Told in five distinct acts that span the Prague Spring of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be chronicles the journey towards both artistic freedom and sexual liberation of renowned Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková.
Back in the 1960s Prague, against a backdrop of Soviet oppression, Libuše is desperate to be a photographer. But she is not initially accepted into the renowned FAMU film school as she is from a “politically unreliable family.” However, if she shows the “right attitude” she can re-apply, she is told.
So Libuše decides to adopt a more proletarian persona, taking a job in a print factory. Her co-workers are both curious and suspicious of her until she proves that she can hold her alcohol as well as they can, at which point all barriers are removed. She takes memorably intimate photographs within the factory, makes close friendships, such as with the bewitching Jiriña (who “confuses men’s minds”), and seduces young men such as the “mysterious Richie.”
But when the party gets to see Libuše’s photographs she is accused of defaming the workers and is forced to leave the factory. In a bar she fucks the barman and gets pregnant and just about receives approval from the Abortion Committee to terminate the pregnancy, after which she feels both “devastated” and “worthless.”
When she is eventually accepted into FAMU at the age of 24 she feels uncomfortable within the “elite environment” and therefore escapes into the Prague nightlife where she meets Franta, who is fun, and who offers the possibility of great sex. She becomes pregnant again and this time has a back-street abortion. She marries Franta, but the marriage is doomed as he refuses to leave his mother.
Throughout, Libuše has chronicled all these intimate moments her life in still photography, which we are presented in the film, alongside reading from the diaries she kept over all these years.
“She was surprised that she took photos of everything,” director Klára Tasovská tells of Libuše’s reaction after her photographs were catalogued and digitised for the film. “And also she has a lot of self-portraits. That was also surprising for her.”
Thereafter Libuše sets off an unwitting odyssey of self-discovery, to Japan where she befriends Katsuyuki, the husband of a Czech friend and who takes an interest in her work.
When she returns to Prague she discovers the underground and clandestine T Club gay bar, where she meets Eva “who is beautiful in her brokenness…it turns me on.” But after a murder close to the club, Libuše is asked to submit her negatives to the police, at which point she realises that her photographs are compromising the lives of her club members. She therefore refuses to take any more pictures at the club.
The photographs from this period, when exhibited In Arles in 2019, invited comparison to the highly intimate work of Nan Golding, who was working and living in New York around the same time.
Libuše is persuaded to go to Berlin, and therefore demands a divorce from Franta in order to arrange a marriage of convenience to leave Prague. The decision represents both a “step into the void, but a step forward,” even if, when she first encounters the Wall, she doesn’t know if she is “inside or outside the cage.”
When Libuše visits Tokyo again in 1988 she receives a commission to photograph Rei Kawakubo’s latest Comme des Garçons collection. These pictures may have been highly regarded, but for her they were “purely commercial” works that didn’t reflect her personality. From the other side of the world, Berlin seems once more a “positive” proposition.
Libuše returns in 1989 to take a job as a hotel maid, but “despite cleaning stairs, I’m still a photographer. Maybe even more so. The camera is a navigational tool. It helps me return back to myself,” she narrates.
Before the start of the new decade, the Wall comes down. And when she returns to a newly liberated Prague, she meets and falls in love with the married Marta…
A coda sequence suggests that Libuše’s subsequent life may have been a happy one.
Director Klára Tasovská knew of Libuše and her work before the 2019 Arles exhibition. “The Czech Republic is a very small place, so artists know each other well… but I never heard about her life story.”
She was approached on the occasion of Libuše’s 70th birthday to make a programme for Czech TV. “I met her and I was so fascinated by her and told them that we definitely had to prepare some huge project, an important work about her,” Tasovská tells BDE.
Libuše had offered some notes and comments from her diaries for the Arles exhibition, but for the film she gave Tasovská everything, which comprised tens of thousands of photos and tens of thousands of diary pages. At which point the labour of love commenced.
“At the beginning it was a free timeline and it was stressful,” she explains. “And then I saw that her story could be in five chapters, because she lived in Prague, in Berlin, in Tokyo, and then in Berlin again. And then she returned to Prague.”
Tasovská decided to collaborate with Czech editor Alexander Kashcheev, who edited the Oscar-nominated and Student Oscar winner Daughter (2019). “He also fell in love with the project and we worked together for two years, sitting eight hours a day and also weekends.”
The first cut of the film was two and a half hours, but it seemed “unstructured” and overlong, given how the visuals consisted of still after still. So it was cut back to 90 minutes. What’s more, the team were having to catalogue the photographs as they went. “At the beginning we didn’t know how it happened, this journey, because Libuše is a little bit messy, a little bit unorganized,” says Tasovská. Nevertheless the process of organising the material was “creative,” she adds.
“We had something on her discs in digital form, but not all the photos,” she says. “We worked with offline photos and then we had to rescan every photo, [all] 3000 photos and change it in the timeline. It was work for one month, but we did it.”
The film, sold by Square Eyes, will be released in Germany by Salzgeber after Berlinale before its selection for other major festivals (about which Tasovská remains tight-lipped). It will be released theatrically in the Czech Republic in September before its broadcast on Czech TV and Arte.
As Libuše is a visual artist herself, how did she react to this visual interpretation of her life? “I think she loves it,” Tasovská replies. “Although sometimes it’s hard for her…some things like abortions and other things.
“But she said that it’s very interesting to see her life – or some parts of life how she lived them. She’s very happy that we could make this film together. And also [that] she is the main narrator and there is her voice…She’s very happy for that,” Tasovská signs off.
