The last television show

This April, Bojana Andrić left us, a woman who dedicated her whole life to television. She presented me with an award for television criticism, as a kid, a TV Maniac from B92 who writes about television in the weekly "Vreme". I have never met a person who is able to subordinate his own artistic work to the preservation and promotion of the work of others, and that is on a medium such as television, where egoism and narcissism are almost taken for granted. She was only jealous of the work of her Historiography Editorial Office, through the "Teveteka" and "Trezor" projects.

Her plays are My friend Charles, Australia is far away., Wrong assessment, Ordinary life, Song, Professor Kosta Vujić's hat, Butterfly and series Aleksa Santic. Dramaturgy was her vocation, she wrote with a pencil, all her life she looked like a teenager who was in a hurry somewhere and spread the energy of a nuclear reactor around her.

She spent her entire working life at Television Belgrade, i.e. RTS, but on two occasions she was seriously disappointed in this institution. The first time it happened was during the shameful period of TV Bastille, when RTS expelled all opponents and critics of the Milosevic regime and its war propaganda in various ways. Unfortunately, many media beheadings of that time have experienced open or silent rehabilitation and flattery in today's regime as part of an attempt to revise the tragic legacy of the 1990s. Bojana is one of the last "televisionists", as she called the people who built television in Serbia and Yugoslavia, adhering to high professional standards not only in the technical, but also in the artistic sense. That's why she realized very early on the need to treat the legacy of television, since its creation in the fifties of the last century, as a cultural heritage that requires protection, preservation and study. Bojana was actually a TV anarchist, a person who within the system managed to achieve incredible results with guerilla methods. She practically occupied the old studio of RTB at the Fair and turned it from a warehouse into a proto-museum of television where, along with her colleagues, she was the editor, curator, conservator and archivist. It was amazing to walk through that space where Bojana knew every exhibit, as well as every light bulb on the wall of the studio. There she also found the legendary script for the series Impure blood Vojislav Nanovič, who was believed to be lost and based on which Milutin Petrović filmed the series.

The idea of ​​a television museum has much more to it than the preservation of a tradition that is taken out of the depot when necessary and shown as a shrine to the faithful in the church. Bojana realized a long time ago that television is a witness to an epoch, culture, and politics and that it can be used as an integral part of any current production, from news, drama to documentary and music programs.

That's where the second big disappointment happened, because RTS still doesn't want to actively use its archive, that treasury that hides and preserves unpleasant facts from our political past, especially when it comes to the 1990s. Namely, all current political actors have their own dark wartime editions, which may be partially deleted on YouTube, but only broadcasting old editions of Dnevnik would show unpleasant memories and parallels with our reality. That's why the archive is used as an anecdote, as a picture of a girl or a woman, hairstyles of actresses or bell ringers of our presenters and singers. With Bojan, I talked about the RTS archives as a counterpart to the DB archives, where you can see who was eligible, who was an informant, and who was denounced. She was actually disappointed because of the conscious neglect of tradition, history and the work of generations of top professionals. That is why she was completely dedicated to the project of digitizing the archive, with the idea of ​​making it accessible to media researchers, but also to colleagues who work in television today. Bojana was able to draw parallels with current events through materials from "Tresor" in the late night or early morning hours. For example, today I thought that Bojana would be able to find in the archive relevant parallels to walks, blockades and walks to convey a message, or support an idea, or, in the worst case, the Leader. Serbs from Kosovo, for example, were abused back in the eighties when they came to complain about Albanians, until Sloba declared: "No one is allowed to beat you." Then there are the relays, the 1968s, but also the protests of the 1990s, which stopped for months right in front of RTS.

Bojana was the only one who had the strength to guerillaly record her show in the studio between the two scheduled times, using the technique and scenography that she was not given. She annoyed all the management because she was not prone to compromises and did not agree to be a TV archivist like those from "Drazvni posal". On the contrary, they tried to ignore her, to which she voluntarily, as a pensioner, volunteered in her own newsroom. Her life's work is "A guide to the production of feature programs of Belgrade Television 1958-1995", a book that is the Bible of every researcher of television in this area. It was exactly that - a guide through the history of television, and now our task is to add Bojana Andrić to that history as a big and important chapter.