"Yugoslavia was a big, serious country," says Predrag Pega Popović. cinematic cinematographer, professor and one of the founders of the Camera Department at Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, in an interview for the new issue of "Vremena", summarizing the time in which he worked and created.
Popović is the first graduate cinematographer in the former Yugoslavia, the author of 26 feature films and numerous documentaries, as well as a long-time pedagogue. He studied at the FAMU Academy in Prague, where he witnessed the events of the Prague Spring and the Soviet intervention in 1968.
His photograph of the charred body of Jan Palah from 1969, which he took in the morgue and which later toured the world, was created then, even though he was not signed as the author for a long time.
The recently shown documentary series Spring in a Prague School is a story, as its author Milan Nikodijević says, precisely "about a famous photograph and its author, about challenges and fears, about censorship and self-censorship in the turbulent time of the Prague Spring and the military intervention of the USSR in 1968 in what was then Czechoslovakia", of which Popović is the author.
Popović points out that the possibilities for work used to be wide: "We worked where we wanted, without restrictions", but some films like "The Mystery of the Organism" passed the censorship of the Republic Commission for Film Review.
Experiences from Prague
The experience in Prague shaped his understanding of freedom and the system: "We saw what repression and the police system meant," while he says of the former Yugoslavia that it was freer.
As part of the "Prague School" generation, he introduced the European spirit and new aesthetics to Yugoslav film, working with numerous important directors and on large-scale productions, but also participating in the development of a feature-length documentary film.
When asked what is key to his job, he answers simply: "It can't be done without passion. And without connection with the team."
Looking back on his own career and changes in the film industry, Popović says: "I'm old school", pointing to the difference between the former and modern way of working, but also to the continuity of experience that marked Yugoslav cinematography.
Read the full interview in the holiday double issue of "Vremena", which is on newsstands from Thursday, April 9, or subscribe now to printed or digitally edition.
