"THE GOLDEN SIXTIES" "DUŠAN HANÁK 322" "I grew up in times of Soviet folk songs and the pathos of Soviet war films really influenced me." "The way people sacrificed their lives for a country or others, for those who are to come," "I wanted to be like that too so I remember walking out of a cinema, all dazed." "I felt a kind of catharsis." "Paradoxically, as a 12-year-old boy I'd wear a red star pendant and decided to enroll into an army school to be an officer because it seemed like a useful thing to do back then." "I changed my mind in 1953 when Stalin and Gottwald died because our teachers would cry in our classes for them and I could sense something phony and false in that and I had to stifle my laughter which was really difficult" "but I didn't feel as if I was being cynical at all." "At universities they accepted only working class youngsters," "I wasn't one of them so I went to work in a mine for a year, quite a tough job because it was really hard to learn the mining technique." "I came to entrance exams with black circles around my eyes because I didn't know how to wash it out," "I couldn't put soap in my eyes." "They were pretty suspicious, and nice Mr Kucera asked:" "Do you really work underground?" "I said:" "One kilometer deep." "During the second exam they were quite impressed with some fragments of my work," "I didn't know why I wrote it or how I could ever use it," "I'd just note down some motives of what was happening around me and were interesting for me." "The era that followed was one of the happiest in my life because Prague and FAMU in the early 60's were awesome." "They accepted 17 people but only 4 of us graduated." "It was pretty tough back then but it may have been the reason why Czechoslovakian films gained such a great success." "There was an atmosphere of freedom and we all realized that the liberation was growing like in 1963 when the famous conference of Kafka took place, where Kafka didn't represent capitalism anymore." "Jarmila Orlova was starring in my very first film Alcron." "I found her very interesting." "She played this student who became a prostitute." "The topic wasn't very common but I really liked it." "When I showed this film to my later very good friend, my teacher of psychology and sociology of art, Mr Pondelicek he said:" "It has a nature of the new wave." "Are you always so pensif?" "Broody?" "5S'il vous plait?" "Your glass." "Tired?" " You mustn't be like that." " I don't understand you." "Not only I, but we all thought it was our duty to make films which would reflect our society." "All my life I had on mind that each film should bring an answer to a hidden problem which existed in the society, and that this answer would give meaning to all author films." "When making Artists I was interested in the background and a winter season of artists who lived and still live on the edge of society and they have an inner freedom which must be accompanied with a discipline, otherwise it's no freedom." "This freedom must be practiced and the artists would practice and work hard with love." "It made a great contrast compared to what I saw or felt." "Mr Werich was and still is one of the titans of Czech culture." "Let's say a fairytale is an art genre, and we know about art that it speaks only to those who understand its language." "My fairytales speak to those who understand my language." "We wanted to make a film and Mrs Werichova said:" "Boys, if you'd come and dig our garden, it might help the negotiations." "So we started digging until we dug the whole garden over, and the next morning he said:" "Ok, what would you like?" "After lunch Mr Werich got into a very good mood, he told us he's going to have a bath and left in a bathrobe." "Suddenly he appeared in the doorway, stark naked, looking like a baroque angel and took a funny bow." "We were overwhelmed with happiness and stunned and our two quick photographers completely failed to react because they were immersed in what he was giving us, he was giving us his freedom." "See how tired I am because it's no fun to make fun, but we must fight human folly and I use humour as a weapon." "This fight against human malice can never be won but we must also never give up because if we did this human folly would flood the whole world." "Film Teachings was about a hypocricy of young people, who were taught at schools to be two-faced." "What should young people actually strive for?" "To build up their qualification that gives quality to our life." " Nora?" " Not to be two-faced." " Not to be two faced..." " What else?" "They should deeply appreciate collective work." "See?" "As easy as that." "Come on, girls, what else should youngsters strive for?" "They should organize debates for those who have a false view of the origin of our world." "I studied making feature films so in this documentary I used some implicitly staged scenes, however they weren't supposed to spoil the authenticity." "Got herself a boyfriend but fails to meet her obligations." "I used to be a young girl too but this is too much, ladies." "I was at Karlovy Vary Festival with my film Artists when I was walking around I came across this big room and found a really photogenic hairdressers' competition." "I'd never seen it in a film and I was so fascinated I forgot to go to the cinema, and I thought this could be a perfect basis for a film." "Our hairdresser's contest has entered its second half." "I myself think that even these hairdressers will not step into their adult lives unprepared." "Our company supplies this contest with hairslides..." "To tell the truth, I was quite indrawn as a young man but thanks to filmmaking I found my way to people." "I'd carry a notepad instead of a tape recorder because that would create an obstacle between us and I'd observe the typical situation and types of people." "Out of this big group of hairdressers-to-be" "I chose 6 or 7 distinct types, like my brother non-hairdresser or musician Janko Lehotský who was a fan of Ray Charles." "I liked Prague but I wanted to be a Slovakian filmmaker and to be independent, not somebody's assistant." "So I wanted to make my own author documentaries." "A bang of the door behind me," "I don't know when I'll see you again, with healthy eyes." "He couldn't stop the car even though I asked him to, we kept on going..." "A Call into Silence is a documentary film about art and verbal work of schizophrenics which came into existence due to lectures of Ivo Pondelicek." "I loved them because he'd speak about human soul." "We met after my graduation, he told me about an exhibition of best works of European schizophrenics," "a one-day thing and I didn't want to film the real schizophrenics," "I was more into their work and places where they lived." "When I say hello to someone" "I can't imagine what I'd do if the person got to talk to me and I get so scared I prefer to stay unnoticed." "I got the testimonies from various psychiatric clinics and thanks to Mr Pondelicek" "I could visit a remarkable clinic in Pilsen." "They used kind of medieval manners," "I myself saw that, like letting people who believed they were royalty walking around in costumes, or they had this closed unit called Hell." "One for men and one for women." "Some of the quotations which you can hear in the background come from a scientific study by Zbynek Havlicek." "I'm really grateful I can call him my friend." "I'm connected with the whole world." "Others can hear my thoughts and I listen to voices of those who listen to me." "Film Mass is made from a viewpoint of a person who totally respects believers." "I am this kind of person." "True, sometimes I have doubts if the person really believes orjust pretends to do so as I've already mentioned when talking about politics." "Now, as for religious people, this church was crowded with true Christians" "and this 90-year-old priest, he was simply a saint, an ascetic man, a talking soul." "From Paul's Letter to the Romans:" "Brothers, we know the hour has come to awake from sleep for now salvation is nearer to us then when we believed." "The fact of faith, you know, and the fact of disbelief." "I tried to observe these in the church itself." "I could see that most of the believers were old people waiting for the Messiah to come." "There were no middle-aged people there because they don't really need the Messiah just yet." "I was also very interested in children, the new generation who were playing around, whispering and so on, altar boys cared about candies more than about Latin rituals." "Once there was an amazing screening of this film." "As an author I was lucky to experience an argument between two groups of French surrealists in Paris who came to watch the film and were laughing at a scene when this old priest can hardly walk up stairs to a pulpit." "I was outraged but couldn't tell them off in French." "At the same time there were people from a nearby cathedral and they were defending the Christian message and I liked it, you see, all my life I've been captured by a feeling of relativity." "I tried to express this feeling in Mass and in my film 322:" "Yes, things can be like this but also the other way round." "Will it or won't it come out?" "An eternal question asked by cameramen." "The moment they take out a camera the Sun is gone." "The youngest documentary filmmaker Dusan Hanak on a big scene, shot by a hidden camera for sure, for this method is so popular among documentary filmmakers." "You will see this footage in his newest film called Old Shatterhand Has Come to Us." "Location:" "Czechoslovakia, cast:" "Locals and foreigners." "I really enjoyed working on this film as it gave me a chance to use this counterpoint principle." "I observed the gray reality of socialist realism through eyes of a stranger from the West shocked by this "red country"." "I also used some music from the 50's, scenes with lethargic members of a socialist brigade were accompanied with ideological optimistic lyrics something like Let's go, comrades, to a theatre tonight." "Me and Oskar Šághy, one of the best in this area, rented a jeep and from afar we watched people working, it was so funny back then." "Stefan Kamenicky came with an idea for this film, he put a stone somewhere in various situations and people kept walking by instead of picking it up." "I myself added a couple of situations later on and also a point to it all but it was partly censored because there was a full censorship until the invasion." "So they banned this film in 1967 and wasn't allowed to be awarded in Karlovy Vary." "Being able to make films about art was a luxury." "However, I love these topics," "I am a fan of this so-called classical music and I admit even today I hate a material aspect of a concert." "I want to concentrate on a spiritual aspect of music that's why in a film Impresia me and my cameraman Strelinger never showed faces of musicians only their fingers because we wanted to create impressionist scenes." "I was touched by Benjamin Britten's Metamorphoses." "Because I perceived the image in a wider context so I thought of Ovid's or Picasso's Metamorphoses and that's how a unique artifact came to existence." "These television, or audiovisual artifacts began the era of an AV art in Slovakia as artist perceive it." "I was looking for a story for my graduation film, and also something to introduce myself at Koliba Studios, the atmosphere was so free back then, even Rob Grillet was invited to work there by Marencin." "I thought Koliba could even co-produce an adaptation of Sartre's The Wall." "But it didn't work out, anyway, in this fruitful atmosphere of the 60's many interesting books were published." "A new generation of writers appeared." "I was stroke by Jan Johanides and his book Privacy." "I guess I'd read the book once but very thoroughly and I didn't want to read it ever again because I was so fascinated by its story." "The main character gets into an extreme situation and has to recapitulate and reevaluate his whole life so it wasn'tjust me who felt this way back then." "The whole society needed it." "And I wanted to preserve a spirit of Johanides's story." " Are you comrade Sepesi?" " Yes, I am." "What's up?" "From Interhotel." "I see." "Wait here." "I filmed Johanides's work, he was full of authentic experiences and I felt it too, it was an image of Bratislava as I knew it in the early 60's and Johanides trusted me and let me write the screenplay" "which we consulted afterwards." "The main shift in the story was that the main character in the film was a communist" "which was not very in, especially in The New Wave, and as I talked to my two Czech colleagues they flinched a bit." "Where does Maria Valkova lie?" "Valkova?" "If she lied in the East part, she's not here anymore." "She's my mother." "What's her name?" "Let me check in the book." "My friend Ales Brezina was at a Prague screening." "He almost graduated at an evangelistic faculty but they kicked him out because he'd signed Chart 77." "After seeing my film 322 he said it was a Christian film." "I was so surprised because the moment of forgiveness is so important there and in the end it is confirmed by Vlado Weiser, a pure soul who forgave that enthusiastic communist from the 50's." "I found that interesting." "As for characters in my films," "I myself wrote some of them, sometimes I had a co-writer, many of them were written for concrete actors." "Mr Václav Lohnisky used to play episodic roles in Czech films but I casted him into the main role and he was great." "He didn't have to act because of his own inner authenticity." "Mrs Vinicka, the biggest star of then East-European cinema was a beautiful woman and an amazing person." "She was surprised when I told her not to act but to believe even though her partner was Mr Abrham whom I admired." "He was just fantastic." "My most precious memories are connected with Mr Machacek." "He was a fascinating actor and person and I was honoured to hear him say he wanted to work with me." "Many of the non-actors who worked on my films, they 'd speak in their own words, live their own lives, like Vlado Weiser who couldn't be listed as a co-writer but the words and situations come from his own life" "and I publicly announce this." "And he wasn't the only one." " Are you a boy or a girl?" " A human being." " Don't be cheeky, your ID." " What's this?" "Are you on duty?" " No." " Well, come with me, then." "It was by a documentary style of shooting that The New Wave contributed to innovating feature films." "Feature films were in a crisis and documentaries helped bring them back to life." "This is why I'm interested in the space between them." "The film You Shall Not Kill was a great project." "It was based on a true story and I really like that because I've got to believe the story actually happened and then I can make up some new details." "So there was this boy, about 13- or 14-year-old," "who went for a swim into a swimming pool in Trencin, someone jumped on him by accident and the boy drowned." "His father's reaction was very aggressive, there came some young man who tried to bring the boy back to life" "and the father considered this man almost pathologically a killer of his son." "So as I was casting the role of a quasi-killer and the boy with long hair seemed interesting to me." "It was hippie Vlado Weiser." "I was fascinated by those long-haired artists of life," "I would hang out with them and write down some dialogues." "They were making art out of life." "Among those three boys there was a character of little Madonna, a pregnant virgin." "In that time police went after these hippie people and I was eager to make a film about these four free people, these white crows in a small-town factory who were hated by others for being different despite the fact that they were really good people." "Dusan Mitan was a personality whom I chose just like I would choose actors." "He was a very interesting man." "He wrote two or three fantastic books under the influence of South American magic realism which I felt close to." "This was to be an absurd film." "Mitan's original prose described a life of a gravedigger's family." "As a child I knew a family like this, a town gravedigger with his wife and a child who lived on a cemetery isolated from the outside world and from time to time there would come a man wearing a long coat and a cap." "For ten years I'd seen Kornel Földvari in this role who is not aware of this idea even today." "And this man is bringing news from the outside world in." "For example he brings the family some old newspaper, let's say from the times of monarchy." "The film was to be called They Killed Us Ferdinand." "So this family was to live with information from a world which doesn't even exist anymore and it resembled our situation as we lived in isolation here but this idea turned out to be too realistic though absurd so there was no way this project could pass." "Things do not always work out." ""Na korze" Theater, and I really mean this, had European parameters." "It had a great repertoire, the plays were fantastic so when I was addressed by Maros Porubjak," "I was truly honoured." "Unfortunately the timing after the occupation was not perfect and things were complicated." "Thanks to Porubjak I decided to stage two plays," "Ionesco's The Lesson and Pinter's The Dumb Waiter." "We connected these two plays with a stage set made by my good friend Jan Svankmajer, he worked with me as an art designer on films 322 and Pictures of the Old World." "So except great actors Marian Labuda, Martin Huba and Peter Debnar, there was this personified woman, a beehive which later appeared in my film I Love, You Love." "We started rehearsing and I'd always come prepared but still I felt guilty for rehearsing so early." "And then one of the actors came to me and suggested, you know actors and their mood swings," "he just refused to do exactly what I demanded and it seemed to me the rehearsals went wrong so I decided to make it harder for them and swap roles." "And then as they got their roles back, they were very grateful." "But the truth is that those three weeks helped us a lot, many things were clear at reading rehearsals." "What I'll say now may look like a bad joke." "Our minister of culture Valek, a good poet and a bad minister, had an advisor who told him" "Ionesco and Pinter are Western authors so they banned it." "After this attempt they staged only one old Russian play and that was the end of this important chapter of the Slovakian theatre." "They never put in writing that I was banned, trying to protect themselves." "All the bans were executed by phone or personally." "There was no need for them to tell me I had been banned because they ignored all my suggestions in film studios" "so I started working for TV." "So Pictures of the Old World was originally a short TV film with those people from Martincek's photos." "The idea came from Boris Hochel who let me make the film my way without any intervening." "Together with Mr Martincek I met the most important people and I picked four of them, the fifth one was chosen to a certain extent by both of us." "It was this congenial Adam Kura whom Mr Martincek just started to photograph in that time." "Well, put me on screen so that it gets funny." "A man takes interest in funny things." "These are the photographs." "Should I read?" "May 23, 1970, Saturday, me, all gloomy in a chamber." "It was a real blessing for me." "I admired not only wisdom of the old people but also their independence, their freedom." "They were living on the edge of society and literally did not need the regime, you know?" "They didn't want to go live in blocks of flats, they wanted to live happily in their wooden houses, to live in harmony with nature or with themselves" "and sometimes it worked but the village togetherness was not a standard thing." "For example the lady who appears in Pictures was considered a real weirdo by other villagers." "In this film I tried to express the fact they accepted her the moment she had died." "What is all the riot for banging on her solid door" "You can make her drink some tar still she will be from afar" "Now she's burning like a star having drunk a gulp of tar" "These people didn't need me to encourage them." "They felt comfortable in the state of immovability while most of other people adapted to a certain lifestyle because of some basic salary, they stayed true to themselves." "Believe it or not." "I met some of those people only once." "During this one meeting I wrote down things they said, the most important things they might be able to say again" "because I know that when we work with creative people who never repeat themselves, we can make them repeat their interesting ideas," "bring them back to saying it once again." "I had a wife and three kids." "Together we built a house and they expelled me from there so I went to the mountains." "It was the time when first people flew to the universe." "Gagarin was the best astronaut of that time." "Pictures of the Old World were banned straight away, it was a quick decision in Prague and in Bratislava." "They considered it a provoking social film, what a nonsense." "They said it was the first Slovakian film which develops an aesthetic of ugliness." "They just considered those beautiful old people, the people who possessed the biggest inner beauty, they considered them ugly." "It means they were ashamed of their own grandfathers but it was not my problem." "I could not have been hurt by this, they were so wrong." "They used the same explanation when putting a ban on my film I Love, You Love." "I love people." "But where are they?" "And life?" "We all live it." "People tend to treat their lives bad and they can't stop." "I would have been happy if I had been allowed to make a feature film after Pictures." "A film about pataphysicists, about those creative people on the edge of society who are different than others." "I did live with those people on the streets," "I had a huge supply of great surroundings and great people." "I call it an urban folklore, the creative Hrabalesque people who live in every city or culture on the edge of society and they are common and very original people." "I had a very good friend, a Slovakian pataphysicist Milan Stonacek who lived in a bunker or perhaps a windowless cabin." "He was a little paranoid but with a sense of humour." "He wanted to breathe an absolutely fresh air, he didn't want to be seen in his house so he refused to have windows and breathed the air through some pipes in his roof." "A perfect invention." "He knew there was a tunnel under the Danube river which he could use anytime, and when there were planes flying over his village they were either sending out a good message which made him feel good or a bad message which made him run into a shelter." "A fog means that even a rain can be called a nice weather." "This alternative life in Bratislava was closely connected with my best friend Gustav Dobrovsky whom I loved for being such a free and beautiful person." "I have to admit he managed to finish his sociology studies thanks to me because I wrote the final part of his thesis because he was indisposed." "But he could integrate people who were around him." "With him we could experience a great amount of happenings." "He was very creative, wrote two books of remarkable poems which were fully acknowledged by our friend Andrej Stankovic." "I mean I'm not the only one who says that under the regime one could reach a state of an inner freedom." "Yes, the situations in the Czech and the Slovak Republic were different but let's not think of Slovakia as a paradise because even here people were watched by the communists," "for example a young communist, a promising director said:" "How come that guy who is not a member of our party can make films and I, communist, am not allowed to?" "So the final decision in this respect was up to the chairman." "My position was paradoxical, they didn't relegate me into the short film department, they kept me in Koliba studios but if I wanted to make films" "I had to do my best to stay in that salaried employment." "I had to keep on searching for different types of poetics, different ways of approaching reality, so I did until 1980." "A Day of Joy came up as a project of Alex Mlynarcik, a conceptual artist and a very talented man full of energy who sacrificed everything to be able to work back then." "He wanted to pay respects to people who lived and worked in the surroundings of a forest railroad in Orava." "Today's weather forecast:" "Nice and very warm, highest temperatures 27-30°C, a sunny weather in days to follow and mild wind." "It was typical that he invited about eight Slovakian artists of the same alternative mind despite the normalization." "They all came to my bachelor room and asked me to cooperate." "As for my part in the project," "I suggested to dress all guests in historical costumes which were supplied by our friend Marian Filadelfi." "We like old things because they make us remember." "My wife is old and that's why I like old things." "We like old things because they make us remember that once we were young." "A Day of Joy was being made alongside with Pictures and that's why a photography is equal to a camera shot here." "For example, Luba Laufova took part in making this film, one of the top photographers in Slovakia, underrated, she doesn't even have her own monograph," "a wonderful creative person, sad to say, she took her life." "It was interesting to travel by train through the country," "Mlynarcik and others came up with an idea of homage to world conceptual artists." "So we'd stop by various artifacts or pieces of art." "There came about some humorous and absurd motives." "Those people rejoiced and what's even more important, all those people experienced" "a moment of parting with freedom." "I think that it is perfectly OK to have various individualities in one generation of Czech, Slovak or Hungarian nation." "There are various attitudes and everybody needs his or her own motivation." "People are different and in their diversity, strangely enough, they create a homogenous image of a certain era and this applies especially for cinematography." "And I am glad things are the way they are now." "Other films by Dusan Hanak were affected by regime bans, still he maintained continuity of his existential work." "He crowned his efforts by a documentary allegory Paper Heads (1995)." "He works as a photographer and a professor at VSMU."