“Our pseudo-lives were nothing but speech bubbles. We desecrated everything. […] We ground [it all] to dust,” says Vít Soukup as the pessimist Drudge in the series Old Mates. His approach to films was similar. He made works full of ironic references to high culture and low, and enjoyed using clichés in their raw state. He desecrated, belittled, emptied, and thus could express fundamental truths that, undisguised, would have sounded too banal.
In fact, based on his Suppository Theory, he wanted to prescribe his “homeopathy of Banality” to all the fine arts of that time so that they might break free of their elitist incomprehensibility.
The films of Vít Soukup are being published on a DVD by VVP AVU and Divus publishing.
http://www.divus.cc/en/eshop/product/film-a-multimedia/1815/vit-soukup-vsechno.html
More on Vít Soukup:http://www.vit-soukup.cz/
Second part of a series: A drama of two aging men and the search for one’s place in the sun
A spoof of the Czechoslovakian television series Dobrá voda (1982, dir. František Filip) about a group of horse breeders. In The Silver Trail, set against the backdrop of a snail farm with its champion race snails Slimey and Escargot, we follow the same dramatic story as in the original series: a son’s rebellion against his father, who is “the last honest guy in this place”. The honor of an entire dynasty is at stake, the farm is struggling for survival: first comes an external threat in the form of a mafia-like traitor, and then it is destroyed by the revolt of the farm’s heir himself.
With: Jan Materna, Adam Hlaváč, Jan Veselý, Vít Soukup, Stanislav Maruška, Jakub Sova
Announcer: Jan Kučera
Camera: Adam Hlaváč
Music: Jan Kučera
Title song: Vít Soukup, Jan Materna
Written and directed by: Vít Soukup
In the Window to the Archive programme the AVU Research Center in Prague (VVP AVU) in conjunction with Artyčok.tv is regularly releasing works from the VVP AVU video archive (go to http://vvp.avu.cz/idatum/search/artvideoarchiv?string=). The selection for Artyčok.tv focuses on older works (materials from the end of the 20th century), works bordering on video art, film and documentation, or on purely documentary materials related to the recent development of Czech and Slovak visual art.
