Zuzana Piussi and the Eccentric Subject: Positional Female Authorship in Slovak Advocacy Documentary

Abstract

Slovak documentary filmmaker Zuzana Piussi is the most prominent representative of film journalism and advocacy documentary in Slovak nonfiction cinema. Despite an impressive body of work spanning two decades and addressing a wide range of socio-political topics, her films remain insufficiently studied domestically and are virtually absent from international documentary scholarship. This paper argues that what critics identify as formal and argumentative inconsistencies in Piussi’s work in fact constitutes a deliberate system of transgressive strategies. Through textual analysis of selected political documentaries, drawing on documentary studies and feminist theory, the paper demonstrates how Piussi positions herself as an eccentric subject – in Teresa de Lauretis’s sense – in order to render invisible or hidden power structures visible. She transgresses the norms of documentary discourse by blending modes, techniques, and voices. She abandons the position of a neutral observer by subordinating her dramaturgy to advocacy and directly intervening in the reality she documents. She crosses ethical boundaries of documentary – those of consent, transparency, and balanced representation – in order to strengthen her argument. And she deploys her own gender subversively as a provocative authorial strategy. Together, these strategies define Piussi’s practice as a specific form of positional female gaze within the tradition of advocacy documentary.