Koudelka: Crossing the Same River screens in the 2022 Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival «Testimonies» section.
Josef Koudelka is probably one of our last living legends of photography. Koudelka’s life resembles a vagabond, only equipped with his camera, a pair of hiking boots, a sleeping bag, a box of colored pencils, and an almanack. Obsessed with living in the moment in purest simplicity, he has been on a perpetual journey for the last fifty years in search of beauty which others can not see. Probably no other photographer works with such dedication and persistence as he does.
Koudelka has avoided paid assignments throughout his career, focusing purely on his own projects. His first publications captured the drama of the Russian invasion in Prague, 1968. Although the photos became legendary in the West, they were credited anonymously for decades for fear of possible reprisal that could negatively affect his family, whom he left behind the iron curtain in 1970. He shortly thereafter joined Magnum Photos, providing him with a home base throughout his nomadic lifestyle. «The aim is only important because it permits you to take the trip. It is not important to get there. The road is much more important.”
Probably no other photographer works with such dedication and persistence as he does.
Visualising a state of displacement, exile, and extinction has been an underlying theme throughout Koudelka’s work, which in many ways reflects his own state of life after he became an exiled artist. One of the most iconic photo essays of the 20th Century is Koudelka’s first book, Gipsies (1975), which captures the Roma population migrating through Europe just before their nomadic lifestyle was forcefully assimilated with modern society. He managed to seize a time and cultural phenomena just before its extinction. After travelling with the Roma people for almost two decades, Koudelka turned to landscape photography void of humans in the mid-1980s and started using panorama format. «It is more difficult to find the people who would fit me in my world. I don’t like T-shirts with writing on it, somehow, it disturbs me, and it makes it visually complicated. I like simplicity. I think the world in the past was much simpler. Maybe living was more difficult, but visually it was simple.»
Ruins
One of Koudelka’s specific trademarks is that he returns to the same motives year after year in order to seize their image with the utmost perfection. «I want the maximum of myself, of the things I take pictures of any of my photographs – this means repetition, but not repetition where I repeat myself. Then it must stop.»
In Koudelka: Crossing the Same River, the film director, Coşkun Aşar, who is the one-person film staff, follows the legendary photographer on perhaps one of his last missions. Together they revisit the sites from Koudelka’s last project, Ruins (2019). Koudelka has been photographing Greek and Roman archaeological sites throughout the Mediterranean since 1991.
Patiently we follow this older man with a limping walk, and we watch with awe of how he inches himself into the ideal position to capture the perfect composition. With Koudelka as our guide, we are on a discovery tour. There is an amazing richness hidden in these stones, and at the right moment, the light brings the plasticity forth, and unseen things become suddenly apparent.
With Koudelka as our guide, we are on a discovery tour.
Koudelka does not capture the monuments in a romantic or historical way. On the contrary, he creates new drama by confronting the past with the present within his frame. His photographs depict a captivating narrative that evokes a feeling of tragedy and beauty. «I have been here seven times… these stones become my friend. I know them, and they know me. It is nice to say hello to the stones you like. Even if you go to a quarrel with marble, every piece which is laying there is already a sculpture.» After each search for a motive, each finished panorama print is presented as a tabloid that lasts for 15 seconds in a vacuum of sound. It feels majestic.
This is truly an enjoyable movie, beautiful in its simplicity, that really brings forth what matters. Accompanied only by the natural sounds we become fully engrossed in being in the present. This is a film about discovering and about being. There are no talks of past achievements, no history or explanations, no voice-overs, just being here and silently watching this man who enjoys every moment of being alive. Perhaps this is why at the age of 80, he still prefers to sleep outside. “…When you are laying on your back, and you look up at the stars, it gives you a good perspective of what you are. You are nothing. You are just an accident, a little accident. Two people made love, your parents – and you should feel very, very happy for this little accident.»
Continuing to shoot the Holy Land
Coşkun Aşar’s correct film treatment and approach to the subject is not a discovery he made by himself. It is actually a continuation of Gilad Baram and Elisa Purfürst’s approach in Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land (2015). The film language, including the principles of how to work with sounds, is so similar one can not credit Coşkun Aşar for much originality.
The result is nevertheless a poetic study of one of our last living great masters of photography. The film captures the serenity of being here and now, discovering beauty, and creating. The film is simple and, at the same time, absolutely engrossing.
