Vlastimil Venclík

“When I will talk about the time, they accepted me at the Film Academy, in 1966, it all slowly moved towards a culmination which happened in 1968, the freeing, when other perspectives opened as well as painful social wounds. I felt a need to make a movie about rehabilitation. I run in Prague with a tape recorder and recorded political prisoners and prepared material for a movie. When I collected about 40 hours of material, I found out I have no right to make a movie about it because I did not experience it myself and that it needs some personal experience. So, from the 40 hours of materials I chose one story of later dissident Klement Lukeš who became the main witness and I filmed only some final scenes for the edited movie in my second year. The movie was called ‚Národ sobě, groteskní dokument o cestě k socialismu‘. I started with Jan Masaryk’s speech in 1948, in January, ‘I believe we weather the year 1948 as a well-functioning parliamentary democracy’. Because it was one of the key movies for me, one of the key things, by which I stood with my whole personality, I remember it still today, including what those people in the movie said. Then there was a cut and militias marched, Gottwald’s roaring enthusiasm, the balcony and so on. And I only finished shooting prisons and Klement Lukeš live.”

“Someone asked me to write something which would cheer people up during the epidemic. And I wrote an essay which was called ‘What we actually can do’. And I came to the conclusion that the only thing which no one can take away from you is what you gather inside. I have always thought that freedom is mostly an inner thing. You can have it even if you are in jail as London wrote in The Star Rover. The freedom is a feeling you can induce. We knew it even during the times of unfreedom. It means that you stand by your opinion or by your feelings and you try to make the world a better place within your limited options.”

“Suddenly people understood that if they want to function okay, they have to adapt, or if they want to live in a reasonable way. Because only lunatics or people who somehow need the truth to live or see it as a necessity, like bread, they get their ass kicked, of course. The ‘normal’ people hid and waited. And I think that actually, historically, Czechs have this Švejklike nature, which was in a part so ingeniously depicted by Hašek. That it’s a kind of protective camouflage, which helps us survive. That’s what the film The Uninvited Guest was about for me. The important part wasn’t that he came there in the night. That happens all over the world. But these Czech sly-boots like that married couple in the film, who protest at first and want to kill him, until they realise that they can actually communicate with him, with the occupier. He tells them: ‘The man next door has a sow [in his flat].’ That’s the basis [of the film], that [the uninvited guests] are in every flat. That when Landovský charges in with a suitcase in the night, the husband rushes off to his neighbour, opens the door, and a similarly dressed [guest] appears there, and in the next flat as well. He [the uninvited guest] tells him: ‘They’re everywhere.’ And the couple have to get alongside it somehow, alongside that crushing fact. And they do it by finding out that this [guest] is quite nice, he sleeps in their bed with them. He’s like that, and he says: ‘The man next door has a sow, and I want to get on well with everyone. The times require it, you must understand. I’ll be like your brother and friend, isn’t that enough?’ I’m quoting from the dialogue of the film, which I saw many times. It cost me basically my whole career, so it’s kind of a crucial work for me. I’ve never shot anything better because I could never work freely. And it’s not that I don’t have the material, but there isn’t any interest in it any more.”

“I think that there’s one important thing that has to be stressed, that me and the whole of my generation are the ‘children of the Fifties’. I can still remember that when we came to school, some of the comrade teachers showed great interest in what our parents said at home. For instance, I never joined the Pioneers, and that’s the first moment when you find that you have to adapt socially. Because you find that you might get into trouble otherwise. For example, during the war one of the key things about this attitude was that the Russians had robbed us in 1945. Back then they told Dad: ‘Don’t you go abotu telling anyone!’ Those two-faced morals were already in effect. They were the liberators, and that halo of theirs, I already knew I wasn’t allowed to speak about it at school. I also remember how our teachers asked us if our parents listened to Free Europe or Voice of America. That’s something when even at the youngest of ages you see there’s a conflict between truth and reality and that if you want to survive, you have to, as the comrades said, be wary and vigilant. So that’s what you have to be so you don’t blab out something by mistake, like what you heard at home or what your parents listened to.”

“Military service, that’s a waste of time. It’s such a bizarre thing, I have to share. I served for two years in Pardubice, and my initial assignment was as a dog handler. During boot camp, that was the first two months, and I was a bohemian kind of person. Say, there was an alert, and I said: ‘Well, I’ll finish my lunch first, right?’ So you can imagine they wiped the floor with me. I could tell you lots of bizarre incidents, say, how I got lost during a night-time exercise. What’s important about the dog handler is that my friend wrote on the envelope of a letter he sent me: Private Venclík – the dog handlerandler. And they considered that the divulging of a military secret. I was frightened of the dogs, and I was glad when they re-assigned me. So I didn’t even get in touch with them, it was right at the beginning. They then assigned me to the specialisation of Assistant for Oxygen Equipment and Extinguishers, another bizarre title. And basically what that meant was that I served at an airbase and wore a blue uniform, which soon came to an end – the blue uniforms for the air force. We refilled planes with oxygen in Pardubice. And there was one problem – that we couldn’t grease the taps in the oxygen depot because it would immediately explode. Back then I was weak, sickly, so it was pretty difficult for me to open those taps. One time they cancelled a flying day because of me, because I couldn’t open it at all. So I said I’d saved the state millions. Because when they don’t take off, it already cost a million back then. That’s when the aeroplanes where on the ground, and when they fly up, that has to be several millions.”