- The feature film of visual artist Tomas Svoboda is not solely preoccupied with film. It is not a quaint reflection on the moving image. It is not a hilarious story of one summer afternoon. It cannot be viewed as a record of a work in progress. Neither is it a narrative film. And it most certainly isn't about the technology used in creating film footage. The film is about life.
- Tomas Svoboda is a visual artist. His original project "Like a Movie" is a reflection on film (and the moving image in general) as a specific language and medium, and on its influence on our lives. It traces five basic lines both in respect of its mode of thinking and on the level of form and content. In its own way each of these lines reveals the same thing, namely that though film and life are two separate worlds, there exists a kind of point of intersection, and that at certain moments we are unable to distinguish what is film and what is reality. The first line is represented by the preparation of a lecture on film as a medium in which filmic fiction and life intersect, influencing and permeating each other such that they interrogate the boundary between them. It is shot from the POV of the person working on the lecture and then adds quotes from books, texts from the internet, illustrations from films, videos, security camera recordings, etc. From simple examples of the penetration of life by film, the author of the lecture gradually arrives at the conclusion that film/video/moving image has so influenced the way we perceive our surroundings that we could easily forfeit our lives as a consequence. This line culminates with amateur shots from civil wars in the Middle East in which many people filming events on the street with their mobile telephones were shot or killed. They recorded their own murders, their own deaths, because they did not experience reality physically but through the safety of the moving image on the display of a smartphone. The second line comprises a sequence from the studio filming of an actor in front of blue-screen. It thematizes the emergence of film, the role of the actor and his or her character, the professional background and the production technology. It is shot by a camera simulating the view of a "real" camera as it would be used during filming. The actor is gradually led and manipulated by all the usual professional elements participating in the creation of an audiovisual work, which at the end is subject to bitter reflection by the actor himself. The third line is made up of classically shot scenes from the weekend retreat of a psychologist speaking with an old friend, a screenwriter who is unable to distinguish the "real" world from the "film" world. These worlds become so intertwined that the screenwriter has to seek medical help. Dialogues are interspersed with reminiscences, flashes of the patient's memory. The humor closes with some serious considerations regarding the method of saving and retrieving visual sequences from human memory, only for everything to be overturned and called completely into question. The fourth line is the "narrated film". When we recount events to our friends, the story of a film, we inadvertently transform one medium into another. The moving image reverts to text unfolding in time. An important personality in world cinema, the director Jiri Menzel, narrates the film Closely Observed Films, which in 1968 won an Oscar for best foreign language film, in his own words. The fifth line is made up of a recording of the "production process" of an audiovisual work intended for screening in a gallery. In an abandoned factory an artist creates an environment for shooting a short video containing reflections on the moving image. The video is shot, edited and presented as an image within an image within the framework of the film. All the lines are visually distinct both in terms of environment and the method of filming. They are edited individually, but over time they begin to interpenetrate by means of linking motifs. Gradually they create an interwoven structure that in the end is integrated at a surprising point / points. Notwithstanding all the motifs described above, the feature film by the visual artist Tomas Svoboda is not a film about film. It is not an essay on the moving image, nor is it a humorous story from one summer afternoon. It cannot be regarded as the record of a working method, nor as a narrative film. And by no means is it a film about the technology of film recording. It is about life.
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