When it comes to morality, Babaja felt as a part of a high classical tradition, especially the literary clarified. Meditatively consistent, literary originals were the most logical “dialogue” base for his own creativity.
Both Babaja’s position and his creativity are imbued with seeming paradoxes. Babaja is the acclaimed proponent, the paradigmatic representative and a pioneer of auteur film in Croatian modernism. Even though he was respected, historically he was left out from the mainstream favored critics and audience. He got stuck almost on the very margins that he himself chose. His work gives an impression of stylistic consistency, and yet shows a difference between an earlier stylistic allegory phase and a later phase characterized by naturalism. He is valued as the most significant representative of the clarification of the film’s cinematic quality, as he is almost experimentally interested in the testing of special stylistic and visual possibilities of films. It can be said that there is no other Croatian author who, as thoroughly as Babaja, adapted literary works and used music and visual arts as classical inspirations.
So, the paradoxes are really only seeming. All these polar characteristics are consistent and interconnected.
From his first days Babaja chose to be a stylist – he thought that stylistic clarification is the key to the articulacy of the artistic experience. Even though today, his film Jedan dan na rijeci seems to be an anachronous television causerie, it was a film of picture (careful composition and lighting atmosphere), and of constructive and narrative play (humorous narration with illustrative counterpoint). This style became dominant in his series of allegory films (for example Ogledalo, Lakat kao takav, Pravda), while the accentuated visual composition, testing of stylized vistas and decor stylization only reinforced the symbolic elements in film scenes. A transition to naturalism was evident in his visual fascination with bodies, rich fibers with corroded surfaces, mighty micro-dynamics that the eye discovers in static situations and in caught-in-the-act scenes. None of the stylized vistas were lost in the second phase; they were only stretched out and developed “into an investigative manner”.
All this stylization was regarded as very modernist, in the tradition of the early modernism of European artistic movements and trends, but it also announced the arrival of modernist cinematography. Along with the Zagreb school of animated films, it had elements of amateur experimentalism and early on announced modernism and the auteur film in this area.
However, his stylization was not an end in itself. In all his allegory films Babaja was worried with questions of morality in life, both the morality of the society and of the individual. His best film from the allegory phase, Pravda, is a meditative analysis about the relativity of moral absolutes: the impulse to protect the weak is regarded differently by a society as participants change. Personal engagement is limited by fear of personal failure and is compensated by imaginary projections. Allegorical moral in his short films, (and the feature film Carevo novo ruho), further developed into a more complex sympathy moral in films from his naturalist phase. These films are still philosophically general but are more related to specific situations that clarify the moral. This is present both in documentaries (Tijelo; Čuješ li me; Čekaonica) as well as feature films (Breza, Miris zlato i tamjan, Izgubljeni zavičaj).
And when it comes to morality, Babaja felt as a part of a high classical tradition, especially the literary clarified. Meditatively consistent, literary originals were the most logical “dialogue” base for his own creativity (screenplays written by Božidar Violić and Tomislav Ladan, or those based on literary works by Slavko Kolar and Slobodan Novak).
But, what connects Babaja’s stylization and his philosophical morality is his personal meditativness. His films are not objective morally stylized studies, but are more his personal reflections. He reached out for stylization to clear up his philosophical doubts and thoughts and to make them more impressive for other people. They are the author’s expression and with their expressiveness are aimed at sympathetic souls. This meditativeness is present in all his films, but is most visible in the two of them: documentary Tijelo, and the emphasized Kamenita vrata.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Babaja seemed to be such a paradigmatic representative of the auteur film. After all he embodied all of its indicative traits: belief in the Art, art which is an expression of artist’s exceptional individuality, but also of an individuality that is meditatively concerned with the world and its own participative role in the world. (Hrvoje Turković)