10 great Slovak New Wave films

The first-ever UK release of Peter Solan’s The Barnabáš Kos Case (1964), which has just been issued on Blu-ray, throws a spotlight on a still neglected but unimpeachably vital part of what is correctly called the Czechoslovak New Wave but too often casually abbreviated to ‘Czech New Wave’. And while we instinctively deride Neville Chamberlain’s notorious comment that Czechoslovakia was “a faraway country” inhabited by people “of whom we know nothing” (made as he signed part of it over to Hitler in 1938), this remained true of most of Slovakia’s film output until very recently indeed.

But alongside Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Ivan Passer et al, based in Prague’s Barrandov Studios, there was an equally vibrant film culture coming out of Bratislava’s Koliba Studios. And if Eduard Grečner, Elo Havetta, Juraj Jakubisko, Peter Solan and Štefan Uher remain obscure even to otherwise well-informed film buffs, that reflects how distribution is too often guided by the vagaries of fashion. Ironically, the decade’s best-known Slovak-speaking film was technically a Czech production: Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s Oscar-winning The Shop on the High Street (1965).

However, perception has been changing, thanks to the efforts of the Slovak Film Institute in Bratislava (whose DVD and Blu-ray releases are invariably English-friendly) and Second Run in the UK, which has licensed several SFU restorations. All of the titles cited here are available from one or the other, and often both.

As for The Barnabáš Kos Case, it’s a laugh-out-loud funny satire about what happens when you knowingly put a bona fide idiot in charge of a prestigious organisation for cynical Machiavellian reasons. It took years to be greenlit because various Slovak film industry apparatchiks read it as a personal attack on them, but the fact that its targets are so universal and still so alarmingly relevant has kept it startlingly fresh.

Director: Stanislav Barabáš

Released on 6 May 1961, between František Vláčil’s The White Dove (4 November 1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (6 April 1962), Stanislav Barabáš’s film offers a similar blend of accessible narrative and poetic imagery. It was invited to play in competition at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, and while it came away empty-handed, it nonetheless signalled that something creatively interesting was stirring in the hitherto largely ignored Slovak part of Czechoslovakia.

It’s not as resonant as the Vláčil and Tarkovsky masterpieces, being primarily a rousingly rumbustious Boy’s Own adventure story in which assorted schoolkids join the anti-Nazi resistance of late 1944 (against their own openly fascist teacher), but it’s given added heft by a subplot in which young Rudko adopts a wood pigeon with an injured wing (shot down by his careless classmate, slingshot virtuoso Vincko) and tends it back to health. Which is clearly a metaphor for the country recovering from Nazi occupation, but Barabáš sensibly doesn’t over-egg it.

It’s substantially elevated by a haunting, polystylistic score from Zdeněk Liška, one of the greatest of all film composers but rarely cited alongside equivalents like Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone thanks to him working exclusively in his native Czechoslovakia.

Director: Štefan Uher

Despite several credible candidates, including the above-mentioned The White Dove, film historians now generally agree that The Sun in a Net was the first authentic ‘Czechoslovak New Wave’ film. Being Slovak helped; unlike more closely observed Czech contemporaries, Štefan Uher was able to bend or break cinematic and ideological rules before the authorities twigged what was happening.

From the start, Uher and cinematographer Stanislav Szomolányi infuse ostensibly banal shots of Bratislava kids at play with unexpected touches (at one point lining up, backs to the wall, as though preparing to drink the rising sunlight), while the city’s aerial-festooned roofs are a recurring image and overarching metaphor. The teenage Fajolo is a photographer, and shares his creators’ concern with capturing someone’s essence through well-judged composition and close-up, his studies of hands being particularly evocative.

If the narrative elements are more familiar (Fajolo’s relationship with his girlfriend Bela, never solid, comes under acute strain when he’s assigned to a rural collective farm and both become tempted to stray), there’s so much else going on that this scarcely matters. Though neglected internationally, the film was an acknowledged influence on Miloš Forman, then actively looking for new ways of telling stories on film.

Director: Peter Solan

Aside from Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948) and Alfréd Radok’s Distant Journey (1949), which had the authority of being made by former Nazi camp victims, fiction features fought shy of the Holocaust until the 1960s, with this being one of the earliest examples. 

Komínek (Štefan Kvietik) is a concentration camp prisoner facing imminent execution when he gets an unexpected reprieve. This comes when camp commandant Kraft (Manfred Krug) asks him how he came by his broken nose, in the process discovering that Komínek used to be a boxer – and Kraft wants a sparring partner to while away the hours with. Which means that not only does Komínek get to stay alive, but he also gets decent food and regular rest, because he needs to keep in shape. Unsurprisingly, his fellow inmates are less than happy about this, and Komínek feels intensely guilty too, but what choice does he have when the alternative is execution?

The long-take scenes in the boxing ring are impressively brutal and no less impactful psychologically and indeed existentially: should Komínek beat Krug to a pulp, knowing that he’d probably be killed afterwards, or should he meekly absorb the weekly batterings and survive to fight again?

Director: Peter Solan

The most ostensibly ‘realistic’ of the films discussed here, but also the most revealing in terms of contemporary attitudes. It’s set entirely in and around a swish nightclub from dawn to dusk, which feels like a microcosm of society from top to bottom, with everyone carefully trying to conceal their motivations only for the ever-flowing alcohol to cruelly expose them later on.

Two plumbers, Kvetinka (Stano Dančiak) and Miloš (Marián Labuda), are archetypal Jack-the-lads in search of a good time, which they hesitantly attempt to have with visibly more sophisticated tourists Mira (Jitka Zelenohorská) and Olga (Jana Gýrová). Meanwhile, middle-aged Baláz (Július Pántik) is ostentatiously splashing the cash, while a German visitor seems like the only truly happy man there, as he doesn’t speak Slovak and therefore isn’t privy to the caustic commentary by Betka the barmaid (Valentina Thielová), who’s seen all this before.

So have we, but it’s done exceptionally well here, with Peter Solan and writer Tibor Vichta eschewing obvious caricature in favour of a rounded, Formanesque sympathy for everyone involved. That they all emerge sadder and wiser at the end is a given, with Baláz’s late revelation as to the source of his wealth being particularly heartbreaking.

Director: Štefan Uher

Štefan Uher and his regular cinematographer Stanislav Szomolányi had already established themselves as remarkable image-makers, which reputation they amply confirmed with a film in which virtually every shot is a small miracle of imaginative conception and composition – appropriately so for a film about art, artists, the creative impulse and how it’s ultimately financed, shaped and censored by people with their own particular agendas.

But this is no finger-pointing polemic; it’s clear from the opening shots that the approach is broadly surrealist (or ‘Nadrealist’, its Slovak equivalent) and that although it superficially flirts with the familiar theme of an artist becoming besotted with his female model, it never settles down into a staid rut.

Annabella (Jolanta Umecka from Roman Polanski’s 1962 film Knife in the Water) arrives by train in a high-arched station whose interior space recalls Giorgio de Chirico, and is pursued by two artists, the impish young painter Tristan (Ladislav Mrkvička) and the self-conscious older sculptor Raven (Otakar Janda). The latter sometimes appears to her as a literal raven, just as she in turn becomes a mermaid, their artist friends take on the characteristics of the zodiac, shrouded figures spontaneously burst into flames, and mirrors reflect more than just the person contemplating them.

Director: Eduard Grečner

Three masterpieces with a medieval setting premiered in Czechoslovakia in 1967 and 1968, the Czech ones by Frantisek Vláčil (Marketa Lazarová, The Valley of the Bees), the equally impressive Slovak one by Eduard Grečner.

Set in a remote, mountainous part of what would become present-day Slovakia, the drama is kickstarted by the unexpected return of Dragon (Radovan Lukavský), of whom his former neighbours seem visibly terrified, and his appearance (scarred, one-eyed, permanently grim expression) doesn’t ingratiate him either. He has a particular impact on Šimon (Gustáv Valach) and Eva (Emília Vášáryová), and we sense from the start that there’s lengthy and complicated history between the three of them – which of course we find out about later (often in flashback), but very little turns out as one might have expected.

It’s an impeccably structured cautionary tale about prejudice and unthinking mob mentality, spellbindingly shot in black-and-white widescreen by Vincent Rosinec and with an almost tactile approach to its material. The use of sound is particularly striking, with Ilja Zeljenka’s atonal score so perfectly integrated into the overall sound-field that everything arises organically from the images. It’s a tragedy for Slovak cinema that Grečner wouldn’t be allowed to make another film until the 1990s.

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Hang on a minute; surely Alain Robbe-Grillet was French? Indeed he was, but in the late 1960s he accepted an invitation put out by the writer, poet and active surrealist Albert Marenčin, who persuaded his bosses at Bratislava’s Koliba Studios to proactively raise Slovak cinema’s international profile by inviting distinguished foreign filmmakers to work there with minimal creative restrictions. Others included Jerzy Skolimowski, who directed part of the portmanteau film Dialogue 20-40-60 (1968).

Robbe-Grillet would make two films at Koliba, this one and Eden and After (1970). His protagonist is played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who answers to both ‘Ján Robin’ (‘Jean’ in the French-language version) and ‘Boris Varissa’, but he may well not be either – and they could as easily be traitors as heroes, depending on which (if any) of their picaresque World War II exploits turn out to have any bearing in historical reality.

Throughout, the film is deliberately and gleefully lying to us, either through Trintignant’s words or more subversively through images and sounds that aren’t at all what they initially appear to be – a reminder that Robbe-Grillet was Alain Resnais’ screenwriter on the similarly elusive Last Year in Marienbad (1961) as well as one of France’s most celebrated experimental novelists.

Director: Elo Havetta

And now for something completely wild. Although not as visually and conceptually unhinged as Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) and Fruit of Paradise (1970), Elo Havetta’s debut feature (he only made two before dying young) has the same explosively effervescent joie de vivre. So much so that it simply doesn’t matter that it’s hard to follow at first, as it explodes so much with colour, life and intriguing random silent film style intertitles (one simply reads “Ph!”).

“Anyone can perform miracles as long as he dares and tries,” says one of his gaggle of eccentrics at an early stage, and Havetta was clearly speaking from the heart. People are as likely to dance on the rooftops as in the streets, playful trompe l’oeil effects abound (what initially appears to be shot through binoculars turns out to be the viewpoint of a shotgun), and a brass band, tightrope walkers and an elephant join in the fun.

Even a foreign viewer can readily appreciate that this is intensely Slovak, not least because of Havetta’s regular recourse to historical documents, paintings and photographs, puppet re-enactments of the much-filmed legend of Juraj Jánošík (central Europe’s Robin Hood) and rousing folk tunes.

Director: Juraj Jakubisko

The so-called ‘Slovak Fellini’, Juraj Jakubisko was more successful than Elo Havetta at catching at least some international attention; his second feature, the hallucinatory war triptych The Deserter and the Nomads (1968), was even distributed by Columbia Pictures, which paradoxically may be why it’s the hardest Jakubisko film to get hold of today.

His third feature, named after a Slovak proverb (“God looks after birds, orphans and fools”), ranks alongside its almost exact contemporaries, Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968) and Miklós Jancsó’s The Confrontation (1969) in its crystallising of 1968’s rebellious spirit. Although it lacks explicit political references, the Czechoslovak authorities unsurprisingly divined “nihilism and the negation of not only socialist but any kind of social and ethical principles” in this story of three twentysomething orphans – Yorick (Jiří Sýkora), his girlfriend Marta (Magda Vášáryová) and his best friend Andrej (Philippe Avron) – attempting to evade reality following a devastating conflict that could be anything from WWII to the 1968 Soviet invasion to an unidentified apocalypse.

Of all the films cited here, this one has the most in common with the freewheeling spirit of the French New Wave (especially the trios underpinning Bande à part and Jules et Jim), albeit transplanted to rural Slovakia.

Director: Dušan Hanák

Like its Czech counterpart, the Slovak New Wave continued into the early 1970s, but the writing was clearly on the wall for its more adventurous spirits. Bizarrely, Dušan Hanák’s second feature, a documentary about old people living in the Tatra mountain region, was banned locally until 1988, although it would be completely uncontentious in the West.

There are only fleeting indications of when the film was shot; its subjects live their lives in their own way, and if that way started in the 19th century (for them specifically; it may have originated centuries before), then so be it. As they age, they cling doggedly to their most fundamental pleasures – one man has such severe leg injuries that he’s lived on his knees for decades, but that didn’t stop him building his house.

There’s little indication of the turbulent century that they’ve lived through, but they were most likely too remote and self-sufficient to ever be directly affected – although one man has developed an obsession with the Apollo space programme, while ruefully acknowledging that he probably wouldn’t make the grade as an astronaut. But it’s this witty interplay between the minuscule and cosmic that makes the film so completely enthralling.