Film

Between Entrance and Exit is a film greatly influenced by the emotional world of my youth - by the apartment in which I was born, filled with heavy, dark 19th century furniture (in fact much of the furniture used in the film comes from the apartment in which I was born) and by three personalities who were born in my country and whose work influenced much of the world: Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler. While making the film they were always present in my mind. Their work explored the essence of human existence with its contradicting emotionality and inexplicable desires.

But Prague itself was the biggest inspiration for me. Although this film carries certain elements of my youth, it should be regarded as pure fantasy and nothing more....! The symbolic character of the title Between Entrance and Exit is very easy to understand. But it is as "easily" understood as the time given to us between our birth and our death.....! 

In our film there are two protagonists - a man and a woman....They meet in a labyrinth of an abandoned apartment filled with antique furniture. They are in a room filled with long forgotten love-letters or in a winter garden. Maybe they are contemporaries, maybe they only live in each others fantasy....Their seriousness, clownery, vulnerability, sexuality and their insecurity and violence is the fabric of which this film is made. Their emotional encounter is commanded by one thing only: by the realization that all their desires and all their unfulfilled dreams are here just for a short while and will soon be snuffed out like a candle....

The short film entitled “Schwarzfahrer” is shot in an historic Prague tram from 1930 which I used to travel on as a very young boy. The theme of this film is an encounter and a surreal trip of the two passengers. It is a meeting of a middle aged woman with a younger man in this nostalgic trip through time and space and through memories which perhaps never even happened. It is a symbol of irrevocable loss of young love on one side and on the other the only security accompanying us all our life: the terminal station. The trip of our protagonists might be meaningful or useless or something just in between - but certainly with humour even if it is as black asanthracite....! The song by Schubert “Nacht und Träume” (1822–23) is of essential importance as it adds tenderness, sensuality and intensity to this film. “Schwarzfahrer” is a German term for people who use tramswithout paying for the fare. None of us ever bought a ticket for our journey through life! Nobody ever told us which tram we should take....! As a result, we have to change trams often. But whichever tram we take, one thing is sure - sooner or later we will arrive at our "final destination".

In 2015, I was invited to the Cinematica festival in Ancona. While being there, I was taken to the Monumento ai Caduti, with its impressive stairs leading into the Adriatic sea. I stood on top of these steps and looked at other people's shadows scattered across the steps in all kinds of abstract rectangles. I found it very intriguing and symbolic and decided to make a short film inspired by it. The symbolism of the place is easy to understand. There is the monument dedicated to all soldiers who died in any war. There are the mighty stairs leading downwards into the ocean or upwards towards the sky. Also the plot for the movie is simple: A couple who spent some forty years together are celebrating the anniversary of their honeymoon which started on these steps. So here they are again, forty years later, on the same spot, looking back at their lives, trying to come to terms with it, and trying to look into a very short and unsure future. With tears and laughter and with humour and sarcasm, they try to reenact some of the moments they shared in the past. The seemingly important moments are diminished by the time passed, some of the negligible events become prominent. The eternal struggle between microcosm and macrocosm is ever present. All values change and there is some kind of feeling of loss and nostalgia in the air. The celebration of their honeymoon starts turning into hallucination and illusion in which the line between reality and fantasy no longer exists.

For at least 2 years I have planned to make a short film on the theme of Carmen with the ex senior dancers of NDT III. I think, that it is not difficult to understand why the theme of Carmen attracted us and why we wanted to make a new interpretation of it. My fascination with the theme of Carmen is multiple. Our aim was to reduce the cast to only four protagonists: Carmen, Don José, Escamillo and Micaëla. The great Czech automobile Tatra became the bull without which no Carmen can exist which had a decisive impact on the film. 

The performers are much older and actually too old to play the flamboyant and passionate characters. This actually became a very intriguing aspect of the whole undertaking. They hadthe opportunity to re-live and reinterpret their emotions however with the experience of all the time that has passed by. They do this with much more humour and fury then how they wouldexperience it as young people. They now see everything through a deformed mirror of time and they live these moments anew to the very extremes of their personality. Because this story is timeless and because it has already happened to the protagonists years before and because they re-interpret it now, we have decided that the film will hardly ever be shot in normal speed. All sequences will be either sped up or slowed down. By doing so, we want the spectators to be exceptionally aware of the time which passes through us in every moment of our existence! We felt that the ideal site for this film would be a land totally flattened and destroyed by human beings – the only place which could host these primary emotions of the protagonists.