Záviš, the Prince of Pornofolk Under the Influence of Griffith’s Intolerance and Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday or The Foundation and Doom of Czechoslovakia (1918–1992)

An attempt to interpret the peculiarity of the modern era. Martin Heidegger introduces the concept “authentic existence,” i.e. the acceptance of responsibility for one’s own existence and concerns about that existence; the possible manner of those concerns are explained by Karel Vachek in his book The Theory of Matter. The opposite is false existence. In light of the fact existence always understands its options, knows about them, choice depends on willingness alone, and it can not evade through ignorance. In a variety of quite often bizarre situations, the film attempts to find the lines between authentic and false existences. The director almost exclusively employs static shots, most of which are staged, as if trying to distance the audience from events they already know from television reports. Thanks to frequent use of a wide 8mm lens, he frames the depicted content’s peculiarity in a peculiar formal structure as well. On the heels of a threelegged dog, Vachek leads us on a journey through the Czech present and the Czechoslovak past: four-yearold Edvard Beneš saves his parents’ lives, sixty-year-old Václav Klaus does and doesn’t play tennis, a statue bangs its head against a wall; people fight in ketchup and bury their dogs; a collapsed house, a house made of marijuana, and a businessman’s billion-crown villa; polar bears, falcons, and stuffed foxes. The songs of Milan Záviš Smrčka, a wise user of vulgar words, round out the whole comedy-lecture. (official distributor synopsis)