Miroslav Janek

"That was normally a two-year military service, but the unit was just like that, it was the Army Art Ensemble, it's in Pohořelec, the front building, if you remember, this huge building, that's where they the [tram] twenty-two stops. So it was like half soldiers and half civilians, there was a ballet, a symphony, a jazz orchestra too. I was in the publicity department there, and I had the job of taking pictures from time to time. I had a beautiful photo chamber there, and actually almost unlimited walks. There was no canteen, so we were given money for food and had to eat out on our own, three times a day. So for me, the Black Ox, that was a second home, and that's where I went to eat and drink beer and stuff. And especially there was this great bunch of people. So that's where it opened me up, I sat in the office with Petr Sís for a year, a friend of mine at the same time. Then we connected in New York. Or Labus was there with us in the army and people like that, so I even made a couple of my amateur films there."

"Ever since I was a kid I lived in those vaporizers, those developers and fixers, because it was traditionally done in the bathroom, right. If it was just right, my dad would put a board in there and put an enlarger on top of it and just take pictures, and well, there was a camera whirring. But other than that, he had a projector and a screen. And we were always begging him to put on a film because they, in those days, in those days you could buy eight-millimeter copies of all sorts of short, like animated films, Bratři v triku (Brothers in T-shirt). So our, or at least my favorite movie was Mr. Prokop Builds a House, and that was just a puppet movie about Mr. Prokop building a house and he's always drinking rum and then he's like building it a little crooked. Then there's shots through this kind of wavy glass where there's actually a view of this drunken bricklayer. And then I think it probably ends with this sort of socialist ethos that he's going to somehow come out of it, sober up, and somehow understand that he shouldn't be drinking and that he should be building the bricks straight. But we were mostly amused by how drunk he was, how he was slapping the mortar and stuff, so we actually had a kind of cinema."