Totalitarianism indexes and pop-cultural interventions in Slovak feature film. A contribution to the contemporary art mediality

The study is concerned with images of totalitarianism in Slovak feature film after the year 1989. It monitors the level of social criticism in the1970s and 1980s film against the background of historical, economic and political context and provides examples of banned and censored films. The author raises a question whether the Slovak film paradigm of totalitarianism representations has changed after the year 1989. She seeks the answer using Peirce triad typology. It enables her to identify three specific forms of the totalitarianism legacy discourse: the iconic variant, which is based on reviving a particular experience, the symbolic variant, inspired by the memory and headed for the future and the index variant, revealing the causal relationship between the past and the presence. The iconic variant includes the biggest number of films, which are represented by the collective past stories and dominated at the turn of the decade and in the first half of the 1990s. (The Right For The Past, Sitting On A Branch I Am Fine, Better To Be Rich And Healthy Than Poor And Sick, The Camp Of Fallen Women, When The Stars Were Red). In terms of size, the symbolic variant is the smallest, the thirdness. It is associated with the expressive gesture of an emotional protest (See You In Hell, My Friends!, Rivers of Babylon). In the author´s opinioin, the best reflection is given by the index variant, containing a correlation, allowing the past-presence juxtaposition (Private Lives, Tenderness, The City of the Sun, Mosquitoes‘ Tango). With regard to the current economic possibilities and value preferences, it is most desired together with a genre (Music).