Kinopravda Institute is a factory of ideas exploring the various horizons of cinematic arts in the 21st century.
“An Introduction to Film” was conceived as a collection of articles in which students of the Academy for Theater, Film, radio and Television in Belgrade, as well as all those who want to gain a better understanding of the basic characteristics of the cinematic craft and its techniques, aesthetic principles, and its most important achievements and movements, find the most important data, instructions and explanations.
– Writer
The publication of this material provides a film study resource for students and teachers
which is unavailable elsewhere. Vlada Petrić’s reading of “A Corner in Wheat” is a work which is comprehensive and rigorous in its hermeneutic approach. This essay represents a critical analysis of the cinematic structure of this film and the cinematic techniques utilized by D. W. Griffith, with Petrić also providing a detailed shot-by-shot and textual analysis of Griffith’s composition within the framework of the filmic action and the course of its development, as well as laying out the structural intricacies of his editing.
After this reading, television can no longer be watched with the same associations as before then, and this confirms that the book The Eighth Force not only manages to enrich the reader with new and concrete knowledge, but also abundantly stimulates his imagination.
– Jovan Ćirilov
The explanations and data collected in this book are necessary for anyone who intends to dedicate himself to film directing or any other type of direct work in film industry.
– Writer
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Is this book proof that Petrić has a conflict between his knowledge and his wish? Is it behind the objective presentation of facts in a clear, very simple way (what it seems that his book is read with interest) does not pulsate the ardent commitment to habitation film as true art?
– Josip Kulundžić
Vladimir ‘’Vlada’’ Petrić (11 March 1928, Prnjavor, Kingdom of Yugoslavia – 13 November 2019, Belgrade, Serbia) was an eminent film studies scholar, a Harvard University professor, and the co-founder of the Harvard Film Archive. He was the first recipient of a PhD in a film studies in United States. Throughout his creative career, Mr. Petrić directed for film, television, theater, focusing on producing and directing experimental video essays later in his life. Petrić’s academic publications are marked by seminal works in his areas of expertise, which include film form and technique, particularly in American and Soviet cinema.
Vlada Petrić graduated from the English Language and Literature Department of the University of Belgrade in 1956. Prior to this, he worked as a teaching assistant for acting and directing at the Academy of Theater and Film in Belgrade, where he also received a degree in film and theater directing in 1958. He also served as a director at Radio Television Belgrade from its founding in 1958. After receiving a professorship in film history at the Academy of Theater and Film in 1960, Mr. Petrić spent the period 1965-1966 on a study trip in the Soviet Union at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, where he conducted research into Soviet cinema under the tutelage of Lev Kuleshov and Nikolai Lebedev. In 1970, Petrić went to the United States as the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, where he enrolled at New Your University and in 1973 became the first person to receive a doctoral degree in film studies at a US institution of higher education.
In the period between 1972 and 1974, Petrić was a visiting professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the State University of New York (SUNY). Petrić was then offered the Henry Luce Chair of Cinema at Harvard University in 1972 and remained in that position until 1997. During this period, he also lectured extensively at universities across the United States and Europe. Together with the legendary documentarian Robert Gardner and the influential philosopher Stanley Cavell he established the Harvard Film Archive and served as its Founding Curator until his retirement in 1997.