The cryptically titled Personal Life of a Hole opens with an on-screen quote that gives a sense of proceedings to come. “I also don’t understand everything,” it reads. “We all swim in the hole of non-understanding.”
This free-flowing cerebral essay attempts to combine the deeply philosophical with the gently amusing, and while the journey is oddball and smart its playful quality helps keep things ticking over in breezy fashion. Director Ondřej Vavrečka mixes interview statements with stop-motion footage of people and inanimate objects as he muses over a variety of subjects.
Philosopher Peter Kuzel discusses Aleatory materialism, a philosophical concept posited by the late Louis Althusser, while French theologist Annick de Souzenelle debates love and the current state of the world against a backdrop of footage of protesters out on the Parisian streets. As she says: “Flowing water symbolises unconsciousness. Today’s world is completely unconscious. All the yellows vests walk in the streets of a completely unconscious world. They are terribly scared.”
In his introduction to this essay, director Ondřej Vavrečka asks, “What is the world?” Is it at all possible to discover, understand and describe something that is so random and disconnected, so unanchored in space and time as the world of today? Is it not needless to look for sense or meaning where there is none?
Therefore, rather than looking for fixed points, the filmmaker focuses on holes and gaps, on inconsistencies and imperfection – in nature, in culture, in love and in work. And together with scientists and philosophers, from Althusser to Žižek, he creates a lively and thematically eclectic collage to explore how this emptiness can be pondered.
Czech Republic-Finland, 2020, 62mins
Dir/scr Ondřej Vavrečka
Production Silk Films, Czech Television
Producer Alžběta Janáčková
Cinematography Simon Todorov, Ondřej Vavrečka
Editor Anna Petruželová, Ondřej Vavrečka, Benjamin Kolmacka
