Classics in Purgatory
In 1950, Bratislava set up its own studios, the Koliba Studios, promoting the production of an early national cinema. Because of its taste for folklore and rural traditions, Slovak cinema was sometimes equated with an escape cinema that served the interests of the communist regime, far from the freedom of tone that prevailed in Prague at the time, which did not stand up to scrutiny. The Sun in the Nets (Štefan Uher, 1963), for example, is one of the cornerstones of Czechoslovakia's New Wave and is of stunning formal beauty. The Boxer and Death (Peter Solan, 1963), about a prisoner temporarily rescued from a concentration camp by his boxing skills, is more conventional and shows impeccable skill. It is a local film that earned the country its first Oscar for Best Foreign Film, The Lark Mirror (Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1965), a striking evocation of the collaboration and insidious hold of Nazism in the small village of Sabinov. Juraj Jakubisko, the author of a prolific work for film and television, was for a long time subject to communist censorship: The Birds, Orphans and Fools (1969), which was banned until the fall of the regime, is a surrealist ode to freedom and childhood in a country ravaged by war. Fantasy, disjointed narration and formal inventiveness seem to be the watchwords of Slovak cinema, as in Fête au jardin botanique (Elo Havetta, 1969). At the same time, the pope of the New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was invited to Slovakia to shoot two films, The Man Who Lies (1968) and Eden and After (1970), proof that the avant-garde attempts were then in the smell of sanctity. The beauty of the Slovak countryside goes hand in hand with a penchant for phantasmagoria. This is again the case in Images from the Old World (Dušan Hanák, 1972), a fascinating poem filmed about a vanishing world, that of old farmers in the Tatras. After the repression of the Prague Spring, the Slovak studios were less watched by the communist authorities and became a kind of refuge for filmmakers who wanted to preserve their artistic freedom, but who nevertheless faced competition from television. Jakubisko regained his freedom and made some of the most important films of the 1980s, such as Perinbaba (1985), an adaptation of the Grimm brothers' tale, which retains all its cruelty and features Orava Castle and the High Tatras.
After independence
The film industry logically suffered the full brunt of independence and acclimatization to capitalism after 1993. Martin Šulík is the main filmmaker to emerge in the wake: The Garden (1995) reveals this bucolic and meditative vein characteristic of Slovak cinema. More recently, he has made a film, Gypsy (2011), about the gypsy community. My Dog 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 looks back at the genocide of the Roma, sometimes hidden 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 an ex-boxer adrift who had a brief moment of glory at the Olympic Games, portraits of women such as Never Say Never (Tereza Nvotová, 2017), films that are generally quite dark. Documentary cinema has had some successes, such as The Border (Jaroslav Vojtek, 2009), an investigation into how a village was arbitrarily split in 1947 between Czechoslovakia and the USSR, or Velvet Terrorists (Péter Kerekes, Ivan Ostrochovsk and Pavol Pekarcik, 2013).
