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Decades in life of a Czech family captured in new Třeštíková doc film

Evropa

  16:18

An intimate portrait of one Czech family, ‘Private Universe’ also reflects the country’s history from mid-1970s to present day

Honza Kettner with a photo of himself from the 1974 short ‘Miracle’ (‘Zázrak’); ‘Private Universe’ covers nearly four decades in the life of a man born ‘on camera’ foto: © Negativ FilmsČeská pozice

The leading Czech documentary maker Helena Třeštíková has earned international renown via a series of films that follow the lives of their subjects for unusually extensive periods of time. Her latest, “Private Universe” (“Soukromý Vesmír”), is the director’s longest project to date, recording the story of one family over a remarkable 37 years.

Třeštíková, 62, honed her singular, painstaking approach with the 1980s Czechoslovak Television series “Marriage Stories” (“Manželské etudy”), and later based her first cinema release “Marcela” (2006) on the tragic fate of the wife in one of those portraits. “René” (2008) followed a repeat offender to and from prison over two decades, while the harrowing “Katka” (2010) documented the downward spiral of a Prague drug addict.

“Private Universe,” which receives its premiere this week, represents a marked change in terms of subject matter. “‘Katka’ and ‘René’ are about people on the fringes of society, but this is a portrait of a family that functions normally, that’s stable,” Třeštíková, the recipient of the 2008 Prix Arte from the European Film Academy, told Czech Position. “One of their children is a bit of a rebel, but generally speaking it’s about normal people.”

While undeniably less dramatic, the latest documentary by Třeštíková (who was Czech minister of culture for a few weeks in January 2007) is visually creative and frequently funny. Following the bleak and depressing themes of her previous films, that must have been a bit of a relief.

“Well, I’m very glad I could make such a film,” she says. “It may look like I just concentrate on tragic stories. But my ambition is to be a chronicler recording life in all its forms, and this form is far more common.”

© YouTube — The official trailer for ‘Soukromý Vesmír’ (refresh your browser if video isn’t visible)

Miracle start

The new film grew out of “Miracle” (“Zázrak”), a 15-minute documentary Třeštíková made in 1974 about Jana Kettnerová and husband Petr Kettner having their first baby, Honza, while in their mid-twenties. (The two women’s mothers had been friends and they’ve known each other since early childhood.)

From that moment, Petr recorded key moments in the family’s story – Honza’s first steps, the arrival of daughters Anna and Eva, building their first house – in a series of 30 or so scrapbooks. His readings from those diaries provide “Private Universe” with a charming and often amusing narrative glue.

Like thousands of others under Communism, the Kettners in a sense retreated into their own “private universe,” focusing on raising their kids and trying to keep their heads down.

Jana, a sociology graduate, says she has no regrets today about choosing to be a stay-at-home mother rather than making the compromises required to build a career in the totalitarian state. “I’m glad I lived through that period. It was quiet,” she says. “I didn’t mind being at home.”

For his part, her husband, an electrician, tells Třeštíková that the Charter 77 protest movement simply “passed them by.” However, Kettner did travel from their home in the north Bohemian town of Liberec to Prague for a rare unauthorized demonstration in 1988, a year before the collapse of the Communist system.

Honza, in his mid teens when the Velvet Revolution occurred, is the member of the family who ultimately becomes the most overtly political. Attracted to the punk lifestyle, he becomes a wild-haired anarchist and enthusiastic marijuana smoker. The habit stays with him as he drifts about for some years before meeting a Basque activist in Spain, where he works as a dishwasher. Differences with Jana arising from his failure to “fulfill his potential” are among the few tensions in the film.

Teflon crooner

In parallel with milestones in the Kettners’ lives, “Private Universe” features archive TV footage reminding viewers of events in the wider world. Indeed, in a way it offers a kind of potted history of the country over the period from 1974 until 2011, including key turning points (November 1989, EU accession) and a procession of political leaders (presidents Gustav Husák, Václav Havel and Václav Klaus, former premier Vladimír Špidla).

However, keen not to distract too much from the family’s story, Třeštíková mainly focuses on just two “externals.” One is the Cold War space race, and in particular the first, and only, Czechoslovak cosmonaut, Vladimír Remek. “The cosmos is a basic symbol of the age in our film,” she says. “When I repeatedly saw Honza’s drawings of rockets and cosmonauts in the family scrapbooks, my mind was made up.”

The second such motif is the evergreen Czech singer Karel Gott, now 72, who we first see parroting Socialist platitudes as a normalization-era pop star and expressing his admiration for Remek at the time of the latter’s 1978 space flight as part of the Soviets’ Soyuz 28 mission.

But, evidently able to adapt to any system, the multimillion-album selling crooner also pops up 11 years later leading huge crowds on Wenceslas Square in the national anthem with exiled folkie Karel Kryl during the revolution. Still hugely popular, he becomes a joke presidential “nominee” in the 2000s.

“If you live in this country, Karel Gott is always present. Whatever’s going on, he’s always with us,” says Třeštíková of the ubiquitous pop singer. “He’s never disappeared, and he’s unique in that. When I was looking for a figure like that for the film, I kept coming back to him.”

She recounts an old joke: Do you know how Gustav Husák will be regarded in 50 years? As an insignificant politician in the era of Karel Gott. “And that’s what’s happened!”

By the way, a recording of an old radio interview (discovered by a friend of the director’s on a tape in a junk shop) in which the singer speaks about his experiences of an illicit substance provides a surprising – and hilarious – coda during the closing credits.

“Private Universe” (“Soukromý Vesmír”)
At selected Prague cinemas from 26.1.2012

— Ian Willoughby is a Prague-based freelance journalist

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