| Abstrakt: |
This essay concerns two Czechoslovak-French co-productions directed by celebrated filmmaker and 'nouveau roman' author Alain Robbe-Grillet. These two films -- THE MAN WHO LIES (L'Homme qui ment / Muž, ktorý luže, 1968) and Eden and After (L'Eden et après / Eden a potom, 1970) -- were made in collaboration with Slovakia's Koliba studios. Paying particular attention to The Man Who Lies, I explore these films both as works rooted in contemporaneous Slovak cinema and as self-consciously transnational texts that thematise their co-produced status. I discuss the important contributions of Robbe-Grillet's Slovak collaborators, notably production-group leader Albert Marenčin, and examine how THE MAN WHO LIES, set during the Slovak National Uprising, can be and has been read in contextually specific ways. At the same time these films inscribe and foreground the hybrid mingling of nationalities that is the reality of co-production. The key theme of imposture in THE MAN WHO LIES reflects back on co-production's masquerade of national identity, while the film's experimental sound techniques extend, rather than efface, the dubbing practices that were a longtime 'necessary evil' of co-production. Finally I suggest how the very cultivation of national hybridity is relevant to the Slovak context, serving to illustrate -- and valorise -- Slovakia's status as a 'cultural crossroads', absorbing and synthesising foreign artistic trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
