Hana Slavíková (*1976) is a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker, an artist and researcher in the field of film, radio and television and she is also the head of the Studio of Radio and Television Dramaturgy and Screenwriting at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. She also completed her Master's studies in this studio, which she followed up with her PhD studies in Dramatic Arts. She completed her doctoral studies with a dissertation entitled Czech and Slovak Television Film of the 1960s: Intersections with the New Wave, in which she examined the connections between television drama and the alternative movement of Czechoslovak cinema before the start of the normalisation period, which became a phenomenon of global significance thanks to its distinctive authorial personalities.

She is the author of several radio plays and worked as a script editor at Czech Television. She has written several dozens of scripts for Czech Television. In 2016, she published a book dedicated to the life and work of František Čáp, a director who was active in both Czech and Slovenian cinema. The important Czech director František Čáp, whose traces in our cinema disappeared after his emigration in 1949, subsequently emerged as a key figure in post-war Slovenian cinema, working under the name Franz Cap for German, Austrian and Italian film and television productions. This fact was consistently revealed thanks to the research efforts of Hana Slavíková. The book is very rich in information and summarizes several years of research efforts, while having a fictional overlap, as factual information is interwoven with reflections and imaginative parts of the text. Hana Slavíková further transforms her creative method and her way of writing, which she discovered while working on the book about František Čáp, into a format she refers to as a performative essay. It is a form that combines literary, film and theatre methods, combining extensive systematic investigation with intuition and spontaneity.

International film directors also accompany her in her further research work. In her latest book, published in 2020, Hana Slavíková analyses the films of the Spanish director Carlos Saura. The title of the book, Cine teatro Saura: Wandering through the cinematic work of Carlos Saura, is a variation of the term cineteatro, referring to spaces in which audiences could previously be exposed to both cinematic and theatrical experiences. Carlos Saura's films are just that space. The journey through the cinematic work, based on phenomenological principles, is guided by the desire to convey unusual and, in a way, risky methods of narration that can be a way of a different kind of perception of and relation to the inner and outer world. The book chronicles Saura's vast work, the circumstances of its creation, and the life context of this extraordinary director. This original essay is based not only on a thorough study of sources, including the Spanish archives, but also on the author's own experience as a viewer and her deep personal relationship to Saura's work.

I think that even before the term started to be used, I encountered it during my postgraduate studies at the Theatre Faculty of JAMU, due to the fact that my work was supervised by the writer and essayist Pavel Švanda, who very conscientiously and from his inner conviction directed us towards essayistic exploration of the world. He, in his authorial setting, felt the need to counteract the tendency, which worked more along the lines of Professor Srba, to look for areas of contact with artistic principles. Švanda led us exactly in the opposite direction. He insisted that we should not set our methodology in advance, that it would be binding for us. In his view, one should identify as precisely as possible the reasons why he or she is pursuing a particular topic, even if they end up somewhere they did not expect to be. When the process of cognition pulls them in a certain direction, they respect that direction and rather question with some degree of consistency why it is happening. And then they usually come to some conclusions that would not be predictable in advance and would be impossible to reach without respect for the process, whose predictability has its limits. This means not being disconcerted by the fact that from time to time you find yourself at a point where you are not sure which way to go. To persevere, to survive that developmental phase where it is not entirely obvious that you are going from point A to B, because somewhere in the process there is a more subtle experience that is probably not attainable in any other way, and then it is possible to arrive at some knowledge that would not be attainable on the basis of a structured methodological intention.

Even at the seminars there were some major clashes of principle between Professor Srba and Professor Švanda, but I think it was very good that both lines remained alive. When people tend to follow a structured, methodologically more clearly defined path towards naming their own creative process or the creative process of artists who somehow appeal to them, they can certainly choose the clearer path. But at the same time, if one's nature, one's style of creation, tends more towards essayistic knowledge, it should be maintained as a perfectly relevant option.

I applied it to my two texts, where I tried to make sense of other filmmakers. And I understood that what might not be considered particularly relevant in art history, like the various private developmental stages of filmmakers that somehow translate into their work, is extremely important for people who are trying to cultivate other filmmakers. The thing about the creative process is that if the inner freedom and willingness to embrace uncertainty as a developmental phase, as a necessary part of the process of knowing, is lost, we deprive ourselves of the ability to create freely and to reflect on creation. Moreover, even that reflection itself has a creative dimension. Even though perhaps more in a phenomenological sense, it is necessary to move away from direct experience and somehow take it up again for oneself, to make it important.

Frankly, if you look at the recommended readings for most courses in art schools, you will find that most of them are theoretical art history books, which are certainly necessary to achieve some quality of education - and I don't question that at all - but there is a great lack of literature where the creative person, the artist, finds so much need to name his own experience and share it that it becomes some kind of foundation for the development of someone else through the experience he describes. Not by copying the development, but by realizing that something is natural and that certain moments in the creative life that do not rely on certainty or on some predictability, on an unshakable foundation, are part of creation.

Then it is actually about accepting that development can be more subtle and that sometimes you need to find the inner patience and actually the courage to let things mature. And that this is appropriate, that it is possible, that it is not a fault. It seems to me that quite often a kind of pre-emptive feeling of guilt is at play - that I am betraying proven principles. And that artistic research is a kind of semi-guerrilla or mischievous activity that is quite often passed off as a purposeful effort to parasitize science and research and that this is how artists have found a way to siphon off resources from science and research. But I think it's not like that. Here - and this is not just a problem in the Czech Republic, but in general - there are only a very small number of artists, whether in theatre, film or visual arts, who have been so consistent that they have reflected on the process of their work in some quality. In the end, the most valuable thing we have and what we can rely on, even in the context of teaching in art schools, is this type of texts. And if we could get more people in the creative field to see this as natural in art research, and make higher demands on it, then the reflections would be more frequent. There would be more access to the kind of texts that can push us. The focus of the theoretical background or the literary background that art schools operate with would shift more in that direction, and that would be a good thing.

We all sort of intuitively know it and we keep saying, yeah, this Peter Brook guy does it awfully well. He's written a number of books that we keep going back to and they keep surprising us. Brook has written these books with precision, but also with literary quality. Moving Point, for example, is a book that is immensely readable, but also written with a certain ease and consistency. And that's what you want: lightness and consistency. He has managed to capture the key moments, and when you read it, you suddenly feel that you are really shifting your thinking about theatre, that this is the impulse that changes the way you look at things. It is always repeated that something is theoretical and something is practical, that something is artistic, but that is a prejudice.

This is an artistically reflexive position, which is not meant to have a flippancy in it, but to have a lightness in it. And by lightness I mean the freedom and the courage to go somewhere "where the lions are". And somehow that's missing. That courage has something of natural curiosity in it, and curiosity means either naming what has not been named, or even daring to name something that has already been named, in different words and from a different angle. This is the source of most of the misunderstandings that art schools have with theoretical or art science disciplines. It's always the case that the art disciplines or other theoretically oriented disciplines have their own stabilized terminology, that's their great security and actually their great asset, which we don't have. We, when we try to create our own conceptual apparatus, or to name seemingly the same thing in a different way, it causes a great wave of resistance or even a priori rejection - that we should not intrude into something that is already established. But if we agreed to that, we would probably stop evolving.

I also sometimes find it difficult to understand that this supposed territorial struggle eventually leads to a kind of systematic blocking of the possibility of a different view of creation. I think that reflection itself can be another level of creation. That is, we can write something in an essayistic-fictional way and we can use our own concepts to do it. No one is stopping people who apply artistic research from creating their own terminology and explaining it either. But we still live under the assumption that if you do it, it's something unseemly, and that leads to procrastination, and the more we procrastinate, the less credible we are to those around us.

I think that's somehow the case and that it's really related to self-esteem. We've come to define ourselves in some sort of comparison. We are too stuck, we compare ourselves too much to what we are different from the artistic disciplines. We are too little free to question who we are and what the point of our pursuit is, even without constantly comparing it to what is already seriously established and unquestioned. Therein lies the fundamental problem. 

I think that one admits to a certain type of difficulties that can accompany, for example, the creation of a script. The screenwriting profession is quite specific in what we are constantly dealing with: whether a script is an independent work or not. We have been repeating Otakar Zich's conclusion for some seventy-eighty years that a theatrical play is not a work in itself, and we have transferred this to the script. In any case, the screenplay already has the idea of a film in it, if the composition of the creator's talents allows him to indulge in this. There's a degree of imagination there, which then influences the intrinsic claim to describe one's own vision as accurately as possible. And then various pressures enter into it, which in few fields is as raw as in the field of audiovisual production and cinematography, because there it intersects with the great costs that affect the production. And then there are political pressures, which was very clear with both Čáp and Saura. 

I've been involved in writing two scripts that were, in a way, slowed down for political reasons, even though it didn't happen under the totalitarian regime - but I think one is much more receptive to what that external pressure does to the creative soul. That level of sensitivity is hardly possessed by people who grasp it on a purely theoretical level, which has an objectifying tendency, because they simply lack the experience. I don't mean that my experience is comparable to that of Carlos Saura or František Čáp, but it is basically comparable in that one realizes that the pressures one faces are internally absorbed and always influence the way one then deals with a given subject, with a given topic. To resist a pressure and to reach an inner decision to reject it, even with some risks: all this influences the so-called comfort of creation. I think that we are ready to categorize the individual components related to the various pressures on a theoretical basis and to somehow break them down and name them, but that there is no need to ask what this mixture of influences does to a person who, as a solitaire, has to continue to process the script or has to transform the text. It may seem like it's just such unreliable probes into the soul of the creators and that it's irrelevant. But in fact, where the creators at least give some fragmentary access to the dilemmas they faced, we end up finding that they have very fundamentally influenced the shape of the work, so it's not something peripheral, but instead it's pivotal and sometimes it's an intersection of many influences.

I think that's the case, and I think that's actually something that's related on a different level to the dramaturgical profession. For example, I see it as a very fundamental problem now that in most dramaturg positions there are people who have come from theoretical disciplines, even though they may be focused on aesthetics or film studies. I respect them as experts in those fields, but when you deal with them as an author, you feel that they are completely lacking in creative experience. If a dramaturg doesn't have the experience of a creator who has written a script at some point in his life, he can't even do the job, because at some stage, apart from being able to analyse the material, it also means being able to put himself in the position of the author and find a way to get him to change something in the script. To understand why it might not be possible, or why it doesn't turn out the way one expected. I think there's also a fair amount of psychology there, which is based on creative experience rather than any theoretical knowledge, and that's necessary. And we're neglecting that. 

Dramaturgy, from my point of view, is definitely an area that is very closely related to artistic research, if it were functional. If we could refresh that, admit that our strength is that creative experience is often linked to the ability to step back and name things, it might even have a very real impact on the quality of, say, public television drama. It used to be that the dramaturgical figureheads of television were people who at the same time were used to writing themselves and then only spent most of their lives as dramaturgs, but they had an initiatory creative experience, which was then followed by an analytical reflective ability. At a moment when this is disappearing, it is almost tragicomic how the crisis of screenwriting, playwriting and cinema in the Czech Republic is being addressed. There is a lack of people who have both creative experience and the ability to name the problems of a particular work and move it forward. We decided that this wasn't necessary, and we believed that a theoretical background was enough to be a creative partner to a script writer or audiovisual artist. But the experiential overlay is essential for quality. We still wonder why it doesn't work. And I think it doesn't work for these reasons. For example, in relation to our industry, it's pivotal. That's the reason why we should do artistic research, because it can produce people who will both be capable of their own creative activity, who will have creative experience, and who will have the analytical reflective capacity that will allow the naming of certain themes, certain motifs, certain problems, which again is not possible without artistic experience.

It was different. With František Čáp, it was through a completely accidental encounter with the legacy of his personality in the Slovenian environment. For us, Čáp was purposely removed from the history of cinema. Thanks to my travels, I came across his name somewhere in Ljubljana and on the Slovenian coast, and I began to understand that this man was an important element of another, from our point of view marginal cinema. I became interested in his personality, and it absolutely went hand in hand with the creation of the documentary and the script. That's something that didn't end up making it into the book, but before the book there was a play script that had cinematic elements. In parallel, the documentary material then began to be produced and only at a later stage the book. And the book came about also because some of the documentary footage couldn't be used, because many people said the most important things purposely off the record, and they had no problem with the fact that it would be processed in a literary way, but they had a problem with speaking on camera, for example. So there's more the immersive part, which was essentially creative, and which was then reflected in the book in the italicized, fictionally conceived fragments of the text. Later on, Čáp became a famous personality. On the anniversary of his birth, a celebratory documentary was to be made, which was eventually filmed by a Slovenian director. I think he had much less source material than we had filmed. And then you realise that you could take advantage of that from a performance point of view, that is, to compete with the Slovenian filmmaker, to make a parallel documentary and have two different perspectives. 

In the end, however, I found that one can still get some deeper level of connection, because the text and the documentary material take a longer time to mature. With Čáp, which for me is not finished at all, because I am still working on the script and the book is only one layer of the narrative, it ends up being a story that says a lot about the development of Europe after the Second World War. It's about what you experience as an exile when you flee your culture to a bombed-out Germany, and then from there you come to an area where the Italians have been expelled from and which is totally uprooted. So what was only the xth layer of knowledge for Čáp is ultimately, perhaps because of the time lapse, something that is pivotal for me. Some universal theme. I don't think you can come to that if you say to yourself, here are the TV offers, I'll meet the demand. Through the experience of making - because I worked for a while in television on series shows in particular, and that's also an interesting and exhausting experience - you find that you don't want to respond to demand anymore. That's also a developmental phase, and in that respect the books were terribly important to me. A book is the freest thing you can do when there are pressures that are pushing your audiovisual work in a direction you don't intend to go. So the literary position is suddenly the most congenial at that stage of knowledge, and then something else can build on it.

It was different with the book about Saura. I, as a teacher at the Audiovisual Department of the Faculty of Theatre, began to think about what the initiating moments were for me as a young author, or the key cinematic stimuli, and I found that it was Saura's work. Saura dared to break the principles of narrative that were instilled in us, but he did it in such a way that he still delivers a very powerful story, but he delivers it in a very different way than we're used to. The book then evolved from trying to give students an experience of Carlos Saura's work, which meant showing his films for six months and talking about them. Suddenly one found that it resonated, even though Saura touches on subjects that are seemingly remote to students. His films speak a universal language to the next generation. There has also been a demand from students to understand his personality and narrative style, which does not conform to the guidelines one normally comes across in screenwriting departments. The idea was to immerse oneself in the work of art and try to understand both the motivations of the author and to try to describe it with some degree of universality, so that it would be applicable, perhaps, to students of screenwriting or to people who have a need to express themselves cinematically in some way. 

And then with Saura, the parallel experience of dictatorship was important. That was a huge theme for me, not only for the book, but for other things I did, like radio work and scripts. I want to say that in my work, there was from the beginning not only the will to deal with the traumatic level of Czech history absorbed on a very personal level, but also to ask what it is like. If the meaning of creation is not also in the fact that one manages to translate into it what cannot be grasped by other means. I think that this is the case of Czech history, which is somehow processed in terms of theoretical comprehension, but it is not processed effectively in terms of experience, that the essence of what life in a dictatorial environment entailed fails to be conveyed. And that's something that Saura has done, he has absolutely consistently reflected that in his work. Both Francoist Spain and the painful period of transformation, which even in Spain didn't turn out perfectly, because again it looks like the fascists are going to have the upper hand there, and that those tendencies are still being reshaped in society. We have a similar situation in this country, but there has never been a filmmaker like Carlos Saura who would reflect this out of an inner need. He just sees that society is changing, he feels the restlessness and he captures it somehow. And that hasn't happened in this country. In this country, it happened in a kind of purposeful isolation, and it didn't lead to an understanding of the given period. I dare say that when one sees Saura's work, one can feel quite properly that one has understood the changes in Spanish society, even if the story and the film image do not have the ambition to capture it in any clear and understandable way, but in the end they have that effect. He has something that a theoretical text or any other form of reflection cannot have. Because he conveys an emotion to you, which I don't mean just in the Brechtian sense, but that emotion starts something internally. When one is struck by an emotion, then one is also inclined to reflect more consistently through that intervention on the given period and on the situations that people faced. And where that intervention doesn't take place, it doesn't actually happen.

Actually to understand them, to understand their sources. Through that inner intervention there is a need to understand the source of the emotion, the causes of the intervention. And these can have both a historical-political context and the creative method of a given person who, under certain circumstances, formulated and fulfilled it for himself. I guess that's the way to go from my perspective, at least in relation to Saura and his work. It was quite important for me to become aware of the effect of his works, which is actually therapeutic, and which I could perceive much more acutely, also because of my private context, because this is again something that would be difficult to cover in an art historical study. I realized that this was something that I would not be able to convey in a form like the Memory of a Nation says this happened then and there. Because de facto you're talking about something more subtle: how the psyche of the people who were only fleetingly, seemingly, touched by the system has changed. But somehow it has affected their internal setup, and that's what a film of this type is able to do. A documentary à la BBC is not able to do that, another format is not able to do that. I'm looking for a way, and with Saura I see that he's succeeded, so I'll just spend more time with him and try to understand it. I'll try to find points of contact that maybe will be partially transferable or not, but actually can influence my own work or my thinking or the work of the students that we're talking about it with. And it's also important to say that those things were actually happening. When we were watching Saura's films, some of the people who had plucked up the courage to break with the established principles of narrative suddenly began to show a tendency to come out of the principles that Saura was working with. Sometimes it helps a lot if you can get to the point of capturing and naming the process somehow; that can be a springboard for students who are struck by the film, want to try something similar, and may also have a text that tries to extract some more clearly identifiable principles out of it.

The quality of teaching in art schools may depend on artistic research, because if we could get creative people not to consider reflecting and capturing their own creative development or that of other people as something marginal, we could hardly have the kind of thing that normally happens in art colleges when, God forbid, a personality leaves, either simply to another environment or out of this world, without leaving behind these kinds of texts. Then there are wounds that absolutely cannot be healed. Sometimes the departure of strong personalities who have somehow shaped their studios and many of their students paralyses art academies. Of course, the text is not omnipotent, but it's some terribly important lead to build on. 

I think that the existence of the work itself is not always sufficient in relation to teaching in art schools. In order to take courage as a young artist, one must be aware that various stumbles, difficulties, hesitations have also accompanied the development of the people he looks up to. For us, the projections made by Professor Švanda were crucial in this way. For example, he played us the whole of Buñuel, including the films that were not good, and suddenly one was forced to admit that he was not only a great. The great surrealist also made extremely conventional works that he didn't really subscribe to, and with good reason. But it happened, and every wobble need not have fatal consequences. Sometimes that wobble redirects a person somewhere. It's some level of experience that if it fails to be conveyed, then those people, even as creators, don't have to pluck up the courage. Or what happens is that they enter that great competitive environment, cinematic or television, and they're left completely paralyzed. If you don't have the courage within yourself to do things differently and you get into an environment that pretends that performance is somehow predictable, adjustable, and that you're supposed to go that way and respect it, people will lose the will to express themselves in their own original way very quickly. If they take that courage out of school, and that inner will, which may be based on the shared experience of someone else who created in different circumstances before them and to whom they relate, there is also a moral obligation not to betray themselves. If those people leave the school internally unstable because we don't give them that, we don't give them that experience, then that effort, say five years, may be completely wasted, because that person will find themselves in a so-called real environment, and there they will get cold feet and then recover in five or ten years, or not at all. So yes, that courage is absolutely crucial.

Absolutely, it's giving courage, that's what I do. I was lucky enough to get that from my teachers, that's what the school was good at in the 1990s. At least in our studio there were two or three personalities who were able to instil courage at different moments, some strongly and some less so. 

It's probably terribly megalomaniacal to say this, but I am concerned about the state of Czech culture, especially audiovisual culture. I think we are in pretty unflattering conditions and the quality is really not good. And it has been going on for at least two decades. It's important to give courage to those people who are studying, not to smother the flame of talent that is burning, and if there are a few more people who have courage, then there is some chance that the conditions in institutions that are public and that you protect because of that, but at the same time you know that the system is actually wrongly set up. For me, the courage of the individual at the moment when it starts to be multiple really means hope that art can be preserved and developed even in spheres where the pressure to apply only commercial principles is huge and growing.