Cinema of Slovakia

The cinema of Slovakia encompasses a range of themes and styles typical of European cinema. Yet there are a certain number of recurring themes that are visible in the majority of the important works. These include rural settings, folk traditions, and carnival. Even in the field of experimental film-making, there is frequently a celebration of nature and tradition, as for example in Dušan Hanák's Pictures of the Old World (Obrazy starého sveta, 1972). The same applies to blockbusters like Juraj Jakubisko's A Thousand-Year Old Bee (Tisícročná včela, 1983). The percentage of comedies, adventures, musicals, sci-fi films and similar genres has been low by comparison to dramas and historical films that used to include a notable subset of social commentaries on events from the decade or two preceding the film. One of them, Ján Kadár's and Elmar Klos' The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965), gave Slovak (as well as Czech and generally Czechoslovak) filmmaking its first Oscar. Children's films were a perennial genre from the 1960s through the 1980s produced mainly as low-budget films by Slovak Television Bratislava. The themes of recent films have been mostly contemporary.

The center of Slovak filmmaking has been the Koliba studio (whose formal name changed several times) in Bratislava. Some films conceived at the Barrandov Studios in Prague have had Slovak themes, actors, directors, and occasionally language, while Prague-based filmmakers and actors have sometimes worked in Slovakia. In line with Slovak, Hungarian, and Czech histories, their past sharing of the Kingdom of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, there is early overlap between Slovak and Hungarian film, and later between Slovak and Czech film. Some films are easily sorted out as one or the other, some films belong meaningfully to more than one national cinema.

Some 350 Slovak feature films have been made in the history of Slovak cinema. It has produced some notable cinematic works that have been well received by critics, as well as some domestic blockbusters. In recent years, Slovak films have often been made by working (wholly or partly) with foreign production companies. Joint Slovak and Czech projects have been particularly common. The Slovak film industry has been dogged by lack of money intensified by the country's small audience (2.9–5.4 million inhabitants), which translates to the films' limited potential for primary, domestic revenue.

A Slovak-themed drama, Snowdrop from the Tatras (Sněženka z Tatier, dir. Olaf Larus-Racek, 1919), about a maturing girl looking for her place in a city appeared within months of the creation of Czechoslovakia. The first Slovak full-length feature movie was Jaroslav Siakeľ's Jánošík in 1921. It placed Slovak filmmaking among the earlier 10 cinemas in the world to produce such a film. Other feature films were released early, but the absence of a permanent local studio and the competition from the emerging conglomerate of studios and distributors (AB Studio, later Barrandov) in nearby Prague proved daunting. An early international recognition came from the International Venice Film Festival for Karol Plicka's The Earth Sings (Zem spieva, 1933). Martin Frič's Jánošík of 1935 was released internationally, including in Italy and Germany, and was shown in Slovak-American communities until the 1950s.

The first Department of Film in Czechoslovakia (probably the third such department in Europe) was opened at the School of Industrial Arts in Bratislava in 1938, headed by Plicka and with the future Oscar-winning director Ján Kadár among the students, but it was closed after Slovakia's independence in 1939.

The authorities set up the short-film studio Nástup ("Muster"), the precursor of the Koliba Studio, to produce newsreels during World War II, but it made no feature films during that period. Although with a substantial post-war makeover and change of name, the studio continued its production after Czechoslovakia was partly reconstituted in 1945, and the feature film industry began to take off. During a brief period after the war, the Communists had not yet gained full control, allowing one or two interesting films to be made in the Central European countries, including Paľo Bielik's Wolves' Lairs (Vlčie diery, 1948) in Slovakia. The Communist Party, which valued the propaganda potential of cinema, took power in Czechoslovakia in the coup d'état of 1948.

Within a few years, film production was heavily controlled by the state and films were not allowed to undermine Stalinism. Psychologising was frowned upon and characters became cardboard cut-outs subservient to political ideals. A dominant feature of film poetics of this period was descriptive-symbolic stylization. Even the titles of films like Dam (Priehrada, Paľo Bielik, 1950), Young Hearts (Mladé srdcia, Václav Kubásek, 1952), and Hamlets Have Started Off (Lazy sa pohli, Paľo Bielik, 1952) were designed to represent social and societal change. The title of The Struggle Will End Tomorrow (Boj sa skončí zajtra, Miroslav Cikán, 1951) symbolized the irreversibility of what was shown to be the progress of the working class. The name of the leading character in Kathy (Katka, Ján Kadár, 1949) was popular at the time, and so her "ascent" to an industrial laborer was laid out as a better future for thousands of young women.

Unlike their colleagues in Prague and neighboring countries in the first years after the Communist takeovers, the Slovak directors of development were consistently unable to "meet the plan" outlined by the Communist Party and were unsuccessful in drafting the required number of socialist-realist projects, which affected the number of films passed for production although the money for them would have been made available by the authorities. Most of the resulting films were neither popular nor critically acclaimed. Exceptions among the former included Josef Mach's folkloric musical Native Country (Rodná zem, 1953) with ticket sales, relative to population, among the highest in Slovak filmmaking. Across the Communist-ruled part of Central Europe, there was a recognition that for an active and popular film industry to exist, film-makers should be given more control of production. This process accelerated towards the end of the 1950s.