava emerges in this director’s work as a quiet voice speaking to the heart. Let us hope that at the end of a century and a wonder of heritage left behind, Puriša is still singing.