New Cinema in Czechoslovakia (Part 2) - (By Alistair Whyte - 1971) - Movies

"Romance", Jires contribution to "Pearls of the Deep", is an unremarkable little film distinguished only by the warmth and sensuality of the actress playing the gypsy girl. His second feature, "The Joke" (1968), takes an ironic look at the rigidly conformist atmosphere of the fifties. With his third feature, "Valerie and her Week of Wonders" (1969), Jires enters the realm of fantasy. Based on a famous Czech surrealist novel of the interwar period, the film interweaves imaginary adventures of a young girl with the real events of a week in her life. Shot in beautiful colour, "Valerie and her Week of Wonders" is an extremely poetic film which juxtaposes visions of beauty with images of horror.
Vera Chytilova's episode in "Pearls of the Deep", entitled "The World of Self-Service", starts off in an atmosphere of everyday reality that recalls Milos Forman. When a bride and a young man who has been searching for his girl-friend go off into the night the mood changes and the film ends in an atmosphere of fantasy. Chytilova's most famous film is the bizarre comedy "Daisies" (1966), imaginatively shot in colour by the director's husband Jaroslav Kucera and it relies almost entirely on visual effects. The film traces the actions of two girls who are totally selfish and completely irresponsible. Chytilova has said that her original intention was to show the false values by which man lives but that the completed film is about 'destruction or the desire to destroy'. Unfortunately the film is far too strained and the attempt to give it wider implications by the juxtaposition of war images at the beginning and by the atomic explosion at the end is clumsy and unoriginal.
Pavel Juracek, one of the collaborators on an early script for "Daisies", is himself a director. In 1963, together with Jan Schmidt, he made the short feature "Josef Kilian", which won prizes at many festivals. With its hero's vain search for Josef Kilian and for the shop from where he hired a cat, with its portrayal of people passively accepting bureaucracy, this film is very much a reflection of the world of Franz Kafka. The first feature Juracek directed on his own was "Every Young Man" (1965), a film in two episodes, about military service. The first part deals with the relationship between a corporal and a private, forced to spend the day together. The corporal begins by haughtily ignoring his inferior in rank, but by the end of the day, has come to respect the younger man. The second episode is much more panoramic, giving a whole series of touching or comic incidents involving all or some of the members of the regiment. "Every Young Man" is a humorous film with satirical touches which shows compassion for the individuals within the regimented atmosphere of military service.
Nemec, Chytilova, and Juracek create films that have been variously described as fables, allegories or parables in which the logical or chronological order of events is often disrupted. A director who uses similar techniques is Antonin Masa, who wrote the script of Schorm's "Courage for Every Day". In "Hotel for Strangers", subtitled 'a mummery about love and death', Masa uses speeded-up action, symbolism and fantasy. In this reconstruction of the diary of a murdered man, Masa, like Schorm, shows that the individual who does not conform is destroyed by the world.
This fascinating period of the mid-sixties in the Czechoslovak cinema also produced a number of delightful comedies. "Never Strike a Woman - Even With a Flower" (1966), directed by Zdenek Podskalsky, is the amusing story of a middle-aged musician who, despite appearances, is irresistible to women. The film is distinguished by fine performances from Vlastimil Brodsky and the ever-present Jana Brejchova, who are in real life husband and wife. "Private Hurricane" (1967), by Hynek Bocan who worked as assistant to Nemec and Kachyna, traces the complex interrelations between three seperate couples. The film has moments of black humour when the factory worker, beautifully acted by Pavel Landovsky, makes a series of violent but unsuccessful attempts to kill his boss who is having an affair with his girlfriend. This is a sophisticated film which takes a cynical look at relations between the sexes, and the director handles the complex plot structures skillfully. These witty films seem, however, very lightweight in comparison with the more serious, more experimental, more socially critical films of the Czechoslovak New Wave.
Since 1968, only a few new films from Czechoslovakia have been shown abroad. Among these are "Valerie and her Week of Wonders", already discussed, and "The Deserter and the Nomads" (1968) by the Slovak director Juraj Jukubisko. The film is made up of three episodes, each set at a different period of history, but linked by a recurrent character who is, in fact, Death. Full of images of extreme cruelty, "The Deserter and the Nomads" is a pessimistic allegory of the human condition.
"The Cremator" (1968) is a first feature by another Slovak director, Juraj Herz. His film is a black comedy set in the late thirties and early war years. Fearful of the consequences of having a Jewish wife, an employee in a crematorium murders first her, then their son. He finally becomes director of the crematorium and is shown to be delighted at the thought of the thousands of 'clients' which fascism will bring him. What is so striking in this horror comedy is the contrast between the man's middle-class ambitions and the bestial lengths to which he will go to realize them.
Although these three features have been exported, more films were banned in Czechoslovakia in 1969-70 than in all the preceding years since the war- including features by Schorm and Menzel. Many leading directors left the country to work abroad, some may never return. Thus, the New Wave in Czechoslovakia seems to have come to an end in 1968 with the intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops and the resultant political changes.
(Copyright - Alistair Whyte)

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