The Key for Determining Dwarfs or The Last Travel of Lemuel Gulliver

Colour, Beta
Czech Republic, 2002, 58 min
Section: Czech Films

Synopsis

Of the 33 diaries left by legendary Czech screenwriter and director Pavel Juráček (1935-89), director Martin Šulík and co-screenwriter Jan Lukeš (the editor of the recently published diaries) selected the years 1964 to 1972. With stylistic refinement, the volumes insightfully comment on the temporary lightening of the cultural-political climate in socialist Czechoslovakia, and describe (sometimes with romanticising self-centredness) tempestuous reversals in the filmmaker’s private life and his agonizing creative doubts. The diaries served as the basis of this essay-like documentary, capturing both Juráček’s personality and the period of that Czech cinematic miracle, the new wave. Formally, the filmmakers took advantage of dramatic and animated techniques (while Juráček’s on-screen presence was successfully provided by his son Marek). They also play with the diaries’ chronology, and profit from Juráček’s manuscripts and drawings. Their poetically free, associative approach to the material allows the film, which deals with more than the fate of just one individual, to work as an outstanding meditation on the development of a conflicted modern artist. 

About the director

Martin Šulík (b. 1962) graduated from Bratislava’s Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (VŠMU) in 1986 with the well-received medium-length film Staccato. After making a few documentaries, he debuted in features with the poetic film Tenderness (1991), which immediately ranked him among the most interesting Slovak directors of the younger generation. Šulík strengthened and further developed the lyric-ironic and original visual style of his debut in the highly popular critical successes All I Love (1992), The Garden (1995 – many awards including Czech Lions for Best Film and Director), Orbis Pictus (1997) and one segment from the coproduction Prague Stories (1999). His latest feature is Landscape (2000). As an actor he has appeared in Alice Nellis’ tragicomedy Some Secrets (2002), and he coproduced Matej Mináč’s successful All My Loved Ones (1999).