1965 · short · experimental

Elegy

Directed by Nedeljko Dragić · 4m · 1965

Being a cartoonist and caricaturist, Dragić applied for a competition organised by Zagreb Film and so his succesful career as an animator started. However, his films remained strongly connected with his comic strips both in terms of style and narrative, and some of these are actually the animated version of his comics. Elegy, Dragić's debut film, for example, is based on his comic called Nostalgia, as he explains in an interview with Bosnian-Swedish theorist and animator Midhat Ajanović in his book "Nedeljko Dragić: The Man and the Line" (2014). Elegy is about a prisoner longing for the flower that caught his eye through the bars of his cell. The animation is quite static, a quality coming from his background in comics.

Our read: Elegy (1965) reads as a sombre, slow-burn, surreal short · experimental entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic in outlook, with a strong directorial signature.