Atrakción

Helena Bőhmová / Czechoslovakia / 1974 / The film already had its Czech Premiere / 16 min.

synopsis

Helena Böhmová’s (Třeštíková’s) graduation documentary offers a glimpse into the lives of the Šmíd siblings, a family of circus performers from South Bohemia. Accompanied by an eclectic musical soundtrack ranging from traditional folk music and trumpet to pan flute, we watch them rehearse at their winter quarters. Their testimonies reveal that they pursue the dangerous professions of tightrope walking and pole acrobatics primarily out of passion, as the work brings little financial reward. Gaining the admiration of women is another motivation. Both the preparations and the performance itself in Kralupy, along with the performers and their audience, are captured in authentic-looking black-and-white footage, while occasional colour sequences lend the film a poetic, even metaphorical dimension. This is reinforced at the end by portraits of the performers and a quotation from Nezval’s poem Levitation (“To free heavy things from gravity, to be a pauper yet walk like a prince”). The opening credits are styled after contemporary poster graphics, while the title lettering recalls Eva Švankmajerová’s poster for the film We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise (1969, directed by Věra Chytilová).

biography

Helena Třeštíková (1949, née Böhmová) is one of the most successful Czech documentary filmmakers of the prominent generation that emerged in the 1970s. During her studies at FAMU, she made several notable films, the best known of which is Living Water (Živá voda, 1972). Throughout her career, she has focused primarily, though not exclusively, on longitudinal documentary filmmaking.