Item: Beograd prestonica Jugoslavije
Rating: 6.7
Author: Archivist John

Is it worth your time?

If you are a history nerd or just like seeing how people used to live before everything got so loud and digital, then yes. Watch it tonight if you want to zone out and travel back to 1932.

If you need a plot or characters to keep you awake, you will probably hate this. It is just a camera moving around a city for half an hour.

I found this while looking for something short to watch after finishing The Canary Murder Case. It feels like a completely different world, obviously.

Belgrade in this movie looks like it is having a bit of an identity crisis. It wants to be Paris, but it also has these very old, dusty corners that feel like the 1800s.

The director, Vojin Djordjevic, clearly had a list of things he wanted to brag about. Look at our new post office! Look at our big bridge!

There is this one shot of the bridge where the camera just sits there. It stays for about ten seconds too long, and you just end up looking at the ripples in the water.

I noticed the traffic is a total mess, even back then. There are cars, horse-drawn carts, and people just walking into the middle of the street whenever they feel like it.

It’s actually kind of funny how unorganized everything looks compared to modern city planning. Nobody seems to know where they are going.

The film captures these tiny moments that I don't think were meant to be the focus. Like a group of kids staring at the camera with their mouths open.

They look like they’ve seen a ghost. Or maybe they just haven't seen a movie camera very often in their neighborhood.

The architecture is pretty cool to look at if you're into that sort of thing. Some of the buildings are really grand and imposing.

But then the camera pans left and you see a pile of dirt or a broken fence. It feels honest in a way modern travel ads never do.

I kept thinking about Broken Blossoms while watching the crowded street scenes. Even though that’s a totally different kind of movie, the way people move in these old films always feels so frantic.

Everyone is walking like they are late for a very important meeting. Or maybe the frame rate just makes them look faster than they really were.

There is a lot of footage of the Kalemegdan fortress. It’s the high point of the movie, literally and figuratively.

The view of the rivers merging is actually quite beautiful, even in grainy black and white. You can almost feel the wind blowing through the grass on the hills.

I did find myself getting a bit bored around the twenty-minute mark. There are only so many shots of government buildings a person can take before they start checking their phone.

The editing is a bit choppy. It feels like someone just glued different days together without much of a plan.

One scene shows a market where people are selling vegetables and probably chickens. The contrast between the fancy royal palace and this muddy market is wild.

It reminds me of the gritty realism you sometimes see in The Red Inn, but without the murder and the gloom. Just regular people trying to sell some onions.

I liked seeing the fashion of the time. Every single man is wearing a hat. Every single one.

If you didn't have a hat in 1932 Belgrade, were you even allowed outside? It's a mystery.

The film doesn't have a big ending. It just kind of stops. It’s like the cameraman ran out of film and just went home to have dinner.

It leaves you with this weird feeling of nostalgia for a place you’ve never been to. A city that mostly got blown up a few years later in the war, which makes it feel a bit sad to watch now.

It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a neat little time capsule. I’m glad I watched it, even if I did yawn a couple of times during the part about the parliament building.