MemoryΥs Merciless Burden
by Babis Aktsoglou
Vatroslav Mimica, one of the best cartoonists of the Zagreb school, stood out in the mid Τ50s thanks to a series of short films characterised by originality in direction and graphics. These films were also characterised by the existence of the Kafkaesque absurd, which we also find in Prometheus from the Visevice Island; the fourth film that put Mimica in the limelight of cinematography. MimicaΥs Prometheus was filmed during a flourishing period of Yugoslavian cinema and opening up to European innovation (mostly with the work of Aleksandar Petrovic and Dusan Makavejev. This film is about the merciless burden of memory and uses flashback in the literal sense of the word: not as a linear composition of the past events that influenced the heroΥs young life, but rather like a flash, a quick image of the memory. Mate, the hero of the Yugoslavian resistance, does not console himself for helping Zeus/Tito win the Titans/Germans. On the contrary, like a contemporary Prometheus, he wants to bring electric light/fire to the villagers, but they are not able to appreciate his gift. Zeus/The Communist Party abandons him and his punishment consists of the lack of appreciation and the heroΥs fall from his pedestal followed by the exile to the inland.
The film is an allegory criticising the end of the ideals and the responsibilities of the Communist Party. However, it is not attracted by the rhetoric and the didactic character of socialist realism. On the contrary, it constructs a complex filmic discourse based on the effects of editing; a typical characteristic of many other films of the same period (Mimica himself speaks of how the Czech director Jan Nemec influenced him). The scenes of the past, extremely brief at first but longer as time passes, never roll in a linear form but are confused in time and are sometimes repeated. But this is real memory, isnΥt it? Memory is an amalgam of old images and events and not a story of the past narrated in chapters (as in all flashback academic approaches). The film had a great impact on the Yugoslavian cinema and its international success motivated many other young directors to turn towards the current events of their times signifying the phenomenon of the Yugoslavian nouvelle vague. This "Prometheus", finally, changed something Π at least in his countryΥs cinema.