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...
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...
The President of the Republic dr. E. Beneš's visit
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A record of the trip of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic Edvard Beneš to Slovakia. The footage maps the journey from Bratislava to central Slovakia, to the towns of Trenčianske Teplice and Mošovce.
This short ethnographic film is the first part of the series Through the Agricultural World intended to promote village life and the work of the peasants to the townspeople. Plicka chooses stylistically significant and aesthetically impressive shots of sowing grain, Easter celebrations, and...
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...
A cinematic poem with an impressive soundtrack that complements and completes the cinematic sketches of the folk culture of the Slovak nation previously made by ethno-photographer and director Karel Plicka. With its perfectly constructed dramaturgy, the documentary follows the beauty of the natural...
Plicka's work is an extreme case of the multilingual version and its war and post-war form recalls many period cultural and political contexts. After the war the original version was supplemented by Czech commentary and the soundtrack was replaced by new music consisting of pieces by Baroque Czech...
The news film, shot by Karol Plicka, shows the first Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk on holiday in the Czech countryside. Plicka was often called upon by Masaryk to photograph portraits and family and state gatherings. The film material proves that Plicka was able to get unusually...
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...
Visiting Slovaks from New York through to Mississippi
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Having finished his film Jánošík (1935), Plicka embarks on the journey of a lifetime. Accompanied by a Slovak-Czech delegation of politicians, inventors, and cultural representatives, he is particularly interested in the life of Slovaks in America. He observes the towns and the architecture, and...
The original introductory part of Karol Plicka’s film The Earth Sings (1933), which was replaced with a sequence of shots of Bratislava during the era of the First Slovak Republic. Spring in Prague is a short film, a poem dedicated to Prague – a city of baroque churches, modern houses of...
Slovak folklore presents its beauty not only in celebratory customs and children’s games. The short documentary proves that Plicka perceived poetry also in the everyday work of the people, in their determination and their diligence with which they were able to create a legacy for the next...
A perfect marketing film from the 1930s. The short film is an advertisement for Baťa's new products, presented through the traditional celebration of the end of winter – the carrying of a lighted Marzanna into a stream. Plicka once again stylistically outdoes himself in his search for perfection...
