Prague Stories

Morning in the Park

Setting up for Interview

Why film? Professor Garrison asked this question today as if he had been waiting for weeks to pose this seemingly simple question. I was working on a side project in class for the website and didn’t participate in the collage of responses, so here goes. Flashback to nine in the morning; we are on our way to interview the famous animator Gene Deitch for our second documentary when he calls to postpone for one hour. George, Andrew and I sit in a park and watch. Sitting and watching is the quickest way to become grounded again if you feel yourself losing touch. I asked myself a similar question, what am I doing here? Answer: Making films. Why? Flash-forward to one in the afternoon, an amazing interview finished. Who knew that a man of such passion and character worked in a second floor studio down this dirty side street in Prague? This is the answer to the question. Why film? Film, as a medium has the ability to record picture and sound, as an artistic instrument film has the ability to record life as a visual memory. I know it’s obvious. Gene, the man we interviewed, just celebrated his 82nd birthday. Today, dying was on his mind, not a fear of it, but a simple statement, “I don’t want to die, no one wants to die.” Every man has struggled with the idea of immortality, religious or secular, and film helps to fulfill this addiction. If something was to suddenly happen to Gene (hopefully not) then we could still see him, hear him bantering with us about religion and his favorite pictures of his wife. Film gives every person, every time period a human face and brief immortality.

Planning for Interview

Everyday Metro

It is a failure of the human intellect to become adapted to a place so much so as to begin ignoring it. Even in a city as fascinating as Prague, mundane appearances still occur. Today regrettably began as one of those days, a lazy breakfast, a metro ride to school and a quick visit to the coffee machine outside of class. We are in the middle of planning our second documentary; we sit in the classroom looking through the names and numbers of local animators that George had compiled a few days prior. The list ranged from world famous surrealists to students working a few floors above us. I was a little lost.

CHASE
So what are we going for here? Who
do we want to speak to the most?

GEORGE
We’ll speak to anyone who will speak
to us.

CHASE
Lesson learned. Never count anyone
out.

Even in the most uneventful days lessons can be learned, people can be explored and small occurrences suddenly become huge. A Slavic woman was singing at the top of her lungs at the usually hushed metro station; although she sang with authority and a decent alto voice, no one offered her a second glance. I had no idea what she was singing about, whether it was praise or slander, but her passion was worth a second glance. Maybe these days that seem uneventful are actually messages to pay closer attention to the world around you.

Words of Wisdom

Breakfast Discussion

Wherever you are, breakfast and dinner bring different connotations, different takes on the day’s activities and different people to share them with. Today, we (George, Andrew and myself) knew at breakfast we had a wary task to complete, but we were fresh and full of ideas. Our first documentary is due tomorrow, and we still have to shoot cutaways and finish editing. The art-nouveau café we’re sitting at has its name in the history books as the intellectual dining spot of the last hundred years; I can feel the picture-covered walls, that have listened to so many famous poets and authors, smirking a little as we fumble over maps and notes. We all felt we were on the right track, but we needed an outsider’s opinion on where we finally needed to go with the film. After we finished our drinks, we went next door to our school for a meeting with Andy Garrison.
Dinner consisted of an American-style sandwich on an onion bagel; we brought it back to the dorm rooms so we could begin editing. We took Professor Garrison’s advice to heart, to listen to our subjects, to make sure that we believed what they were saying. After the meeting, we returned to the residential neighborhood where we found all of our subjects and proceeded to shoot those all-important cutaways. At dinner we knew we were on the right track, the morning’s optimism was slowly turning into the pleasant dread of a night full of editing, and although the three of us were still together, we didn’t say much. We quickly ate our meal and began the night.