Revenge of theaters and/or states: Theater dinar and other financial levies in the operation of Croatian cinema-theater.s in the interwar period

The article focuses on a neglected economic aspect of the early history of cinemas in Croatia. The author deals with financial charges imposed on cinema owners during the 1920s and 1930s. In the spectrum of financial charges that burdened the operation of cinemas, the author primarily addresses the problem of the "theater dinar", which she believes materially and symbolically demotivated cinema owners to work. Contrary to the established thesis that the crisis of cinema culture in the 1930s is related to factors that are at the level of global crisis tendencies, the author analyzes and concludes about the destructive influence of the State, embodied in both municipal and higher instances, on the operation of cinemas. In addition to the specific material difficulties faced by cinema owners, this example opens up a broader problem of the abolition of market freedom as a capitalist model that was promoted by the rise of the Zagreb film industry and cinematographic culture in the 1920s and the introduction of a system controlled by the State. The work is based on extensive research of archival materials from the Archives of Yugoslavia, the Historical Archives of Belgrade and the Croatian State Archives, as well as film and daily periodicals.