Died inconspicuously – the comments we are

The author is a director

The premiere of the Slovak film is usually an important social event. They patrol before the cinema camerasto supply food to the boulevard consumers. The most sought -after article is the actors who have just come out of the canvas, regardless of whether they spent one or twenty days to shoot, whether they thought about the text or just recited the underlined replicas.

Before the stretched microphone, mandatory superlatives renounce those who spent many years with the film, who wrote it and created it, and just unnoticed passed their back, because after the premiere of the film, their presence is almost erased from public consciousness.

Fifty years ago, one of the invisible and at the same time our greatest, screenwriter Ivan Bukovčan died. His work is an amazing archive of contemporary moods and a testimony of the moral dilemmas of the individual in a system that systematically deformed morality.

« What if we were giving him? » asks one of his characters to a friend. « Well, we should have peace! » retaliates the second.

Although he wrote at the time of normalization northernmia, he did not relieve the claims of the truth of the characters. He was not an anti -system author in the open sense of the word, he was on the edge of an acceptable defiance, but from his works to feel a struggle for the inner integrity of a person who finds himself in a situation without alternatives.

At a time when the audiovisual production was balanced between propaganda and banal, Bukovčan was a rare case of the author who maintained artistic and human dignity. It is sympathetic that he did not despise the audience and received a reward in the form of the audience favor.

The film of the last witch from 1957 was seen in cinemas two and a half million spectators, so, besides newborns and people on a fatal bed, apparently the whole Slovak population. The film Copper Tower is particularly highlighted from the set of his work.

Director Martin Hollý called it a male ballad. At first glance, it appears to be a simple relationship scheme of friends in the isolation of the alpine cottage in the embrace of the beautiful panorama, where the rains wash the civilization lacquer.

Bukovčan wrote a text about men where guys are not the one who wins, but the one who does not move when looking in the mirror. He did not get rid of his characters, gave them humanity and repeatedly fascinated the variations of the Slovak man located among the utopia of the team and the experience of systemic disillusionment.

Nowadays, the redefinitions of the genus, identity and relationship dynamics are the Bukovčan’s text a little subversive. In the middle of narratives about toxic masculinity and decaying patterns of patriarchal behavior comes Bukovčan with an alternative. A man is the one who drags his cargo, even if he does not rule, who kidnaps the blame when he fails.

He left us a picture of a person who balances in the country without any roads on the edge of the abyss between memory and guilt.

Ivan Bukovčan died before Sunday’s braid 25th May 1975 at the age of 53. Without big gestures, unobtrusively. However, the power of the story does not define who tells him, but how deeply it touches those who receive it. He left as if he was invisible.