Jan Vladislav - Diptych

This diptych by Kateřina Krusová is devoted to Jan Vladislav, a Czech poet, essayist, and translator, who translated from twelve languages and whose translated works include the prominent figures of Dante, Michelangelo, Baudelaire and Verlaine.

The film Jan’s Return from Parisian Exile to Prague in Summer 2003 follows with sensitive participation the move of the poet’s library back to his homeland, behind which is concealed his profound sorrow over the death of his wife.

As though on the margins of the ordinary, its continuation Jan in Sicily in Summer 2004 describes a day by the sea, when the beauty of the endless sky and the sea without a horizon fuse with one man’s gradual relinquishing of the world.

The monologue of an old man at the beach, words that give the special occasion its name, draw attention to it, confirm it in memory as something as visible and audible as the sea. A sequence of several images changes the moment of encounter into an intensive film fragment, emerging before one’s eyes like the pure time of a man turning back towards eternity.

The viewer longs for the intuitive lyrical motion of the film between sun, sand, water, and death to continue, as it evokes strength and mental obligation. The film’s metaphorical richness, encompassing a walk through a grove and moments spent bathing on the beach, are subordinated to a clear and hermetic form.

This minimalistic film lets man enter into nature in its ordinariness, standing in for fate. The sound of the wind can be heard and the element of the sea accompanies the old man, describing the world in soft and subtle images that transport the film onto the indefinable plane that is poetry and through which poetry happens, an indistinct shudder, when man ceases to be the measure of all things and nature is no longer just a mirror of man’s inner experiences, but is the unknown force at the close of man’s time.

(source: catalogue IFDF Jihlava)