Marital Etudes 20 Years Later - Ivana a Vaclav

Marital Etudes 20 Years Later continues the cycle Marital Etudes, broadcast by Czechoslovak television in 1987. The cycle at that time consisted of six documentary films, which explored the lives of six couples for six years following their weddings (1980-1986). Since 1999, Helena Třeštíková resumed shooting and she has now taken the protagonists of her films to the present.

In the episode entitled Ivana and Václav we witness a married couple of architects, who run a giant furniture shop in the upscale Vinohrady neighborhood of Prague. They have five children together, and it would seem they are perfectly happy… A man moans at his partner: know yourself. Documentary film may be the place to search for meaning, caring for one’s soul, learning what forms the limits of man and woman.

The time-lapse method in film contributes something of the relationship between the confessor and the confessing, in a stream of dialogue, passing through landscapes of love, break-up, returns, and the intimate loneliness against a social-political background that results from human participation in public affairs. To put so much faith in time, however, means to work without a rescue net, for it is time who dictates the method and lends order to this great inner experience of others’ lives.

A past permanently present in a film turned towards future is formed by confessions, a number of details defining the social status of the protagonists. In particular, the perspective of the transformation of society as a whole as can be expressed within the narrow circle of a single family. This significant part of an inner memory of Czech society would be unthinkable without the director’s sensitivity, her empathy, patience and respect for her objects.

In a debate on the recent phenomenon of reality shows, the sociologist Jaromír Volek placed the time-lapse documentaries of Helena Třeštíková far above the voyeuristic boredom of TV coldness precisely because of her desire to understand, to capture reality in such a way as to help us understand human destinies.

(source: catalogue MFDF Jihlava)