An Interview with Petr Fischer about Film and Czech Television
One of the three jurors for the Fresh Generation competition section is journalist Petr Fischer, who has worked for different periodicals and in the editorial office of the Czech BBC. Fresh news is that soon he will move to Czech television, where he will be directing the editorial office for art and culture. We asked him several questions about his job as a juror and about his plans within Czech television.
An Interview with Petr Fischer about Film and Czech Television
For me the interesting thing is making up some rules that I can use when looking at films. In my work as a film critic I’m trying to find and create these measures every day. It’s very interesting when I have the opportunity to compare them with other jurors. Films within this section are debuts or second films, which is even more interesting as young directors in their beginnings are trying to break the stereotypes. In this sense it is probably the most “fresh” stuff that you can see here.
And so what are the criteria that you set for evaluating the films you see here at FFF?
They aren’t set in advance. That’s why working as a juror is so interesting for me. We have to find these criteria again and discuss them, which is exactly the work I enjoy. Discovering the criteria is always the most interesting part. It is new all the time, not based on a set criteria or set form. But evaluating according to set criteria has unfortunately been quite common in Czech film journalism.
Those six films in the Fresh Generation section are quite “genre” typed films, how are you going to evaluate them?
Each genre film works with a certain code, and this code is partly being confirmed and at the same time partly overcome. My favourite thesis is of Karel Thein's, a philosopher and a film critic. He says that filming is nothing more that filling some genre categories, but that in Czech cinematography, since the time of the new wave, we have seen it differently. Czech filmmakers made a step aside, they started doing social-critique, instead of doing film. But Thein states that the genre reveals what kind of a filmmaker one is, and that it's not only about confirming the particular genre, but also about stepping out of it, and redefining it.
And do you think that Czech filmmakers can work within genre categories?
I think they can't, that they're still avoiding it, trying to say something about society instead. Actually, the only genre that Czech directors are trying to perfect is that of the “warm-hearted comedy”, a special genre that has been “defined” by the Czechs.
So now about your new work for Czech television. What interesting things are you expecting from that?
I don't expect anything at all from Czech television. The only thing I expect is that it will give us space so that we can do our work differently from how it used to be done there. And I was given such a promise. We can say that until now, there has never existed a real editorial office for art and culture, that it was only about simple announcing of events. There was no critical opinion, no endeavour to put things into a broader context, which is what I hope to change. We want to open up and broaden art and culture on TV, we want to have longer programmes, thematic blocks, on ČT24 we should be twice a week in the main news. Our aim is to present art and culture as a part of society, something that we're living, not only watching and consuming.
