Pictures of the Old World

Dusan Hanak's 1972 Slovak documentary is about elderly villagers in the Liptov region of central Slovakia. Its starting point is the photographs Martin Martincek took of the same people; Hanak decided to film the lives behind those portraits. The documentary is about people left outside modernisation, but does not present them as remnants of the past. Those who speak describe their own lives, their losses and their thoughts about death directly; the camera offers no explanation and produces no pity. After it was made the film was banned in Czechoslovakia and could not be shown for around seventeen years. What the censors objected to was not a political message but a picture of poverty that did not fit the narrative of socialist modernisation. It entered circulation only at the end of the eighties. Who it's for: those interested in the Eastern European documentary tradition and portraits of rural life. Who it's not for: viewers wanting the guidance of a narrator; the film consists almost entirely of faces and voices.