author: Petr Kubica
(International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava, Czech republic)
This documentary film pays a tribute to Elo Havetta (1938–1975), a solitery director, an author of only two feature films (Celebration in the Botnical Garden and Field Lilies) that belong to the best of the Slovak cinema. At their time, they brought playfulness and spontaneity, on wich the authors of the documentary base their happening – a journey to the director’s grave in the search for his legacy.
The two directors of the documentary film let the poetics of his work penetrate through their conception, they use quotation from his films, but above all, by intentional stage-managing of individual episodes of a medium-length film, they want to continue in Havetta’s gesture of playful aesthetics, wich determined both his work and life.
All things in the film become a film character – Elo Havetta. It is a playful and cheerful work of art, wich, after all, has more meanings than seemed to have at the first sight. It is based on true stories of the director’s life, wich having been told all over again and again have become the same
source of again have become the same source of inspirations as his films. Two kind of the myth create a personage, because Havetta is not only commemorated, but actually put on stage through another movie, wich, made of ornaments, keeps the author’s intuition oscillating between a symbol and its explanation well-ballanced.
The character in the film is a kind of an inter-personage, a conceptual object representing a reflection of its image.
The film wants to liberate the meaning of life-work of the artist from his positivistic portrait, it gives up convencionality and through a game and metaphor strives to achieve intuitive picture and dramatic credibility. A re-created film character of Elo Havetta is subject to emotional collective memory, however, above all, it is an inner projection of the individual experience of the youngest generation of filmmakers, of their ironic and fragile declaration.