Classics in Purgatory
In 1950, Bratislava acquired its own studios, the Koliba Studios, fostering the production of a national cinema avant la lettre. Because of its taste for folklore and rural traditions, Slovak cinema has sometimes been likened to a cinema of escapism that served the interests of the Communist regime, far removed from the freedom of tone that reigned in Prague at the time, which does not stand up to scrutiny. The Sun in the Nets (Štefan Uher, 1963), with its stunning formal beauty, is one of the cornerstones of the Czechoslovak New Wave. More conventional, The Boxer and Death (Peter Solan, 1963), about a prisoner whose boxing skills momentarily save him in a concentration camp, demonstrates impeccable craftsmanship. It's a local film that earns the country its first Oscar for Best Foreign Film, The Lark's Mirror (Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1965), a gripping evocation of collaboration and the insidious hold of Nazism in the small village of Sabinov. Juraj Jakubisko, author of a prolific body of work for cinema and television, was for a long time the target of Communist censorship: The Birds, the Orphans and the Fools (1969), banned until the fall of the regime, is a surrealistic ode to freedom and childhood in a country ravaged by war. Fantasy, disjointed narration and formal inventiveness seemed to be the watchwords of Slovak cinema at the time, as in Fête au jardin botanique (Elo Havetta, 1969). At the same time, the pope of the Nouveau Roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was invited to Slovakia to shoot two films, L'homme qui ment (1968) and Éden et après (1970), proving that avant-garde endeavors were in their heyday. The beauty of the Slovak countryside went hand in hand with a penchant for phantasmagoria. This is again the case in Images of the Old World (Dušan Hanák, 1972), a fascinating film poem about a disappearing world of old farmers in the Tatras. After the repression of the Prague Spring, Slovakia's studios came under less scrutiny from the Communist authorities, making them a kind of refuge for filmmakers anxious to preserve their artistic freedom, albeit in the face of competition from television. With his new-found freedom, Jakubisko made the essential films of the 1980s, such as Perinbaba (1985), an adaptation of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, which retains all its cruelty and features Orava Castle and the High Tatras.
After independence
Logically, the film industry suffered the full force of independence and acclimatization to capitalism after 1993. Martin Šulík was the main filmmaker to emerge in the aftermath: The Garden (1995) is indicative of the bucolic, meditative vein characteristic of Slovak cinema. More recently, he has signed a film, Gypsy (2011), dedicated to the gypsy community. Mon chien Killer (Mira Fornay, 2013) depicts the hatred of a handful of idle skinheads. Another sign of new interest is a documentary, Hole in the Head (Robert Kirchhoff, 2017), which revisits the sometimes obscured genocide of the Roma by the Nazis. Recent years have seen an increase in film production, including The Candidate (Jonáš Karásek, 2013), a political thriller, The Goat (Ivan Ostrochovský, 2015), about a drifting ex-boxer who had a brief moment of glory at the Olympic Games, portraits of women such as Without Ever Saying It (Tereza Nvotová, 2017), films that are generally quite dark. Documentary films include such successes as La Frontière (Jaroslav Vojtek, 2009), an investigation into how a village was arbitrarily split between Czechoslovakia and the USSR in 1947, and Terroristes de velours (Péter Kerekes, Ivan Ostrochovsk and Pavol Pekarcik, 2013).
