Pavel Branko

Pavel Branko was born on board a French ship heading to Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic Sea. 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.

Pavel Branko (April 27, 1921 – August 17, 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."

Branko spent his childhood in Hatshava. He moved to Bratislava in 1931. 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.

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.

His political activism ended abruptly in June 1942, when he was arrested, together 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.

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. 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.

After liberation, Branko worked as a freelance translator of fiction, as well as philosophical non-fiction from English, Russian and German. The years 1945-1949 meant for him a gradual disillusion concerning the real practices of the Communist Party and the Comintern which ended in public withdrawal from the CP in 1949, with many consequences involved. Nevertheless, the reputation of the former Resistance fighter and political prisoner saved him from the worst, and when he began to write film reviews, he soon 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), 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), 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).

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).

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).

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.

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. All this was due to his support for and involvement in the movement that the media in the West referred to as the Prague spring. In 1970, Branko briefly managed to land a one-year job as scientific collaborator at the Slovak Film Institute (SFÚ). In 1973, being 52, he was forced into ‘retirement’ for good. This was, incidentally, also the time of his divorce. He married his second wife, Emily, in 1979.

As film critic he was blacklisted during the entire "normalization" period of real socialism (1972–89), and as translator from 1972 to 1978. From 1972 until 1976 he occasionally published film essays on uncontroversial topics. This was possible because friends and former colleagues agreed that he might use their name as a cover.

Between 1990 and 2007, Pavel Branko published film criticism in such journals and daily newspapers as Dialóg, Film.sk, Film a doba (Film and Time), Filmová revue, Kino-Ikon, Kultúrny život (Cultural Life), Mosty (Bridges), Nové slovo (New Word), Pravda (Truth), and Sme (We are), and on the air waves via Radio Free Europe.

NOTE: Publishers in Czechoslovakia did not make use of ISBN or ISSN before 1990.

In 1997, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Academy of Performing Arts (VŠMU). Three years later, in 2000, various honorary prizes were bestowed on him by the SFZ, the ÚSTT, and the LFSR (Prémia SFZ, ÚSTT, LFSR ) for his collected works that contained much of his film criticism. The 3 volumes are titled Straty a nálezy (Lost and found), I, II, III.

Also in 2000, Pavel Branko was awarded the Zlatá kamera (Golden Camera) at the MFF Art Film Fest, together with a laudatory diploma by the Prime Minister. And in the same year, he received the prize Cena slovenskej filmovej kritiky (Prize of Slovak Film Criticism) for his Straty a nálezy, 1948 – 98.

In 2007 he received the Slnko v sieti (Sun in the net) Award of the Slovak Film and TV Academy for a lifetime's achievement (Cena Slnko v sieti za celoživotné dielo).

In 2009, the documentary filmmaker Zuzana Piussi (or Susan Piussi) made the documentary A Hero of our Time about Pavel Branko. The title refers to Lermontov’s novel that depicts a "superfluous man" - a hint which serves to remind us that Branko sees himself ironically or skeptically as a ‘superfluous man.’ Indeed, neither the Tiso regime nor the Stalinists ‘needed’ somebody like him, who ‘swims against the current.’

In 2010 Jaro Rihák shot a portrait of Pavel Branko for the Slovak TV series GEN (Gallery of national elite).