Jog Film

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  Jog Film | 2019

“Jog” is the name of the camera that captured the film. A jog is also a term for “approximately 1-2-seconds-long videos” from which the film was created. I do not enjoy acting as much as “living and breathing the role” so I decided to perform all the scenes. I am the director, performer and editor all-in-one. Anna Tesařová was the Jog Operator (the camerawoman). I did not invent the theme of the movie, I´m living it. It is maddening to see how humanity is losing all the spiritual values while trying to convert them into consumerism. I see how people do not know who or where they are and how they are unaware of their actions. The capitalism distorts all cultures and religions, one example for all being the Black Friday, and Hollywood film production is glorifying this process. The hero of this kind-of-a-story makes it through many difficult trials but there is a seemingly happy ending. The triumph lies in return to the mother´s breast which represents a capitalist society. I find such conclusion annoying so I decided to make a parody of that. It´s a joke lacking humour because the parody is the real mythological story with no happy ending. The whole filming process was a great madness that increased in its intensity. One synchronicity followed another. Take for example the scene where the Devil is burning symbols of the world´s biggest religions. We reserved the roof for filming one week in advance, however on the actual filming day, the Notre-Dame cathedral burned down. Also, even though there was very little information about it in the Czech media, Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem was also on fire on that very day. I just felt as if I were not the director at all. Visions came and I was just a puppet in the hands of fate. Carl Gustav Jung said that an artist who is not working with symbols consciously is just visualizing the collective unconscious. I believe that this was the case. Or take the scene in Kraków with the music of Norwegian black metal band Formloff in the background. The music comes from the album called Spyhorelandet which means Vomit all over the country. I reviewed and interviewed this band a few years earlier. I was listening to the album in different moods and various states of mind, including the one that comes before the sleep. Then the hallucinations came: They were something between an acid trip and hypnagogic dreaming but I was completely sober at that time. I saw a cubist city, streets and houses crossing each other and a lots of strange visuals seen from all angles at once. Above was a bust of some man. The bust was made of wires rotating around the axis. I decided to make a music video based on this hallucination. Then, in Krakow´s Jewish quarter, on the Christmas day, I found a bust that looked almost the same as the one I had seen earlier. It confirmed to me that I should finish the movie no matter what it takes. Another funny coincidences followed. In Krakow, there is an actual statue of a dog called “Džok” which sounds the same as the name of the film. The name was also invented without knowing that this exact word had already existed. Another dog called Jock was already featured in the film “Jock: A True Tale of Friendship” - the word “jock” being the most common word in that film. Old Jock is also a great beer made in the Scottish highlands. And there are so many other details in the film that I could write an essay about but then we would not be able to get to the point quickly. My dissertation reader Lenka Střeláková realized that this work was an initiation ritual prior to leaving the institution of the university. Well, I have some trouble remembering my childhood so everything I remember until now is mainly being a student. The ritual became more difficult during the process of making the movie because I love nature and I used to walk in the forests all the time, yet I stopped my direct contact with the nature for one year while filming. This resulted in a withdrawal and depression leading to new inspiration. I broke this decision just three times, strictly for the sake of acquiring new footage. The extreme amount of material for editing only added more difficulty to the ritual. Well, after all, the final part of this film is my life itself after completing it.