One More for the Road

Recounts the life and career of Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grli in the form of a lexicon of film terms tied to anecdotes spanning Grlis life. I read a lot this year. Old, new, borrowed, blue. This was the best. The paradox of reading something so avidly that you cant put it down and then I got to the last 20 pages slowing down to a snails pace and reading so slowly so that it wouldnt be over so quickly.Mike Downey, European Film Academy From his post-Nazi-era childhood in Yugoslavia to his college years during the 1968 invasion of Prague, the Yugoslav dissolution wars, and his subsequent exile in the United States, these personal stories combine to provide insight into socialist film industries, contextualizing south Slavic film while also highlighting its contacts with Western filmmakers and film industry. From the introduction by Aida Vidan: The one hundred and seventy-seven film terms provide sometimes a direct and at other times a metaphoric path to Grlis stories and concurrently serve as a self-referential mechanism to comment on a series of film attributes. The entries can be read in any order, allowing for the readers own montage of the books universe. Grli adroitly captures the absurdities and paradoxes in ones life resulting from the sort of tectonic shifts with which East European history abounds.