A Few Musings on Specific Films

ALICE (1988)

In the film, I transposed the thoroughly concrete world of the open-eyed Alice to the world of dreams, as seen through the fence of Alice’s eyelashes. My film definitely is not a fairy tale, nor a work of free association, but a pure dream.

We shot in a house called “At the Key” in Nerudova Street, in Prague’s Malá Strana neighborhood. I had my studio in a former bakery in that house. We built Alice’s bedroom there, and basically all the interior scenes were shot in this building: in the attic, the basement, the staircase, etc. Only the exterior scenes were shot elsewhere, in the countryside. But there, it’s hard to animate. The light changes and fluctuates quickly. You have to watch the exposure constantly; the wind can’t blow… We always set up a large tent over the place we were going to animate, and we lit and shot the entire scene as if we were indoors.

As a director, working with children is like working with animals. They get distressed. Young Kristýnka [Kohoutová] who played Alice told us after a month of shooting that if she had known what a bore filming would be, she would never have signed up. And the Slovak girl with whom I filmed Down to the Cellar, one day took her coat and ran off. We chased her down the streets of Bratislava and tried to talk her into giving us another chance. She couldn’t bear it anymore. When children watch a film, they see it in continuity, the entire thing… but when they’re in front of the camera, they only experience the tedium of the work. Moreover, Kristýnka couldn’t see anything that Alice saw in the film, since we only animated that later. So, for her, it was a total bore. 

On top of that, we also were filming over a very long time—the child changes as she grows up and ages. We filmed probably for a year. And, of course, one scene here, one scene there, because we could not shoot in sequence. We have a scene where Alice enters the door as a seven-year-old and, on the other side, comes out of the door as an eight-year-old. In the meantime, her grandmother had fattened her up over the holidays, which made the film even more fantastic. Kristýnka had one little tooth knocked out, and her mouth wasn’t pretty, but she had beautiful eyes. I have her speaking, but for [the shots of] Alice’s mouth, I took another girl. I generally choose my actors by their eyes and mouths, not their acting skills.

Kristýnka now works in an institution for troubled youth. She’s an educator there. She never acted in another film.

FAUST (1994)

The Faustian myth is one of the key myths of this civilization. Everyone will one day stand before a dilemma: either to live a life in conformity, with a vague promise of institutional happiness, or to rebel and choose the route of anti-civilization, regardless of the consequences. The second path, subversion, always ends in individual defeat, the first in the failure of humanity as a whole. Of course, audiences during the period of so-called “normalization” [Ed. following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet armies in 1968] were very sensitive to allegories hidden in my films, and reacted to them. Although I’ve got to say that I was never interested in political “machinations” like the other dissidents. I’m convinced the problem runs much deeper and doesn’t only concern politics but the whole of civilization. This civilization is sick otherwise the cankers of fascism and Stalinism could not have sprouted on its skin.

CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE (1996)

I introduced the film at its premiere with the following words:

LITTLE OTIK (2000)

The lives of people today are driven by fashion trends. TV, commercial cinema, and advertising constantly drill into our heads how we’re supposed to live—most importantly, how we’re supposed to consume. To attain such “noble” goals, trends must constantly be innovated; what was fashionable a year ago is now passé and reprehensible. In the interest of increasing consumption (and profits), trends are short-lived, superficial; they only innovate the form. Because they’re superficial, they’re unable to affect our psyche profoundly, or to replace and erase from our unconscious the ancient myths that, for centuries have influenced our ancestors. These old myths are closely linked with our psyche, nature, and its laws. And so, these myths still live with us; they’re only drowned out by the quack trends of our time. All we have to do, though, is to give them (even inadvertently) a little space in our lives, and they immediately strive for fulfillment through some weird logic.

Little Otik, just like Faust before (and even Conspirators of Pleasure), reflects these mechanisms of our psyche: [in each of these films] people fall under the influence of a myth they put in motion, usually through some innocent act, then suddenly they cannot step out of it, and are manipulated by some “imaginative logic” to the bitter end. Who is, or what symbolizes the character of Little Otik? That’s a basic question about the meaning of this film. Does Little Otik personify nature, which has no humanistic inhibitions—nature that we love, nature that is our mother, but also our killer? Or is Little Otik our dark unconscious, which controls but also destroys us, and which only children and lunatics can communicate with? Maybe both at the same time. 

Certainly Little Otik represents something that transcends us—something primordial. It becomes a threat and danger. We would like to get rid of, or at least control it, but we also somewhat cling to it, because it is our creation. This ambivalence is what’s destructive to us. Little Otik is a certain irrational part of our lives which we bring to life through our senses. At the same time, we banish it to the fringes of society when organizing our lives (via civilization). We are, in vain, trying to somehow pacify it rationally. And so, remaining with us, Little Otik keeps devouring us. Maybe it’s a punishment for civilization gone wrong.

LUNACY (2005)

Poe entered the gallery of my “saints” during my puberty. The myth that I then created around him still affects me, though perhaps now it has been drowned out a little by more contemporary myths. I reached out to Poe’s stories three times for my films: “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” for short films, and motifs from his stories “The Premature Burial” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” for Lunacy. In the ’90s, I was lucky to visit Poe’s house and grave in Baltimore.

SURVIVING LIFE (2010)

Surviving Life is based on a dream I had. When I woke up, I thought the dream felt like the beginning of a film, so I made it the beginning of this film. Then I just made up the rest and put it on paper. For the first time in my work, I joined dreams and reality in the sense of Breton’s communicating vessels [Ed: in which the dream is the enabling “capillary tissue” between the exterior world of facts and the interior world of emotions, between reality and the imagination].


INSECTS (2018)

The inspiration for this film was “The Insect Play” by brothers Čapek. It’s a misanthropic play where the Čapeks compare people to insects, and civilization to an anthill. Even though the play was written in the 1920s, it is still relevant today. In our film, the play is the backdrop of the actual story: an amateur theater troupe in a small town is rehearsing “The Insect Play.” During the rehearsal, the actors’ lives intertwine with those of the characters in the stage play.

It’s not a “political” film, but an imaginative one that offers several possible interpretations. It is closer in tone to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis than to the work of Čapeks. (We borrowed the insects from the zoo, where they are bred as animal feed. After the shoot we gave them back.)


KUNSTKAMERA (2022)

This is definitely my final film. It’s a walk through the buildings that house my collection (the castle and the former granary in Horní Staňkov, near Klatovy). It captures the imaginative and magical atmosphere of the collection and its environs; the soundtrack is limited to music and foley sound effects. The film should give the impression that it’s not a “dead,” closed collection, but a space where ordinary life continues, a “living” and enjoyed reality (for instance, the sequence that shows an unfinished snack lying between pieces of art; a water bowl for a dog or a cat; an unfinished cup of coffee; slippers; an unmade bed, etc.).

Why did I make this film? History tells us that up to this day all kunstkameras have, upon the death of their creator, been taken away, sold off piecemeal, or destroyed (like the collections of Emperor Rudolf II, or André Breton). Yet these are unique documents of the state of [society’s] imagination at that time. Official museums cannot replace such collections because they lack personal commitment.

I realized that my collection would certainly meet the same fate, so I decided to document it now (the remnants of the magical world), at least in this way.