Created in 1997, the Jihlava festival, about a hundred kilometers southeast of Prague, in the Czech Republic, is one of seven in the European Doc Alliance network, dedicated to documentary cinema. Gustav Mahler grew up here and German-speaking, Slavic and Jewish communities historically mixed together. Here the vibrant heart of Central Europe still beats.
For its 27th edition, from October 24 to 29, 2023, the festival honored the history of French cinema with sessions dedicated for example to the Méliès brothers or Marguerite Duras, showed once again its love and expertise of experimental cinema as its constant concern for contemporary debates, with a strong social, environmental and political commitment.
Failing to be able to account for all this richness, we are choosing to share with you some highlights of Central Europe, through two meetings with monuments of contemporary cinematography and the preview of a extraordinary film about the father of contemporary Czechia.
Béla Tarr, melancholy of resistance
The master of Hungarian cinema, 68 years old, gave a master class in front of a young audience, filled with veneration. “ I don’t work differently with actors or non-actors, these are all human being, he explained. They have to be themselves, if they start acting, I say, “That was very enjoyable, but not for this movie.” »
So, for THE Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), screened before this exchange, is the meeting with Lars Rudolph, very similar for him to the protagonist of the central part of the book by his compatriot Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Melancholy of resistancewhich convinced him to embark on his adaptation.
He plans everything, the music, which he considers as a character, with which he must therefore get to know before filming, the setting in which he likes to first spend time alone, then to prepare his shots without any character, so that they do not lose their spontaneity. However, it does not follow any storyline or dialogue. These characters must improvise on the instructions he gives them, staying as close as possible to their deep nature.
“ It’s a bit like cooking, you look at what ingredients you have and you forget the recipe. You do the best with what you have. » Laughter is heard from the audience, perhaps surprised to discover in this director celebrated for these majestic and meditative black and white sequence shots, a speaker with biting and deeply embodied remarks.
“ When you’re twenty, if you don’t want to change the world, you’re a f… conformist », he says to thunderous applause. “ Afterwards, continues the one who says he is always perceived as a black sheep in his country, I understood that the problems are not only social, but ontological and, ultimately, cosmic. »
When asked about his relationship with documentary cinema, he replies that he does not know what it is. “ The presence of a camera changes people. Therefore, what you are filming is indeed f… fiction. The only question is what you want to say and what you want to share with people. »
For him, finally, journalism is a different category. “It’s only when you transform your experience that you make art.” I haven’t experienced war and I couldn’t see myself going to film in Ukraine. It is up to the person who experiences this experience to talk about it. »
Agnieszka Holland, still political
The great Polish director discussed her latest fiction via video, The Green Borderreleased in September in Poland and compared by the Minister of Justice to a “ Nazi propaganda film “. Also shot in black and white, in a hurry, it shows the reality of the suffering endured by the refugees in the border between Poland and Belarus from November 2021.
The hate campaign to which the director was subjected forced the production to provide her with two bodyguards for her travels. She had to leave Poland temporarily. As for the film, it already had more than 750,000 spectators in its country in one month. thanks to government advertising », she smiles. Many believe that what is shown there and the reaction as outrageous as it is defamatory of those in power towards it also had an influence on the elections, which turned out in favor of the centrist opposition.
Invited by the festival which wanted to show its support for a film which has just been released in the Czech Republic, she explained that she had deliberately chosen not to go towards the documentary format for several reasons. “ I like having control over what the actors do, rather than observing characters “, she first confided in a personal capacity, before adding that she would have feared, especially on such a subject, “ to enter too much into people’s lives ».
This did not prevent her from having among her film crew several Syrian refugees who were very familiar with the situations she wanted to report on, in order to remain faithful to reality. The film took as its setting a forest near Warsaw for reasons of authorization, in a setting however very similar to that of the events which took place in the east of the country.
It was preceded by meticulous investigative work. “ I met a man who had crossed the border twenty-six times “, she recalled to convey both how difficult the passage had become and how unshakeable the determination of the refugees was. His next film will focus on the biography of Franz Kafka.
Memories of Vavslav Havel
When, after thirteen years of almost continuous power, first at the head of Czechoslovakia, then at the head of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel once again became an ordinary citizen or, to use his words, “ a former president for life “, he asked Petr Jancarek to film the rest of his life.
World premiered at the festival, the resulting documentary – Havel speaks. You hear me ? – paints an intimate and humorous portrait of the man who, dreaming of being a director, became a famous playwright and whose stature as a political opponent of the communist dictatorship led almost in spite of himself to the heights of power.
The career of the head of state is therefore quickly retraced by archive images in the pre-credits to give way to the daily life of a man fighting against illness, haunted by his old cinema dreams. Born into a wealthy family – very closely linked to the birth of the 7th art in Central Europe –, for this reason he had paradoxically not had access to artistic studies, alternating between poetic writing, then drama, and working-class experiences.
The world that appears to us, where we come across Joan Baez in concert and a photograph of John F. Kennedy on a library shelf, where we see the great playwright in intimate conversation with the filmmaker Milos Forman (who passed away in 2018) , takes us back to a time of hope and change after decades of the Cold War.
Marked by Franz Kafka and the theater of the absurd, the former president shows himself to be an amused witness to the power that he had first imagined in his plays, before realizing that reality corresponded to what he thought of it. had written. Above all, he is aware that the world and humanity are now changing at a frantic pace and in unpredictable ways.
Twelve years have passed since the disappearance of this major figure of “velvet revolution”. Despite the color images and the proximity created by the documentary maker with his character, behind the struggles of a man who experienced during the same year 1989, for the last time the prison of the reprobate and for the first time the honor of the presidency, it is also a question here of the melancholy of the resistance, in the face of a Central Europe now threatened by populism and the ever-devouring ambitions of Moscow.
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