"Josef Kilian" ("Postava K Podpirani" - 1963), directed by Pavel Juracek and Jan Schmidt (b. 1934), was not banned like "Report on the Party and the Guests", but its distribution within the country was limited. A Kafkaesque story that takes place in contemporary Czechoslovakia, it seems almost to foretell the position Franz Kafka was to have in his native land in the sixties. In the spring pf 1963, at an international scholarly conference at Liblice, Kafka, long damned by the establishment, was officially rehabilitated. In the eyes of the world, Pavel Juracek, one of the most striking personalities of the period, remained the author of just this one film. His feature debut- a single film consisting of two thematically connected stories- "Every Young Man" ("Kazdy Mlady Muz" - 1965), revealed with melancholy humor the alienation of young men in military uniform, and confirmed the existence of an extraordinary talent. But Juracek's major work was to be "Case for a Rookie Hangman" ("Pripad Pro Zacinajiciho Kata" - 1969), inspired by Part III of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". Although the script was finished in the early sixties, the shooting was postponed under various pretexts for years, Juracek, in the meanwhile, helping other 'young wave' directors with their scripts. He finally got to shoot his long-awaited film in 1968-1969, but it was completed only for the storage vaults of the post-Soviet occupation censors.
The codirector of "Josef Kilian", Jan Schmidt, also had to wait more than a year for the opening of his film "The End of August in the Hotel Ozone" ("Konec Srpna V Hotelu Ozon" - 1966), which was written by Jurasek. His picture of a world destroyed by atomic war, a world inhabited only by a surviving group of young women, was too depressing and too desolate for representatives of official optimism and leaders of the military. Whereupon the athletic, anti-intellectual Schmidt- director of a number of interesting short films on sports themes- tried, within the Czechoslovak context, to create something that was practically unknown there- a romantic action film. His two efforts in this area were "Lanfieri Colony" ("Kolonie Lanfieri" - 1968), and the multi-episode film based on the short stories of V. Vancura, "Queen Dorothy's Bow" ("Luk Kralovny Dorotky" - 1970).
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