Cinematography on the Adriatic Islands

Cinematography has a significant role because of the strength and broadness of the inclusiveness of the larger scope of the citizenry into the contemporary arts and culture. The project comprises research of the history of cinemas of the Adriatic islands throughout the 20th Ct. and mapping of all locations on which cinemas functioned permanently or temporarily, as well as insight into the programs of those cinemas. Furthermore, the research includes mapping all films that are connected to the Adriatic islands.

This subject has not been systematically tackled so far, thus the long-term research of the authors of the project, next to the field and archival work has also been opened for additional comments and information via the communication platforms. The project is a differentiated narrative about landscapes and spaces of the Adriatic islands: on one side the cinemas shaped the modern urbanity, and on the other side they represented the cultural context and interpersonal relations which that urbanity motivates. Constructing the cinemas on the Adriatic islands was a strong aspect of their modernisation. Next to the cities where the cinemas already had existed, after WWII many cinemas opened in villages across the country. With the development of tourism in the 1960s, many open-air cinemas were opened, which added a new atmospheric value to the experience of seeing a movie on a big screen.

In his short documentary Islands of Forgotten Cinemas a director and film critic Ivan Ramljak noted down the sad contemporaneity of many forgotten cinemas on the Adriatic islands. In that way, the mentioned film is not just an elegy on oblivion, but also an ode to the remembrance of the collective experience of seeing a movie in the cinema, the ode whose rhythm has been pulsing in the backbone of this project. That social need for the collective experience of seeing a movie we feel today, too. Because, without collective experiences – a society simply does not exist.