Freedom as Punishment

The full-length documentary début of one of the most successful filmmakers of the young generation, Miro Remo, shows that it is virtually impossible to extricate oneself artfully uses mood-creating musical motifs which humanise the unappealing anti-heroes. It is a mosaic of attractions rather than a coherent story.

Miro Remo has had a nose for attractive themes since studying at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. He is able to treat these themes playfully, to transpose them into unusual locations and exotic characters that are out of the common run – in a stylistic garb which digresses from dirty shots and does not give preference to what to depict over how to depict it. At a time when the public perceives Slovak film production to be non-attractive and abstruse
when compared with American studio/television production and its different traditions, Remo’s approach is welcomed with regard to his perception of cinematography as a whole with a set of various functions (also in regard to audience potential). Remo worked with these elements in his short films Cold Joint (Studený spoj) and Arsy-Versy (this is one of the most successful of all domestic films in terms of the number of awards at international festivals). His portrait of a bat lover was based on a socio-dramatic perspective, but he worked with semantic elements of documentary comedy about an eccentric bachelor – his mother worries about him as she is already quite old. The title of his latest film, Comeback, immediately gives a foreboding of a similar reference to the visual parable, this time in the cyclic lives of the main protagonists – repeat offenders Miro and Zlatko.

Just as in his previous works, his native town of Ladce and its surroundings have become the “crime scene” – here he repeatedly finds ideas for his works. Comeback starts with the two protagonists serving their sentences in the Ilava penitentiary and waiting for their impending release. It could sound like a typical annotation for a social drama; this perspective is also supported by the promotional materials and the initial accounts of the prisoners who have probably had their predestination to a return to society implanted into their own language and thinking. The first third of the film deals with Miro’s and Zlatko’s living conditions while still serving their sentences, the remainder of the film deals with their lives after their release and captures their attempts to integrate themselves in life in freedom. According to the filmmaker’s comments, it follows that the structure of Comeback was formed in medias res, after getting the feel of life behind the bars and after becoming familiar with the possibilities available to them in this community and space. Thus, the film is divided into two parts, the first – in prison – is a view of the rhythm of the everyday lives of several prisoners. “Images from prison” record, between observation and staging, how prisoners spend their leisure time, from the production of a French dictionary up to toning the muscles using buckets of water instead of dumbbells. They are an exhibition of attractions, mainly at the visual level, such as the sculpturesque depiction of tattoos, or at the verbal level – pulp fiction stories about enforced anal sex. These tabloid suggestive elements are combined in the montage with humanising moments, such as the theft of a cookie and work duties in the prison workshop. The broad range of situations does not then depict the prisoners as one-dimensional schematic figures (when a character has only negative connotations, he is presented as just a crook), but breathes life into them. Despite all this, the characters do not come across as likeable since the years spent behind bars have left their mark on the way they express themselves and on their physical appearance. Pragmatic cold-blooded calculations or the absence of remorse for what they did prevent the viewer from relating to them emotionally, even though, rationally, the viewer is capable of understanding their future wishes and desires. It is quite courageous to prepare such an exposition; the philosophy given here comes closest to the three tragic-comic “velvet terrorists” [1] and their ambivalent attitudes and acts. A certain amount of spoonfeeding and the didactic character of the scenes which are what they are on the textual and visual levels, without any overlapping, were probably caused by the restrictive conditions in prison, just as the initial motto – “that’s enough of everything” shouted by the decimated Zlatko – which in a few seconds encapsulates the idea of the film, and subsequently appears to reveal the filmmaker’s underestimation of the audience’s ability to comprehend the meaning of the film from the episodes selected, and diminishes the expectations from the subsequent development.

The second part of the film, which takes place after Miro and Zlatko are released, is more exciting. We get to know the protagonists through their actions when free, and through interactions with their relatives and pals. The narrative is structured along two individual branches which overlap only when the director intervenes during an interview in a radio studio. The men represent different approaches to how to direct your life out of prison, which renders this part dynamic and more surprising. While the younger Miro tries to actively release himself from the vicious circle of repeat-offending, the older Zlatko moves on an alcoholic merry-go-round and the development of their lives in freedom shows up the paradoxes of the functioning of society and the judicial system in Slovakia.

The musical score by David Kollar has a fundamental effect on the viewers’ experience
– more markedly than at the beginning. Koller expresses the abstract inner world and everything the characters undergo in a live and plastic manner, from ambient even meditative positions (becoming aware of freedom) to the almost noisy depiction of estrangement and the physical unpleasantness of the outer reality. The mood-creating electro-acoustic music together with the false subjective views is a shift from the observational mode of the recording to the staginess and implicit commentaries on the part of the filmmakers who otherwise move on an impartial and credible level. Attractions do turn up in the second part also, even though not so often as in the first part, particularly as verbal accounts of sexual practices and fantasies, but such motifs confirm the already mediated characteristic of the protagonists.

The second part of Comeback is strongest in
the moments when it reveals partial instances
of wandering in freedom and their ambivalent nature without the black and white perspective (when Zlatko, drunk, falls on the ground like a sack of potatoes while climbing over a fence and Miro sleeps on the grass in front of the apartment building as he has no place to go). Here, Remo rather shows than judges, he maintains a distance and he leaves it to the viewers to make up their mind without affording them any guidance as to what position they should adopt on the re-socialisation of repeat offenders. On the one hand, he records ostracised individuals, on the other, he does not refrain from expressing their own share of guilt, without him resorting to searching for an enemy or the losers getting even with society. The ambiguous presentation of Miro and Zlatko touches upon the issue of existence and the functioning of the social system and, at the same time, it affords a space for deliberations on whether its existence would be meaningful and the subsequent re-socialisation applicable for certain individuals. At the same time, the film gives itself a loophole because a sample
of two recidivists and a few interviewed cellmates can hardly be regarded as representative, not even from the qualitative point of view. Hence, the film investigates the rules of the functioning of a life moving in a vicious circle, from the perspective of the behaviour of individualities. However, it conflicts with the generally accepted and presented view of repeat offenders, as it offers scenes of interviews with the anchor-woman Miroslava Ábelová as a contrast. Based on her naively selected questions and attitude, there is a visible difference between the mediated information from the media and the audience’s direct experience with the given theme. The contribution of Comeback lies precisely in presenting moments which most of society would prefer not to see, because they disrupt the opinions which people can most easily identify with and which we formulate with a view to bolstering our safety and superiority.

Comeback (Slovakia, 2014) _DIRECTED BY: Miro Remo _SCRIPT: M. Remo, Juro Šlauka _CINEMATOGRAPHY BY: Ivo Miko, Mário Ondriš, Jaroslav Vaľko _EDITED BY: Marek Kráľovský _MUSIC: David Kollar

Miro Remo (1983, Ladce)
Studied documentary directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Before making his full-length début Comeback he attracted attention with his original short portrait of his uncle and grandmother entitled Arsy-Versy (2009); he won dozens of awards at film festivals for
this film. He also made Cold Joint (Studený spoj, 2007), Pohoda Festival (Pohoda, 2010), Beverly Hills 01863 (2012) and collaborated
in the making of the TV series Slovak Cinema (Slovenské kino), Cans of Time (Konzervy času), Photographers (Fotografi), The Customs (Colnica)... He is currently working on a film about the successful Slovak singer Richard Müller, and also on a documentary entitled Coolture (Cooltúra).

Žofia Bosáková
PHOTO: Association of Slovak Film Clubs
[1] Velvet Terrorists (Zamatoví teroristi) – full-length documentary made by directors Pavol Pekarčík, Ivan Ostrochovský and Peter Kerekes.

Daughters and Sons, Mothers and Fathers

Jaro Vojtek has been making documentaries since the mid-1990s and has received awards for them at home and abroad. Just from glancing at his filmography, it is quite obvious that he is attracted to topics usually denoted as “social”, in particular to the topic of man entrenched or imprisoned in a certain social environment – whether edifying, devastating, stagnating, voluntary, imposed or necessary... Fish Tank (Akvárium) is about Kosovo refugees, Crazy Man (Blázonko) about a mentally disabled man, Here We Are (My zdes) about a family from Kazakhstan who migrated to Slovakia, Back Passing (Malá domov) about a Roma boy who dreams of becoming a footballer, The Border (Hranica) about the life of people in a small village on the Slovak-Ukrainian border which was forcibly divided after World War 2 into our part and the Soviet part, The Gypsy Vote (Cigáni idú do volieb) about a man with political ambitions...

Traditionally, directors are categorised as being directors of documentaries and directors of feature films. Whether this division is strict or the line between fiction and non-fiction is permeable – and to what extent permeable
– that is a matter for the specific author (or the country, period). Several decades ago, it was quite usual in our country that young graduates of FAMU in Prague were not allowed to make full-length films straight after returning to Bratislava. First they
had to sharpen their claws for a shorter or longer time, i.e. they had to gain experience
in documentary filmmaking, or as assistants to directors of feature projects made by older colleagues. That is the way in which Štefan Uher, Peter Solan, Dušan Hanák and Juraj Jakubisko started out. Nowadays, it is no longer a requirement for aspiring filmmakers to follow along these tracks, but they do not remain wholly unused – someone does take them from time to time. Recently, for instance, it was Juraj Lehotský who made his feature début The Miracle (Zázrak, 2013) after making several documentaries (the best known of them being Blind Loves – Slepé lásky). Or, even more recently, Jaro Vojtek made Children (Deti, 2014), even though this is not this documentary filmmaker’s first contact with a fiction film.
In 1999, he made a short film, Dreamers (Rojkovia), “a story about the complexity of relations in a young marriage” which was distributed as part of the Czecho-Slovak project Magnificent Six (Šesť statočných).

Vojtek’s latest film consists of several
stories. Not just literature (for instance, the late medieval picaresque novelettes
and novels, Boccaccio’s Decameron, or the newer ones Around the World in 80 Days) but cinematography also has known the episodic story structure from its distant past. Almost right from the outset, as the magnum opus
of behemoth D. W. Griffith Intolerance of 1916
is one of the most famous of omnibus films.
And he has had many successors with equally resounding names. Omnibus films were made in our region too, to mention just a few: The Song of the Grey Pigeon (Pieseň o sivom holubovi), Deserters and Pilgrims (Zbehovia a pútnici), Dialogue 20-40-60 (Dialóg 20-40-60), Only a Day (Iba deň), Fine, Thanks (Ďakujem, dobre). Not only feature films but also documentaries were made with an episodic structure, for instance Other Worlds (Iné svety) or the quite recent Slovakia 2.0 (Slovensko 2.0) where feature films and documentaries meet with a single animated film. In the Encyclopaedia
of Film (Encyklopédia filmu), Richard Blech characterised an omnibus film as a “full-length film consisting of shorter, separate stories that are organically linked by the theme, the main idea being depicted in various circumstances and under various conditions (environments, generations of characters, historical periods, etc.)... The composition may be free or fixed, with differing degrees of the binding elements given by the initial intent.”

The opening story of Vojtek’s Children is entitled Son. It starts with a scene in the waiting room and the doctor’s room which
is unpleasant for all of those involved; the desperate and clearly exhausted parents
drag their probably autistic son by force from under the examination couch and sit him down in the dentist’s chair. Within a small space, we watch a family marked by the disability of their youngest member, in particular the relationship between the father and son, a father who deep inside carries a serious question about love.

The second segment entitled Marathon starts with the main hero, a young Roma, in prison. He has left his wife and child at home in the settlement, he is made anxious by the fact that they do not visit him or write to him. With the assistance of his cellmates he manages to escape and runs for dozens of kilometres through a snowy forest, along a stream, through a cottage area, hurt, cold but determined to run in order to find out what is going on with the people he loves.

The third story – Canary – is the story of a small boy fascinated by birds. He lives with his mother and her uncouth, hostile partner. He looks after a canary, he teaches it to sing, as if he were looking for things in the canary which he cannot find in relationships with people.

The final episode is entitled Dad. His adult daughter is undergoing a life-changing crisis, as her suspicions that her husband is cheating on her are confirmed. The break-up of the family looks to be inevitable. Trapped in an emotional turmoil, the daughter decides to make the dream of her very old, wheelchair- bound father come true.

Let us try and look at Vojtek’s film
through the prism of the brief entry in the Encyclopaedia of Film cited above. We have four stories linked by a main theme. The title
of the film suggests that children are the main theme but, with the exception of the story entitled Canary, the film is primarily about parents, about their relationships – with their child (Son), partner (Marathon), father (Dad). The episodic film has a free composition, the individual segments communicate with each other only marginally, there could be more binding elements given by the initial intention – the intent that the audience anticipates – and they could further strengthen each other. Each story could be an independent short film, some of which would be more successful, others less. But the overall idea is not rendered any more profound by combining the stories in one unit.

The journey is the strongest, non-basic element linking the four stories in a positive manner. The main characters always leave their original place in order to find answers to their questions, the solution of the problem, peace somewhere else – the journey to the Czech Republic to see a healer, the run through the forest to see the son, riding a bus to a bird competition, a journey to the sea. And there
are other common areas also. Not one of the families in the stories is the sort of family
that might feature in a cheery commercial. Disability alternates with Roma origin and prison, step-fatherhood with divorce. And everything takes place in shabby, unattractive, but inventively shot interiors or on poor streets; somewhat naïvely, nature affords the only pleasant environment in the film – a snow-covered forest or deserted seaside.

Director Jaro Vojtek said: “A documentary is more complicated because you have to wait for a certain situation, you have to patiently capture the events, get the protagonists in certain contexts so as to avoid creating a staged impression and not to lose authenticity. However, authenticity for me means that the viewers believe what is happening in front of their eyes, regardless of whether they are watching a documentary or feature film. When the audience does not think about how it was done. Because life unfolds so credibly before them that they primarily perceive the content and the meaning of the depicted events.” This time the strong sense of authenticity present in most of Vojtek’s previous films is not so much present; as viewers we sometimes have to think “about how it was done”, because the “content and meaning of the depicted events” are sometimes predictable. However, on the other hand, it needs to be noted that, as a full- length feature début, Children will definitely attract attention. The theme – family, children, parents – is the strongest aspect of the project. It is a theme that needs to be discussed at length, especially nowadays.

Children (Deti, Slovakia/Czech Republic, 2014) _DIRECTED BY: Jaro Vojtek _SCRIPT: Marek Leščák _DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Tomáš Stanek _EDITED BY: Maroš Šlapeta _MUSIC: Michal Nejtek _CAST: Éva Bandor, János Gosztonyi, Vlado Zboroň, Roman Bubla, Martin Horváth, Richard Felix

Jaro Vojtek (1968, Žilina)
Studied documentary directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. His full-length début Here We Are (My zdes, 2005) was screened at the Karlovy Vary IFF. In 2009, Vojtek made the documentary The Border (Hranica) which won the Prize for Best Central and Eastern European Documentary Film in the “Between the Seas” section at the Jihlava IDFF, and it was screened in the prestigious Spectrum section at the Rotterdam IFF. Three years ago he presented his documentary The Gypsy Vote (Cigáni idú do volieb) and he is currently preparing a documentary about families with autistic children So Far, So
Close (Tak ďaleko, tak blízko) for cinemas. Jaro Vojtek also collaborated on several TV projects. Children (Deti) is his feature début.

Zuzana Mojžišová
PHOTO: Association of Slovak Film Clubs

Silence That Remains Tacit

In Silence is a film based on long-term research by Slovak musicologist Agáta Schindlerová who specialises in the fates of Jewish musicians under Nazism. It arrives in the cinema at a time when it emerges yet again that the participation of the First Slovak Republic in the deportations and persecution of Jews is being downplayed or even denied in some political and social circles.

Accordingly, this film could represent a substantial, i.e. authentic, contribution to the issue of the Holocaust; the film accepts Slovakia’s participation in the persecution of Jews without question. At the same time, it could be an interesting contribution to the genre of docu-drama, or dramatic films made on the basis of archival research (which has recently become topical in almost all forms of dramatic art – from drama through opera to feature film). However, In Silence did not just seek to engage its audiences by means of authentic materials; it appears that, quite early in the preparation phase, the project’s authors already had the aim of taking it to international audiences. And so it also represented something of a compromise and the topic of the Holocaust was quite evidently built upon “Academy Award” pillars – the film’s original name (Mrs. Schindler’s Diary – Denník Agáty Schindlerovej) refers to the famous film by Steven Spielberg thanks to the coincidental concordance of names, while the topic is evidently a variation on Polanski’s The Pianist.

Producer Lívia Filusová has allegedly long sought to make a film about music and she considered Agáta Schindlerová’s research to afford an excellent theme. The original idea was that the film would be made in the currently popular documentary spirit. In the end, the collaboration with the Czech director Zdeněk Jiráský has resulted in a feature film which is claimed to be an unusually poetic film without dialogues, a quite novel treatment of a topic that has now been exploited in the cinema for a long time. Slovak and Czech funds were used to produce the film and it is also the first Slovak film ever to apply for support on the crowd-funding portal Kickstarter, which indicates how unstoppable, brave and inventive the producer is. The film actually arrives in the cinema in a form that admirably reflects the professionalism of all the members of the creative team. Therefore, the greater the pity that this form also means a squandered opportunity of really saying something new on the theme of the Holocaust.

If we understand a Holocaust film as a specific sub-genre of historical film, then In Silence fits quite accurately within its genre matrices. These play into the hands of fictionalisation of the real event and also offer an emotional model that allows the audiences to experience a certain catharsis, so that they can subsequently return cleansed to their everyday lives, without taking home too many unanswered questions.

In Silence conforms to the structure of most films about the horrors of war: it starts out with images of an idyll (mostly of the middle class) which is suddenly disrupted by the intervention of a greater power. That is how the first post-revolution Czecho-Slovak contribution to the topic was made – All My Loved Ones (Všetci moji blízki) by Matej Mináč. Thus, In Silence does not initiate a local “discourse”; on the contrary, it continues this discourse with regard to the basic ideology. The initial idyll is outlined in a visually and musically attractive retro-nostalgic spirit. The individual scenes accurately evoke the modern image of the pre-war era, from the editing and figurative procedures of period films to period commercials. At a rapid pace, we get to know several characters who have just one thing in common – a preoccupation with music and love. Content-wise, the introduction focuses primarily on spending leisure time in the spirit of the rising modernity and the burgeoning contact with nature, mainly with the element of air: the aesthetics of the period commercials define the image compositions from the roller-coaster and the scenes from trips into the countryside – the individual lovers or married couples undertake them with a camera or in an elegant car. The scenes from the recording of a popular song by the Comedian Harmonists only serve to endorse the concept of carefree retro-modernity. The fact that this idyll is about to be disrupted is suggested primarily by the repeated jump cuts to printing presses: the subtitles right at the beginning of the film inform us that in 1935 the book Jewishness and Music with the ABC of Jewish and Non-Aryan Musicians was published; it was quickly followed by two further editions (1936, 1938), and complemented in 1940 by the NSDAP’s institute’s Lexicon of Jews in Music. Music (and love) are thus presented as a counterpoint to the printed word – while an idyll such as might be lifted straight out of the illustrated magazines still endures, a number of books are published that should cleanse the music of its non-Aryan elements (and we are also led to infer that books not complying with the Nazi ideology were burnt).

The contrast between the printed word intended to remodel the public space and the introverted inner monologues of the characters evoking authentic diary entries is a good idea; however, just like many other counterpoints (love versus loneliness, music versus silence, etc.) it becomes submerged under the layers of conventional ideology. Already in the first part of the film, the over-restricted range of the motifs introducing the audience to the pre-war idea of happiness is regrettable. The conflict on which the film is based is, thus, essentially reduced to a conflict between the Holocaust and frivolous light-heartedness, replete with middle-class dreams of love ending in marriage, where the music plays the somewhat conventional role of supporting retro-nostalgic moods: we see the group mentioned above, the Comedian Harmonists, only in period recording scenes in the radio studio through the eyes of an admiring lady, a young couple get to know each other thanks to jazz, a promising ballet dancer confesses to admiration of the most beautiful ballet teacher. There is one scene which is largely successful in avoiding these conventional images, one in which we see the composer, Arthur Chitz, playing a hitherto completely unknown composition by Beethoven, in the silent presence of his wife, ostensibly for the first time after its author (“No one has ever heard it before… Except for Beethoven… No one ever…”). Nevertheless, this scene does not avoid a certain tackiness – its sole purpose is probably to emphasise that the musicians in the sequences are equal or even superior to their Aryan colleagues.

But the inner monologues of the characters suggest a great deal more than just a loss of middle-class concepts of music: for instance, the Holocaust strategy is revealed through them as a gradual transition from the imposed identity (“Overnight I stopped being a Slovak and I became a Jew,” says one of the characters) through the loss of dignity right up to the absolute silence which is also reflected in the final title of the film. Silence represents an impressive, but insufficiently employed metaphor. It not only means lost memory (in the case of the pianist Edith Kraus, it is expressed in the form of her total loss of memory of any notes), but it could also be a metaphor of the lost humanity and everything that edifies and liberates a human being from the inglorious identification with the withering, mortal body reduced to a single goal: to survive for a few more minutes.

It is a great shame that the film does not focus more on emphasising the weight of the individual monologues and, despite the effort to combine dream and naturalistic images, it ends up using the conventional imagery of the genre. This relates to the representation of the middle-class idyll referred to at the beginning of the film, but also to the subsequent “Holocaust”, whereby both types of images are located within a conservative ideological framework. It is a pity also because original works about the Holocaust based on original, authentic accounts are by no means superfluous, even today. However, In Silence is based on the highly predictable underlying premise that the Holocaust is best represented by a sudden change in the colour scheme (from warm tones to steel blue), conspicuously changing the characters’ clothes to smeared striped uniforms or changing the make- up. It is also a shame that, although In Silence is a film without dialogues, it is not without pointless words. Instead of the expected authenticity or work with silence so cleverly alluded to in the film’s title, words are heard almost continuously and their real power is from time to time lost in the pathetic acting of the cast and the director’s inability to define a clearer attitude to the naivety of the frequently tacky monologues from the early part of the film – these are in no way compensated by the sudden maturity of the observations in the second, Holocaust part.

In Silence (V tichu, Slovakia/Czech Republic, 2014) _SCRIPT AND DIRECTED BY: Zdeněk Jiráský _DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Michal Černý _EDITED BY: Hedvika Hansalová _MUSIC: Martin Hasák _CAST: Judit Bárdos, Jan Čtvrtník, Kristína Svarinská, Ján Gallovič, Laco Hrušovský, Valéria Stašková

Zdeněk Jiráský (1969, Jičín)
The Czech filmmaker graduated in screenwriting and dramaturgy from the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He mainly makes television documentaries, such as Vanishing Prague (Mizející Praha, 2008), As Regards Kitsch (Co se kýče týče, 2008), Asák (Asák, 2010) or The Jagiellon Dynasty (Jagellonci, 2012). He has also made travelogues for Febio. The social drama Flower Buds (Poupata, 2011) presented at the Karlovy Vary IFF in the East of the West competition section was his first film for cinemas; it won four Czech Lion Awards.

Jana Dudková
PHOTO: Film Europe