Even if, in the last ten years since Dr. Ante Peterlić (1936-2007) passed away, something very new and important happened in the area of critical thought, interpretation and analysis of film as well as the film art itself, the value of legacy of the authority of Croatian film critical thought, founder and champion of domestic filmology, and ultimately a film director, would remain the same. Furthermore, a decade later, Peterlić’s thoughts on film are quoted more often, his critical discourse is unsuccessfully imitated and his books – this foundation of Croatian film literacy – are more popular and read. Over the years, the value of his debut feature film Accidental Life from 1969, which has unjustly been underrated for a long time, also increased. This film of a modernist type, that transformed Peterlić into a film author for a short time, as well as other facts that we know about him – including the cannons of important directors and films, still raises questions about what we have not managed to find out from Peterlić or about him while he was alive. For example, is there in the almost ascetic analytic system of the historian and critic some unknown (maybe also sinful) enjoyment?; is there some trace of his directing (or theoretic) intervention in the films on which he worked as assistant director?; and finally why was Accidental Life his only feature length film.

This short program devoted to Peterlić additionaly urges ask to ask the same questions. Instead of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which was (publicly!) known to be his favorite film ten years ago (publicly!), at this occasion John Ford was pushed aside by Jean Renoir with his French Can Can from 1955. Peterlić’s „secret“ or „private“ love is the abundant musical fantasy about Paris at the end of the 19th century, a story about Moulin Rouge and Pygmalion, about love yearnings and artistic passions, which, as an atypical film by the author of the celebrated and thoroughly analyzed The Rules of the Game from 1939, was defended only by his fans film critics from the Cahiers du cinéma, such as François Truffaut. Underneath the layer of Technicolor, replicas of impressionistic paintings, set design of Monmartre and the catchy musical theme, they had the ability to see and feel the old Renoir. If we know that during his formative years as a film critic in the early 1960’s Peterlić was on the same wavelength as the members of the French New Wave, sharing their detailed analysis of films and authors’ policies, it does not come as a surprise that in this case he found himself in their company once again.

Films that Peterlić worked on, either as assistant director on Papić’s episode Čekati of the omnibus Ključ (1965), or as a director of his own film Accidental Life, present us with a world that is poetically and stylistically closer to the world of the new wave champions rather than to mature Renoir who is full of optimism and life. With their portrayal of existential anxiety and inertia as a sort-of a “youth’s illness”, today these films belong to the corpus of Croatian author (modernist) films. Luckily, the wave of revalorization of domestic film, which has been getting stronger in the last fifteen years, included also Peterlić’s feature-length debut giving the prematurely deceased director, whose life certainly was not at all accidental, sort of a post-humus satisfaction. (Diana Nenadić)