PHOTO FROM I'M NOT EVERYTHING I WANT TO BE

The making of a Czech photographer documented in hundreds of stills

Since Libuše Jarcovjáková (pronounced like "LEE-boo-SHAY YAR-kof-YAK-ova") has been called "the Nan Goldin of Czech photography" we can begin with Laura Poitras' 2022 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the widely shown and admired film about Nan Goldin herself. It's a different story entirely. Nan Goldin hung out with druggy partying East Village artistic types whom she chronicled with her camera. Then she became a leader in. the cancelling the art museum reputation of the Sackler family behind Oxycontin, after beng addicted herself. . Libuše Jarcovjáková grew up in the repressive atmosphere of Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia, chronicling everything she saw. Her parents were both painters, but only her father was paid for his work. She struggled to make something of herself in the seventies and eighties in Prague and West Berlin, photographing marginalized people, like the Roma, also getting to Tokyo where, on the second trip, she began to make money. In Prague through a friend she discovers the place where LGBTQ people of all stripes gather, the T Club, and this is another important series.

This film is narrated as a diaristic autobiographical account by the photographer Jarcovjáková herself (in Czech). An absorbing if not altogether informative self-portrait, it comprises a continuous fast-flipping chain of her black and white photos (Goldin's were in a gooey rich color that photography galleries at first rejected), that form an account of her struggle to find herself and gain recognition. The flashing photos are accompanied with appropriate sound effects to make them seem more like a movie - crowd sounds, subway train sounds, the buzz of traffic, the chatter and clink of glasses in a bar - you name it. Sometimes - warning is given at the outset - there are minutes of brain-damaging-style fluttering flashes to illustrate a club that could hurt your eyes or give you a headache. The subject of this film is a heavy drinker and partier who documents monumental hangovers.

The first photos shown are landscapes, and austerely beautiful, which draws you in but is a bit misleading. The storytelling with beautiful stills makes one think of Chris Marker's 28-minute 1962 sci-fi film told with voiceover and still photos, La Jetée. La Jetée is a haunting tale of time travel, an enduring classic. This is an autobiographical one-thing-after-another account of a rough life. The photos are hastily snapped in the heat of the moment and deliberately unbeautiful, often blurry and overexposed, though the tonal range deepens after the success begins to come.

Jarcovjáková recounts her struggle, starting from after high school when on several tries she can't get admitted to the university because her family isn't sufficiently communist. She strives to prove herself working class by working in a factory, but she gets kicked out. She has a penchant for alcohol, and entanglements with several men lead to unwanted pregnancies that aren't easy to end after the first one because she can't report to the state abortion clinic anymore.

Jarcovjáková is frumpy, grumpy, depressive earth mother type. (plump, with big pendulous breasts well displayed here) who in the long early segment of this film is constantly flailing about, not successful at anything else, but like a true photographer, always with camera in hand and always taking photographs. They are blurry, messy, ugly, but vital. SHe is like a rough news photographer of her own life, every aspect of it. When she sleeps with a man, there are photos of him before and after, dressed and naked, and often of her naked staring into the camera. It's the kitchen sink school of photography. It's deliberately unbeautiful. Sometimes she finds a good subject, as when she gets an invitation to a Roma dance and this leads to a series of photographs of Roma people, though she doesn't seem to enter into their lives anything like, say, Larry Clark and the speed freaks of Tulsa or Danny Lyon and the motorcycle gang.

She marries one of the men, named Franta, who turns out to have no ambition in any direction. Eventually the possibility of travel comes up. This is done through a "fake" marriage to a West German man called Helmut. (Ironically, he is handsome and cool.) Once Franka is persuaded to grant a divorce, Helmut and Libuše marry we glimpse long-haired Helmut in a suit grasping long-stemmed flowers. He disappears soon after (after perhaps a token night in the same bed) but now she has a travel permit.

With the travel permit Libuše goes to West Berlin. Nothing much happens but she gets hit by a Mercedes and lands in the hospital with a broken ankle. She photographs the hospital room with two old women. She declares that it's terrible to be old. Yes, it is terrible to be old--in a hospital with Libuše.

A friend invites Libuše to Tokyo. Here, she gets some fashion jobs that bring in money, but they don't satisfy her. She goes home. Back later in Berlin, she is present for 1989, the bringing down of the Wall, which of course she photographs. Sometimes it seems as if the photographs are not so good, but it is just that there are so many of them they can be used almost like a movie, with the narration and the sound effects. And with the voice and the many photos Libuše takes of herself, there's a strong sense that she is present and this is her life, her eye of the camera we're seeing through. As if all her photographs were never meant to be looked at but flipped by to illustrate this narrative.

What's lacking here though, for all the self-portraits, which are usually as frumpy as Libuse herself, is much self-awareness or self-analysis. A major instance of this is that Libuše seems to be discovering that she likes women, but she never explains this. Notably, she is not analytical about her sexuality. She just shows a couple of women she gets involved with. No, this is just the narrative of a rather random life, set apart by tireless photo-taking. Libuše gets depressed early on, when living at home with her parents, and is prescribed antidepressants, which seem to make her hyper. Another phase, another set of photographs. But no introspection.

It all runs together somewhat, but clearly it's on her second trip to Japan that Libuše gets some real recognition, and this is when she has reached the age of 33, which earlier she has declared to be thought of by some as a crossroads and also a time when an accident might be in the cards. After the end of the film, there is some footage and signage - including the process of mounting a huge photo portrait of the photographer as the notice of an exhibition - that shows Libuše Jarcovjakova is now at last an international name in photography.

Though her early life was so oppressive due to the Czech communist regime, Libuše seems never much tempted to emigrate to Germany or Japan or anywhere else. She has returned to Czechoslovakia and affirms that she wants to stay there.

Im Not Everything I want to Be, 90 mins, premiered at the Berlinale and showed at Copenhagen ((CPH DOX) and a number of other distinguished international documentary film festivals as well as Karlovy Vary, Camden, and the Viennale. It opens this week (Nov. 7, 2025) at the Metrograph in (7 Ludlow St, New York, NY 10002via) Grasshopper Films.


[LIBUŠE JARCOVJÁKOVÁ SELF PORTRAIT

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.