(Soukromé století - král Velichovek, Tatíček a Lili Marlén), Jan Šikl / ČR, 2005
Czech version, 104 min
In 1992, the director Jan Šikl founded an Archive of Private Film History. From the hundreds of hours of material he thus obtained, he patiently and painstakingly transformed elements into the parts of his documentary project Private Century.
These intensely emotional films offer, aside from a lasting sense of multiple death (of a human being, of an image, of cinema), offer an exceptional insight into the mental texture of the relationships within families and society.
Period details form the backdrop to family life, whose intimacy, in turn, is permeated with political and social activity. The difficult relationship of Czech and Germans in the fatal cataclysm of war and occupation is portrayed in the two parts presented in Jihlava, illuminating the life of a German farmer (Tatíček ) and his daughter (Lili Marlen).
Suggestive shots from a prolonged party. The flat‘s windows are blacked out, because of the threat of bombing in occupied Prague. Masked Lili, together with a girlfriend, shows off in front of the party – the friend will soon set off to make love with German soldiers. All is filmed by Lili‘s Czech husband; during the war, Lili would divorce him and marry a Bohemian German. The German-Czech bourgeoisie is having fun – in the context of larger history this is a eloquent footnote, in the fluidity of the film it is torture, for we can see those who did not live to see the beginning of this present film.
The whole tone of the passage of time, neither lost nor recaptured, is set by the flow of intimacy, the shifts of which both director and editor have grasped to perfection, and simultaneously managed to convey in an idiom different from that of the perspective of the author of the family footage. The comprehensibility of the story is the direct result of the fragments of archival imprints, aesthetically unambiguous, but at the same time obscure outside of the family circle.
These images are a sediment between light and film, between an individual and a nation, between narrative and history (and historiography), they form an important border that in various stages of consciousnness and subconscious demands active understanding from the viewer, which can never be permanent, but which can be called a metamorphosis through moving in circles.
