Personalities
Juraj Jakubisko
It has been almost 15 years since the countries declared their independence from one another, but Slovakia born director Juraj Jakubisko’s personality, work and focus are all marked by the dual cultural identity of the former Czechoslovakia. Experimental films during his student days at FAMU, The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, opened the doors to film festivals worldwide and domestic acclaim equal to that of Fellini or Bergman. Long after the premiere of his first feature film, Jakubisko retains his own personal image of the world and in the words of film critics he uses imagery like a painter and thoughts like a poet, presenting them all in a perfectly mastered cinematic style. His latest work, gothic-thriller Bathory, is scheduled to be in cinemas starting fall 2007.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Jakubisko taught still photography at a secondary school for applied arts in Bratislava.In 1960 he moved to Prague and studied at FAMU under the distinguished writer and vedette of 20’s Czech cinema Vaclav Wasserman.He graduated in 1965 and followed this with work at the Magic Lantern theatre and its avant-garde stage director, Alfred Radok.
At age 28 Jakubisko directed his first feature film, Crucial Years (Kristove roky), about the illusions of youth lost in adulthood.Among the film’s many awards are the FIPRESCI and Josef von Sternberg awards at Mannheim, Germany. That was followed by Deserters and Pilgrims, where Jakubisko realized his artistic vision in the dual role as cinematographer and director. The short-story triptych received the medal for young artists (Little Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival.
The French co-production Birds, Orphans and Fools, manifested from the shock of the Soviet occupation in August ‘68 and the resulting despair and absurdity. Jakubisko perceived a connection between the two producing countries in the Slovakian pilot and French General Stefanik, and cast Philippe Avron as one of the leads. The three protagonists symbolically remind us of the horrors of occupation, violence, totality and destruction in which love and life itself are destroyed. “There is something both cruel and light hearted about this film,” said Avron who attended a retrospective of Jakubisko’s work recently in Paris.
The Soviet Union and their Warsaw pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the country’s nascent liberalization (’Prague Spring’ January to August ‘68). During the communist clampdown that followed, Jakubisko’s work – like all who remained in the country – faced heavy censorship. Essentially banned from feature film making for 15 years, his short films and commercials continued to bring forbidden recognition. But Jakubisko seized an opportunity to speak out with his 1979 Build a House, Plant a Tree, where his negative hero became the main protagonist who characterized the times: “one who doesn’t steal from the state, steals from his own family.” The resulting success at the film festival in Amsterdam placed the film on a list of prohibited works and meant another embargo on further activities for the director.
An earlier effort, See You in Hell, My Friends, had been stopped by communist censorship. The story, full of surrealistic symbols and bizarre images, depicts the fate of people who gave up their own freedom and after a painful awakening are searching for new hope. The film was completed 20 years later and released in 1990 with the original negative material that remained beyond the censor’s reach, in the hands of the Italian producer in Rome. The break in filming did not detract from its powerful message against totality, fanaticism and ideological terror.
Political oppression continued and Jakubisko’s film making activity was highly scrutinized, but he was invigorated by the creative validation that his film received at Amsterdam. He used the subject of infidelity to explore the comedy genre with Falsehood in Slovak Style in 1981. The Millennial Bee followed with Jakubisko mingling different genres to reveal the story of three generations of peasants and the threads of love woven by forefathers and their descendants. Using his typical stamp of allegory, fantasy and visionary imagery, the mystic existence of nature is confronted with the emotions and vitality of the protagonists, determined by the developments of civilization and the increasing cruelty of history. A success across generations and sold- out locally for weeks, the film was awarded at the International Film Festivals in Venice and Sevilla, received several local prizes and won Best Film of the 1980’s by Czechoslovakian journalists in 1990.
In the 1985 The Feather Fairy,actress Giulietta Masina brings a lightness and cheerfulness to Jakubisko’s childrens’ tale, which won awards and recognition throughout the world. For her husband, director Federico Fellini, Jakubisko was considered a ‘real brother.’ “In Jakubisko’s films the irrational, miraculous and fabulous appear as naturally as life itself, but not all of us have Jakubisko’s eye to enable us to see the miraculous, unexpected and fantastic, even in simple everyday life,” said Fellini.
Sitting Pretty on a Branch, about the years following the war through to the fifties, came out in cinemas a mere three months prior to the fall of socialism. With the beginning of perestroika, the director was able to break taboos and the film won the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival in Russia in 1990, as well as awards in Venice, France and locally.
After the fall of the totalitarian regime in November 1989, Jakubisko made a film about the search for happiness, satirically entitled It’s Better to be Wealthy and Healthy than Poor and Ill. Intoxicated by freer morals, the two main characters rush forth in their search for happiness, mistakenly considering this to be wealth and success only to discover the meaning of morals, love and forgiveness in the end.
The separation of Czechoslovakia in 1993 and the political involvement of both Jakubisko and his wife, actress/producer Deana Jakubisková-Horváthová, meant that the couple had to move to Prague where they established Jakubisko Films. Their first production was An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World in 1997, which is taken from the Nostradamus prophecies. Jakubisko states that, “some people are afraid of the prophecies of this 17th century French astrologer, but as a skeptic I don’t think the world will end the way he predicted. That’s why my film is about an ambiguous report, not a certain one. I still believe in the human race,” affirms the director, whose use of magical realism in cinema has been compared by critics to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ cherished literary style. The film was shown at more than 60 international film festivals and won four Czech Lion awards.
Jakubisko followed this with the 2004 bittersweet comedy Post Coitum, starring Franco Nero and a gallery of couples looking for love in all the wrong places.
Bathory, Jakubisko’s 15th feature film, looks at the life of 16th century Hungarian Countess and accused murderess Erzsébet Báthory. Some say that the legend of her gruesome deeds inspired Bram Stoker’s tales of Dracula. In his first English language film, Jakubisko’s bloody fairytale takes inspiration from history and will be in cinemas in fall 2007.
Taos Talking Picture Festival awarded the director with the Maverick Award in 1998, and he became a member of the European Film Academy (EFA) in the same year.
In 2000 Jakubisko was awarded the title of Best Slovakian Director of the 20th Century by film journalists and critics, as well as being the first director from the eastern bloc to win the Golden Seal in Belgrade, Yugoslavia for his contribution to world cinematography. Considered an artist of magical realism, the same year Jakubisko was awarded a Czech Lion for Best Film Poster for Wild Flowers (Kytice), a local and international success.
Of his other activities, Jakubisko continues pedagogic work at the Film Academy of Performing Arts where he was named senior lecturer in June 2001 and has played a major role in educating the younger generation. In October 2001 Jakubisko was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Masaryk Academy of Art in Prague for his artistic activities and for his support of art. He has also held his own solo exhibitions of paintings and during a retrospective of his films at the Accattone cinema in Paris patrons had a chance to see an exhibition of the director’s illustrated scripts, paintings and posters – a window to his cinematic vision of the world.
In 2002 the director received a Czech Lion for Artistic Achievement. The same year he was also honored with the prestigious Pribina Cross, given by the Slovakian government for his significant contributions to the development of Slovak cinematography.
Deana Jakubiskova-Horvathova
Loved and hated, meek and domineering, soft and hard, calming and provocative, pure and controversial, but always a full-blooded woman with the boundless energy of a non-conformist standing outside the pack. These are the screen and stage roles of Deana Jakubiskova-Horvathova. She will next be seen on the big screen as Darvulia, the local sage in director Juraj Jakubisko’s bold vision of notorious 17th century murderess, Countess Erzsebet Bathory’s life. In recent years the actress and well-known personality has added producer to her list of credits.
Born in 1958 in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia, Deana attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Bratislava (VSMU). While still a student she made her feature film debut in the drama Anonym, directed by Juraj Lihosita and began appearing as a guest actress on the stage of the Slovak National Theatre. Following graduation in 1981, she was offered a permanent engagement with the theatre company, easily establishing herself as a character actress with a remarkably wide range, confirmed by such tempermental yet sympathetic characters as those in Ibsen’s drama Hedda Gabler and Moliere’s comedy George Dandine.
As a member of the Slovak National Theatre company, Deana created many unforgettable characters, including: Lady Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III, Hilda in Ibsen’s Lady of the Sea and Sofia in Griboedor’s Utrapy z rozumu (The Trials of Wisdom) amongst others. She would play the lead in more than 20 plays during her 12 seasons with the company, and received the highest recognition from theatre critics for her role as the schizophrenic Sophie in Tennessee William’s drama Creve Coeur. Deana’s suggestive interpretation of her character’s ‘diagnosis’ even overcame the age difference between her and the seventy-year old character, and at an early age she was singled out for her ability with psychologically volatile roles.
The post-revolution euphoria following the end of communist rule and censorship that closed 1989 gave way to the sobering reality of standing up for your beliefs, and Deana publicly defended federal interests, supporting a unified Czechoslovakia oriented policy. As Slovakia’s aspirations for independence strengthened in the early ’90s, Deana and her husband, director Juraj Jakubisko, moved to Bohemia and she left behind the theatre, a successful dubbing career and a catalogue of more than 60 roles in television films and series.
She admits her personal and artistic development has been dominated by two directors: in theatre Milos Pietor and in cinema her husband Juraj Jakubisko. In their first film together in 1989, Sedim na konari a je mo dobre (Sitting Pretty on a Branch), Jakubisko cast Deana in the role of Zelmira, the naïve, fanatical CSSR Youth Movement Member symbolizing the horrors of the political machinery of the 1950’s. In their next film, Lepsie byt bohaty a zdravy ako chudobny a chory (It’s Better to be Wealthy and Healthy than Poor and Ill), Deana played a completely different character, the non-conformist photographer Nona trying to find her place in life in the chaotic period following the fall of the totalitarian regime. In Jakubisko’s visually lavish Nejasna zprava o konci sveta (An Ambiguous Report about the End of the World), Deana was involved as a producer and as the female lead Verona in the feature film version and the television series of the same title.
Horvathova began her producing career at the end of her 1993-94 season at Prague’s Divadlo Theatre where she played in the adaptation of B. Hrabal’s book Prilis hlucna samota (A Solitude Too Loud), Durennmat’s Meteor and Mrozek’s Tango. At this time she professionally assumed the double name Jakubiskova-Horvathova and established a joint company with her husband, director Juraj Jakubisko, to produce and distribute the director’s films, as well as a variety of others. In this new role she was afforded a level of creative collaboration that more closely mirrored what she loved and missed about stage acting, “where you are a true partner with the director,” reflects Deana. “As a film producer you are invested in the director’s vision,” says Deana who confirms the delicate balance in the producer-wife/director-husband scenario that would be impossible to manage without her acting background.
Their first production, An Ambiguous Report…, received four Czech Lions in 1998 for best music score, best sound, best editing and best actress in a supporting role. The film screened at 60 film festivals around the world, where it also received numerous awards, including at the Montreal, San Diego and Denver film festivals.
From a repeatedly rejected screenplay based on Karel Jaromir Erben’s poetic ballads, Deana produced the box office hit, Kytice (Wild Flowers). The film, director Frantisek Brabec’s homage in seven parts to Erben’s work, has been seen by approximately 750,000 filmgoers and won four Czech Lions in 2000 for best cinematography, best music score, best sound and for best film poster, an original creation by Juraj Jakubisko. The film received a nomination in the Best Film category, but Deana feels her greatest contribution was to influence the views of what constitutes a ’saleable’ film. “Half of your success is having a good film, the other half is good distribution,” she says. “I proved that we don’t have to make thoughtless commercial fare. We are able to present high quality poetry that is also a success at the box office.”
The couple’s 2004 production Post Coitum is a bittersweet comedy starring Franco Nero and a gallery of couples looking for love in all the wrong places.
In 2005 Deana began pre-production on the four-country co-production Bathory, director Jakubisko’s $14 million historic thriller based on the life of 16th century murderess, the Hungarian Countess Erzsebet Bathory. The film stars Anna Friel, Karel Roden, Hans Matheson, Vincent Regan and Franco Nero, and shot over a seven month period in classified castles throughout Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
In addition to overseeing the post-production and distribution of Bathory, Deana is working on issuing a complete filmography of Juraj Jakubisko’s work on DVD, as well as continuing a traveling retrospective of the director’s previous feature films and artwork that has already been seen over 30 cities throughout the world. South Korea and Rome are scheduled to receive the retrospective in 2007.