I’m Not Everything I Want to Be

Jeste nejsem, kym chci byt

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

VERDICT: An enthralling doc on Czech photographer Libuse Jarcovjakova, whose candid, diaristic images showed a communist Prague on the margins, and life on her own terms.

Czech photographer Libuse Jarcovjakova has spent her entire adulthood capturing her experiences in deeply personal pictures, in an effort to understand herself. From her countless diaristic still photographs, a candid, raw and compelling portrait of her effort to live and create art on her own terms, resisting the conformity demanded by the communist authorities and the strictures of marriage, has been assembled by filmmaker Klara Tasovska in I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, screening in the Special Screenings section at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. It took many decades for Jarcovjakova’s immense talent to be properly recognised (a large exhibition of her work in Arles bookends the film). But this more or less chronological succession of grainy black-and-white images (colour, too, comes later) speaks volumes. With striking framing and unfiltered honesty, we’re taken right into her world. The blunt honesty of Jarcovjakova, in voiceover, is just as disarming, as she recalls the circumstances and tumultuous emotional currents that lay behind each moment frozen in time by her camera.

Jarcovjakova decided to become a photographer at sixteen years old, but it was 1968 in the Czechoslovak capital, and Russian tanks rolled in to crush the cultural openness of the Prague Spring. As freedom of expression was cracked down upon by the communist regime, talented artists were emigrating, and party collaborators replaced them. Jarcovjakova, whose parents were painters, and whose family was blacklisted as “politically undesirable,” was barred from enrolling at university. Determined to improve her working-class credentials to gain admittance, she secured a job at a printing factory, and took photographs while working there, debauchery interlaced with the hot, ink-stained labour, as employees sought regular release from drudgery. She was soon banned from using her camera there by the party, her snapshots not according with the high-minded illusions of their propaganda.

A beautifully evocative soundscape, with noise from the factory floor, and the murmur and glass-clink of late-night pubs, further animates images already brimming with energy and surprise. A Roma ball, and herself at home amid the psychological upheaval of an abortion, are also among the flow of images taken by a photographer interested in the margins of experience, spontaneous and taboo states of being, and unsanctioned feeling. Jarcovjakova has been described in her artistic approach as reminiscent of Nan Goldin, the seminal American photographer of queer subculture and intensely revealing intimacy, and there is substance to this comparison, especially in Jarcovjakova’s images of evenings at T-Club, the underground gay bar where she was a regular in the ‘80s, and which was a pocket of clandestine freedom in a nation whose authorities denied that homosexuals even existed there. Fans of Czech New Wave cinema will enjoy sequences at the cat-filled home of Ester Krumbachova, a creative force on many key works of the movement, and a friend of Jarcovjakova’s mother, who encouraged the budding photographer to have confidence in viewing the world differently.

Jarcovjakova was finally accepted into famed Prague school FAMU to study photography, but did not feel comfortable in what she experienced as an elitist environment, and was more content when out partying with her friends, and taking photographs with no set guidelines or confining scrutiny. Artistic freedom as a means to discover and know oneself was a recurring urge throughout her life, and she referred to the camera as “a navigation tool” for returning to herself. She left her husband, a Nietzsche-quoting train station worker, fuming at home to venture to Japan, and had a stint in Tokyo as a successful fashion photographer. She was able to make a decent living from this work, but ultimately felt unfulfilled by its commercial nature. West Berlin (her passage secured by a sham marriage) also offered new cultural experiences but as many disappointments as open doors, as she struggled to adjust to a profoundly unfamiliar capitalist system. After a complicated affair with a married woman, and amid the jolting transitions of the Berlin Wall’s fall, she was again drawn home to Prague — a city that at times seemed like a cage, but within which she saw herself mirrored in a multitude of ways.

Director: Klara Tasovska
Screenwriters: Klara Tasovska, Alexander Kashcheev
Producers: Lukas Kokes, Klara Tasovska
Cinematographer: Libuse Jarcovjakova
Editing: Alexander Kashcheev
Music: Oliver Torr, Prokop Korb, Adam Matej
Sound: Alexander Kashcheev, Michaela Patrikova
Production companies: Somatic Films (Czech Republic), nutprodukcia (Slovakia), Mischief Films (Austria)
Sales: Square Eyes
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Special Screenings)
In Czech
91 minutes