Vlatko Gilic dies: the architect who never studied film
Vlatko Gilic, the Podgorica-born director who trained as an architect and made only two features, has died in Belgrade at 91. In 1980 NBC ranked him among the 50 greatest directors in film history.
When the American network NBC drew up its 1980 list of the 50 most significant directors in the history of world cinema, a name from Podgorica sat between Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. Vlatko Gilic had exactly one feature film to his name at that point. Everything else was short work, shot for the Dunav Film studio between 1966 and 1973.
Gilic has died in Belgrade at 91. Two directors, Sead Sabotic and Nikola Vukcevic, confirmed the news on Facebook late on Thursday night, and the Montenegrin daily Pobjeda carried it.
An architect who never sat in a film school
He was born on January 1, 1935 in Podgorica and graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. He never took a single directing class. He moved into film in the mid-1960s through documentary and short fiction, and stayed there long enough to build the body of work that still gets him cited alongside far more famous names.
His first short, Mala svetlost (A Small Light), was co-directed with Predrag Golubovic in 1966. Then came Povratak na rodno drvo, Homo Sapiens, In Continuo, Ljubav and Moc. The titles are short and almost conceptual, which is no accident. Gilic worked with the image first and the story second, and the architect’s habit of thinking in mass, void and cross-section shows in his frames more clearly than any film school ever would have.
Why did NBC put Gilic among the 50 greatest?
The answer lies in the shorts rather than the features. In Continuo won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 1971. In Oberhausen, then the most important festival in the world for short film, he took the Grand Prix twice. He also carried away top prizes from Leipzig, Bellevue and Melbourne, and picked up a Golden Globe nomination.
The NBC list of 1980 was the only one of its kind on which a filmmaker from southeastern Europe appeared, and that filmmaker was Gilic. His films are held in the collection of MoMA in New York, and the Harvard Film Archive assembled a retrospective of his work in 2024.
Two features, both of them at Cannes
There are only two feature-length fiction films. Kicma (Backbone), from 1975, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Dani od snova (Days of Dreams), from 1980, screened in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section.
This is where domestic film history keeps tripping over Gilic. Directors in the region are measured by how many features they have delivered, so a man with two of them reads as a minor figure by that arithmetic, whatever the list from New York said. He spent decades as a name that got quoted more often than it got watched, while his strongest material, twenty minutes at a time, stayed off the schedules that reach a wide audience.
The department he founded in Novi Sad
The second half of his working life was taught rather than filmed. Gilic co-founded the directing department at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad and served as a full professor there, and in 2011 he was made professor emeritus. He also taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cetinje.
Several generations of people now working in film in Serbia and Montenegro passed through those classrooms. That makes it fitting that the news of his death arrived not through an institutional statement but through a post by two directors on a social network. Sabotic and Vukcevic wrote it as men who knew him, not as anyone discharging a duty.
