“From an institution that was on the verge of collapse, we made an institution of European and world proportions. What we did represents the top realisation of the original principles of film archiving, as stated by Eva Orbanz, the then president of the international organisation of film archives. Everything that was collected over generations is available to our public and the world. Will someone who comes and sees that we preserve one of the few surviving cameras of the Lumière brothers think of us a little differently? I’m sure they will. The Cinematheque is one huge album, and we are guardians of memories. That’s what I was throughout all the years that I worked, and I’m proud that this house was protected from the influence of political and financial malfeasance.” The good spirit guarding Rale’s office at the Cinematheque was the film Casablanca, starring the famous Humphrey Bogart. Two framed stills from that film hung on one wall, while in the central spot, behind the director’s back, hung a huge picture of brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière: “The first job I did when I arrived at the Cinematheque in 1992 was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the shooting of Casablanca. We organised a party at the Sava Centre, it cost us an arm and a leg, but we sold seven thousand tickets. It was an unforgettable event. According to all polls, that film is still ranked as one of the ten best films in the history of cinematography. Rale talks about film intimately. He likes to talk about it as a document in time, which is why he says that the last century was actually the century of documentary film: “What is the film Love and Fashion today, with the divine Beba Lončar, the inimitable song of Đuzo Stojiljković and other artists?” This is a document about a Belgrade that does not exist, about the busiest street in a capital city without cars, with Beba Lončar on a Vespa, about petticoats... Nothing similar exists or has been invented in human civilisation that can embody life and spare it from oblivion like moving pictures. Where will you be able to watch The Great Dictator in Serbia today other than at the Cinematheque?” Rale cites for us another detail from the time when he fought, together with people from the City Assembly and the Ministry of Culture, for the Cinematheque to gain a new building:
I received the award with lots of mixed feelings. It’s a good thing that I didn’t receive it posthumously. I felt great excitement when I said that I was dedicating the award to Vesna, to whom I was married for 45 years “The then director of the Federal Directorate for Property said, with undisguised disdain, ‘What is the Cinematheque? Every city in America has four larger cinematheques than ours’. It took me a while to figure out that he was talking about video rental clubs! And some other powerful people had already envisaged that building as being a centre for branded sports goods. They couldn’t imagine that so many square-metres would go to something they hadn’t heard of !” When it comes to Rale’s biography, we mustn’t overlook the International Film Festival
in Palić. He participated in its founding back in 1992 and remains its director to this day. He rounded off his career with the forming of the SANU Audiovisual Archive and Centre for Digitization, of which he was among the founders and the first administrator. At the end of the story of this unusual man to whom Yugoslav and Serbian culture owe so much, Radoslav ‘Rale’ Zelenović reveals to us that he applied for the Faculty of Dramatic Arts four times... And he didn’t pass the entrance exam. And his son Đorđe also failed to pass this exam twice: “Fortunately, neither he nor I gave up.” Đorđe has been working at the Yugoslav Cinematheque for years, and his work preserves the memory of his father at this archive. During the many decades of his working life, Rale received numerous awards, including the most important ones - the Sretenje Order, the Vuk Award, the French Order in the rank of Knight of Culture and Literature ... But he still can’t believe that the state of Serbia hasn’t awarded this cultural institution with some of the orders it grants every year, at least in 2019, when the 70th anniversary of the Yugoslav Cinematheque was commemorated.
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