Miroslav Janek

* 1954

  • "Coincidentally, I was already living with Tonička in the family house, with two friends who were the owners of the house and who had studied in America in 1967, 1968 and 1969 and then returned as students. At that time it was possible to somehow briefly legally - to study abroad. And as we were spending those weekends there, the idea came up that maybe we could run away, so to speak. So we agreed and we made a condition that we would only go if all four of us got - well, they had a little girl, but she didn't need papers - if we all got all the permits. That was a list of everything you had to go through and stamp to get across the western border. So if we all got this permit and all these dollar pledges and I don't know what all was needed, we'd go. And if one of us doesn't get it, we don't go. Well, we all got it - apparently because everybody was registered in a completely different city. Tonička was a permanent resident of Ostrava, I was a permanent resident of Železný Brod at that time, and somehow it just worked out that we all got it. So we just got ready one day and left."

  • "That was normally a two-year military service, but the unit was just like that, it was the Army Art Ensemble, it's in Pohořelec, the front building, if you remember, this huge building, that's where they the [tram] twenty-two stops. So it was like half soldiers and half civilians, there was a ballet, a symphony, a jazz orchestra too. I was in the publicity department there, and I had the job of taking pictures from time to time. I had a beautiful photo chamber there, and actually almost unlimited walks. There was no canteen, so we were given money for food and had to eat out on our own, three times a day. So for me, the Black Ox, that was a second home, and that's where I went to eat and drink beer and stuff. And especially there was this great bunch of people. So that's where it opened me up, I sat in the office with Petr Sís for a year, a friend of mine at the same time. Then we connected in New York. Or Labus was there with us in the army and people like that, so I even made a couple of my amateur films there."

  • "Ever since I was a kid I lived in those vaporizers, those developers and fixers, because it was traditionally done in the bathroom, right. If it was just right, my dad would put a board in there and put an enlarger on top of it and just take pictures, and well, there was a camera whirring. But other than that, he had a projector and a screen. And we were always begging him to put on a film because they, in those days, in those days you could buy eight-millimeter copies of all sorts of short, like animated films, Bratři v triku (Brothers in T-shirt). So our, or at least my favorite movie was Mr. Prokop Builds a House, and that was just a puppet movie about Mr. Prokop building a house and he's always drinking rum and then he's like building it a little crooked. Then there's shots through this kind of wavy glass where there's actually a view of this drunken bricklayer. And then I think it probably ends with this sort of socialist ethos that he's going to somehow come out of it, sober up, and somehow understand that he shouldn't be drinking and that he should be building the bricks straight. But we were mostly amused by how drunk he was, how he was slapping the mortar and stuff, so we actually had a kind of cinema."

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Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

It seemed that the gray of normalization would never end

Miroslav Janek, 1988
Miroslav Janek, 1988
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Miroslav Janek was born on 3rd January 1954 in Náchod. From the age of ten he took photographs and at the age of 14 he made his first short film. After finishing primary school in 1969, he entered the Trutnov Grammar School, where he graduated in 1973. He applied to FAMU several times, but was never accepted for political reasons. In 1973-1974 he worked as a photographer at the Regional Cultural Centre in Hradec Králové. He served his compulsory military service in 1974-1976 as a photographer in the Vít Nejedlý Army Art Ensemble. In the 1970s he began working as an assistant editor at the then Czechoslovak Television. In 1979, he decided to move to the West, and after completing all the formalities, he received permission to leave and left for West Germany in the summer of that year. After a year he flew to the United States and settled in Minneapolis. In absentia he was sentenced to one year‘s imprisonment without parole and to forfeiture of all property for the crime of leaving the Republic. From 1982-1986, he served as an educator at the Film in the Cities Media Arts Center. He later worked with American director Godfrey Reggio. He also made around ten independent films in the United States. Since 1996 he has lived in the Czech Republic again. He worked with Czech Television and in 1998 he began teaching at the Department of Documentary Filmmaking at FAMU in Prague, where he headed the production workshop. In 2022 he lived in Prague.