Karel Vachek – New Hyperion

(Tvar no. 22, 1992)

Michal Bregant

The Magic of Reality, or occurrences without commentaries.

When Karel Vachek had behind him the films Moravian Hellas (1963) and Elective Affinities (1968), Vratislav Effenberger wrote that Vachek "was not looking for satisfaction in derision, that he let himself be captivated by the irrationality of reality on the very verge of awe. But he does not allow it to swallow him, he is able to understand it in its most delicate shades, and above this, is able to create a kind of critical monster, that lifts the values of a documentary into the level of penetrating symbolization."

Vachek's film concept of the world is not entropic, though. It has order, it is organized with the awareness of the necessities of film. The New Hyperion, with which Vachek spent more than a year in the editing room, is a complete work. It's complete - by the way it is built, not a single part can be removed from it without the threat of destruction.

Also the prattle of politicians is in Vachek's view an integral part of this magic and so real world filled with almost mythical figures. It's not mythical in the sense of the reduction of the human aspects, but in the sense of uniqueness, of an internal dimension, in the sense of the grandness of their big moment.

This concentration on the heart of phenomena wants to lead the spectators' attention away from the external peel of information, that is why the names of the participants appear all the way at the end titles, you don't read who is who at any other place.

That film aims into the heart of the second, in which a day dream might otherwise occur. It is seeing; a spy-hole through time in the likely direction to the sources of our perception.

With a feeling of lightness and torment, you will watch Vachek's imaginativity of thought interwoven with the bitter happiness from being, his escapades of intellectual and poetic humor from the borderland of consciousness and dreams. That is Karel Vachek how you can meet him today, after finishing the evidently most extensive documentary film in the history of the Czech cinematography. A controversial work, that evokes such responses, that it might now be possible to objectively say, that it is an exceptionally provocative and bold work.

... we are not only being witness to a work of art ... but of - something that has the ambition of light.