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Martin Slivka's documentary film about Karol Plicka (1894-1987), the founder of Slovak cinematography.
A film portrait about Professor Karol Plicka, focusing on his films, photography and folklore work.
Karel Plicka was also cinematographer of this short movie. Editor in charge was Alexander Hackenschmied. There is an extraordinary emotional charge, every shot is working on its own, such as photographs, paintings and poetic complement intertitles in this short. From the perspective of nature and the perspective is shifting to the people and their habits, work and clothes. Peculiar documentary shots underscore Ruthenians (men, women and children) who are interested in looking into the camera and the curious "eye" showing off their habits.
Folk architecture, costumes, work, customs and traditions, dances, and other expressions of traditional life in Slovak villages.
Karol Plicka was an important musician and composer. He recorded folk songs immediately after hearing them in musical notation to preserve them for future generations. Similarly, he records and interprets traditions associated with dance, folk song and local stories that vary from region to region in his film The Eternal Song. The short documentary presents merry-making in Slovak and Czech regions that are changing with the coming modernization and transformation of musical records.
A short reportage from post-war Slovakia. President Edvard Beneš came to Banská Bystrica to celebrate the first anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising. His journey through Central Slovakia was a motivating and celebratory moment for the people and the compatriots from the areas of partisan fighting.
The Matica slovenská (a mostly government-sponsored cultural, academic, and archival institution) employed Karol Plicka (1894-1987) as its ethnographer, who was able to make documentary shorts from about 1926. He obtained funding from the President’s Office in 1928 to produce an hour-long documentary about village life, Through Mountains and Valleys (Po horách, po dolách). It was awarded a Gold Medal at the International Exposition of Photographic Art in Florence and received an Honorable Mention at the International Venice Film Festival in 1932.
A Czech folklorist who received a prize for a visual myth about Slovakia The Earth Sings (1933) at the Venice Biennale, made for Prag-Film a film about the culture and traditions of the Cheb district (The Egerland, practically uninhabited by Czechs by then), for which a propagandistic prologue and epilogue was shot by F. B. Nier.