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An ordinary clown for ordinary people

My World Is Upside Down
Regissør: Petra Seliškar
(Slovenia)

What is Petra Seliškar's documentary about the Slovenian poet Ježek really about?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Nothing, in either the narrative or the narrative tool, guides the viewer through the film My World Is Upside Down. You get some clue: The documentary circles about the work as well as the interpretations and self-interpretations of Frane Milčinski – usually known as Ježek – a Slovenian poet, satirist and writer who was active in the mid-1900 century. Still, it's a guessing game, especially if you don't know Ježek before. It seems that director Petra Seliškar either knows more about Ježek than she manages to convey, or that Ježek is the kind of person you never really get to know. His work becomes what defines him, or rather what veils the person behind it.

Look through walls. With a joking and slightly confused expression in his eyes, Ježek looks straight at the audience in the opening scene, while talking about his penchant for looking through walls. The "human anthills" behind the walls are fascinating, he confides to us, but adds: "Sometimes I get scared (…) I see incredibly thin walls separating joy and pain, good and evil, life and death. I'm getting anxious for you. " Then his furrowed, wrinkled face bursts into a smile: "But I think it's so funny to see through walls."

The film's structure is held together with bits and pieces of Ježek's performances – more specifically footage from stage performances and from what appear to be interviews conducted at his home in the 1980s, where he talks about his work (and his life), but at a way that is as much played as what he does on stage. These Ježek moments are mixed with archival footage of lean workers – struggling in fields and garbage dumps – and people queuing outside public offices or looking through the fences surrounding construction sites.

Untitled women. Maybe the movie is more about what Ježek saw as he looked through walls, and less about what Ježek could have looked like if someone had seen through his wall. In the interview parts he tells a little about himself – even though the stories are carefully staged, for example about how he spent the youth pulling on the hook in the holidays with a guitar. Such "poor artist" stories reveal that some have the opportunity to choose such a lifestyle while others cannot escape it. Or that others can rarely enjoy the freedoms of a "vagabond – king of the world" (as Ježek wrote on his guitar), but have to find themselves trapped like a snare.

Throughout most of the film, the latter, namely the women, only appear among the nameless masses in the film's archive footage. Ježek's fiction heroes are always boys and men (or the Man). Today's musicians / bands who reinterpret Ježek's music and lyrics in the documentary consist of men. In one case, it is with a women's choir in a very traditional role: passive, referred to standing in the background and repeating the words of the male soloist.

Halfway through the documentary, there is a scene that embodies this very clearly: Ježek comes out from an empty theater while singing something deep about happiness – as a form of desire – and in the background, a cleaning lady sweeps up what is left after the performance.

Still, a surprising turn occurs when Josipa Lisac sings Prisoner's ›Ode to the Bedbug. After her comes a number of female singers who interpret Ježek's works. One of the most memorable of these is Bernay's Propaganda version of Darwin is right (Darwin is wrong) – one of the most pronounced political Ježek texts in My World is Upside Down:

"No, no no no no no no no no, Darwin was wrong (…) Man is not one, there are two kinds of People (…) the first has sunk into debt, the second has gold, honor and power (…) no no no no no, Darwin went wrong! ”

The film cuts from Bernay's propaganda back to Ježek's clown version of this section, and he says, "But the question is: When will Darwin get right?"

An ordinary clown. Ježek claims that he has never had "artistic ambitions", and that he is not an artist. "I'm just a kind of all-purpose service, available for people's daily use (…) an ordinary clown to ordinary people," as he puts it.

When the works of this common clown – which witnessed the atrocities of the 20th century, including in the Italian concentration camp Gonars – are interpreted by 21st century male Indian rockers seemingly chemically free of self-environmentalism, something happens with the words of common concerns such as Ježek causes it to float in the air: They fall plump to the ground. The documentary attempts to show how the legacy of Ježek lives on, but inadvertently it also shows how it cannot do so in a time marked by self-absorbed seriousness. Of course, there is a glimpse of something else, even in the 21st century, and in My World Is Upside Down these flashes come to light through Kimmo Pohjon's accordion and the post-punk fury of Bernay's Propaganda.

At the beginning of the film, Ježek talks about how his repertoire "happens", and tells about "the hours and days of useless thinking and sleepless nights (…) endless sleepless nights," and then he sums up: "Yes, sometimes it's difficult, very difficult, "followed by:" And sometimes it's very easy. " No more, no less. It might be one of the boldest things to strive for in a film that is not really about anything special: to demand space for useless thinking and sleepless nights, until the moment occurs when a tiny spark suddenly creates something. Or as Ježek puts it: "As if two thoughts met and waved to each other."

The film was streamed to MODERN TIMES subscribers throughout February. 

Nina Trige Andersen
Nina Trige Andersen
Trige Andersen is a freelance journalist and historian.

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