2024-04-26 14:31:17
Making a film about a prison may seem like an odd idea; however, the history of that of Uhersko-Hradiště was also special. Originally from the 19th century, it served its purpose until 1960. Later, it housed more peaceful institutions, such as the school canteen and the sorority. After 1989, the building fell into disrepair until it seemed that it would be demolished.
If that were to happen, not only the subject of the new documentary film The Prison of History, which has been shown in cinemas since last Thursday, but above all an important witness of the modern history of south-eastern Moravia would disappear. The most moving period of the building was between 1949 and 1954, when the investigators of the communist State Security, led by Alois Grebeníček and Ludvík Hlavacka, used especially brutal interrogation methods for the victims, even for that time, they invented torture instruments themselves and subjected the prisoners to senseless hardships.
Today, the value of the Uhersko-Hradiště prison lies in the fact that it is the only Czech criminal prison from the previous regime that has survived basically in its original form from the 1950s. She remained a witness of her time. In 2009, the first initiative was created for the dignified use of the building, whose tragic history was long remembered only by a plaque with the names of 29 executed and martyred here. Over time, other organizations and associations joined, until seven years ago the decision was made that, among other things, a museum of totalitarianism would be established here.
Reconstruction is scheduled to begin in 2025 and end perhaps three years later. In the interim, when not much is happening here, and when there is precisely the time and space to think about the future meaning of the object, the full-length documentary The Prison of History was created. Experienced documentary filmmaker Jan Gogola Jr. invited Matěj Hrudička, a student a generation younger than him at the Tomáš Bata University in Zlín, to direct.
The older member of the tandem, Gogola, a fifty-two-year-old native of Uhersko-Hradiště, simply put, represented memory and experience. The task of Hrudička plus the mostly student crew that shot the film was to deliver new and original generational perspectives.
The sound of creaking tiles
The bearers of the message are the narrators on the screen. Some of them are former prisoners, their descendants, but also family members of former investigators, or residents of Uherské Hradiště of all generations. Until now, some for decades, they lived within sight of the complex without getting a chance to look inside.
The process of rediscovering historical memory in the film takes place right before our eyes. | Photo: Aerofilms
Only the movie gave it to them. Until recently, they only knew the shell of that house: the snail’s shell, seen a thousand times, did not reveal anything about its interior. And so they go inside with the camera to discover – what exactly? The path to historical knowledge is always a path to oneself. The more a person is able to resound within himself during such “onion peeling”, as the writer Günter Grass called the process of learning about the past, the more useful history can become for him.
Helping the memory to develop is the task of the invited guests, mostly artists, in the documentary. They are generally looking for ways to ensure that the exposition that is created here does not just repeat the adverse facts. The future museum could easily become anti-communist kitsch, “a place of professional lamentation”, warns musician Ivan Palacký in the film. Which would benefit no one.
The descendants of the prisoners perceive the space differently, as does the director Jiří Svoboda, who in 1989, just before the fall of the old regime, shot the drama Just Family Matters, a variation on Costa-Gavras’s Confessions from 1970. In doing so, he casually reveals that the condemning film He was able to produce the 1950s at the time of perestroika mainly because he himself held a position in the Communist Party at the time. The former member of the Communist Party and the post-revolutionary chairman of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic suggests that the “time” (!) was bad, and suggests that he would be able to deliver an even greater verbal quirk; it’s a shame that the creators didn’t use this option.
Painter Vladimír Kokolia, on the other hand, is opening a workshop on the spot with students from the local high school of arts and crafts. In the barred, overgrown windows of the prison, he discovers new and unexpected spaces of imagination: dead holes in the walls come to life with previously unseen flowers and even seem, despite the bars, to point the way to freedom.
Musicians Ivan Palacký and Jiří Pavlica, in the roles of sound wizards, find out whether the emotions exhaled by the house can be transformed into music, the co-creator of which could also be the visitor himself. At one point, Palacký discovers that the crooked tiles in the prison corridor make different sounds and that you can play on them with your feet: so let’s go.
Sculptor Otmar Oliva, himself locked up in another prison during normalization, suggests that those who claim that the old are unable to convey important truths to the young are wrong. After all, the main thing that is transmitted is not information, but attitudes. Only the one who is internally truthful becomes, at the same time, spontaneously and unwittingly, a real reporter of his own and other people’s past.
The film The Prison of History has been showing in cinemas since last Thursday. | Video: Aerofilms
Name the truth
There are also patient confrontations during prison calls. The daughter and granddaughter of the former investigator learn the truth that their family member was one of the cruelest torturers here. Neither woman can seem to accept this truth; unfortunately, the film takes place in too small a time frame for such a thing to be possible.
The red star painted on the ceiling of the prison chapel, on the other hand, appears to the descendants of the prisoners as pure disgust – but only until the moment when the director Svoboda tells them that he had it painted only for the purposes of his film. It is difficult to briefly indicate in a smaller space that naming historical truths among deposits of all kinds is difficult.
The documentary searches for the place where the gallows was located, on which a total of 16 people were supposed to be executed in Uherské Hradiště. It is recalled that an StB agent was deployed even in the confessional of the local prison chapel; he later wrote a report on the revealed sins in the interrogation room.
The process of rediscovering historical memory is happening right before our eyes. Does the film reveal enough? Jan Gogola, a student of the now deceased documentarian Karel Vachko, created the project using the Vachko method. It has a well-thought-out starting situation and a choice of actors, and it unleashes situations with them that can probably turn into a confrontation and, through it, a non-conformist redefinition of the topic. Unlike Vachko, Gogola himself does not intervene much in the matter. He apparently believes in such a result, which will be achieved by itself after careful preparation.
Example: in front of the camera, director Svoboda seems like a person who would like to think about himself much more than we see. The 78-year-old may have even done it, but those passages were cut out in the editing room. Vachek would almost certainly push Svoboda into such a situation. Naturally, Gogola was not obliged to do the same.
But his film, precisely because it goes to the heart of the subject, acts in part as a denial of the plan that the Uhersko-Hradišť Museum wants to distinguish itself: to expose the visitor to such strong emotions that it changes his view of reality. In this sense, Gogol’s and Hrudičk’s film sticks to the wall, which is a shame. It gives the impression that there were more plans for how things should turn out at the beginning than there are healthy ones in Vachkov’s concept of the documentary.
That there is a plurality of points of view, the Prison of History mostly indicates: for example, by the emphasis with which it also covers the so-called edge in addition to the human world. The attention that the film pays to various spiders and bugs in addition to the human narrators, among whom is also the Minister of Culture Martin Baxa from ODS, as if to indicate that the history of the given place could and perhaps should be told in countless other ways as well. We do not know which angle of our view of the past is the best. But we believe that it makes sense to look closely and that the outcome of our actions matters.
The basic sound in the film is the obnoxious screeching of an ungreased door, through which, who knows, the late February Czech executioner in Uherské Hradiště could control the gallows, which has not yet been found. That sound doesn’t make you sleep. It would be good if it turned out the same with the local museum exhibition.
Film
Prison of history
Directed by Jan Gogola Jr. and Matěj Hrudička
Aerofilms, in theaters from April 18