Joze Gale

Francis Ford Coppola once said: "Even if I never make a film again, I will always be able to say that I am the one who made The Godfather." Joze Gale can also say this: "I am the one who made Kekec."

Like The Godfather Kekec also very soon became something more than a film and someone more than a film character. Kekec reached out to the masses and became a huge hit, a story without an end, the eternal future of Slovenian film. After all these years we still cannot get it out of our minds.

Certainly, other films also become hits, but they do not become myths, pop idioms and national codes. Kekec came to be all this: a myth, a pop idiom and a national code, and at the same time it was the crossroads between the painful, complicated and pathological relationship between Slovenia and film.

Of course, Joze Gale could write books on this issue. After all, he is a Slovenian director who could make "serious", "demanding", "intricate" drama films, intended for the "adult" and "mature" audience, only outside Slovenia, away in Bosnia (Foreign Land and I'll Be Back), while in Slovenia he was typified and was given no choice but to make only films for children and youth, easy films (the three Kekec films, Family Diary). Only later, in the eighties, could he make "serious" films also in Slovenia (Wasteland, Love is the Ruin of Us All).

It is not surprising that in Slovenia Gale was typified and discriminated. Immediately after the Second World War he was involved in making the first Slovenian film, and two things were clear about this film in advance. First that it would be something big, pompous, historical and mythical, ok, fundamental, after all, it was the first Slovenian film and simultaneously a film about a birth of a nation. And second, it would set the standards for the history of the Slovenian film and its future. That is why you can think of Kekec as a Gale's small conspiracy, as his counterweight to the film On Our Own Land shot in 1948 by France Stiglic, where Gale was just a "second director".

Kekec really seems like a conspiracy. More properly said, in 1951, when the period defined by the Law of the Five-Year Plan of the Development of the National Economy of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia, Kekec seemed as if it fell from the sky. Like an unknown flying object. Like a miracle. It was so colourful that it was not even necessary to film it in colour. It was stylised, compact, beyond everyday politics, agitation and beyond showing the "objective historical processes".

On one hand it was far away from the socialist regime, while on the other hand it was wonderfully expressionistic. Another aspect of it was that Gale seemed to want to invent all the genres of the Slovenian film at once: musical (Kekec sings), adventure (over hill and dale, from adventure to adventure), horror (Bedanec as a monster), persecution film (the hunted gradually becomes the hunter), thriller (Bedanec and Kekec play cat and mouse games), melodrama (the hero returns to his family in the end), costume film (the film takes place in the past), comedy (Kekec turns everything into a joke), fairy tale (Good vs. Evil), a film about the mountains (alpine setting, panoramic shots of beautiful sights) and an educational film (child's maturing). Heh, do not forget that Gale's debut was a short propaganda topical film Anything for a Child (Vse za otroka).

Not only was Kekec completely different from Trieste (Trst), filmed in the same year by Stiglic, it was also different from the films made in Yugoslavia at that time. It lacked the national liberation iconography, the socialist jargon, it had no ambition to stir the nation, it was without direct references to the current problems of the working class and without connection to the pathos of the post-war construction.

It stood there by itself and alone, but unique - as if it were from another world - from a world that did not exist anymore and from a cinematography that did not yet exist. Yugoslav films made between 1947 and 1951, that means between Slavica and Trieste, namely focused exclusively on the forming of the partisan army and on the patriotic sacrifice, on fugitives who stand up to the aggressor, the German offensives, the heroic fighting of the Yugoslav nations and the general people's resistance, the indestructible major Bauk and the saboteurs, national traitors, reactionists, spies and ex-Gestapo members that want to undermine the new social order and progress, the youth work brigades and the new factories. All of the Yugoslav films from that time, with the exception of the Serbian Miraculous Sword and the Croatian farce Bakonja fra Brne, all took place in a world that people could see through the window. In 1951 Kekec could not be seen through a window. It was fresh and new, it was breaking new ground.

I am not saying that Kekec is impossible to imagine during the Second World War. He could be a young idealist who, like his "contemporary", the Serbian Young Boy Mita, joins the national liberation fight. Of course, in the end he would return to his village as a brigade, as a collective singing a partisan march in unison. But Kekec was not like that. He did not care about the cooperative codex. When he roams the hills and woods, he leaves no doubt that this is a path that he has to walk alone, like performing a ritual - a child matures and grows up when he spends a night in the woods alone. Or when he goes into the wide world alone.

Kekec was a hymn to individualism: namely, Kekec does everything himself. He himself settles the score with Bedanec, the child kidnapper, the family demon, yep, with the terror of the children. Even more than that, he alone does what the collective is unable to do. Therefore he returns to his village alone, like a pop hero. Everybody sings his song. Everybody walks with him. And behind him.

Gale filmed two sequels to Kekec: Good Luck, Kekec (Srecno, Kekec, 1963), the first Slovenian film in colour, and the psychedelic Kekec's Tricks (Kekceve ukane, 1968). However, he also made three "remakes" of Kekec - Beyond (Onkraj, 1970), Wasteland (Pustota, 1982) and Love is the Ruin of Us All (Ljubezen nam je vsem v pogubo, 1987).

In the first film a former partisan tries to tell a heartbreaking story from his days as a partisan to teenagers, who orgiastically and carelessly party in a club (sex, drugs & rock'n'roll). His story is a story from the woods, a story of engagement, responsibility and sacrifice, but he does not find the connection with the rock'n'roll generation - the partisan is Kekec, who has been left alone, far from action and the woods, in a world that does not need him and does not understand him, the hunter with nothing left to hunt.

In the second film, which is actually based on a television series and takes place in the end of the 19th century, the woods are full of Kekecs, who have over the years mutated into sheep, Kekec's mirror images. They are static, apathetic, in agony, passive and powerless, "whiners and wimps", far from action, social engagement and fighters' bravery. The capercaillie is nowhere to be seen, so they are left with no other option but to sit around a campfire and recount stories about people who failed to go into the world. They still go into the woods, but nothing happens anymore.

Ironically, the film Love is the Ruin of Us All, Gale's last film, was more of a "partisan" film then Kekec was - the company camping in the forest was just a nostalgic allegory of a group of partisans, to which Gale also belonged. This group was once changing the world, spending nights in the woods, and then, in the eighties, it started losing its voice and all that it had left were memories, no more than flashbacks, and sitting in silent woods by the campfire.

It is surprising that Kekec was so visual and kinetic. Even more than that. The films about Kekec had such prominent elements of film, sound (Kekec singing, him imitating an owl and so on), and vision (Mojca being blind, seeking the cure for blindness), while Joze Gale, born in 1913 in Grosuplje, was, on the other hand, basically a theatre person. He graduated in theatre direction from the National Conservatory in Prague (1938), made his living as a theatre actor until 1943 in the Slovenian National Theatre, went into the woods and became a partisan and a member of the Partisan Theatre Company and the National Theatre in the liberated territory. After the war he added theatre directing to his acting career (Audrey, Giraudoux, Brecht, Sartre, etc.) and teaching at the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television. After Kekec, which won the first prize for youth films in Venice in 1952, he had not made another film in Slovenia for as many as 10 years. He made two in Bosnia, though - Foreign Land (Tu?a zemlja, 1957) and I'll Be Back (Vratiau se, 1957). But, ironically, with the second film about a frustrated invalid, an ex-partisan, who after the war cannot find any purpose and contact with the society anymore, Gale anticipated Babic's The Feast (Veselica, 1960).

Gale did not return to Slovenia until Family Diary (Druzinski dnevnik, 1961), an urban film where the children were left to themselves, while their parents were constantly away. "The family diary", a sign of growing alienation, is their only social contact. Which is not strange - Slovenia in the sixties evolved into an industrious, workaholic, consumer and commercial society. And Rusa Bojc, who pesters this urban Slovenian baby-boom generation, two years later pestered Kekec, as Pehta, of course. On the other hand, Family Diary itself got its addition towards the end of the sixties in the film Kekec's Tricks, where the parents are not shown at all, and where Bedanec kills animals out of his selfishness, greed, and for commercial benefit. Here Kekec, Mojca in Rozle, "nature's children", Slovenian flower-power kids, stand up to this new consumer mentality.

It seems as though Gale were filming Kekec for his whole life. And why not? Kekec set the standards for the Slovenian film, true, it became an eternal future of Slovenian film, and it overwhelmed the national set of images. And the national consensus. After all, what is Gale's Wasteland (1982), if not Kekec at the beginning of the 18th Century? Who is the Grogovcev family if not "Kekec's" family in wait for the next revolt? Gale's heroes were only different variations on Kekec. Slovenians have not agreed on many things - but they agreed on Kekec. And they still do. Thus it is not surprising that with other directors it has always seemed that they are filming or want to film Kekec, even if per negationem.

Marcel Stefancic, jr.
Ljubljana, February 2002