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This paper centres on Bogdan Žižić’s documentary films, aiming at providing arguments, on the basis of the number and quality of Žižić’s documentaries, for the claim that Žižić was primarily a documentary film author and only secondarily a feature-length film author. Reviewing films, the author of the paper establishes a thematic diversity of Žižić’s documentaries, ranging from intimist films about artists and people with health problems, emphasising the intimate even when tackling social topics, to strongly socially engaged films. Furthermore, stylistic diversity of his documentary films is described, from a more direct approach to reality inspired by cinéma vérité and direct cinema to the more indirect relationship to the reality through narrator’s speech, preparedness, symbolism, subjective frames, stylizations and philosophical discourse and a frequently present leitmotif pro- cedure. Žižić’s documentary films Jasenovac (1966), Praise to the Hand (1968), Foreign Worker (1977), One Life (1985) and Damnatio memoriae (2000) are analysed in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centres on Bogdan Žižić’s documentary films, aiming at providing arguments, on the basis of the number and quality of Žižić’s documentaries, for the claim that Žižić was primarily a documentary film author and only secondarily a feature-length film author. Reviewing films, the author of the paper establishes a thematic diversity of Žižić’s documentaries, ranging from intimist films about artists and people with health problems, emphasising the intimate even when tackling social topics, to strongly socially enaged films. Furthermore, stylistic diversity of his documentary films is described, from a more direct approach to reality inspired by cinéma vérité and direct cinema to the more indirect relationship to the reality through narrator’s speech, preparedness, symbolism, subjective frames, stylizations and philosophical discourse and a frequently present leitmotif pro- cedure. Žižić’s documentary films Jasenovac (1966), Praise to the Hand (1968), Foreign Worker (1977), One Life (1985) and Damnatio memoriae (2000) are ana- lysed in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]