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In the article I probe the creative process of work of producer and actor above a role. It is important to be able a producer to explain to the actor essence of reincarnation, and must skilfully use “standards an actor from life”.
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The text analyzes the distribution of three Slovak films created in 2017 (Piata loď (Little Harbour), Špina (Filthy), Nina to Slovak cinemas. This year new Slovak films reached 1,414,132 cinemagoers, which is a 21.13% share of total cinema admissions. This is the highest annual number recorded since the establishment of the Slovak Republic (1993). The study looks for an answer to the question, Why do some Slovak films achieve higher admissions then others? It also seeks to point out the variability of the criteria to measure the success of a film with the audience.
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Using the example of three films – Kandidát (The Candidate, 2013, dir. Jonáš Karásek), Pirko (Little Feather, 2016, dir. Lucia and Petr Klein Svoboda), and Únos (Kidnapping, 2017, dir. Mariana Čengel-Solčanská), the present study deals with distrust in the systemic elements of society in Slovak feature films in the period following the establishment of the Audiovisual Fund (2009). By means of a thematic and stylistic analysis, it points to the similarities between the selected films. It shows their rootedness in the established trends of Slovak cinema as well as their diversion from them, which is mirrored in their dialogical work with the phenomenon of reality, by creating an illusion of anticipation or influencing future events.
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The text deals with the ways in which Slovak live-action films made in the 1990s introduced the topic of mistrust in the State and in its institutions. Using specific examples, the text demonstrates that such mistrust was not primarily a critical attitude, but rather consisted of two basic forms of rejection. On the one hand, live-action films made for cinema often promoted the post-modern principle of a “relative” truth, presenting a lifestyle with minimal ties to the State, sometimes also formulating a mistrust in specific state institutions (the police, state-run artistic institutions, education system) by means of irony. On the other hand, films made for state television frequently drew attention to corruption in state organisations and the fact it was usually being generally accepted as a status that did not need to be analysed. In both cases, the message of the 1990s was carried onto the next millennium, and can eventually be interpreted as a way of solidifying the discourse of mistrust that we perceive in contemporary Slovak film for cinemas and television.
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The present study offers a critical reflection of contemporary Slovak authorial production. Focusing on three films, the author analyses the authors’ approaches to representing reality from a formal point of view. The author claims that all of them relativize the status of documentary film, using as a tool of critical analysis Carl Plantiga’s definition of documentary film, included in his concept of “asserted veridical representation”. The films under analysis use three formally different approaches of relating to social reality. One relies on an acted form, the second takes the form of a historicizing essay, and the third promotes the author’s subjective views through a cut collage of motifs stemming from reality.
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The text deals with the context in which the term Generation 90, which refers to the most prominent contemporary Slovak documentary makers, was constituted and developed. It returns to the term’s author, Pavel Branko, and his analysis from the beginning of the new millennium, and then maps subsequent scholarly responses to Generation 90. In its conclusion, the paper introduces two key works of the new artistic movement, Ladomírske morytáty a legendy [The Horror Stories and Legends of Ladomir] and Hlas 98 [Voice 98].
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This study focuses on forms of censorship that appeared in Slovak authorial documentary film after 1989, with investigative documentary being the most afflicted genre. In the introduction, the author describes institutional forms and mechanisms of state censorship, which was used as an effective ideological tool to supress “inappropriate” information in Slovak film production during the existence of the first Slovak State (1939 – 1945) and in the former Czechoslovakia (1948 – 1989). Residues of such institutional censorship later also appeared in democracy (1989 – 2015), namely in the form of politically or religiously motivated pressure exerted on audiovisual production and its authors by the representatives of the ruling (government) parties and their nominees.
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Television, as it continues to play an important role in mass media, almost naturally comes to terms such as the concepts of presence and distance. The frequency of machine-like repetition in television genres, the difference between represented reality and the original, together form the phenomenon in which the notions of mutation and concealment are best approached.
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This paper investigates the way in which one of the canonical American playwrights, Sam Shepard, perceives the role of existential fear, performance and the “original sin” in shaping both personal and collective identities of Anglo-Americans. America and its people in Shepard’s plays have, in our analysis, been scrutinised through the lenses of postmodern theories, as well as the theories of the most prominent philosophers delving into the modern capitalist society and culture at the turn of the century. The bold insights of Baudrillard, Foucault and Jameson into what we might call the text of the modern cultural moment, their theories of simulacrum and hyperreality, power and postmodernity as the cultural logic of late capitalism, have been the theoretical grounds for our examination of the expression of the modern US culture in Shepard’s plays.
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Premiering at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival to great acclaim (it won the award for the Best Canadian Feature, and was eventually included in the IFF’s annual Canada’s Top Ten), Stephen Dunn’s Closet Monster employs monsters metaphorically, primarily in order to express the psychological damage of violent homophobia and to comment on toxic masculinity. Yet monstrosity is not merely a metaphor but also a strategy: the protagonist, a closeted teenager named Oscar, appropriates both monstrosity and heroic narratives in order to manage life as a homosexual person in a deeply homophobic environment of contemporary suburban Canada. The magic realist details which permeate Closet Monster – the talking pet hamster, the scenes seamlessly fusing body horror with realism – exemplify the film’s poignant, almost fairy-tale-like approach to “homophobia-related violence” and the effects of PTSD initiated by Oscar’s witnessing of violent enforcement of gender normativity in his childhood. This paper proposes to examine the politics of the film, in particular Dunn’s deployment of monstrosity in the representation and condemnation of violent homophobia and toxic/hegemonic masculinity. As these issues are inextricable from the wider cultural context of normative gender and sexuality, Dunn’s criticism of heteronormativity is discussed as well. It is in this context, also, that the film’s depiction of the production, policing and elimination of “monstrous” (i.e. homosexual) bodies is examined.
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In the 1960s and 1970s the Clement Greenberg’s Modernist ideology of ‘purity’ played a central role in the definition of ‘avant-garde cinema’ as a serious, major genre of film. This transfer between ‘fine art’ and ‘avant-garde film’ was articulated as ‘structural film’ by P. Adams Sitney. This heritage shapes contemporary debates over ‘postcinema’ as digital technology undermines the ontology and dispositive of historical cinema. Its discussion here is not meant to reanimate old debates, but to move past them.
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Through a corpus assembled under the name of the Hungarian Post-communist Black Series, this paper aims to reconsider the proposals of Nouvelle Histoire historians as well as the time stratums of R. Koselleck, regarding the articulation of different time sets when constructing film history. How can film historians build a proper time structure involving economic and political memory, the evolution of the Hungarian film production system and the multiple times a film may recall? This reflection was made in order to understand such a chain of events as 1988–1990, and to offer new ways of considering the problem of an event’s status in its relation to films and the form of memory they present.
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In the following article, I examine the originality of Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó’s (1921–2014) filmmaking practice. Jancsó appears as a unique representative of European filmmaking tradition who was motivated by a specific commitment to develop and increase the function of cinematic form, the effectiveness of images and sounds and performances of the actors which aesthetically formulate, translate and change the effects of Hungarian cinema to higher qualities and dimensions of art and spectacle. The significance of the filmic form comes forward, and the camera-based organisation of it increases the intensity of narration. Jancsó’s use of folk rituals adds a strong sense of pictoriality to the overall narrative structure, because his emphasis lies in the physicality of different appearances inside the frame. In his own stylistic way, Jancsó processes these various formations executed by the performers in a style in which all the elementary forces—whether physical, pictorial, psychological, or aesthetic—work in conjoint with one another. In this regard, Miklós Jancsó’s cinematic spectacles are symbolical fantasies enriched by phenomenological realism.
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The non-existence or deficiency in the production of popular genres in the history of Slovak cinema after the split from Czech Republic in 1993 has been a much discussed subject in the Slovak filmmaking community. It is a common belief among both filmmakers and film critics, that due to the lack of popular genre traditions and financial difficulties of film production, Slovak cinema is not able to attract domestic audiences and is primarily focused on the arthouse and festival circuit. This overt simplification, however, has in recent years been challenged by the emergence of several films that introduced generic novelties into Slovak cinema.The paper deals with two major representatives of this popular genre upheaval that were successful at the box office: the political thriller Candidate (2013) by Jonáš Karásek and the detective story The Red Captain (2016) by Michal Kollár. Both films are literary adaptations touching upon the subject of continuity of the communist regime after the democratic turn in 1989. Although not unanimously critically praised, they both gained considerable attention thanks to presenting an alternative to the realistic arthouse social drama trend of Slovak fiction film. The text examines innovations that these films introduced into popular genre discourse of Slovak cinema by concentrating on prominent storytelling and stylistic techniques derived mainly from mainstream popular cinema and offer some preliminary thoughts on reasons underlying their successful reception among domestic audiences.
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The paper discusses the influence of modernist aesthetics on the changes in the dramatic structure of film. In the films analysed by the author, the typical tricks for the classical model, such as dramatisation of action and climax as the classic denouement, are etiolated, turning into their antitheses: de-dramatising of action and anti-climax. On the examples of films such as: The Four Hundred Blows by F. Truffaut, The Adventure by M. Antonioni, Gran Torino by C. Eastwood, The Mist by F. Darabont, Smoke by W. Wang, and Three Monkeys and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia by N.B. Ceylan, the author demonstrates the functions and artistic potential of denouements which shift attention from action to characters and leave the viewer with the dilemma of an “open” ending.
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The article explores fragmentary, transmedia images of the nomadic "Tulse Luper VJ Performance" in terms of activation of the senses. Considering its key characteristics (such as mobility of the spectator, the multiplicity of viewpoints, fragmentary storytelling), this VJ screen-based performance challenges ordinary assumptions of the cinematic experience. This perspective sheds a new light on the areal connection of the multi-screen environment that exceeds the perception of one linear story in favour of a kaleidoscopic stream of images and ekphrastic writing. By analysing spatio-temporal specifics of the No TV "Tulse Luper VJ Performance", this methodological study attempted to demonstrate that the VJ projection could not only be perceived as a reconfiguration of the basic trilogy but also as a unique, non-linear, touch-based manipulation of storytelling that aims at transforming a cinematic event into a real-time, expanded audiovisual project.
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The aim of this essay is to identify the ways in which long films might be seen to constitute a challenge to the capitalist ideology that underwrites much of contemporary life. I shall do this not by identifying what makes a long film long, but by working with the very relativity of the term (it is not that all movies over, say, three hours in length are ‘long’). That is, I shall argue that a film becomes ‘long’ when it contradicts the demands of contemporary life under capitalism. I shall then explore to what extent this contradiction always holds if all films are, regardless of running time, spectacles of a sort, and thus not a challenge to, but a critical component of life under capitalism. Finally, I shall suggest that it is when films are unnecessarily longer than they should be, e.g. when the internet is not working for online film viewing, that we have perhaps the most powerful challenge to the ‘busy’ ideology of life under capitalism.
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