Jan Novak's new and yet unfinished documentary, Citizen Vaclav Havel Goes on Vacation, has just been screened at Northwestern University. In the summer of 1986, Vaclav Havel, always under the surveillance of secret services, decides to see whether travel for recreation is still possible for him in the Czechoslovak Republic. Following Vaclav Havel's own silver-colored Volkswagen Golf, ADC-77-13, now owned by a friend, and 1980s police Tatra cars, the film retraces the journey, revisiting the places where the playwright dissident had stayed, and interviewing the surviving friends. The footage is interspaced with 19:30 TV news, traditionally featuring comments on this year's grain harvest, rejoicing over a new factory footbridge, deploring the rain that fell down the barley. The familiar news with its "live" coverage and interchangeable timelines.

The documentary maintains the same distance to its subject as did an average citizen of the Communist block to the daily nuisance of undercover agents eavesdropping on conversations, 48-hour arrests, or chronic lack of products in the stores. Inhabitants of the other side of the iron curtain readily recognize that theater of absurd played out with the minimum of variation. The inept policemen conducting sometimes brutal searches of the house, foraging and plundering, and being duped by wit or by sheer chance. The film includes an interview with a policeman, who used to stalk Havel's summer house and who, on the eave, had no inkling of the coming revolution.

There are graver notes, recalling the cruelty of the 1950s regime, the ruthless Stalinism when, as Jan Novak pointed out in the discussion after the screening, "one put one's life on the line, and just one's existence."

The film resuscitates memory. First, Vaclav Havel's own recollection of that summer, one among other, since then overshadowed by events of greater import. The very normality of the trip, in the company of not-so-secret agents, stands out today perhaps more than documents of a revolution: as quotidian against quotidian beyond synonymy. The uneventfulness of this summer vacation turns it into the memory of anyone's summer: for, anyone's summer could, at any moment, be always interrupted. This document plays with and questions contexts: the president becomes a citizen among others--and the title of the movie brings to mind Vojak Svejk--; the daily news that ponctuate the reconstructed trip, today, seem pictures of another planet, like Gagarin in his cosmonaut's suit in the news' opening sequence, like uniform youths performing synchronic exercises in front of Husak, Jakes, and the whole myopic clique. The historic context of Charter 77, of the Velvet Revolution is moved to the background. Here, it is rather the memory of the police search for a document openly lying on the table and of an encounter with a police pawn after the coup.

Jan Novak's documentary accomplishes not a small thing: it places the viewer, regardless of his origin or age, in the context of the Communist everyday, and allows him to experience the commonplace absurdity of the age of terror. Also, a question for today: aren't we too serious?