Bijeg u pobjedu Johna Hustona – uzori i značenja.

The film Victory (John Huston, 1981) is a sports war film centred on an exhibition football match between prisoners of war and German football players. The Paris match is an opportunity for the prisoners to escape the German prison camp. However, the team of Allied prisoners of war give up on this idea the moment the German team starts winning. Instead of the planned escape, they decide to finish the match and fight for the victory. There are several models for the film story about a football match and they can be found in American and British films about World War II prisoners of war and their attempts at escape, as well as the Soviet myth about the “death match” played in Kyiv in 1952 and its cinematic presentations. The underlying meanings of the film encompass the victory on the pitch earned by skill and persistence as well as the victory in terms of the escape enabled by the French spectators who invade the pitch after the game. On a more general level, the film addresses the victory of sports over politics and the victory of people over occupation and totalitarianism. The title of the film is multi-layered – the film talks about winning in different spheres and on different levels of meaning, providing us with the patterns on how to preserve freedom and democracy in the difficult times of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]