Born in 1935 in Podgorica (Montenegro), Vlatko Gilic is a conundrum. He directed thirteen films between 1966 and 1980, achieved international esteem with a Silver Bear at the Berlinale and an Oberhausen Grand Prix, then transitioned into academia and teaching while continuing to invent screenplays. Interviews with the cineaste-professor are exceedingly rare; his eleven short and two feature-length outputs speak confidently for themselves. Alloying Christian metaphysics/symbolism with politicized allegory and ritual, Gilic’s early philosophical inquiries scrutinize humankind (namely its ever-elusive “nature”) with the use of observational, languid, even transcendental technique. His images are as slow as they are rapturous, and as socially anchored as universally timeless; in these disquieting glimpses, sparse fly-on-the-wall witnessing is mobilized to overwhelming, exalted ends. The films, as Ben Harrison noted elatedly (but not altogether wrongly) in 1976, “make use of documentary material, yet their selectivity and structure are as rigorous as lyric poetry. They exploit the camera’s ability to capture the individual and the concrete, yet they make statements of mythic proportions. They are full of sensational images, yet they sustain moments of great quietude. The subjects are ostensibly secular, yet they contain numerous religious references. Like all works of genius, they are untranslatable. No description or paraphrase can do them full justice. One must see them to appreciate them, and having seen them, one can never forget them.”

Indeed, Gilic’s sinister oeuvre includes enough frightening, gripping and downright searing iconography to occupy any susceptible mind for a lifetime. From the hopeless escape maneuvers in Homo homini—the second installment in a mythologic trilogy, with rising megastar Dragan Nikolic as Sisyphus—to the equally inevitable drudgery in Pull, Pull, this screening gathers seven lucubratory nonfictions shot in the late 60s and early 70s. All stored at the Harvard Film Archive on exquisite 16mm prints, the films showcase Gilic’s stylistic-conceptual attitude in its stern focus, consistency and depth. Mortality (both animal and human) looms as a generalized, interspecies angst, pictured acutely in the slaughterhouse exposé In continuo—a not-so-distant cousin to Franju’s Le sang des bêtes. Power—its machinations and deceptive manipulations—likewise occupies these shorts as a leitmotif, most spellbindingly in the eponymous hypno-drama featuring occultist and telepath Slobodan Cirkovic Roko of Man Is Not a Bird (Dusan Makavejev, 1965) fame. Love and devotion in their danse macabre with corporeal danger propel Love as well as Judas, while One Day More has recently come to light in its astonishing internationalist dimension. In 2024, researcher Anna Ulrikke Andersen unearthed documentation listing Gilic’s vignette of visitors-convalescents taking a gyttja mud bath near Bujanovac in southern Serbia as one of the films screened on Norwegian public TV (NRK) to launch the “Year of Rheumatism” fundraising campaign in August 1974. Two years later, the Nordic country began sending patients to the Dr. Simo Milosevic Institute for Physical Medicine, Rehabilitation and Rheumatology in Igalo, Montenegro—an intercultural partnership that continues to this day. Whatever role Vlatko Gilic’s seductive films played in the exchange, one thing is evident: for all its existential abstraction, this is an art with consequences; for all its centering of futility, it is a cinema that left a mark on this world.