Pavel Branko (27 April 1921 – 17 August 2020) was a Slovak film critic, film theorist, translator of fiction and non-fiction literature, and author of articles that critique questionable use of language. He has been called "the doyen of Slovak film criticism.""Nestor slovenskej filmovej publicistiky a kritiky" – See: Mariana Jaremková, "Filmovanie bolo pre mňa zážitkom", (Interview with Pavel Branko), in: Film.sk, No.11, Nov. 2009, pp.29.(ISSN 1335-8286. The printed version can also be checked online as a pdf.file.) – On the website of the International Film Festival Bratislava, Branko is also referred to as the "Nestor slovenskej filmovej kritiky" (the ‘Nestor’ of Slovak film critics). – Check the ‘external links’ section further below!).14th International Film Festival Bratislava: Hrdina našich čias (A Hero of Our Time) (Refers to Branko as the "Nestor of Slovak film critics").
After the fall of real socialism, he has received many prizes that honour the man and the work of a lifetime. In his life and work we find many traces of the impact of the history of Czechoslovakia. Branko was married to Emilia Brankova.
Life and work
Youth and early career Pavel Branko was born on board a French ship heading to Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic Sea.Emil Polák, "Knihy, ktoré by vás mohli zaujímať aj po novom roku" [Books that should be of interest to you, even after the New Year (Book review of Branko's Against the Current)], in: Nové slovo, 27 Dec. 2011. – Nové slovo (New Word) is a left-wing weekly magazine for politics, culture and the economy. (ISSN 1336-2984). His birthplace was registered as Trieste which had just reverted from Austrian rule to Italy. Branko's father was a Slovak Jew converted to Protestantism, a clerk in Hatshava (Hačava), Hnushtya (Hnúšťa) county, Slovakia and thus a citizen of Austria-Hungary, a multi-national state, till 1918. His mother was Russian.Branko is quoted, "Jeho otec bol Žid, ale o židovstvo sa veľmi nestaral, bol dokonca pokrstený. Mama bola Ruska, medzi jej predkami sa však našli Nemci, Rusi aj Česi." (My father was a Jew, but did not care much for whatever was Jewish, he even was baptized. My mother was Russian, among her ancestors, however, there were Germans, Russians and Czechs.) See: Iris Kopcsayová, ibidem.
Branko spent his childhood in Hatshava. He moved to Bratislava in 1931.Emil Polák, ibidem. Between 1932 and 1940, he attended high school in that city. After having obtained his high school diploma in 1940, he enrolled in the Technical University of Bratislava for 1940–41. The next year he was rejected because of the Jewish roots of his father. Then he had three short-lived jobs until the summer of 1942.
Political activity and imprisonment The Slovak clerical-fascist regime of Jozef Tiso (which was noted for its Antisemitism) brought Branko into the resistance while he was still a high school student. In 1939, propelled by an "enthusiasm for leftist ideals", Branko joined the illegal Communist Party, the most outstanding antifascist force in Slovakia at the time."V roku 1939 som sa stal členom ilegálnej Komunistickej strany."( In 1939 I became a member of the illegal Communist Party), Iris Kopcsayová quotes him. See: Iris Kopcsayová, ibidem.
His political activism ended abruptly in June 1942, when he was arrested along with four other party members. Soon after his arrest, he received a life sentence.
Between 1942 and 1945, Branko was a political prisoner in Bratislava, Nitra, and Leopoldov."Z Nitry ich previezli do Leopoldova." (From Nitra they – i.e. Branko and those arrested with him – were transferred to Leopoldov.). See: "Pavel Branko (* 27. apríla 1921 v Terste, Taliansko)" (biography of Pavel Branko, published by the website of the Fakulta humanitných vied (Faculty or Dept. of Humanities) of the Univerzity Mateja Bela (MBU)).
During the winter of 1945, fearing that the advancing Red Army could liberate the political prisoners, the Tiso regime made a dirty deal with the German Gestapo. The prisoners were formally released, but in fact transferred to the Gestapo directly at the front gate of Leopoldov prison. In this way, Branko was transferred together with many others to the Mauthausen concentration camp in February 1945.See: Vladimír Jancura, "Pavel Branko: Nedám si od žiadnej doby brnkať po nose", in: Pravda, 13 March. 2010. – The Bratislava-based daily is a left-of-center printed newspaper. Also online: - See also: Iris Kopcsayová, ibidem. The three months in Mauthausen, until his liberation by the U.S. army in May 1945, were the hardest of the entire period of Pavel Branko's imprisonment.Pavel Branko interviewed by Katarina Zavarska; USC Shoah Foundation. Pavel Branko oral history (interview code : 15807), 4 Jun 1996. Los Angeles, California : USC Shoah Foundation. eVideo Archival Material : Slovak. Published by the USC Shoah Foundation collection in USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 1994–2017. (Audiovisual testimony of a Holocaust survivor. Includes pre-war, wartime, and post-war experiences)
Literary translation and film criticism After liberation, Branko worked as a freelance translator of fiction, as well as philosophical non-fiction from English, Russian and German. From 1945 to 1949 he gradually became disillusioned with the real practices of the Communist Party and the Comintern which ended in his public withdrawal from the CP in 1949, with many consequences involved.Susan Piussi's documentary film A Hero of Our Time.Iris Kopcsayová writes, "V roku 1948 vystúpil z Komunistickej strany." (In 1948 he withdrew from the Communist Party.) See: Iris Kopcsayová, ibidem – Branko's website gives the year 1949. – See also E. Polák who writes, "The Communist coup (of 1948) disappointed him, and brought him into the opposition." (Emil Polák, ibidem.) His reputation as a former Resistance fighter and political prisoner saved him from significant criticism, and when he began to write film reviews, he quickly became a respected freelance film critic.
Between 1948 and 1952, his film reviews were published in many journals and daily newspapers, such as Kultúrny život (Cultural Life),Kultúrny život was a respected cultural journal founded on 24 January 1946 when hopes for freedom were still omnipresent; it was closed down on 30 August 1968, in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Ľudovýchova (Vernacular Education), Náš film (Our Film), Pod zástavou socializmu (Under the Banner of Socialism), Práca (Labor), Pravda (Truth), Slovenská reč (Slovak Language), Slovenské pohľady (Slovak Views), Smena (Shift),Smena (camera) (Russian: Смена) was also the name of a series of low-cost 35 mm film cameras manufactured in the Soviet Union by the LOMO factory from 1953 to 1991. Svet socializmu (World of Socialism) and others.
The year 1952 brought such a tightening of the ideological limits imposed that Branko's value hierarchy could not accept it. He decided to resign as a film critic and withdrew with his first wife Mary to a lonely cabin in the High Tatras, a mountain range in North-Eastern Slovakia, where he restricted himself to translating books.
In 1956, a year referred to as a "thaw" period, Pavel Branko returned to Bratislava, invited to assume a steady job as film editor of the newly founded bi-weekly journal Film a divadlo (Film and Theater)."In the years 1957–1970 he was editor of Film and Theater, a bi-weekly journal." See: Emil Polák, ibidem.
Since 1956, Branko specialized in documentary film, attending regularly the short-film festivals in Karlovy Vary, Oberhausen, Leipzig and Cracow (occasionally as a jury member), as well as the national Pula Film Festival in Yugoslavia. In the 1950s, 60s, and early 1970s he published his reviews and essays mainly in Slovak and Czech. The Slovak media that published his film criticism in this period included Čítanie o ZSSR (Reading on USSR), Film a divadlo (Film and Theater), Kultúrny život (Cultural Life), Ľudovýchova (Vernacular Education), Mladá tvorba (The Young Generation), Národná obroda (National Revival), Nové slovo (New Word), Práca (Labor), Pravda (Truth), Predvoj (Vanguard), Príroda a spoločnosť (Nature and Society), Rodina a škola (Family and School), Slovenský rozhlas (Slovak Radio), Slovenka (Slovak woman), Slovenská reč (Slovak Language), Slovenské pohľady (Slovak Views), Slovenský jazyk a literatúra (Slovak Language and Literature), Smena (Shift), Svet socializmu (World of Socialism), Učiteľské noviny (The Teacher's Newspaper), Új szó (New Word – in Hungarian), Umelecké slovo (Word Art), Televízia, Večerník (The Evening Paper), and Život (Life). The Czech media included Czechoslovak Life, Divadelní a filmové noviny (Theatre and Film News), Estetika (Aesthetica), Film a doba (Film and Time), Filmové a televizní noviny (Film and Television News), Reportér, Rudé právo (Red Law), Plamen (Flame), and Tvorba (Creation).
Abroad he was occasionally published by Les Lettres Françaises (in France), by Telegram (Zagreb, Yugoslavia), and in Poland, by three renowned film journals: Ekran Warszawski (Warsaw Screen), Film polski (Polish Film), and Kamera. In West Germany, his film criticism appeared in Filmstudio, in East Germany in Filmspiegel (Film Mirror) and in Deutsche Filmkunst (German Film Art), in Sweden in Filmrutan (Movie Frame). In what was then the Soviet Union, two high quality film journals printed his film reviews: Iskusstvo kino (Film Art) and Sovetskij ekran (Soviet Cinema).A selection of the articles published between 1948 and 2007 has been republished in Straty a nálezy (Lost and found), Vols. 1-3, Bratislava 1999–2007 which also gives details on the sources (the original publication).
"As a publicist he was fully recognized in the sixties."Emil Polák, ibidem. – With regard to the 1963–1968 period, see also the Wikipedia article on Dubček (Dubtshek): "In 1963, a power struggle in the leadership of the Slovak branch [of the CP] … unseated … hard-line allies of Antonín Novotný, … president of Czechoslovakia. In their place, a new generation of Slovak Communists took control of the party and state organs in Slovakia, led by Alexander Dubček, who became First Secretary of the Slovak branch of the party. Under Dubček's leadership … the political and intellectual climate in Slovakia became freer than that in the Czech Lands. This was exemplified by the rising readership of Kultúrny život (Cultural Life), the weekly newspaper of the Union of Slovak Writers, which published frank discussions on liberalization, democratization and federalization, written by the most progressive or controversial writers – both Czech and Slovak. Kultúrny život (Cultural life) consequently became the first Slovak publication to gain a wide following among Czechs."
In 1968, while the Prague Spring was still flourishing, Branko was in charge of a seminar offered for budding screenwriters at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. In the summer of 1968, he was a member of a delegation of Slovak filmmakers and critics who came to Bochum, W.Germany, to show and discuss non-conformist Slovak films, including such films as Juraj Jakubisko's Deserters and Wanderers.
While being already a respected film critic, Branko continued to work as a literary translator. In 1967, he obtained honorary awards from the SÚKK and the SV ČSSP for his translation of Maxim Gorky's "Life of Klim Samgin" (Zhizn Klima Samgina / Жизнь Клима Самгина)."Ocenenia: za preklad knihy Maxima Gorkého Život Klima Samgina (1967) (…)" (Awards: for a translation of Maxim Gorky's book Life of Klim Samgin (1967), etc.); Iris Kopcsayová, ibidem.
Blacklisting In 1970, Pavel Branko resigned on his own accord as film editor of Film a divadlo (Film and Theater). This was two years before his official blacklisting. At the time, he found already that his convictions were irreconcilable with the political line (the so-called "normalization") imposed by the new editor-in-chief.