DVD: Pictures of the Old World

Slovak director Dušan Hanák's 1972 documentary Pictures of the Old World (Obrazy starého sveta) is a real rediscovery, another in the remarkable haul that distributor Second Run has brought us from the Eastern European film archives which that outfit has long been exploring. It’s an unusual film at first viewing, and one which grows in power, at times achieving an almost ecstatic sense of life itself, its laughter and tears, combined with a pronounced Surrealism.

Recalled after its initial release and then banned outright, it appeared in public again only in 1988, going on to win numerous festival awards, and later voted by critics as the best Slovak film of all time.

It’s anchored in the earth (something shared, surely, with Dovzhenko), in the life of village inhabitants of the Tatra region, old men, women and landscapes caught in the black and white photographs by the Slovak artist Martin Martinček (1913-2004, photo gallery below) which are at the film’s core. As the opening title announces, they are of people “rooted in the soil they came from. They cannot be replanted; they would perish.” There’s a richly folkloric strand throughout, with a sense of observation that, at least now, seems almost anthropological.

Over Martinček’s photographs Hanák overlayed his own moving images, again black and white: short snatches of encounters with elderly villagers as they tell their short tales, or as we observe them in brief scenes from life. They’re unforgettable vignettes, supported by a rich musical score which combines Handel with Czechoslovak composers, set against an absolutely original soundscape that opens with what can only be described as a electronic pond-gurgle. That inventiveness continues, creating a sense of the juxtaposition of secular and sacred, drinking set against religious moments, as well as the simply eclectic: into these rustic, landlocked lives their polar opposite has arrived, with images of and a fascination with Yury Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who was the first man in space.

Hanák graduated from Prague’s famous FAMU school in 1965 but rather than pursuing a directing career in the better-known Czech film world, he returned to Bratislava and joined the Slovak short film studio. This DVD release includes two of his short films from those early years. Old Shatterhand Came to Us, 1966, is a playfully comic observation of the interaction of foreign tourists with local Slovaks, with a strong sense of the absurd. Mass from the following year is a short devout observational portrait of the church service, wordless except for the text of the liturgy itself. Hanák was already capturing faces in the way that he would develop to perfection in Pictures. Again anarchic in its soundscapes, it’s a memorably sacred piece of filmmaking.

Click image below to enter gallery: Martin Martinček's photographs from Pictures of the Old World