The stage of the Culture Center in Zlatibor belonged, for a moment last night, to a man who has spent his whole career behind the camera, not in front of it. At the opening of the third NAFFIT, the National Film and Television Festival, Culture Minister Nikola Selakovic presented a lifetime achievement award to cinematographer Radoslav Vladic, after actors Petar Bozovic, Miroslav Lekic, Dragan Petrovic Pele and Iva Strljic had walked the red carpet ahead of him. The audience applauded a man whose name rarely appears on a poster, even though his signature, in the form of the images he shot, is stamped on more than fifteen hundred titles of domestic production.
The festival, as young as its name suggests, is running this year from September 3 to 6, with a program that spreads from the Culture Center to Cajetina, Nova Varos and Priboj. Its premise is simple and, it seems, long overdue: to screen, in a single week, the best award winning television and film work of domestic production from the past year, and to bring on stage the people who made it, not only directors and actors but cinematographers, set designers and costume designers as well. We had not covered this festival before, which in itself says something about how rarely these professions get institutional attention.
Vladic was born in 1952 in Belgrade, finished the School of Design and then the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, in the department of film and television cinematography. He has worked professionally since 1970, and over half a century has shot the cinematography for more than 1,500 film and television productions, among them “Variola vera,” “Lepota poroka” and “Tito i ja.” A particular, almost curious detail of his body of work is the experimental film “Kuca,” held in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in a program devoted to European avant garde cinema.
That detail, more than the count of 1,500 titles, is what shows this award is no mere formality. A cinematographer is, by the nature of the job, an anonymous author: his craft is recognized in the light, in the framing, in the mood of a shot, but rarely in the closing credits an audience remembers. Selakovic said at the opening that Serbia has a serious film and television production industry, the largest in the former Yugoslavia, but that it had never had its own festival until now, adding that he was especially pleased NAFFIT was drawing a considerably larger number of foreign guests and domestic film professionals this year. That is the institutional case for why the festival exists. Vladic’s own speech was the case for why an award for a cinematographer makes sense.
Accepting the honor, he did not start with himself.
It is only natural to look back and remember everyone who helped with the filming and everyone who contributed to the final image. That is, first of all, the set designers and costume designers, the most important collaborators of a director of photography, without whom there would be no good image.
He went on to list the lighting technicians, the stage crew, the whole camera department, and said he did not see the award as his alone. “All of them contributed to this award and to the good images I filmed. So thank you to all of them, this recognition certainly belongs in part to them too, not only to me,” he said. That sentence is, in effect, a short manifesto for the entire profession: the image in a film is never the work of one person, whatever name ends up on the award, and a festival like NAFFIT earns its purpose exactly when it brings that shared credit out onto a stage, instead of leaving it in the closing credits.
He closed his speech by thanking the audience for turning out in large numbers for the opening and, as he put it, for “loving film,” then raised a toast: “Ziveli!” After fifty six years behind the camera, six letters were enough for a man who has spent his career building other people’s shots to find himself, for a moment, in one of his own.
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