I'm Not Everything I Want to Be

If, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, "Photography is truth, and cinema is twenty-four times truth per second," I’m Not Everything I Want to Be could be the definitive demonstration of this idea. Technically speaking (and this is what Godard is referring to, of course), every film is made up of a great number of static images, and the motion we perceive is illusory. However, few films consist exclusively, like the marvelous documentary by Klára Tasovská, of a sequence of pre-existing photographs—sometimes sped up to simulate short "scenes," sometimes slowed down to allow us to examine the image more attentively, almost as we would in an exhibition.

In addition to this original construction, there is a double layer of sound work: inventive sound effects accompany the succession of photographs to enhance their narrative effectiveness; and throughout the film, we hear the protagonist, Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková, reading excerpts from her diary corresponding to the time of the photos shown on screen. The texts, like the images, are deeply intimate: they deal with love, sex, mental health, artistic vision, ambition, and despair. But for Jarcovjáková, the personal is political, and the political is poetic. The period covered in the film spans from 1968, a pivotal year in Czechoslovak history marked by the tragic Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion, to 1989 and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; during these two decades, the shifting yet always tense political conditions had a direct impact on private life, daily routines, and emotions.

I’m Not Everything I Want to Be is about photography and uses "period" photos as its sole visual material; it is, therefore, a continuous mise en abyme, especially since the "fotografka" Jarcovjáková often reflects on her art and sometimes photographs her own photographs: displayed, in the process of development, or carelessly left on a table. But subtly, the director also offers us a filmed theory of cinema: she analytically deconstructs the elements that make up a "film", only to reassemble them and smoothly tell the story of another image-maker.

P.S. When I saw this film at the 2024 Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, I was a bit frustrated by the inability to pause the film from time to time to fully look at a particularly captivating photo, an eloquent detail, or an intriguing person; everything flowed by too quickly. On Tënk, it's finally possible!

Itay Sapir
Professor of Art History
Université du Québec à Montréal