 |
|
|
|
|
report: January 2009 |
|
|||
| observer archive | media galleries | search | print issues | Topics | |||
|
» Print this page as pdf
film / photography | Slovakia | by Otto Reiter | 2004-10
Not Cinema-goers, Yet Still VisionariesCzech film has an international reputation. But what about the scene in Slovakia, which has been an independent country since 1993?Even in the old days when Czechoslovakia still existed there were Slovak film visionaries who opposed the official ban on speaking out: Elo Havetta, Dušan Hanák and Juraj Jakubisko. Elo Havetta chose suicide; Dušan Hanák silence and Juraj Jakubisko saved himself during years of being prevented from working by making drawings for the Red Cross.Havetta is dead, Hanák, who entered film history in 1988 with Obrazy starého svĕta (Images from the Old World), has not made a single film in the last eight years and Jakubisko has lived for many years as a producer in Prague, far removed from the anarchic qualities of his early work. But there is still the Slovak Martin Sulík (born in 1962), who since 1991 has made five feature films, and does not wish to leave his native country, but on the contrary wants to use his films (Tenderness 1991, Everything I like 1992, The Garden 1993 and Krajinka 2000) above all to irritate his fellow countrymen and women with bitter romantic warnings and also to recall the past. Even the title of his latest film Krajinka (Small Country) was unfortunately understood by many as a deliberate provocation directed against Slovakia and when at the end it says: "This country will never exist again, all that will remain is a small landscape", he left most of the few viewers speechless. This did not really surprise Martin Sulík: "Our recall has become so short that it is almost sick, and cultural memory doesn't exist at all any more. Is the figure of 30,000 people who saw my film a lot or few in a country with a population of five million? I don't really know, because people don't flock either to the US block-busters in the new shopping centres." And it is indeed a fact that Slovakia is at the bottom of the European rankings for cinemagoers. Whereas eleven feature films were made in 1990, in the past few years it has been only one or two annually. Nobody is interested any more in the Koliba Studios in Bratislava. The planned remake of the first Slovak feature film Janosik (1921 by Jaroslav Siakel), which was proudly proclaimed only a number of years ago came to nothing, for one reason or another. But sometimes (far too rarely) this public and private apathy is penetrated and Martin Sulík can even rejoice when he reads the criticism in the magazine Zmena: “Finally clear words, clear hostility“. What did he read? That he sullies all traditional Slovak values, uses vulgar language to denounce all native families as sick and, above all, that he financed his film with Jewish money. The summary delivered by the Slovak journalist and film director Kamila Kytková, who was born in 1939, is also shattering: “In the last 15 years a lot of democratic and liberating changes have taken place in the Czech Republic. This is not the case here in Slovakia. We did not experience the catharsis of the velvet revolution. The few intelligent minds have withdrawn to their homes, like in the 1970s. Everybody is afraid of losing their personal, and (above all) their economic security.” pictures
related articles» Back to report |
|
|
||
|
Kontakt. The Arts and Civil Society Program of Erste Group
For reproductions of any portion of this Web site please contact the Erste Group. Home | Imprint | kontakt@kontakt.erstebankgroup.net |
||||
