FILMOVÉ OKO, VEDECKÁ MYSEĽ
FILM-MAKER’S EYE, SCHOLAR’S MIND

Summary/Abstract: In the study entitled Film-maker’s Eye, Scholar’s Mind, attention is centred on a monograph by Martin Slivka, Slovak Folk Theatre. This publication is a rare example of the combination of the diachronic (or genetic) and the synchronic (or structural) approaches to the study of Slovak folk theatre. The author has attempted to show that Martin Slivka did not merely acquaint himself with the works of Piotr Bogatyriov, Jan Mukařovský and Claude Lévi-Strauss, but he managed to develop these stimuli and use them in modified form when researching the folk theatre. His research work is peculiar in this sense, that Slivka perceived and interpreted many phenomena as a director of documentary films, which enabled him to see things that might have escaped the notice of an ethnologist or ethno-theatrologist. The second part is devoted to the interpretation of three of Slivka’s documentary films. The point of these interpretations is to highlight the fact that when making them the author was applying his scholarly knowledge. He was not exclusively interested in the compositional side of film: the “logic of the thought” concerned him also. Thanks to this, he created original works in which the cognitive function is powerfully affected by the aesthetic function, and this also applies vice versa. The author has sought to prove that in Martin Slivka’s case scholarly and artistic thinking were incessantly overlapping, and we may regard this overlap as his authorial signature.

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