2024-07-05 05:50:23
He wowed the audience at the Berlinale. Now the documentary entitled I’m not yet, who I want to be will also be shown at the Karlovy Vary festival, proving that not only Czech animation can be a global export. Director Klára Tasovská spent two years working on Libuš Jarcovjáková’s photo collection. She composed her film only from them. And she proved that the picture on the canvas does not have to move in order to be able to move the audience strongly emotionally.
Seventy-two-year-old Libuše Jarcovjáková is today a renowned and world-famous photographer who has been nicknamed the “Nan Goldin of communist Prague”. But before the prestigious foreign media started comparing her to the biggest stars of international art, Jarcovjáková took photos for a long time out of a purely personal need to record the world around her. Using pictures and journal entries. They are the second key part of the picture – the author herself read them.
Films made purely from photographs are not often created and they are mostly aesthetically distinct experiments, although Chris Marker already proved in 1962 with the film Rampa that this method can also tell a fascinating story. Klára Tasovská and her collaborators put together an enchanting portrait from which emotions radiate, but at the same time it is muted. Which is intimate and visceral, but also incredibly funny.
Jarcovjáková worked for a long time among the workers, where as an intellectual she did not fit in at first. She herself describes that she got them by being able to drink eight shots of rum and not fall to the ground. The film is full of similar stories, stories and micro-observations. The combination of photos, music and commentary often makes viewers forget they are watching still scenes.
Photos of parties from the spitting “four” are not accompanied by a big beat, but by Oliver Torr’s captivating, striking contemporary techno, Prokop Korb and Adam Matej also contributed to the imaginative soundtrack.
Jarcovjáková is far from talking only about parties. Her confession is open in all respects. She talks about her own abortions, during one of which she almost lost her life, about partner difficulties, but also about artistic doubts. Her unconventional life took her to Berlin and Tokyo, where she established herself as a fashion photographer. She watched the fall of the Berlin Wall from close quarters.
Libuše Jarcovjáková is currently one of the most awarded Czech photographers. | Photo: Josef Horázný
The film I’m not yet who I want to be is exactly like its title. The creators – among whom we must highlight Alexander Kashcheev, who participated in the script, editing and sound – show Jarcovjáková’s unceasing artistic search as a process that never ends. After all, when the protagonist stepped onto the stage of the large hall of the Thermal Hotel, she immediately took out her camera and documented the packed auditorium.
Photos as a narrative tool have a special power in this portrait. It can be a shield and a protective wall that helps to talk directly even about the most difficult things.
The mix of artefacts and the authentic voice of a woman reading from her own notes is powerful, despite being completely devoid of pathos or any other form of exaggeration. At the same time, a well-timed photo or a series of related photos can also be the punch line of a joke, more accurate than the usual stream of moving film images.
Jarcovjáková definitely became world famous five years ago at the prestigious French photography festival Rencontres d’Arles. Britain’s Guardian named it the exhibition of the year, praise appeared in renowned dailies from Le Monde to the New York Times.
Until that time, she heard words about her spontaneous and emotional photos about bad composition or advice like “Don’t take those gypsies, that’s what Koudelka already does”. The film is full of similar, funny but painful memories.
It is not a portrait of a famous artist, but rather a diary in which the creator is constantly searching and questioning. Both artistic things and personal ones. That’s why it can touch anyone. Like the photograph of Jarcovjáková, the picture about her is ordinary in the best sense of the word. As if there was no difference between living in the underground and shooting covers for the biggest fashion magazines.
Sovereign firstfruits
Another Czech documentary, which can be seen at the Karlovy Vary festival, also stands out for its ordinariness. The debut of the director Marie-Magdalena Kochová, called The Other, was included by the organizers in the Special Presentations section, but it could easily be in one of the competition ones.
The superbly filmed debut follows a teenage girl who is about to graduate and, like everyone else at that age, dreams of disappearing from her hometown. But the family pays most of their attention to her seven-year-younger sister, who lives with an autistic diagnosis.
The heroine of the documentary The Second is an eighteen-year-old high school graduate. | Photo: Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary
Kochová sensitively discusses a neglected topic. It does not focus on the demanding care of a sick nurse, but on the contrary, how the healthy one lives. The film only observes empathetically, does not spare anyone, it touches on how frequent outbursts of emotions accompanied by yelling, cursing and pointing at anyone nearby disrupt the everyday life of all relatives. The author captures the frustrations of 18-year-old Johana, who does not blame her sister and those around her, on the contrary, she blames herself when she tries to put her own needs and goals first at a turning point in her life.
The second is a sensitive, unobtrusive, but all the more necessary image. She is not looking for a trendy topic, but accurately describes a fairly common social phenomenon – thanks to the author’s patience and also thanks to the trust that exists between her and the family being watched.
This year’s Karlovy Vary festival sends out one positive signal about Czech cinematography after another. The upcoming generation of filmmakers can be convincing in documentary corners as well as in the mainstream. And he confidently shows that seemingly ordinary subjects can lead not only to excellent, but also very popular films.
The brilliant period genre film Vlny by Jiří Mádl is leading the audience vote at the festival, but the film The Second is currently closing the top ten.