Miroslav Mikuljan’s nonprofessional film opus, which he created in the Film Club Zagreb before enrolling to the Academy of Drama Arts, is another strong argument for the statement that when doing a historical overview of Croatian short films, amateur productions should not be separated out from the professional. If we look at Mikuljan’s nonprofessional films from 1960s and 1970s we will get a clearer picture not just of him as the author but of the roots of some phenomena of Croatian film that are unjustly and sometimes arrogantly adopted by mainstream professionals.

There is no need to wait for a more distant perspective in time in order to conclude that Mikuljan, challenging himself simultaneously in short films, documentaries and experimental techniques. When he could not find any “extraordinary” phenomena or situations to document, he focused on the routine and daily, for example human (especially female) bodies that merely hurried or strolled passed before his camera (Intermezzo, Post sezona, 1970), thus highlighting the idea of the transience of everything physical. His other topics were supplied by (enraged) nature (for example, the flood in the documentary Sava kod Zagreba 514) or the chaos of society. Mikuljan, limits himself to observation and reduction and allows the different phenomena to speak for themselves. He does it very eloquently and subversively in documentaries consisting of two parts and dealing with the topic of guest workers Putnici Eldorado expressa (1970) and Jesenice-Stutgart (1972).

Mikuljan also knew how to be allegorically subversive, for example in the Rođendan stalagmita (1970), sort of an experimental evocation of individualism that was suppressed at the time. In this film he describes suppressed individualism through a portrait of a lonely man who differs from his surroundings because he is the only one walking forward and not backward. His reduction took Mikuljan to formalism and the abstract (for example Seisana, 1970), but even then he remained, in picture and sound, a witness to the spirit of his time. (D.N.)