INTERVIEW JANA VLČKOVÁ
Jana Vlčková: © Ondřej Šálek
An Editor’s Merits Can’t Be Judged By a Single Film
The work of the film editor Jana Vlčková (born 1981) can’t be pigeonholed into a single genre. She was awarded a Czech Lion both this year and last for the feature films Winter Flies and Filthy, which screened at a number of foreign festivals, she has frequently collaborated with leading Czech and Slovak documentary filmmakers, and she has even worked on several experimental films. The aspects of editing she most appreciates are minimalism and precision. by Vojtěch Rynda There are some recurring names in your filmography, like Olmo Omerzu, Jan Gebert, Robert Kirchhoff... How did this circle of collaborators come about? Before FAMU, I spent two years at Bratislava's Academy of Performing Arts. It was there that I met the documentary filmmakers Zuzana Piussi and Robert Kirchhoff, who in turn introduced me to others, like Peter Kerekes, and ushered me into the world of Czech documentary filmmaking. Through Peter I met Filip Remunda and Vít Klusák. Martin Mareček and I did some editing together in my second year at FAMU, Martin Dušek was in my class when we started, Olmo Omerzu was one year below us... I work well with filmmakers who adopt an original approach that I am in tune with
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and that I find inspiring. And after spending 12 hours a day together in the editing suite we generally end up being close friends.
But Olmo and I try to achieve truthfulness of a similar kind – and I would emphasize the word – through the way we work with actors.
You’ve edited films of all kinds of genres. Which do you prefer most? I don’t like to use the term “genre” where auteur films are concerned. For me they are, above all, original works of art. I would put the categories “fiction” and “documentary” and everything in between into the drawer marked “method”. In the context of Czech and Slovak films of the last 20 years, I love auteur documentaries: when they are well-done, they are the films that come closest to truthfulness. Compared with contemporary feature films, a lot of documentaries also seem to me more compelling and wide-ranging.
In today’s digital era, anyone can shoot and edit a film. Does it hurt your eyes to see these kinds of overproduced videos on YouTube, social networks, and other distribution channels? I’m not on social media very much, but I am aware of the fact that something like a new language is evolving: people have started expressing themselves more visually. Sometimes, when I see a video by some youtuber, I’m fascinated by how naturally they find it to cut non-essential words or silence without even changing the size of the shot. What