A Rich Year, But Not a Year of Big Auteurist Films

The auteurist documentary has long lacked continuity in Slovakia. After 1990 the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts was virtually the only institution to lead would-be filmmakers towards developing author’s strategies in non-fiction film, even though there was no interest in these strategies in practice. Nowadays it would seem that better times are dawning for the auteurist documentary since the inception of the Audiovisual Fund and in part also thanks to the contract Radio and Television of Slovakia concluded with the Government.

Documentary is finding its way more and more frequently into cinemas – not only during film festivals but also in regular film distribution. In 2006, Other Worlds (Iné svety) by director Marko Škop was the sole original title in distribution. In the more fruitful years of 2008 and 2009, the number of full-length documentaries produced for cinemas exceeded 30% of the entire majority Slovak film production.

However, when evaluating the documentaries made in 2012, it would be a mistake to focus just on the distribution titles. There were only four, two of which were made by director Zuzana Piussi. And only two of the four, Men of Revolution (Muži revolúcie) by Zuzana Piussi and The Gypsy Vote (Cigáni idú do volieb) by Jaro Vojtek, arrived in cinemas courtesy of well-established distribution companies. Bells of Happiness (Zvonky šťastia) by Jana Bučka and Marek Šulík was distributed by a new distribution company, Filmtopia, which distributes films mostly in alternative spaces, not in regular cinemas. The Grasp of the State (Od Fica do Fica) by Zuzana Piussi was distributed through the Internet within the fee-paying service Piano.

All four of the films distributed have something in common. They focus either on Roma issues or on politics, more specifically on elections, or on both. The films about Roma, Bells of Happiness and The Gypsy Vote, have a further element in common, i.e. the motif of a documentary play, which is evocative of some formats of private television companies. While the Bells of Happiness admitted this format and balanced the charming artificiality of the role play with a refreshing invasion of scarcely comprehensible reality, the urgency of Vojtek’s film was watered down by the never-subsiding performance of the protagonists, the Sendreis, as if it were not Sendrei’s objective to enter local politics but just the role which he decided to play in society and in the film. However, something substantial permeates from The Gypsy Vote which also characterises the socially engaged films by Zuzana Piussi: Jaro Vojtek, as if coincidentally, managed to show the reasons why we are not able to change the current situation in our society from the bottom or from within a community. Just as in The Grasp of the State, in The Gypsy Vote we can also feel the absence of a vision, but even so the inadequate organisation of those who want to change matters, or the inability to estimate or react to the needs of one’s own target group.

The films by Zuzana Piussi, probably the most prolific Slovak documentary filmmaker, have lately focused on social-political topics: she resolves the issues of political culture, problems of civic ethics and even focuses on the phenomenon of national pride and expressions of extremism. Her film Disease of the Third Power (Nemoc tretej moci, 2011) and all the three films she made in 2012, Men of Revolution, Fragile Identity (Krehká identita) and The Grasp of the State, together create a sort of “tetralogy about Slovakia”. They present a somewhat unflattering image of the country, which is sometimes captured soberly and accurately, at other times is presented in a grotesque and distorted way; flat at some points, and in turn monstrously blown up. The Grasp of the State belongs to the flatter, biased films, making highly selective use of the available information. Despite the “neat” editing and distinct narration underlined by the author’s comments and animated insertions, the film becomes amorphous in the end. Hence, the bleak impression it leaves is twice as big as it might have been, there is no resolution of the situation captured and the film lacks point.

The film Men of Revolution or its first part, which is inversely structured, is also missing a punch-line – and it isn’t even finished: from general, tessellated information on the events from the revolution in November 1989 to the first free elections in June 1990 it progresses to an almost documentary investigation of the case of Ján Budaj and his departure from politics. The collection of talking heads is enlivened by the confrontation with archival materials from 1989 and 1990, but also by the mutual confrontation of the individual current testimonies. Men of Revolution explores this topic but far from exhausts it.

I dare designate the Fragile Identity as Piussi’s best film so far. It is not only her purest film in visual and structural terms, but it also establishes a parallel which leaves a strong, even sinister impression. The Pánis-esque rhetoric and the literally religious raving of several patriots glorifying Slavonic culture as if it were the only one in Europe finds its counterpart in the droning of the crowds in the streets, and what seems in the case of a few individuals like an oddity would become monstrous if it were to affect the masses. The portrait depicted by Zuzana Piussi in this film is again not flattering. However, it is impressive and, in a certain sense of the word, less biased than any of the author’s previous films.

In addition to Fragile Identity more than fifty other documentaries were screened at festivals in 2012. At first sight, this figure seems to be strikingly high, but many of these films are short students’ films. Even though the jury of the Students Film Festival Áčko in Bratislava decided not to award the Best Documentary, I believe that some of the films screened at least deserve a mention. In No Closet Issue (WeC verejná) Katarína Hlinčíková tried quite successfully to create a visual-anthropological essay on the culture of public toilets, taken as a synecdoche of the nation’s culture. The sociological aspect of this film became lost to the benefit of some charming details; however, in any case, we have to appreciate the author’s will to make a “symptomatology” of Slovakia and depict it in a playful and attractive manner. Zuna by Mária Martiniaková focuses on the seemingly exclusively women’s topic of natural birth. The journalistic dimension is sensitively linked to the extremely perceptive view of the author. Martiniaková has made educational or popular-educational films from the very beginning of her studies and Zuna is one of her best.

Mária Rumanová managed to create a charming portrait of two Bratislava nightingales, even though it is a pity that she shot her film Bezmocná hŕstka virtually whenever the main protagonists had time to spare, which limited their film portrait by a quite significant dimension. By contrast, Ľubica Sopková decided to make her portrait of Robert Roth through the professional prism of the actor and his character. Her Interlude (Medzihra) is literally an avant-garde film where Roth’s roles in Samuel Beckett’s and A. P. Chekhov’s plays overlap with pantomime in which only the author directs Roth. However, with regard to the documentary form, this film is considerably hermetic and mannered. With this documentary, Sopková enters the territory of feature film direction which she currently studies at the Academy of Performing Arts.

There were several stylised non-fiction films screened at festivals last year. The semi-documentary by Jana Mináriková 25km2 was shown at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic and at the DOCsk festival in Košice. The film is a sort of metaphorical sci-fi slapstick about life after an accident, blitz activities and allergic reactions to mobile phones. The Star (Hviezda) by Andrej Kolenčík is in turn a touching social tragicomedy about a worker who experiences his fifteen minutes of fame as an actor in the theatre adaptation of the worst movie of all time and… it changes his desires. The originally documentary project of Iveta Grófová Made in Ash (Až do mesta Aš) also moved beyond the borders of stylisation into the territory of feature film.

Exceptionally personal films made by the cinéma vérité or direct cinema method are a contradiction to such stylised or feature “non-fiction” films. One of these is Camino by Jana Bučka where the author asks the same question, with the same interest, as the filmmakers did in Chronicle of a Summer (Cronique d’un été, 1961) fifty years ago: can film deliver a truthful depiction of oneself, of reality? The answer, in both cases, is quite sceptical but positive in that it does not lead to resignation, but rather to a reflection of one’s own documentary procedures.

Two TV series in 2012, Cans of Time (Konzervy času) and Celluloid Country, also provided a reflection of film materials and an examination of what they actually capture. The first one focuses on private film archives, the second on what official cinematography produced in the individual decades. Cans of Time identifies some symptoms of Czechoslovak society through individual stories from 1939 to 1989, emphasising the 1960s and 1980s, while Celluloid Country chronologically tells the history of Slovak non-fiction film, pointing to the historical-political context of the whole country. Both TV series are characterised by the fact that the handwriting of a number of authors can be discerned in them. Nevertheless, both TV series are more balanced than the first series of Slovak Cinema (Slovenské kino) which is very diverse in terms of quality and concept. And that is definitely good news at a time when one is perplexed to discover quite how some documentary series were ever coupled together.

2012 was not a year of big auteurist documentaries. Nevertheless, it was a year rich in documentary films.


Mária Ferenčuhová