Katarína Mišíková

Storytelling through Interaction Hybrid narrative strategies of Slovak social film dramas and documentaries

Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava, Slovakia

The combination of fact and fabulation lies at the core of all fictional narratives. However, the trend of social drama, built on reflecting the actual world and its social issues, emphasizes the connection to factual events through various hybridization techniques. These techniques are applied already in the preparation of the script, which involves several characteristics of documentary work, such as field research, building relationships with real protagonists, and more. There are numerous ways of hybridization: from films capturing real events, through docudramas, to documentaries using elements of staging and fiction. Based on several Slovak fictional and documentary films that utilize hybrid film forms in representing real actors and social reality, my contribution will focus on the interactive practices employed by their creators (especially screenwriter Marek Leščák) and characteristic narrative strategies. My main hypothesis is that the hybridization of facts and fiction in social dramas through reference to current events and emphasizing the direct relationship of the creators to the depicted phenomena activates a specific kind of audience reaction. The common denominator of hybrid films that combine assertive and fictional stances is the emotional engagement of the audience on two levels: while fictional elements stimulate identification and empathy with the film’s protagonists, factual elements prompt active engagement with the presented events. These films also utilize indexes of fictional and non-fictional films: their directors are predominantly graduates of documentary filmmaking, and their previous films evoke in the viewer an expectation of a causal connection with reality. In the public presentation of their films, they emphasize the connection of the film with its real protagonists. They thus create specific statements about the current world, which simultaneously allow the viewer to experience it from the inside through universally understandable fictional assertions.

Katarína Mišíková is associate professor at the Film and Television Faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Her lectures include film history, narrative and cognitive film theory, and film analysis. Her research focuses on issues of realism and hybridisation techniques in Slovak cinema. She published numerous studies and articles as well as the monograph Mind and Story in Film Fiction (Mysl a příběh ve filmové fikci, 2009). She is the co-editor and co-author of collective volumes New Slovak Cinema (Nový slovenský film, 2015), Screen Industries in Eastern-Central Europe conference volume Transformation Processes and New Screen Media Technologies (2016) and Slovak Cinema in 2016 (Slovenský film v roku 2016. 2017) as well as a textbook Selected Chapters from the History of Cinema (Vybrané kapitoly z dejín filmu, 2015) and the author of textbook Academic competencies (Akademické kompetentnosti, 2024). Her professional activities include popularization of cinema among students and pupils.