Fake Opera Trailer

Fake Opera

In 2003, two documentalists: Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda built a hypermarket mockup at the Letňany in Prague. They organised a smart marketing campaign around the undertaking, hiring a professional agency, coming up with the supermarket’s logo and name: Czech Dream. Soon, they start promoting products that would draw new customers, and planned an opening ceremony. Buyers wait for the opening since the early hours, only to be massively disappointed.  The hoax enabled the two film artists to gather material for a documentary that insightfully analyses the social mechanisms and anxieties related to consumerism and publicity. For members of a society that has undergone two decades of regime change, watching this film is particularly painful.
Some Prague residents, especially from the older generation, unused to manipulation techniques in the public sphere (posters, promotions, gadgets: how anachronic compared to today’s microtargeting!), initially treated the hoax with an almost emotional trust, unaware of the extent to which publicity plays with reality or downright lies. Then they felt rightfully ridiculed. The film is also a confession of professional marketers who made the filmmakers look like trade executives. They must have been asking themselves about the point of their work and the moral costs involved. Is playing with reality at the expense of hapless victims alright?  Similar questions are asked by embarrassed employees of major internet corporations in the 2020 film TheSocial Dilemma. Formers Facebook and Google workers are unanimous is stating that if relative order could be introduced in printed media, radio, and television, similar regulations for the internet and social media are absolutely necessary. Otherwise, we are ripe for election fraud, manipulations by secret services, and boundless profits for global giants. The founding fathers of the major websites, originally hypnotised by freedom of opinion and the limitless availability of information, now agree that a mistake was made and we need to step back: unlimited freedom is being misused. Are the tools they invented to blame? It seems the issue is actually with ourselves: the phenomenon that was called “human nature” by nineteenth-century philosophers. “My dear, the real truth is always improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it. Men have always done so,” so goes the famous saying by Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s The Demons. It perfectly fits the definition of post-truth, fake truth, and “visual content.” Anyone can take a technically perfect manipulated photo or film today that will be taken for real; the only thing you need is an impulse: jealousy, controversy, ingenuity, madness...? Playing with reality is addictive. “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” is the motto of the cult game Assassin’s Creed, borrowed from German–Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. As soon as we detach an idea from its bases in real-life experience, it becomes easy to combine it with and relate to any other idea. Chaos is born.  And where there is chaos, there appears a space for manipulation, with its beneficiaries and victims. In his legendary analysis Discipline and Punish of nearly fifty years ago, the French thinker Michel Foucault reflected upon the phenomenon of prisons in the modern era. He derived it from the kinship between knowledge and power. The cultural invention of prison is supposed to replace mindless torture with ever-present and powerful control. We experience this with CCTV on every street, in every park and workplace, with our mobile phones which are so easy to track, and finally, on the internet. We would like to escape that, wouldn’t we?  This is the situation of the protagonist in the short story known in English as The Burrow. Franz Kafka’s story is a dense, parabolic monologue of a subject who builds a refuge that with time, becomes a sort of fortress, supposed to provide security in an uncertain world. However, it turns out the refuge isn’t perfect, and its resident cannot feel secure. He keeps thinking about refurbishing and perfecting his burrow. The fear of his refuge being exposed soon becomes an obsession, and the burrow now appears as a trap: the source of anxiety is within our own minds. It is hard to give order to the world when we are chaotic. is short story by Kafka gave birth to the Bunker. Fake Opera, in which the language of politics, media, and our presence in them have been written into voices.
Waldemar Raźniak 

Warsaw Autumn Festival / Warszawska Jesień
Opera multimedialna
Wojciech Błażejczyk – muzyka
Waldemar Raźniak – libretto,reżyseria
Grzegorz Mart – video Hashtag Ensemble
Lilianna Krych – dyrygentka
performerzy: Marta Grzywacz, Michał Sławecki, Michał Jóźwik, Liwia Bargieł​

Fake Opera, photo: Grzegorz Mart

Fake opera, Photo: Bartłomiej Kiełbowicz

Fake opera, Photo: Bartłomiej Kiełbowicz

Fake opera, Photo: Bartłomiej Kiełbowicz

Fake opera, Photo: Bartłomiej Kiełbowicz