Shot over the course of a week-long entrance examination held by the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, this rigorous yet witty documentary brings to mind the observational, accumulative style of Frederick Wiseman; film-makers Adéla Komrzý and Tomáš Bojar are interested not only in the individual subjects, but also the hidden machinations of cultural institutions.
Designed to weed out the less qualified entrants, the first stage of the exam involves drawing portraits of live subjects. The second round, however, is when things get more interesting. In addition to a written test on art history, the applicants are asked to respond to prompts such as climate change. The film only affords us glimpses of the resulting artworks, but much more screen time is devoted to the professors’ probing questions on the taboos and raisons d’etre behind artmaking, queries that aim to jolt prospective students out of tired cliche and preconceived notions about the lives of artists.
Though often surprisingly blunt, the professors’ line of questioning is far from a critical ambush, but rather an invitation for intellectual discourse; after all, reducing an artwork to gradable qualities is an impossible task. Instead, the teaching approach is more concerned with a candidate’s ability to articulate their methodology and practice in concrete terms. As the artworks move away from direct and collective activism – a trend blamed by one teacher on the fall of the USSR – these Socratic thought exercises seem to be a reaction to the rise of hyper-individualism among the new generation of artists: can the personal still be political if it is divorced from collective struggles? This crucial question of self-interrogation is one that we, as viewers and audience, can also ask ourselves.
• Art Talent Show is available from 12 January on True Story.
