A Report on the State of Things from the Heart of Central Europe
Robert Mihály, The Most Beautiful Corner of the World, 2023.
This is an expansion of some thoughts gathered here.
What is happening in Slovakia?
As a rule, the European, let alone the international press does not pay particularly much attention to it. According to the divison of the continent into a “multi-speed Europe” adopted by the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Slovakia is a relatively small country of the semi-periphery. However, it is also highly-developed, with low public debt and excellent social protection measures, and the world’s largest car manufacturer per capita. Across the former Yugoslavia, it is best remembered, along with the neighboring Czech Republic, as a positive example of how a dilapidated political alliance may disintegrate, something that can only be envied with the experience of the 1990s in the Western Balkans. The revolution that marked the end of Czechoslovakia is called “velvet” for a reason.
After the recent assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, the media tried to explain the “two Slovakias” – Fico’s Slovakia, the Eurosceptic, Russophile, although declaratively social democratic one, and the one in opposition, Euroenthusiastic and Russophobic. Given the long Slovak tradition of political criticism, especially satire in literature, theater and film, the country’s new documentary cinema is especially successful in this endeavor. More so than in many other contemporary societies, it strongly reflects the antinomies of national reality, while it also tends to turn to the experiences of the twentieth century that continue to shape the present social tensions.
New Slovak documentary cinema should not be thought of as a school or a movement but simply a collection of works created in Slovakia over the last few years. These films record and question political struggles and the plurality of identities in contemporary Slovakia, revealing Slovak society as much more complex and fragmented than the division into “two Slovakias” suggests. While also very different from each other, these films all explore some aspect of Slovakia’s multilayered present, including the rise of radical elements in society, corruption, the war in Ukraine and its implications, attitudes toward Ukrainian immigrants, and society’s ties to the country’s political and cultural heritage. The directors demonstrate interest in absurdity and contradictions, social rituals and various forms of gatherings, and exhibit a certain reserved attitude toward the future.
Before saying anything about the individual works, it is worth mentioning the inevitably established connection between the new and somewhat older Slovak documentary films. In this sense, the work of Dušan Hanák, the most prominent Slovak documentarist of the second half of the twentieth century, is particularly important. Although Hanák has been critical of Slovak reality since the beginning of his work in cinema in 1969, his Paper Heads (Papierové hlavy, 1995) offer the fundamental metaphorical image of socialist, transitional, and post-transitional Slovak society, primarily its bureaucracy and oligarchic government – a procession of grotesque, oversized paper heads. It is possible to understand New Slovak documentary cinema even better with Robert Kirchoff‘s Hey You Slovaks! (Hej, Slováci!, 2002) in mind. Here the economic transition is presented as a great disappointment, especially in the rural parts of the country, though Kirchoff also shows the population’s refusal to remain desperate.
That the economic transition implied different structural changes within Slovak society is also evident in Jaroslav Vojtek‘s Here We Are (My zdes, 2005), a film that candidly portrays the arrival of an originally Slovak family from Kazakhstan. While shortly after World War II the Soviet Union had stood for a promised land for much of the Eastern Bloc, such utopian expectations were soon challenged, yet in many cases acted upon only after 1989. Vojtek shows the disillusionment of the immigrants who have crossed their way from Central Asia to Central Europe, only to find themselves in a place they do not quite understand. As if unable to escape the family curse, the Krnáčs are seen struggling in Slovakia just like their ancestors must have struggled first in Sub-Carpathian Russia, where they had initially emigrated, then in the steps of Kazakhstan, where they were forcibly transferred under Nikita Khrushchev. Marko Škop‘s Other Worlds (Iné svety, 2006) reveals another kind of multiplicity of identities, that in the Eastern Slovak region of Šariš. Šarišans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Roma all live there, many of them burdened by specific traditions and social stigmas. There are also young people who feel thoroughly cosmopolitan as they encounter popular music and other global phenomena, resembling their peers anywhere in the world.
It should also be noted that since independence in 1992, a big problem for Slovakia has been the affirmative attitude of a part of society towards the country’s fascist past – the First Slovak Republic, which existed between 1939 and 1945, was a puppet state of Nazi Germany. A redemptive counter-perspective appears in Slovak documentary films as early as the 2000s. Marek Šulík‘s The Journey of Magdalena Robinson (Cesta Magdalény Robinsonovej, 2008) brings an exhaustive confession about the Holocaust by a Slovak photographer of Jewish origin. Furthermore, already in 2012, Zuzana Piussi prophetically entitled her film on social polarization in Slovakia From Fico to Fico (Od Fica do Fica). At the time, Fico was serving his second term, only to win his third in 2023.
Another important place in the history of Slovak documentary cinema is occupied by the multi-genre omnibus Slovakia 2.0 (Slovensko 2.0, Viera Čákanyová, Iveta Grófová, Juraj Herz, Miro Jelok, Peter Kerekes, Peter Krištúfek, Zuzana Liová, Ondrej Rudavský, Mišo Suchý, Martin Šulík, 2014) in which multiple directors try to explain in separate ten-minute contributions what has characterized Slovakia’s first twenty-something years of independence. It is already here that most of the new Slovak cinema motives are noticeable, and some of them also in the films Peace to You All (Mir Vam, 2016) by Juraj Mravec Jr. (the war in Ukraine, in this case from the eyes of a Slovak reporter on the spot), the Czech-Slovak-Latvian co-production My Unknown Soldier (Můj neznámý vojín, 2018) by Anna Kryvenko (through her own family’s involvement in the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Ukrainian director also problematizes the contemporary relationship between Ukrainians and Slovaks), and Paradise on Earth (Raj na zemi, 2019) by Jaroslav Vojtek (accompanying a Slovak photojournalist on assignments around the world, Vojtek opens one’s eyes to the current schisms in Slovak society).
What do these schisms look like then in new Slovak documentary cinema? In the Czech-Slovak co-production Ordeal (Očista, 2021), Zuzana Piussi investigates the disintegration of the judicial system after privatization, i.e. the corruption scandal that broke out after a data leak. In a compilation of video material reminiscent of a television report conflating interviews and numerous clips from the news, the director tells the complex story of how a group of judges, politicians, and entrepreneurs jeopardized democracy.
Barbora Sliepková‘s lyrical Lines (Čiary, 2021), the other hand, shows what contemporary Bratislava feels like. The camera follows the daily lives of ordinary people. There is a middle-aged woman who lives alone and reflects on interpersonal relationships, a young man who strives to become a city councilor but does not know how to present himself, a real estate agent whose enthusiasm for work seems unconvincing in a post-socialist environment, a young girl obsessed with her father’s absence, an eccentric composer who still lives with his mother, and two comically coordinated road marking workers reconciled with the city’s hustle and bustle. Bratislava is the real protagonist of Sliepková’s bleak, black-and-white, low-contrast study of the social environment, both exterior and interior.
In the short film Strigov (2022), Barbora Berezňáková deliriously returns to her childhood memories or a childhood nightmare of sorts, showing her grandmother’s house and the rituals of the Greek-Catholic Ruthenian community in Eastern Slovakia. By using sepia, shooting objects from close range, and editing an amalgam of a child’s sobs and shallow breathing, the director manages to create a very disturbing atmosphere. She also contributes to cultural memory, ending the film with old family photos and dedicating it to the places of her childhood. The work is a nostalgic reflection, and thus a testimony of the rising endangerment of the specificities of the communities such as the Ruthenian one – things get lost with the change of generations, it is suggested. Berezňáková also deserves special acknowledgement for her relatively recent analysis of Slovakia’s past tensions in the Ask at Home cycle (Spýtaj sa vašich). Her Ask at Home 68 (2018) is a study on the impact of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. In Ask at Home 89 (2019), Berezňáková revisits the end of communist rule in the country. In both cases, she is concerned with personal, familial experiences, not with the history written in books.
Robert Mihály‘s The Most Beautiful Corner of the World (Najkrajší kút v šírom svete, 2022) ironically recognizes Slovakia as a concrete utopia. Here scenes from recent Slovak political life surely do not promote the country as an ideal place for self-realization. “The Slovak people,” claims an old partisan off screen as extreme wide shots map the territory of a truly impressive nature, “are like a dove.” Neither the recitation of the patriotic song that follows, nor the speeches of politicians at rallies, and certainly not the costumed reenactment of Christ’s removal from the cross can be read in a tone devoid of absurdity. However, Mihály also shows a rally of the extreme right where young men’s T-shirt inscriptions read “a brother to a brother, an executioner to whores” and “Slovakia to Slovaks.” One of the women competing for the position of a television reporter singles out Jozef Tisa, the “Slovak Führer,” as her favorite president of all time. The gathering of Fico’s supporters shows the instrumentalization of antifascist symbols for some new purposes – support for Russia in the war with Ukraine and resistance to trade ties with the West. The film brings forth many more fascinating but also alarming instances of heteroglossia in Slovak society.
Finally, Peter Hošták‘s short black-and-white collage of moving and still images Cold and Dark (Zima a Tma, 2023) follows Slovak timber merchants in their work. In a voice over, it is possible to hear news about the announced restrictions on wood export, the decision the Minister of the Environment has made in the event of an energy crisis with Russia. On their way to forest destinations, the merchants drive through mountainous industrial areas, as the strikingly high-contrast winter images suggest. The horse they are traveling with helps them fell trees. The film is not only onomatopoeic – based on the image and sounds, it is even possible to imagine the smell, warmth, and clamminess of the animal. Excerpts from men’s conversations as they take breaks from work easily keep the viewer engaged. Sharing brandy, they remember their past drunkenness, tell family anecdotes, and fight with the horse, taking him out for a walk as they would a dog. Hošták manages to capture authentic moments of solidarity among the workers, their common fears, and even their self-identification in opposition to Ukrainians.
New Slovak documentary cinema, therefore, does not introduce completely new thematic concerns, but it provides a new report on the state of society. As a corpus of different works, it brings together the most surprising elements of Slovak everyday life, which is nonetheless not the same everywhere and for everyone in Slovakia.