Between Amateurism and Traditionalism

In 2014, six full-length feature films produced in a professional environment and one amateur film were released into cinema distribution. Although continuity with the previous years is evident, this sample does slightly modify the picture of contemporary Slovak film. It is no longer true that the most important thing happening in Slovak feature film production is related to an effort to join one or other of the irreconcilable sides of the barricade – either social films intended primarily for festival and art house audiences, or films inspired by more popular genres.

Instead, 2014 offered the vision of a much livelier interest in the past, but it also reflected efforts to increase the social diversity of the target groups of viewers. This occurs thanks to experiments in the area of distribution (in particular in
the case of Slovakia 2.0), and also thanks to
the enhancement of the supply by way of new types and genres (in this respect, even non-comparable projects such as the amateurish Socialist Zombie Massacre, the fairy tale Love in Your Soul and the student film Good Man may be regarded as injecting a certain vigour).

As my aim is not to assess cinema distribution itself but rather the values that it brings to the Slovak environment through the prism of full-length feature films, I would like to highlight several specific phenomena introduced by the previous year. Probably the most obvious of these is the resumption of interest in the past, in terms of recollecting traumatic periods of the national past, and the fetishisation of the past through costumes, lighting or stage design. In A Step into the Dark (Krok do tmy), M. Luther brings the traumas of individual failures from the communist era into close relation with individual fates from the period of the Slovak National Uprising and World War II. It is a fundamental gesture. Communism ceases to be a symbol of a discontinuity which hit the country out of the blue and which was staved off after 1989. Instead of a simple retro-nostalgic atmosphere, the film suggests a more credible image of post-war devastation and dysfunction, inconspicuously contrasting with the period-builders’ vision. The open ending of In Silence (V tichu, dir. Z. Jiráský) also points out, even though in a slightly different sense, that the traumas associated with World War II did not simply subside once the war ended. Both films have one shortcoming in common – the limits resulting from the integration of the genre matrices. Their conflicting role is, by turns, to support the impression of discontinuity between various sections of the past, but also between the past and present. For instance, A Step into the Dark
is built on a love triangle with a tragic ending which allows the viewer to experience a catharsis and through it to re-build a defence against the period depicted by the film. Moreover, after
a long period of preparations, it cannot act
as a welcome alternative to “flying Cyprians” and bloody countesses any longer – within the current cinematographic context it appears to be a bit obsolete.

In turn, In Silence is limited by the undue dependence on the conventionally fetishistic visualisation of the Holocaust built on a sharp contrast between the pre-Holocaust retro-modernist idyll and the blue chill of shots filled with unkempt dirty figures in striped prison uniforms. The fact that the concentration camp shots are not strictly realistic but also contain poetic dream insets does not change anything in the conventional genre principle of image selection. And although the ending of the film is open and it is clear that the return to Slovak society, still replete with anti-Semitism and lack of confidence, will not be easy, due to its associations with traditional films about the Holocaust, In Silence supports forgetting and does not allow the exceptionality and extent of the specific, real and (thanks to the work of musicologist Agáta Schindlerová) excellently documented fates to lift itself above the genre visual matrices to which the narration conforms.

Interest in the past in an ostensibly completely different sense is presented by the amateur film, Socialist Zombie Massacre (Socialistický Zombi Mord, dir. R. Blažek, P. Čermák, Z. Paulini). It is a local version of a horror slasher set in a Slovak secondary school about thirty years ago. Despite the substantial differences in the theme, narrative and genre dispersion, all three films are linked by an effort to come to terms with
the past and by an interest in its fetishisation. The latter tendency is most obvious in the introduction to Socialist Zombie Massacre. The film begins with a summary of nostalgic fetishes linked with “normalised” ideas of the life of a period family. It does not make anything out of the fashion and design “fetishes of socialism”, it uses them only to provide an exotic atmosphere for the genre narrative, and the horror is suggested first by the conspiracy associations with the colonisation practices of the Soviet Union. However, instead of criticising the society of that time, the range of emotions anticipated by the genre of the film, and their gradual alteration over the course of the narrative, lead the viewer on through experiencing intense feelings of fear or abomination to the final catharsis. This also brings us to the symbolic coming to terms with the traumas of the period and insulating them from critical consciousness of the past or present.

The films with plots which are not unambiguously located in the past also have features in common, of which the fragmentation is the most symptomatic. In all three films focusing on the image of contemporary Slovakia, the effort to build on a long-term interest in family or partnership stories with more or less pertinent (and dominant) social motivations is prevalent. The fragmentation of the film into short stories or chapters may be linked with an effort to capture Slovakia’s current problems
in their greatest possible variety. However, it rather appears as though, for the moment, the filmmakers have lost the ability to construct
a compact and meaningful full-length story
in the given genre range. As if the times of The House or My Dog Killer, which had actually been developing over a long time, have subsided – but the desire to brand Slovak film on the basis of what they achieved has not been lost.

Slovakia 2.0 (Slovensko 2.0, 10 directors) was made on the basis of another omnibus film Hungary 2011 (Magyarország 2011), tentatively “branding” national identity and, simultaneously, the national cinematography. Like every intelligent brand, Slovakia 2.0 is also based on the effort to enhance a certain awareness of the brand but, at the same time, it queries to some extent the identity of this brand and gives instructions as to how it could be disseminated. We can see in it the effort to disseminate the concept of Slovak film and several inspiring approaches to what Slovakia means today – twenty years after becoming an independent country. However, we need to come to terms with the fact that the film was made as an imperfect producer’s project, fulfilled by directors with works of highly variable quality, whereby the film largely eschews critical tendencies within popular genres and serves up an image of Slovak cinematography as being exclusively art-house.

Like Slovakia 2.0, Jaro Vojtek’s feature début Children (Deti) was produced by Mphilms, the company which was also behind the full-length début of Mátyás Prikler Fine, Thanks (Ďakujem, dobre). The film consists of four stories about dysfunctional relations between parents and children, about the lack of communication and about unexpected forms of love. It contains the “mandatory” excursion to a Roma settlement, albeit, for Slovakia, this time given an original treatment, and several quotations from other Slovak films (in particular, Fine, Thanks and The Miracle – Zázrak). It is again a particular form of branding, aimed rather at the ability of a very restricted audience to distinguish the individual images as allusions to projects executed by the film’s screenwriter, Marek Leščák. Even though the film’s theme is exceptional in the current domestic context, the quality of the individual stories varies in this case also and other shortcomings appear: for instance the attempts to use words or images to express the points that he viewer has already adequately understood from the narrative, or the selection and direction of actors who, in the great majority of cases, imitate rather than “live” their characters (with the exceptions of the excellent Éva Bandor and János Gosztonyi in the final story Dad).

The third film which bears witness to contemporary Slovakia barely meets the criteria for a full-length film and was made at the Academy of Performing Arts. It responds to the long-expressed demand for comedies, and it makes use of absurd humour to revive the topical penchant for films about relations and also about “exotic” individuals (those excluded from society in different ways). Even though Good Man (Dobrý človek, dir. Cs. Molnár) blunders about in terms of pace, dramaturgy and the direction of actors, it does contain several pertinent situations or alienating elements which here
and there are reminiscent of Šulík’s early films or refer to the works of the Slovak new wave (the allusion to The Sun in a Net). The film’s critical view of contemporary times, however, often sinks to the level of absurd verbal humour.

In this respect, even the fairy-tale Love in Your Soul (Láska na vlásku, dir. M. Čengel Solčanská) alludes to the current situation in the country, as similarly “pertinent” sentences can be heard in the film – according to it, people in “this country” have forgotten how to laugh or even to smile. However, the impression the film makes is very traditional, while a more rapid pace, fewer stereotypes in the dialogues and more inventive music would not come amiss. The attempt to vary the target group somehow misses its point, the marketing decision to cast the teenage idol, Celeste Buckingham, in the female title role does not conform to the reality that the film was inspired by traditional Czecho(-)Slovak fairy tales for the whole family. The only thing that is clear is that, since 2008 when Martin Šmatlák highlighted the mysterious post-revolutionary absence of fairy-tales, which were the most successful commercial genre in the 1980s, Love in Your Soul is the first film that has sought to address this deficiency.

It is something of a pity that, in their endeavour to enlarge the genre offering and thematic dispersion of Slovak cinematography, most of the seven feature films released into cinema distribution have remained somewhere between amateurism and traditionalism – whereby one amateur horror film and two professionally made fine-tuned excursions into the past (largely formally) confirm the qualitative broad range of this imaginary axis.

This work was supported by the Research and Development Support Agency on the basis of Contract no. APVV-0797-12.

Jana Dudková
PHOTO: A Step into the Dark (Krok do tmy), Continental Film