The video Empty Locations / And what about you, Mireček? by the filmmaker Jan Rousek, which was created with the support of Artyčok.TV, is based on his doctoral thesis at FAMU entitled Czechoslovak Colonial Film. It is based on the assumption that colonialism also applies to countries that did not explicitly participate in colonialism, but historically benefited from it.
When speaking about the theme of his thesis Jan Rousek said: “Czechoslovak film adopted from the West the colonial stereotype of the black man with a limited range of roles – a black man in Western films was seen for a long period of time in particular as a slave, criminal, native primitive, entertainer or erotomaniac. This stereotype was supported by the character of the cinema industry since blacks did not get many opportunities to form a discourse of themselves. Czechoslovak cinematography adopted this model and films from the period of the first republic show blacks, for example, as servants or barbarians, or in roles emphasising their bodies, e.g. the role of a boxer in the film „Pudr a benzín“ starring Voskovec and Werich, 1931. Socialist cinema later brought a certain ambivalence to the history of depicting the black man – blacks begin to appear in feature films in more dignified roles of students, workers or not too specified characters. The colonial mindset ceases to be explicit, it becomes the clearest and is often connected with the context of the political and commercial interests of the Eastern Bloc (e.g. the film Křik (Scream) by Jaromil Jireš or the poet series by Dušan Klein).
The title of Jan Rousek´s work refers to the text by the theoretician Homi K. Bhabha entitled The Location of Culture. He interprets the location of culture „... as a space where the coloniser and the colonized meet on an abstract and practical level. These are, for example, racial stereotypes that appear in culture and art, but also in interpersonal communication or power structures”.
The author considers the video Empty Locations / And what about you, Mireček? as a part of the decolonisation process within the framework of the history of Czechoslovak cinema. His conceptual method of work is based on the deconstruction and re-interpretation of original scenes from Czechoslovak films, e.g. Křik (directed by Jaromil Jireš, 1963), Jak básníci přicházejí o iluze (directed by Dušan Klein, 1984) and Dědictví aneb Kurvahošigutntag (directed by Věra Chytilová, 1992). All these films feature stereotyped black characters. Jan Rousek says that „... the selected films represent to a great degree the approach of Czechoslovak cinematography towards unfamiliar characters, in this case towards a black who always appears only in a supporting role and is often ridiculed because of being different, because of the different colour of his skin. The character of a black man usually serves as a kind of mirror reflecting the main character who is always played by a white.“
In practice, Rousek re-filmed the given scenes shot by shot in the original locations. But in his film those locations are empty, without actors and in an unclear space-time. We can hear the original soundtrack of the film but the moments when characters of black descent speak, their lines are cut out and replaced with subtitles. The absence of problem moments serves to emphasize the colonial relationships in the story in each film. The absurdity and essentialist bias of the dialogues is made visible thanks to the disruption of the original film experience. Classical films, which are repeated ad infinitum on TV, are already part of the collective cultural memory. They are imprinted in this memory naturally with all the problem places and tropes. It makes sense to become aware of the tropes and look at them from a new, critical angle, because it increases our receptivity and sensitivity which are a necessary prerequisite for changing our behavior outside the fictional space of the film, within our everyday life.
Jiří Žák
The video is a part of the Issue 02: Sweep around your own front door
