Dušan Hanák
 During the shooting of A Day of Joy, 1972. | |
| Born |
April 27, 1938 Bratislava, Czechoslovakia |
|---|---|
Slovak film director and screenwriter. Born 1938 in Bratislava.
Hanák graduated from the FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague in 1965. He began with a series of shorts at the Koliba film studios in Bratislava. Several of them received awards, and so did his first feature film 322 (the code for cancer in medical records of diseases, 1969).
Hanák followed it with the still admired feature-length documentary Pictures of the Old World [Obrazy starého sveta] (1972), partly a meditation on what lies hidden beneath the concept of "an authentic life", a theme already addressed in 322. Although Hanák was treated with suspicion by the more repressive communist authorities that took over after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he found an early refuge in a topic sufficiently removed from big politics to survive on the margins of official production and yet, executed with a finesse that gave it a wide international appeal. In the most extraordinary section, an old man talks with great fascination and lucidity about space travel, recalling how two astronauts walked on the moon and collected rocks while a third circled in their spaceship. Tacked to the wall of his crumbling shack is a small photograph of men walking on the moon. It is a beautiful, elegiac work whose images could apply to Appalachia or any other poor region. Good reviews or not, Pictures of the Old World was ordered shelved after the briefest of theatrical runs. Nevertheless, despite the authorities' surly take on Hanák's films, his next venture, Rosy Dreams, turned out to be another original work. His film I Love, You Love won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival.
Works
Deň radosti (A Day of Joy)
35mm, 22 min, 1972. Download (WEBM)
"This film is a playful depiction of the festivities around the performance If All Trains of the World by Alex Mlynárčik. Deň radosti shows Hanák using the 'inter-genre' style of documentary which made his feature film Obrazy stareho sveta (1971) a masterpiece. Still photography, live action, interviews, old etchings and archive footage of old train journeys are skilfully blended to create a sympathetic and humorous portrait of the romance of an old steam train and the joy of artists and the general public in participating in this children's game for adults. Once again, the avant-garde is imaginatively used to eulogise over traditional values and the past. Deň radosti is important not just for the considerable pleasure it brings; it is the first of a series of films in which artists use film to document "happenings." (source)
Filmography
- Experimental documentary films
- Zádumčivosť (1963)
- Variáce kľudu (1966)
- Metamorfózy (1965)
- Impresia (1966)
- Sonáta, alebo Hľadanie šťastného čísla (1966)
- Výzva do ticha (1966)
- Prišiel k nám Old Shatterhand (1966)
- Zanechať stopu (1970)
- Deň radosti [A Day of Joy] (1972)
- Feature films
- 322 (1969)
- Obrazy starého sveta [Pictures of the Old World] (1972, publicly shown in 1988 for the first time)
- Ružové sny [Rosy Dreams] (1976)
- Ja milujem, ty miluješ [I Love, You Love] (1980, publicly shown in 1988 for the first time)
- Tichá radosť [Silent Joy] (1985)
- Súkromné životy [Private Lives] (1990)
- Papierové hlavy [Paper Heads] (1995)
