Project Ján is a search for a man who disappeared during the First World War and is still listed as missing. Despite the fact that the project draws from old archives, soldiers' diaries or maps and is set in a specific historical stage, it is not a historical document. The author approaches the search for information in a detective way, even though he knows that he is unlikely to discover anything significant. He then poetically reconstructs this real information and combines it with symbolism and imagination. Although he uses old clothing, props and language, he does so only fragmentarily with the intention of leaving "many" unsaid. What matters is what cannot be seen, although we can deduce or suspect it on the basis of certain clues. For example, a shot of a sweaty horse whose activity we will not see, or details of hair in the soil, the origin of which we will not know. So the viewer also becomes a detective in a way and never sees what the characters see. In addition, the characters are often blind or have a reduced ability to see due to weather and other circumstances. Based on associations and intuition, we see not only different perspectives of seeing but also not seeing.
These symbolically accumulate in the form of a blind man, a man with a blindfold, a man who lacks a face or in situations that take place in the fog. There is a disruption of experienced patterns of reading and causality of interconnected events, and an important motive is not seeing beyond the horizon of the event itself. It is so crucial for the film to realize what we cannot see, what is hidden from us, even though we suspect it. All is dominated by details that together associate something that cannot be grasped completely rationally. Although the viewer is not allowed a clear understanding of the story, it is still a captivating experience that supports the strong tension and visual appeal of the image. The exhibition also includes a separate publication with the same name, Ján, which presents the story and events from several other perspectives. The book also appears in the film itself and does not only serve as a prop. Thanks to it, there is a significant blending of image and text, it becomes a carrier of other parallel lines of meaning and interpretation of Ján's story.
Milan Mazúr is a PhD student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, in his dissertation he researches the phenomenon of emptied narration. He creates worlds that intertwine and connect with each other in a fluid line of synapses, creating a kind of endless film story with autobiographical features. Ján is a real and imaginative character, who also appears in the previous film Casaria. The immersive beauty we see in the individual parts of his films is a mixture of nebulae and ice slurry of floating meanings.
