Carevo novo ruho, priča Hansa Christiana Andersena i film Ante Babaje: intermedijsko pripovijedanje kao poligon za političku alegoriju.

The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837) by Hans Christian Andersen is a classic of children’s literature, but also holds an essential, emblematic position in the sphere of world literature and culture in general – it is one of the most translated stories/fairy tales, published in numerous languages and transposed into various media, but it is also a story with a rich semantic potential which allows for diverse interpretations. The focus of this paper is the comparative analysis of the famous Andersen story, and the eponymous feature film by the Croatian and Yugoslav director Ante Babaja, filmed in 1961. The screenplay was written by Božidar Violić, who adapted Andersen’s story for film. The Emperor’s New Clothes is the first feature film by this renowned director, and also the first Croatian feature film in colour. The unusual adaptation by Babaja is interesting on several levels and for a number of reasons – both poetic reasons (the approach is atypical, where the standard scenography is absent, and white surfaces take its place along with the socalled high-key lighting, signed by Oktavijan Miletić), and reasons of a wider scope, related to reception. Babaja’s film enables different readings than the ones based on Andersen’s template by intervening into the motif and narrative dimensions of the original story, but also through transgressions at the stylistic level (intermedial contact with stage acting), and the socio- political context in which the film originated (the time of socialist Yugoslavia). More precisely, Babaja’s The Emperor’s New Clothes reinterprets Andersen’s story by adding to it a concrete socio-political allegory of (not only) former Yugoslavia, while at the same time not discarding the central space of Andersen’s story – the relation between collective conventions and individual consciousness, cowardice and courage, submission and freedom, as the archetypical spaces of human communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]