Director: Klára Tasovská
Libuše Jarcovjáková is a photographer, born in Prague in 1952. Her Prague was one of Communist occupation, fixed gender roles, and oppression of women and LGBT+ people. A Prague taken over by Soviet influence in 1968. A city of transport, industry, and cultural suppression.
Jarcovjáková was determined to document this world and her life, and I’m Not Everything I Want To Be reveals the extent and depth of her work, accompanied by narration from the artist herself taken from her journals. She was inspired by those around her, by nature, the weather, the sounds, the tastes.
Director Tasovská allows the images to tell the story in this inspiring and detailed documentary, adding sound effects to bring the photographs to life while offering an expansive portrait of a woman who engaged with every moment.
The pictures offer a broad social commentary on the iron grip the Soviet Union held over Czechoslovakia, while taking the time to capture the minutiae of daily life’s mundanity. It’s what people take the time to do, where they go, and how they interact.
In Jarcovjáková’s world, everything is of interest and worth making permanent. Few people have taken the time to reveal and represent their lives in this manner. Her narration is sometimes soporific in tone, but it somehow fits with the images, and you keep watching.
This is an artist who is interested in everything, from the blandest of conversations to the enveloping hug of the community around her. We enter pubs, factories, classrooms, bedrooms, and buses. Not only considering the sexism, homophobia, and political pressure, but also matters of racism, sex, and idealism.
Characters populate the documentary and vanish as quickly as they arrive, but due to the volume of images shown, they leave a mark and a memory. In Jarcovjáková’s best-known photographs, the Czech gay underground is captured. Illegal in the wider country, these are places where homosexuals and lesbians can be themselves.
I’m Not Everything I Want To Be is often achingly honest. It discusses identity, love, lust, and freedom from a deeply personal perspective. It captures the fleeting nature of life under occupation, and the ache of finding something new, dynamic, and even subversive.
Under Jarcovjáková’s lens, her work celebrates uniformity and mundanity while challenging the political and social mores around her. Her images of a vibrant nightlife find something very different and offer a skin of protection to the weird and wonderful people around her.
There is a certain beauty and poetry about her photographs. As Jarcovjáková swaps Czech life in 1985 for Western European freedom in Berlin, she encounters a new kind of barrier in the Berlin Wall, now separating her from the East.
The drama of self-discovery is set out through the images presented in I’m Not Everything I Want To Be. Documenting life as a drip-feed of personal awareness, Jarcovjáková’s work attains and retains a wider relevance to how women and outsiders lived in the latter half of the 20th century in Europe, particularly under the influence of the hammer and sickle.
In her journal narration, Jarcovjáková states that her work has “nothing to say.” I’m Not Everything I Want To Be shows the value of images that say everything about the human spirit and soul. This collaboration with Tasovská offers a valuable perspective on a remarkable artist.
I’m Not Everything I Want to Be is screening at the 29th Made in Prague Festival.
