Who Will Guard the Guard? Dalibor or The Key to Uncle Tom´s Cottage

Colour, 35 mm
Czech Republic, 2002, 240 min
Section: Czech Films

Synopsis

This documentary concluding the tetralogy The Little Capitalist, reflecting all the fateful events and storms generated after the November 1989 revolution, is this time set within the confines of Prague’s National Theatre, where stage director J. A. Pitínský is rehearsing his unconventional production of Smetana’s opera Dalibor. In the auditorium as well, the prevailing Czech conscience is being dissected by philosophers, scientists and artists. The first act of the opera provides the background for reflections on Czech history and contemporary society which has yet to face its past, and where politics in all its astringency blends with meditations on the position of Czechs in Europe. With the second act comes the idea of salvation, where the immobilisation of cancers becomes the symbol of new energy in Czech culture. The final act represents a kind of summary of the Czech road to capitalism and current economic problems, but the filmmaker also offers a glimpse of the future and asks: how will the Czech environment come to terms with globalisation?

About the director

Karel Vachek (b. 1940, Tišnov near Brno) film director, documentarist, poet and artist. He graduated from FAMU in 1963 and with his debut Moravian Hellas he closed off his route to filmmaking for several years. In 1968 he made the feature-length documentary Elective Affinities  (Camera d’Or at the Berlin IFF 1991). After a 5-year period of emigration in France and the USA returned in the mid-1980s and, a decade later, filmed his extensive socio-philosophical essay about “great and small politics”, his film tetralogy The Little Capitalist: A New Hyperion or Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1992), What Is to Be Done? A Journey from Prague to Český Krumlov or How I Put Together a New Government (1996), Bohemia Docta or Labyrinth of the World and Lusthauz of the Heart, A Divine Comedy, 2000), Who Will Guard the Guard? Dalibor or the Key to Uncle Tom´s Cottage (2002).