Title of the lecture: Feature film adaptations of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s children’s novel The Brave Adventures of Lapitch
Soon after The Brave Adventures of Lapitch was put on stage in 1934 there emerged an idea that the book should be adapted for the cinema as a feature film. However, as the Yugoslav production was not an option, all the efforts were invested in the search for a foreign producer. After the end of World War II and a slow integration of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s works into the new value system, substantially different from the one in which these works were created, it was only in the 1960s that the idea of cinematic adaptation of Šegrt Hlapić was revived. This time, technical and organizational circumstances were far more favourable. There is documentation about at least three attempts to produce a feature film on the basis of the book (and among these three the script The Brave Adventures of Lapitch by Ivan Brajdić and Zorislav Ugljen). However, in spite of serious efforts to produce a feature film these attempts have never been realized. This study will try to provide an explanation to the question what social factors hampered the realization of the cinematic adapatation of Šegrt Hlapić while at the same time children’s movies based on children’s novels with lower social capital than Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s works were filmed. Moreover, during the period of Communism not a single movie based on the most appreciated works of Croatian children’s literature, and Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s works certainly belong in this category, was produced. The first and only feature film adaptation of Šegrt Hlapić is a film by Silvije Petranović from 2013. In addition, the storyworlds of the scripts are analysed. To be more specific, as the chronotope of the plot of Šegrt Hlapić in its printed versions was not stable, the construction of the chronotope in the scripts of the feature films based on the book will be examined.