Josef

Skvorecky

PN
1993.5
. C9 srsonal history of the Czech cinema
S513
1971
NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

Q*y
TRENT UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

PRESENTED BY

JIM FORRESTER
 All the Bright
Young Men and Women
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE CZECH CINEMA
1N\S
 Peter Martin Associates Ltd.
In Association with ‘Take One’ Magazine
 All the Bright
Young Men and Women
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE CZECH CINEMA

Josef Skvorecky
Translated by Michael Schonberg
 Canadian Shared Cataloguing in Publication Data

Škvorecký, Josef. e
All the bright young men and women : a personal history of the Czech
cinema / Josef Skvorecky; translated by Michael Schonberg. -

(Take one film book series; 1)

1. Moving-pictures — Czechoslovak Republic — History. 1. Title. II. Series.

PN 1993.5.C9S513 1975 791.43’09437

1SBN:0-B8778-110-1

Translated and published with the assistance of the Province of Ontario

Council for the Arts and the Canada Council.

We would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for

stills and information: Barrandov Film Studios, Canadian Film Institute,
Pat Harris, International Film Distributors, Seth Willenson, New Line
Cinema, New Cinema of Canada, Kent Carroll, Grove Press Films, r.
Jerry Breicha, CBC Picture Service, Mrs. Olga Dimitrov, Forman-Crown-
Hausman Productions, Mrs. Marie Haas, Muky, Mr. Antonin Prazak,
Mr. Alfred Radok, Mr. George Voskovec, Mr. Závis Zeman, Film Canada,
United Artists, and several people in Czechoslovakia whose names we
thought better to withhold for reasons only too obvious.

© 1971 Josef Skvorecky

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by

any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, electro¬
static copying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval
systems without permission in writing trom the publisher, except tor
the quotation of passages by a reviewer in print or through the electronic
mass media.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-174568

ISBN: 0-88778-110-1

Printed in Canada by John Deyell Limited

Designed by Pat Dacey, assisted by Susan Fothergill

The Take One Film Book Series is published by Peter Martin Associates
Limited, 35 Britain Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 1R7, in association
with Take One magazine, Post Office Box 1778, Station B, Montreal 2,
Quebec.
General Editors: Peter Lebensold
Joe Medjuck
Acknowledgement

This book is a product of nostalgia: for the country which I left

when others entered, and for the friends I had there who have made
so many fine films, sometimes due to, and sometimes in spite of, the
local conditions. It began in a course I gave at the University of
Toronto in 1969-70. Then, Joe Medjuck of Innis College asked me
to write an article for Take One; after which he and Peter Leben-
sold decided to begin their film book series with a book on the
Czech New Wave, and Peter Martin liked the idea. So I wrote
the book, in the hope that it might help a little to keep the
memory of certain things alive, in this fast forgetting world.
It is not a scholarly work, just a personal remembrance, and
therefore I have not referred to sources. Nevertheless, I would like
to thank all those brilliant, and often courageous, Czech film critics
and historians without whose work, as it appeared in the sixties in
Filmové Noviny weekly, in Film & Doba magazine and elsewhere,
the historical sections of this book could not have been written, and
whose analyses helped me greatly to see many things I would not
have otherwise understood.
My thanks go also to Dr. C. T. Bissell, President of the University
of Toronto and to the Board of Governors of that University, whose
understanding enabled me to write this book during my year as
writer in residence.

Josef Skvorecky
Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT/v

1/GRANDFATHERS AND FATHERS/1

2/THE FATHERS-THEIR SINS AND THEIR SONS/28

3/A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTISTS AS YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN/67

4/A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTISTS AS MIDDLE-AGED MEN/216

5/THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME/241

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF CZECH FEATURE FILMS/ 256

INDEX/266
Foreword to the Second Edition

Very few tilms of artistic interest have been made in the Barrandov
studios since this book was completed in early 1972. The swan song of
the New Wave was Vit Olmer’s debut with a story about university
students, appropriately titles Well, Good-Bye... (Takteahoj..., 1971).
In 1973 an absolute majority of the films mentioned in this volume
were blacklisted and withdrawn from public showing. Radok, Forman,
Passer, Kadár and Jasný have remained in exile; to them has been added
Jiří Weiss and, for the time being, Jan Němec, who was shipped out of
the country as an incorrigible in 1974. Of those who remain Schorm,
Juráček, Schmidt, Chytilová and Krumbachová had not been permitted
to make any new films—the two women film makers were even pre¬
vented from attending the Women’s Film Festival in Toronto in 1973,
where they had been invited to come by the organizers of the event.
The rest of the New Wave directors have been allowed to make Soviet-
bloc equivalents of Hollywood entertainment (TVin ZhrMce-Papoušek;
7?o<ico-Má?a), escapist adventure (The Man from London-Bočan),
children’s films (The Legend of the Silver Fir-V láčil), fantasy based on
the safely-dead-Soviet-author-Grin’s work(Morgiana-Wexz), and, in most
cases, to take the traditional retreat (see pages 36-40) into the ideologi¬
cally non-controversial past ( . . . and say Hello to the Swallows-YaeV,
The Days of Treason-Vávra). These films of the Societ occupation
era are, as a rule, examples of well-polished craftsmanship, devoid, how¬
ever, of any of the social significance and innovation in form of the
New Wave classics. Jiří Menzel of Closely Watched Trains renown was
even forced by Mr. Hrbas (see footnote on page 197) to undergo “self-
criticism” for his past sins, and commissioned to produce a socialist-
realist spectacle about the building of a dam, originally entitled Knee-
High in the Mud, but after censorial deliberation renamed Gold at the
Bottom (the studio workers’nickname for this spectacle was Two Million
Dollars Worth of S_t). Czech cinema reached its lowest depths in
1974 with Steklý’s Hippopotamus, an inept satire on the year 1968
which—to empty theatres—pokes fun at the dead Communist leader
and Alexander Dubiek’s closest ally Josef Smrkovský. Smrkovský,
ironically, was the man who, in 1945, prevented General Patton from
liberating Prague, and thus saved it for the Russians.
The teaching staff of the Film Academy has been purged of all such
undesirables as Evald Schorm or Milan Kunders, and no interesting
graduates have appeared.
Which, under the circumstances, is by no means proof that there are
none.

J.S.
Toronto, January, 1975.
 To Kathryn

who loves to watch the late late show

1/GRANDFATHERS AND FATHERS

It is an indisputable tact and not just chauvinism when I say that one
of the most important pioneers of film was Jan Evangelista Purkyne
(1787-1869). This great Czech physiologist, with an unusual sense
ot humour, came up with a number of original ideas. Being a
theoretician, he didn’t bother putting all of them into practice. The
invention of dactylography, for instance, has been ascribed to a doc¬
tor ot the British Colonial Service, although Purkyne had noticed
long before the uniqueness of the fingerprints, and thought that they
might serve as an excellent tool for identification. He then promptly
forgot about them.
His film exploits, however, are better remembered. Around4840,
having decided to provide a little entertainment for his students, he
glued several grimacing daguerreotypes of himself onto a
stroboscope equipped with a shutter of his own design—a system
which is still used—and became perhaps the first jester ever to ap¬
pear on a photograph-come-to-life. He went on to invent a pull¬
down system which he used to illustrate the systole and diastole of
the heart. In this respect he had advanced further, technically, than
the younger Edison. As he observed himself revolving around his
own axis on the strosboscope—or as he learnedly called it:
kinesiscope—he pondered about the future of his toy: “It may be
presumed, that in time this thing will develop into a new form of ar¬
tistic expression. When this happens it will not suffice to simply
show a single phase of the passing motion. Instead it will be
necessary to show the motion in its entirety.”

The real grandfather of Czech cinematography was the handsome

architect, Jan Krizenecky, who in 1896 brought from Paris the
Lumiere camera and began to take moving pictures of interesting
scenes: firemen running around a fire-engine, with the water really
jetting out of the hose; a group of bearded gentlemen very rapidly
laying the corner-stone of a monument, etc.
The young bon-vivant was a far too enthusiastic visitor of the
Prague cabarets to be contented with shots of arriving locomotives
or jogging labourers. He hired a popular comedian, Josef Svab-
Malostransky, and made a short called Laughing and Crying,
which incidentally contained another “first” for the Czech cinema:
as far as I know it was the first time close-ups were used in the
same manner as they were to be by others much later. Krizenecky’s
work culminated in two very short comedies, The Exhibition
1
Czech Heaven: the prominent standing Frankenstein on the left is historian F.
Palacky; the mad doctor on the extreme right is the composer Antonin Dvorak.

Sausage Vender and A Rendez-Vous at the Grinding Room, both

of which were shown at the Exhibition of Architecture and
Engineering in 1898. The humour of these shorts, like that of the
classical American comedies, consisted of people falling into food
and of Victorian-styled in flagranti situations.

The lonely pioneer Krizenecky found no understanding among

investors, but the first commercial film companies began regular
production some ten years later, in 1908, and from then on they
were very successful. The average yearly feature film production in
Czechoslovakia in the 1920’s was about twenty films; after the
Prague studios at Barrandov were built it increased to between
thirty and forty, occasionally reaching as high as fifty. Early Czech
films contained very little art, as was the case everywhere at this
time when film was primarily a new business venture. The majority
of the productions consisted of comedies of a type easily identified
by their titles: The Pink Slip, Annie Is Jealous, Saxophone Suzi,
The Prague Adamites*; they generally dealt with the comic events
preceding the wedding night. Others were highly popular
melodramas such as The Light of his Eyes, The Silver Clouds or
Hearth Without Fire, mostly based on the enormous sufferings of
enamoured millionaires. Two smaller categories were adventure
* Adamites were 15th century Czech nudists (another “first" for the Czechs); they
were the most radical sect of the Hussite religious movement, one of whose claims to
fame lies in the introduction of the word ‘pistol’ into several European languages. The
Hussite movement preached the return to the Bible a hundred years before Luther.
The Adamites, however, took it so literally that they discarded their clothes and
walked around like Adam and Eve before the Fall. The Hussite leader Jan Zizka mer¬
cilessly slaughtered every one of them, thus setting an example of how to best deal
with deviationists. This film described the amatory adventures of a turn-of-the-
century playboy, and took place at a Prague public swimming pool. The Don Juan's
adventures were complicated by a double, which constituted the first use of double
exposure in Czech cinema. The film was made in 1917.

2
Jan Krizenecky (1868-1921), the handsome lonely
pioneer.

The Kidnapping of Banker Fux: Anny Ondra imitating

Mary Pickford, Eman Fiala as Sherlock Holmes.

films and, after World War I, patriotic super-films. In the latter, the
audiences were treated to mass appearances of giants of Czech
history who, for purposes of greater verisimilitude, wore stiff masks
made after ancient portraits. The result resembled a congress of
Frankensteins (Czech Heaven, 1918). In a film made to com¬
memorate the millennium of the martyrdom of St. Wenceslas, the
first Czech saint, costly armies of extras pretended to be fiercely
engaged in deadly battle and the good king reached out to Heaven
with his sword-bearing hand. He shouldn’t have done that because
the close-up of the hand revealed a wrist-watch on the actor’s
arm, whereupon my father burst out laughing. This is my oldest
personal memory related to film as Saint Wenceslas was the first
movie which my pious parents took me to. That was in 1929, and I
was five.
The adventures were movies of the Bulldog Drummond type
about international conspiracies (The Poisoned Light, 1921). Since
the country never did have a particularly high private crime rate,
such films were usually parodies (The Kidnapping of Banker Fux,
1923; Lelicek in the Service of Sherlock Holmes, 1932). Even
horrors appeared, for instance, The Arrival from Darkness (1921),
a story about a count who after three hundred years in a grave
awakened and fell incestuously in love with a female descendant.
Sometimes the film-makers reached out to themes from foreign
classics, as with The Feathered Shadows (1930), based on a story
by Edgar Allan Poe about madmen who murdered a psychiatrist.
Sometimes they used non-actors with some natural disposition for a
3
Anny, this time in the arms of a drugged corpse that An early use of Soviet-style non-actor: Gustav
came to life in Arrival from Darkness. Fristensky as The Prague Executioner.

particular part; for instance Gustav Fristensky, the Czech world

champion in catch-as-catch-can wrestling, gave a stellar perfor¬
mance in the title role of The Prague Executioner (1927).
The colourful adventure genre brought about the first attempt at
Czech-American co-production. Two rich American Slovaks, the
Siakel brothers, decided in 1921 to make a movie, Janosik, about
the Slovak Robin Hood. The film was shot simultaneously in two
versions with two cameras. The more historically accurate version,
which was shown in Czechoslovakia, had Janosik captured and
executed. The other version, intended for the more sensitive
American public, showed Janosik escaping from under the gallows
and marrying a beautiful girl from the mountains. Both versions
contained long western-style chases on horseback more appropriate
to Arizona than to the valleys of the Tatra mountains.
Film-making was evidently an excellent business, operated
according to the customers’ demands. Despite this, a handful of
enthusiasts decided to validate Prukyne’s prediction and turn
film-making into an art. The early beginnings were comical.
Charmed by Méliěs, Stanislav Hlavsa made Faust (1912); it was
based on Gounod’s opera and had Mephistopheles appear,
disappear and then, astoundingly, re-appear. After the film’s
completion, the director travelled with it through the country and,
hidden behind the screen, sang the part of Mephistopheles, thus
creating one of the first sound films in history. The Faustian
4
The Song of Gold (1920): I love the early-twenties atmosphere of this still, with
Anny Ondra on a period chair looking like a baroque shepherdess.

theme was used again in The Builder of the Cathedral (1919)—the

story of a Gothic architect who offered his soul to the Devil in
order to be able to complete a daringly conceived cathedral. For
the first time in the history of Czech cinema, the word art does not
have to be used in quotation marks. The film was even more
successful abroad than at home: it had a long run in France under
the title La Cathedrale.
But it was socially critical themes that brought some consistency
into the efforts to turn film into an art form. One of the first was
Vaclav Binovec’s The Grey-Eyed Demon (1919), a story about the
labour unrest of the 1870’s; later came Přemysl Prazsky’s Battalion
(1927), a biographical film about the early Czech socialist, Dr.
František Uher. The trend culminated in a film described by
Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach as “the swan song of the
silent film era”. Called That’s Life, it was made in 1929 by Carl
Junghans.
Junghans, although German, has a place in the history of Czech
cinema. He made his film in Prague with Czech money provided by
the popular Czech comedian, Theodor Pistek, who being fed up
with petit-bourgeois farces raised the funds, invested his own
savings (despite the warning of the film merchant Mr. Auerbach
5
Vera Baronovskaya, Pudovkin’s Mother, in Karl Junghans’ That’s Life (1929).
that nobody in the world would ever buy it), and persuaded Czech
actors to work without pay.
The social drama of a washer-woman who slaved to keep her
family alive was made very much in the style of the left-oriented
German school of that time; the German Social Democrats and
Communists promised to finance the film, but in the end failed to
keep their promise and backed instead Piel Jutzi’s Mother
Krausen’s Road to Happiness (1929). Jutzi’s film bore a rather
striking resemblance to an original idea Junghans had been offering
since 1925. It seems that Jutzi had simply “borrowed” Junghans’
theme.
As Mr. Auerbach had predicted. That’s Life was a total financial
flop and it disappeared. One copy was discovered after the war. It
was shown in numerous film clubs and was highly acclaimed. In
1957, Elmar Klos (Shop on Main Street) made a sound track for
the film, but when Junghans saw it in 1964 he did not like it. Klos
used brass band music, whereas Junghans thought Richard Strauss
would have been more suitable.
However, at least one country did notice the film at the time of its
original release—the Soviet Union. Junghans went there with very
high hopes in 1931. He was interested in the problems related to the
use of sound in film; he wanted a functional utilisation of sound
rather than the popular chatty intoxication. At that time, however,
a socialist-realistic code began to be felt in Moscow; Eisenstein and
Pudovkin were already experiencing difficulties and the bureaucrats
did not seem very interested in the functional utilisation of sound.
Instead of “futile” experiments, Junghans, upon their suggestion,
wrote a scenario based on Langston Hughes’ novel Not without
Laughter; criticism of foreign oppressions was a safe and fashion¬
able topic in the Moscow of the early thirties. In the end, the
bureaucrats changed their minds even about criticism of foreign
oppressions and Junghans did not receive any money to make his
anti-racist film. They explained that “a film dealing with such
delicate internal problems of the USA might endanger Soviet-
American commercial relations”.
After this hard lesson in socialist realism, the disgusted Junghans
returned to Prague. His old friends, this time with the aid of a
Yugoslavian company Presvetni Film, secured some moderate
capital and Junghans began shooting Life Goes On on location in
Yugoslavia. Then came the Marseille assassination of Alexander II;
7
political disturbances followed; the shooting dragged on and the
capital dwindled. It took years to finish the movie.
In Germany, meanwhile, the National Socialist German Workers’
Party, in its vociferous building of the New Order, was using slogans
expressing the necessity to fight for peace and for the defeat of
Anglo-American war-mongers. Junghans seems to have been
tricked into cooperation as, after all, were many others. He returned
home and made a commercial hit, Through the Desert (1936),
based on Karl May’s novel; then he created something which he
later, very unconvincingly, tried to conceal. Whatever the real truth
may be, the fact remains that the film The Years of Decision
(1939) bears his name among the credits. Later he maintained that
it was an anti-war film, which is possible, particularly since the
Nazis were very vehemently against war—and cleverly
manoeuvered the Western “war-mongers” into declaring it. But the
film is also a eulogy to the NSDAP’s revolutionary ascent to power.
Junghans, himself, apparently caught on very quickly; in April of
1939 he escaped to France and then to the United States. He never
returned to film-making. Instead he opened a photographic studio,
secured exclusive rights to the manufacturing of coloured photos of
Disneyland, made money and retired to Munich.
As I have pointed out, he was a German who made an outstand¬
ing Czech film. His life reveals the formula of a typical Central
European fate. Hollywood has seen all sorts of tragedies, but this
one is specifically Czecho-German. The lives of famous people of
this corner of the world are not marred so much by disease, change
of taste, or loss of youth, as by battles of ideology which, under
ominous threats, compel them to absolute loyalty. Many actresses
have slept with influential politicians, but they rarely had to pay for
it with exile, as did the beautiful Czech film star, Lida Baarova. She
was chosen by Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda,
the limping “gentleman” who wielded absolute power in the Protec¬
torate of Bohmen und Mahren. This power extended to film stars as
long as they did not commit suicide, as did Baarova’s sister Zorka
Janu, driven by shame. Many directors have failed in other parts of
the world, but very seldom because of overenthusiastic audiences.
This, however, was the fate of quite a few directors east of the Ore
Mountains.
That European specialty affected the career of Gustav Machaty
—the first Czech director to enter film histories. He was truly

8
The eager young man with the wicker chair is Gustav Machaty, the high-school
drop-out who later made Extasy. Here at work in an early Prague film studio.

reared by the movies. Thrown out of high school for disobedience

at the age of sixteen, he became a side-kick in the mini-studios
of the pre-war Czech producers. In 1918, he acted in his first
comedy; the title, Alois Won the Sweepstakes, indicates the
level of the film’s humour. From then on he acted, wrote scenarios,
assisted in skits like The Enraged Groom (1919), Gilly’s First
Visit to Prague (1920), and even got to direct a farce called
Teddy’d Like a Smoke (1919). Being a youth by film possessed, he
obeyed the calling of Hollywood and left for California as soon as
the Great War ended. He arrived there in 1920 and, according to
unconfirmed accounts, worked as assistant to both D. W. Griffith
and Erich von Stroheim. In 1921, Machaty returned to Prague as
the manager of Eddy Polo, a famous movie cowboy of that time.
Trying to increase the popularity of Polo, Machaty spread the story
that he was in fact a Czech from Karlin (the Prague version of
Soho). It didn’t impress the public. During a performance of The
Massacre of Farmer Cook’s Family Polo behaved so arrogantly
that the audience booed him off the stage. The furious cowboy slap¬
ped Machaty’s face and then fired him on the spot.
Machaty was an artist and the two years near Griffith equipped
9
him with a fine film sense. After his return to Czechoslovakia he
spent several years peddling his ideas for art films among the Prague
rich. Finally one of them, who made his money selling canned fish,
wrote a check and Machaty was on his way. Shooting in Prague and
Vienna, and using Czech and Austrian actors (one of them was the
son of the gentleman who wrote the check), Machaty made a film of
Leo Tolstoy’s Kreuzer Sonata (1926). The cast was indicative of
Machaty’s enthusiastic cosmopolitism—he believed that film was an
international art. Kreuzer Sonata bore the markings of the German
expressionistic style and earned the canned fish manufacturer a
goodly sum. Machaty was no longer forced to offer his services to
any taker; instead he accepted an offer to shoot a version of Good
Soldier Schweik in Civilian Life. Inspired by Hasek’s classic Czech
novel, the film was made in Vienna, and was a total failure. It was
evident that the serious young man had absolutely no sense of
humour.
After two years of studying foreign movies, he atoned for this
failure by making the first of his two erotic films, Eroticon (1929).
For the first time in Czech cinema a completely naked actress ap¬
peared on the screen. Her name was Ita Rina; she was Yugoslavian,
and played the part of a train watchman’s daughter; the watchman
was played by a Czech actor, Karel Schleichert. The girl was
seduced and lured away from her father’s house by a rich young
man—a German actor with a Norwegian name, Olaf Fjord—was
abandoned in the big city, and finally properly married to a rich
man, played by an Italian, Luigi Serventi. Thanks to Machaty’s
talent this “true romance” turned into a work of art, although admit¬
tedly a somewhat eclectic one. The text books of cinema quote the
first of Machaty’s many famous symbols: two drops of rain slowly
slide down the window-pane until they finally merge into one—in¬
side the room a debauchee is seducing the watchman’s daughter.
Eroticon’s story was written by the great Czech surrealist poet,
Vítězslav Nezval, who was obviously not being quite serious. He
was more serious in the script for Machaty’s next feature. From
Saturday to Sunday (1931), which has been unfairly neglected
probably because it was sandwiched between the two erotically
scandalous pieces. It was a poetic and socially-critical story of
young sales girls, who worked hard during the week and on Satur¬
day night tried to grab a little bit of the “rich” life at one of the night
spots. Machaty turned the film into a test case for his theory that, in
10
 movies, speech should be used as little as possible, and even the
talkie film should remain primarily a visual medium. That year he
returned for the second and last time to comedy, only to once more
realize that he was no good at it. He produced Naceradec, the King
of the Kibitzers, based on a humorous character created by the
Prague Jewish author, Karel Polaček. Then came his lifetime
triumph—Extasy (1933).
The history of this scandalous and beautiful cinematographic
work is well known. The film was admired by such giants of erotic
art as Henry Miller [viz. “Reflection on Extasy” in his book Max
and the White Phagocytes (1938)]. The unclothed heroine, Hed-
vige Kiesler, launched her great Hollywood career as Hedy Lamarr
from it. Her husband, an Austrian millionaire, tried unsuccessfully
to prevent the scandal from spreading by buying up prints of the
film and the pictures of his nude wife which appeared in magazines.
Later, Hedy Lamarr wrote about it in the book, Extasy and I
(1966). In it she maintained that she had undressed only after
Machaty had pressured her with threats that, unless she stripped,
the film would be a financial failure and her husband would have to
pay. Unfortunately for Miss Lamarr, the still surviving cameraman
of Extasy, Jan Stallich, declared in an article, “Extasy and Hedy
Kiesler ’, that Hedy had disrobed quite voluntarily and performed
the daring scenes with youthful enthusiasm. After the performance
of Lena Nyman in / Am Curious Yellow and other public
cohabitors such “daring”, of course, has completely faded.
Despite the Pope’s protests the film triumphed at the 1934
Venice Festival and subsequently became one of the classics of
11
world cinema. After World War II, certain critics, particularly the
leftists (Georges Sadoul, Chiarini) described it as over valued.
They accused it of cosmopolitism, empty formalism, and eroticism.
When I saw Extasy after twenty years, in 1969, in Toronto, I got
the impression that these critics were paying tribute to the holy war
of A. A. Zhdanov against beauty and love-making. Extasy is a
charming and poetic film of classical perfection, and however cos¬
mopolitan it might be in aesthetic principles and cast, its lyricism
continues an old Czech tradition.
The remainder of Machaty’s life is a typically Czech tragedy,
although it takes place predominately in the United States. Not¬
withstanding his triumph in Venice, he was unable to obtain money
at home, and had to turn to Austria, and later to Italy, where he first
made Nocturne (1934) and then Ballerina (1936). The latter was
sent to Venice, but the audience expected another Extasy and
rejected it. At that time Machaty already had a contract with MGM
and escaped the shame by going to Hollywood. However, MGM
sent people to Venice and had second thoughts about the contract.
Machaty was allowed to shoot only one short (The Wrong Way
Out, 1938) for the series Crime Does Not Pay, and a single 13-
movie, Within the Law (1939). Other than that Machaty barely sub¬
sisted in Hollywood; he received no offers from Czechoslovakia,
was not allowed to enter Italy (he had offended Mussolini), and did
not want to work in Nazi Germany. He made a living as a
specialized side-kick: whenever a famous director felt under the
weather, Machaty was sent for to become a director for a few days:
so he, for instance, substituted for Sidney J. Franklin in The Good
Earth in the scenes where the locusts attack the harvest; for
Clarence Brown in The Conquest with Charles Boyer and Greta
Garbo; he stood in for Sam Wood in Madame X, where, as an “ex¬
pert” on the erotic, he shot scenes in the South American brothel.
His last chance came after Herbert J. Yates, the owner of Republic
Films, married a Czech figure skater Vera Hruba Ralston. Vera
probably put in a word for Machaty and he was given a Dalton
Trumbo script, which he shot and titled Jealousy (1943). The story
of a Czech immigrant was so naive that nobody dared to show it in
Prague—it was not supposed to be comical.
After Jealousy came the long skid; Machaty became financially
dependent on his wife Maria Ray, a costume designer, and when in
1950 she committed suicide, he had to leave Hollywood. He settled
12
 Vancura’s Before the Matriculation (1932). The brooding handsome student is
Antonin Novotny: when I referred to him as “an empty beau” the censor con¬
fiscated the article although the actor was no relation to the President.

in Germany, where in 1955 he wrote the script for G. W. Pabst’s It

Happened on June 20th. Later he directed his only German film
Missing Child 312 which resulted in a professorship at the Munich
Film School. Under his guidance, the students made New Year’s
Eve 1957, but then the school closed. There were only two more
glimpses of hope before the end of his life. In 1957 he negotiated in
Prague about the possibility of shooting two scripts. The first had a
telling title, The Career in Rome, and it was a tragedy about young
embittered film-makers; the second was to be a new version of Ex-
tasy. I don’t know why nothing came of either. I cannot, however,
imagine Extasy being produced in the prudish fifties at Barrandov.
It would have been possible after the arrival of the New Wave, and
Machaty did come to Prague again in 1963. During the negotiations
he became ill, was taken to Munich and there died on December
13th, 1963.

It was a creeping drama with an unhappy end, but in that sense no

particular exception. The fates of Czech film-makers-artists are
often variations of a sad theme. One of the most promising creators
of the thirties was Vladislav Vančura, who did not live to see his
best films: that is films based on his books, Jiri Menzel’s The
Capricious Summer, 1968and František WacW's Markéta Lazarova,
1967. Vančura was shot by the Gestapo after Czech commandos
assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi eminence grise of the
Protectorate, in 1942. His name headed the endless columns of vic-
13
cims listed on the laconic blood-red posters; the posters which were
the only obituaries of the men of Lidice*, and of thousands of inno¬
cent people.
Vančura was primarily a novelist; he was a virtuoso of the
vocabulary, a master of the rhythm and timbre of the Czech
language, but since he did not write in English, he remained vir¬
tually unknown outside of Czechoslovakia. Along with the other
modernists of the 1920’s he loved the wonderful moving pic¬
tures—a Douglas Fairbanks styled script written in 1926 and called
The Incorrigible Tommy survives. He finally got his chance in
1932, when he made a student drama about the “generation gap”,
Before the Matriculation. He directed it in collaboration with the
experienced Svatopluk Innemann, who provided the necessary
craftsmanship, while Vančura gave it the gently lyrical artistic
quality.^ His second film, On the Sunny Side (1933), illustrated the
more sympathetic of the two opposing opinions—both apparently
marxist—regarding human character. Two children meet in an
orphanage—one is a son of a poor widow, the other a daughter of a
rich stock-broker. Under the guidance of a progressive teacher both
of them grow up to become sensitive, model people. The film
echoed the theories of the Soviet educator Makarenko, which were
later considerably neglected by socialist realism. In its Active world,
ruled by predestination of social origin and class hatred, there was
not much room for them.
A year later Vančura made a film in the Carpatho-Ukraine region
of Czechoslovakia, which was quietly annexed in 1945 by the Soviet
Union. It was called The Unfaithful Marijka; Vančura for the first
time used non-actors in this visually beautiful study of the life of or¬
thodox village Jews. His last two films, Love and People (1937)

*Lidice was a village near Prague razed by the Nazis in retaliation for the
assassination of Heydrich.

tThe male star of the film suffered from a different kind of typically Czech fate. He
was Antonin Novotny, and was the Czech answer to Robert Taylor. Around 1936,
Louis B. Meyer received a high Czechoslovakian medal of merit; he was so touched
by this appreciation that he offered the handsome young actor a Hollywood
engagement. His emotions lasted for three months; Novotny did not manage to learn
English in that time, so he subsequently had to return the borrowed swimming pool
and villa, and return home without glory. He continued his career as a screen lover as
long as he could, and then completed a degree in engineering. In a 1963 article on
film history, 1 referred to him as “an empty beau"—and the censor confiscated the ar¬
ticle. Then I discovered that some Western women's magazine had selected Antonin
Novotny—the President, not the actor—the most handsome statesman of the year.

14
Jiřina Stepnickova (kneeling) as Rovensky’s Maryša. She later spent ten years in a
concentration camp for attempting to travel abroad without an exit visa.

from a car-racing milieu, and The Swaggerers (1937), a village

drama based on a classical Czech play, were made in collaboration
with another competent practitioner Vaclav Kubasek; both were
good, although not excellent films. The inspiration provided to
young film-makers by Vancura’s enthusiasm for this youngest art
was the greatest contribution that the famous author could have
made. His fame established a degree of respect for the hitherto
lightly regarded art form. He fought against kitsch, and during the
war led a group which planned the nationalization of the Barrandov
studios. It must also be remembered that his fantasy gave birth to
the masterpiece of Czech historical film, Markéta Lazarova, made
from his novel 25 years after his death.

Josef Rovensky, another of the grandfather generation, did all sorts

of things related to film, but most of all he spent his time trying to
raise money to carry out projects which, in the end, usually never
did get under way. He often made money as an actor—he even co-
starred with the American actress Louise Brooks in Pabst’s Diary of
a Lost Girl—and once in a long while he intelligently directed a
negligée comedy or a B-movie. The first one, made in 1919, was
called The Vanished Writing, and Rovensky introduced in it a

15
young Prague dancer, Anny Ondra, who went on to become the
greatest star of first Czech, and then German, pre-war film. Later
she married Max Schmelling, one of the two men who managed to
knock out Joe Louis. Contrary to the tradition of great stars, she is
still married to him.
Rovensky's opus maior was The River (1934), a gentle, lyrical
visual poem, and a harbinger of the lyricism of one of the fathers of
the New Wave, Vaclav Krska. Together with Extasy it was the sen¬
sation of Venice 1934. Rovensky next directed two lesser films, but
then the young Otakar Vavra adapted for him a classical play of
Czech naturalism, Maryša; it is a story of a village girl who is forced
to marry a rich peasant, and finally poisons him. The part of Maryša
was given to another future great star of Czech cinema, Jiřina Step-
nickova. Probably under Vavra's influence, Rovensky emphasized
the socially critical aspects of the old repertory piece. In 1937, he
began filming Watchman No. 47 but he never completed it; it was
later made in Hollywood during the war as Pickup by Hugo Haas.
He also started Virginity, a movie about a shop-girl who promises
to sleep with a lecherous old man in order to be able to pay for her
sweetheart’s medical treatment. During the second day of shooting,
Rovensky suddenly died. The film was completed by his pupil and
the author of the script, Otakar Vavra.

Vavra is the only member of the founding generation who sur¬

vived all the changes in taste, aesthetics and politics, and is still
making movies. From the very beginning, his films bore the
trademark of determined rationalism and willingness to learn. While
others were self-taught improvisers, visionaries or faltering seekers,
Vavra was the first Czech professional film-maker. In comparison to
Machaty or Rovensky, he never made anything that would stand out
in the history of Czech cinema as a beautiful exclamation mark; on
the other hand he never lowered his high artistic standards. With
the exception of two symptomatic pauses, not a single year has
passed since Virginity (1937) without a new film by Vavra. His last
movie, Hammer Against Witches, was released in 1970. The two
exceptions were the years 1950 to 55, and 1962 to 65. Both un¬
productive periods coincided with the arrival of new trends, and
both must have shocked Vavra’s artistic spirit. The first was the era
of raging socialist realism, and the intelligent communist Vavra
could hardly have been expected to digest the fact that his life-long
16
ettorts towards the creation of an artistic socialist cinematography*
were turning into an embarrassing parody. Vavra never made a
socialist-realistic movie, having escaped the requirements of propa¬
ganda by a retreat into history. The second pause coincided with
the arrival of the New Wave. Vavra’s films are traditionally precise,
rational, and professional work. His own students (he was the most
successful teacher ot the Film Academy) emerged suddenly with
anti-traditional experiments, which they did not learn from him, but
rather from industrious examination of Western films. In this they
followed Vavra’s example in his earlier years. Vavra in turn began
to study the works of his students; after three years of silence he
came up with two beautiful formalistic films, and proved that he still
knew how to do it. In this context it should be remarked that his first
work was a little experiment in social criticism called We Live in
Prague (1933). It was set in the Great Depression period. His last
work to date, The Hammer Against Witches, describes the witch¬
craft trials of the Czech baroque era, but is obviously directed
against trials of a much later period. In between, there was a Golden
Lion from the Venice Festival for The Guild of the Maidens of
Kutna Hora (another historical cryptogram, banned immediately
after the arrival of the Nazis) and more than twenty other films. In
the end Vavra outdid both Machaty and the New Wave in erotic
daring. One American critic wrote about the frolics of a nude thirty-
year-old lady in The Romance for a Fluegelhorn, saying that it was
the most daring nude scene he had ever seen. In addition to its
serious overtones, The Hammer Against Witches can also be seen
as a black mass of nudity, functionally utilized.

Vavra’s exact opposite is the great improviser Martin Fric (before

the German occupation, and after it until the Communist takeover
in 1948, called “Mac” Fric). He started at nineteen with the comedy
Why Aren’t You Laughing (1922), and ended after forty-six years
and almost twice that number of films with the comedy The Best
Broad of my Life (1968). An absolute majority of the films in that
mountain of fun were conceived as comedies—nevertheless some
involuntary socialist-realistic funnies do appear among the
multitude. Unlike Vavra, and despite the occasional lapses, Fric
made a few films which, after so many years, remain very vividly in

*For instance, the Prague Film Academy was his brain-child.

17
Another early still I love: a perfect study in black and white with Anny Ondra
and Vlasta Burian in The Sweethearts of an Old Jailbird.

one’s mind, as do the eternal gags of Modern Times. Kristian

(1939) became symptomatic of the spiritual atmosphere of its time,
in a way comparable to Humphrey Bogart’s movies; then came the
first, and only good, Czech screwball comedy, Eva Is Fooling
(1939), and a parody on kitsch, The Poacher’s Ward (1948), which
many took seriously, and as a result suffered considerable attacks
of melancholia. Last, but certainly not least, should be mentioned
his films with the comic genius, Vlasta Burian (Catacomb, 1940),
and with the duo of Voskovec and Werich (Heave-Ho\ 1934, and
The World Belongs to Us, 1937).
Fric departed after a career as the most successful Czech film en¬
tertainer, although some of his serious films were also remarkable.
Yet even he was affected by the Central European fate: he died of a
heart attack on August 21, 1968, as the first Soviet tanks rolled into
Prague.

For those who somehow managed to escape anonymity, this small

piece of land in the heart of Europe prepared strange surprises and
unwelcome adventures in a period shorter than the average life-
18
The White Sickness: Haas in white coat; The man who felt: 1) A soccer fan, 2) A
sitting: Karel Capek with wife O. Schein- Czech, 3) A Jew - Hugo Haas in Men
pflugova. Off-Side,

span. This is well illustrated by the careers of the four great

comedians of Fric’s films.
Best known on the American continent is a Jewish actor from the
Moravian capitol Brno, Hugo Haas. He was, at heart, a serious
artist, a subtle psychological comedian somewhat in the manner of
Charles Laughton, with whom he appeared as Pope Urban in the
Actors Laboratory production of Brecht’s Galileo Galilei, directed
by Brecht himself. This was preceded by a life full of ironic little
tragedies which became progressively greater, until they culminated
in the final tragedy of a premature death.
Haas was a full-blooded Jew, and only half Czech (his mother
was a Jewish-Russian emigre), and yet the family felt completely
Czech and did not even speak any other language until they were
reminded of their “race” in a typically Central European way: Hugo
in January 1938, when a production of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. and
The World of Beggars, a socially critical film directed by Miros¬
lav Cikan, were viciously attacked by the fascist paper Vlajka,
mainly for Haas’ participation in them. Hugo’s father and brother
Paul, a talented musician, were given an even more tragic
reminder during the war in Auschwitz.
For some ten years, at the beginning of his career, Haas was
viewed by the critics as just one of many handsome, dark-haired
stage-and-screen gigolos; but then, in 1931, in a film based on a
humourous novel Men Off-Side, by another Czech-Jewish artist,
Karel Polaček (who died in a Nazi camp), the audiences suddenly
witnessed the birth of a comic actor of the first magnitude. So
thorough was the identification of the young Jewish actor with the
main character of the film, the Czech-feeling Jewish shopkeeper
and soccer fan Mr. Naceradec, that the success of the movie made
19
Hugo with a very young Gregory Peck Hugo Haas with Charles Laughton in
in Days of Glory. Brecht’s Galileo, directed by Brecht.

Machaty shoot a rather poor sequel to it, Naceradec, the King of

The Kibitzers (1932). In 1933 Haas joined forces with Mac Fric,
and they produced a series of first-class comedies, based often on
their own ideas and scripts (A Dog’s Life, 1933; The Last Man,
1934). Later they used Otakar Vavra as screenwriter in another
series of memorable films (A Lane in Paradise, 1936; Morality
Above All, 1937), and finally Haas started to direct his movies him¬
self; first with the help of Vavra (Camel Through the Needle’s Eye,
1936), and then independently in an outstanding adaptation of Karel
Capek’s anti-Nazi science-fiction drama, The White Sickness
(1937).
In 1939 the tragedy set in: Haas was thirty eight, and he had
never spent one day outside of his native Czechoslovakia. In spite of
the impending, and rather obvious, holocaust he did not want to
leave the country. His wife, however, knew better. The experience
of similar holocausts was in her bones for she, like Haas’ mother,
came from a family of post-revolutionary Russian emigres. First she
fought the French consul, then she fought the Gestapo, finally she
had to leave their new-born baby with her non-Jewish sister-in-iaw
and force her husband to flee in the very last minute before the
brown iron curtain fell down. They went to France where Haas
appeared in one film, The Sea in Flames, and made a documen¬
tary about the Czech cause, Our Combat. But soon they had to
flee again: France fell to Hitler in the summer of 1940.
It is undoubtedly a sign of Haas’ extraordinary abilities that from
his first American movie (Days of Glory, in which he co-starred
with the young Gregory Peck) until the day he left for Europe in the
early sixties, he was featured in some twenty Hollywood films, and
20
Hugo with Linda Darnell in Hugo with Nat King Cole in Night of
Chekhov’s Summer-stonn. the Quarter Moon (directed by Haas).

in 1950 he was even able to form his own company and buy the old
Chaplin studios (where he found an abandoned huge cog-wheel, a
remnant of Modern Times, which he kept as a memento). He di¬
rected fourteen films, and appeared in all of them but one, the most
memorable ones being Pickup (1951), based on a novel by the
Czech novelist Josef Kopta, which had been started but never
finished by Rovensky in Prague in 1937; Thy Neighbour’s Wife
(1953), an adaptation of a story by another Czech-born writer
Oskar Jelinek; Lizzie (1957); One Girl’s Confession (1953); and
particularly the delightful Edge of Hell (1956), an Americanized
version of his and Fric’s A Lane in Paradise, which, occasionally,
can still be seen on TV.
The war ended and he had a strong desire to go home—but the
feared news about the death of his brother and father in Auschwitz
came and shocked him into staying. The only consolation was his
seven year old son, who survived, protected by courageous
relatives, and was sent now to join his parents in the USA. And yet,
the nostalgia proved to be too strong. He resisted it, but eventually,
after more than twenty years, he embarked on a slow and hesitant
journey home. It lead him first to Rome, then to Trieste, then to
Vienna. There he settled, full of indecision: for things were rather
different at home from what they had been when he left. His good
friend Jan Masaryk had died under mysterious circumstances; the
shamefully anti-semitic Slansky affair had not yet been explained;
and there were camps in the country so reminiscent of those where
his family had met their death. He waited in Vienna and, in the
meantime, made several TV films. Finally, in 1963, he came for
a tentative visit. The people welcomed him with love and nostalgia;
21
 Vlasta Burian: "... if Czech cabaret ever had
a genius...”

neither he nor his times were forgotten, even after twenty-four years.
But he did not feel quite at home any more. He refused a part in Jiri
Krejcik’s adaptation of some short stories by Karel Capek, and was
gravely disappointed when the National Theatre declined to accept
his play; it did not quite meet all the requirements of the new times.
Discouraged, he returned to Vienna and made another TV comedy.
The Crazy Ones (1967). In 1968, with the developments of the
Czechoslovak spring, hope flourished once again and he planned a
final and definitive homecoming. But the tanks were faster. He died,
broken-hearted, on December first, 1968. Only his ashes returned
to Prague; they were buried there near the remains of Franz Kafka.

Another great comedian of Mac Fric’s pre-war movies, Vlasta

Burian, was a very different personality from Hugo Haas, but
shared with him, in a certain respect, the Central European fate. He
was something of a Czech Groucho Marx. He had the same mer¬
curial energy, was capable of similar verbal floods, and stupefied the
audience with wise-cracks, explosive gags, aggressive conquests of
women, fantastic mimicry; besides that, he had a great vocal range.
If the Czech cabaret ever had a genius, it was Burian; unlike the in¬
tellectual Groucho’s, his was a strangely warped genius, something
in the style of the idiot savants, the miraculous mathematician-fools.
He lived exclusively for the theatre; for years he appeared on stage
nightly, and three times a week in the afternoon; in the mornings he
22
made movies. Considering this enormous workload, it is doubtful
that he ever knew what was happening to the world around him. His
films took place outside time and space, although they were ac¬
curately delineated historically. Burian represented in them the eter¬
nal idiotic wiseguy—the exact opposite of the Good Soldier
Schweik, who assumed the masque of an idiot to protect himself
from the dangerous insanity of constantly battling ideologies. The
political awareness of this “holy simpleton” was that of a pre¬
schooler.
When the Nazis arrived, the idiot-savant, loved by the nation,
allowed himself to be tricked into collaboration; in a radio sketch he
offered his genius as a parodist to satirize Jan Masaryk. The nation
cringed and friends explained to the simpleton what he had done.
He slowly began to realize what was happening, became careful,
and remained so till the end of the war. Notwithstanding his sub¬
sequent prudence, he was tried after the war ended; he cried at his
trial, but was sentenced to a large fine, given a suspended jail sen¬
tence and, worst of all, he was forbidden to act. For a while he tried
to live without the theatre, but then he broke down. He started to
write self-humiliating supplications and tearful requests to various
agencies, ranging from the actors’ union to the head of state, until he
was finally allowed back on stage. He acted for a while, sometimes
even in movies, fighting for yet another, completely different
ideology (The Hen and the Sexton, 1950) together with Roven-
sky’s Maryša, Jiřina Stephnickova, who shortly after tried to escape
to England but was caught and sent to a concentration camp for ten
years. He remained the idiotic genius, living outside his time and
world, and died during a travelling engagement.

When Burian passed away, George Voskovec was back in the

United States; unlike Burian, he knew perfectly well what was hap¬
pening around him. It was his second trip across the ocean—he had
sailed for the first time shortly before Burian parodied Jan Masaryk
on the Prague Radio. That time, he had travelled with Jan Werich.
Voskovec and Werich appeared after the First World War as an
indivisible comic duo, in the tradition of Pat and Patachon or Laurel
and Hardy. However, with all due respect to Stan and Ollie,
Voskovec and Werich mean much more to Czech culture—they are
the most revered symbol of a great era. Together with Jaroslav
Ježek, the father of Czech jazz, they moulded dadaism, circus, jazz,
23
V + W in a ballet parody from Powder and Petrol: “to say ‘the Prague cultural
atmosphere of the thirties’ is almost equal to saying V + W."

Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and American vaudeville into a new art

form. They created a new form of intellectual-political musical.
Never before had anything like that existed in Bohemia, and it was a
quarter of a century after the Nazis had closed the Voskovec and
Werich theatre, before it appeared again in the Semafor Theatre of
Jiri Suchy and Jiri Slitr (S + S). To say “the Prague cultural at¬
mosphere of the thirties” is almost equal to saying V + W. In the
late sixties Milos Forman mentioned during an American interview
that the average young person in Prague might not know the name
of the current Prime Minister, but he would certainly know the
names of Voskovec and Werich.
They made four films which surpass anything made before them
in Czech film comedy; Powder and Petrol (1931) and Money or
Your Life (1937) were directed by the director of their plays, Jin¬
dřich Honzl; Heave-Ho (1934) and The World Belongs to Us
(1937) were made by Mac Fric. After the films and their anti-fascist
musicals it was easy to calculate what they could have expected had
they waited for the Nazis, and so they went to the USA. They re¬
turned after the war, and when in 1948 the political system
turned another somersault, the tired Jan Werich remained in
Czechoslovakia, while Jiri Voskovec moved, this time permanently,
across the ocean. There he became—as George Voskovec—a

Early American talkies hired European actors to attract Europeans: V + W in a

Paramount musical.

Voskovec and Werich in the brilliant comedy of the Great Depression Heave-Ho'
(1934)

24
Burian + V + W the only time they met on stage: in a
one-act farce written by V + W for a New Year’s Eve
production.
Jiri Voskovec as George Voskovec in Jan Werich today — with a reminder
Henry King’s The Bravados. of the past in the background.

distinguished Broadway actor. He appeared for instance in the title

role ot Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, for which he won the Obie Award,
in the Gielgud-Burton Hamlet, as Einstein in Peter Brook’s produc¬
tion of Diirrenmatt’s The Physicists, as the Pope in Brecht’s Galileo
and most recently in Edward Albee's AH Over. He also starred in
many films, e.g. Twelve Angry Men, Butterfield 8, The Spy Who
Came In From The Cold, Mr. Buddwing, The Boston Strangler,
The Bravados etc. Jan Werich, meanwhile, fought for several years
against “difficulties”; he was attacked for a motley selection of sins,
such as delivering political anecdotes on stage*, but he survived, be¬
cause in Czechoslovakia V + W are not just another couple of ac¬
tors; they are the object of love, which the nation, deprived of any
political illusions, shows only to some of its artists.
But V + W belonged together; each one of them on his own is
but a half. They are also Central European. Their fate
foreshadowed what is happening today, a generation later.

*One of his most famous ones—Question: What’s the difference between im¬
pressionist, expressionist and socialist-realist painting? Answer: the impressionist
paints what he sees; the expressionist paints what he feels; and the socialist-realist
paints what he hears.

27
2/THE FATHERS-THEIR SINS AND THEIR SONS

Czechs began to make films as early as the classical film nations of

the West; they made many, and several received world acclaim both
before and after the war. Despite this, the “World” acknowledged
the existence of Czechoslovakian film as an art form only at the
beginning of the sixties. At that time, the films of the New Wave
started to accumulate prizes at Western Festivals, and this appeared
to the world to be almost a miracle. Czechoslovakia was thought of
as some East European country—political schizophrenia had long
before replaced geography—eo ipso technically undeveloped and
culturally impoverished. As late as 1966, I was asked by a friendly
gentleman in New York whether Czechoslovakia had manufactured
anything besides Pilsner Beer, before being industrialized by the
Russians. When, on another occasion, I mentioned to another gen¬
tleman a story by Ambrose Bierce, he was so impressed that he
spent the rest of the afternoon collaring his friends and pointing me
out as some kind of rarity from the distant steppes of the Elbe
region, who knew the name “Bierce”. I came to understand his
amazement when I taught at Berkeley, where most of my students
had never heard of the San Francisco scribe. The students of the
Faculty of Journalism in Prague used entries from The Devil’s Dic¬
tionary as political slogans in their underground mimeographed
anti-Novotny magazine.
The New Wave was clearly no miracle. It was a synthesis, evolved
from a dialectic situation formed by four factors of the post-war
development.

The first factor was nationalization. This meant the end of financial
worries for the most important element of film production—the
directors. Not that they were suddenly able to burn money
(although some, for instance Vavra in the Hussite Trilogy, tried it
successfully), but they could certainly afford to do more than they
managed under the private producers. The old boys were never as
rich as their Hollywood colleagues, and consequently the average
shooting time of a comedy ranged from a record two to a very
decent six weeks; most of the time was spent arguing about produc¬
tion costs. When the state assumed the role of the producer, the
production time extended to between two and six months (and
frequently longer), which was naturally the first prerequisite of
higher quality.
The second factor was the establishment of the Prague Film
28
 Academy in 1947, two years after the nationalization. Not only were
the students of the Academy equipped with all the tools necessary
lor their art, given expert instruction and enabled to make short
study films, they could also attend bi-weekly, all-day showings of
excellent old films from the well-stocked Prague Film Archives, as
well as good contemporary Western films; to this factor I attribute
paramount importance. The majority of foreign films were sent to
the Czechoslovakian Film Board of Trade, which held the national
film distribution monopoly. After viewing the films, the Board
usually rejected them as unfit for showing in Czechoslovakian
cinemas. However, before they were sent back, the Film Academy
“borrowed” them and showed them for “study” purposes in the
school’s small screening room. Thus, unlike the rest of the public,
the students acquired a solid knowledge of the history of
cinematography, as well as of its contemporary trends.
Simultaneously, they gained immunity against the third factor in the
game.
This was what I would call the nationalization of aesthetics. The
artists of a nation with a long and sophisticated artistic tradition
were being forced to conform to a mandatory aesthetic system of
socialist realism in its most primitive form. The reign of this twen¬
tieth century cultural curiosity in Czechoslovakia was in fact
short—some five or six years—a little-known fact in the West.
Despite the monster’s evanescent life, the Barrandov studios helped
to give birth to some of its most delightful progenies. The unequal
marriage of cynical opportunism and naive enthusiasm can be
credited with such dandies as DS-70 Is Not Starting made in 1950
by Vladimir Slavinsky, the most notorious pre-war director of sen¬
timental petit-bourgeois comedies about the loves of millionaires
and servant girls. A group of saboteurs try to destroy the hero of the
film, a monstrous walking dredger, but are only partially successful,
and are subsequently apprehended and arrested. The workers
repair the good machine and fulfil the production quota. Another
pre-war manufacturer of sentiment who quickly became
nationalized was K. M. Wallo. In his The Great Opportunity a
gang of evil-doers also fails pitifully, discovered this time by a
character called Tonda Buran (in English this would be Tony Un¬
couth, or Joe Hillbilly), an ex-hooligan, who while doing time in a
socialist prison saw the light so clearly, that he turned into a model
shock-worker (a Czech equivalent of the Russian stakhanovite).
29
The thematic range was not limited to direct sabotage. In Thirst
(1949), the co-operative farm workers decide during a very dry
summer to build an irrigation system, but the local “kulak” (rich
peasant) dissuades them from the idea; his sinister intentions are
finally unmasked and the water flows freely towards a somewhat
unexciting happy ending. Another contemporary problem was aired
in Seagull Is Late (1950). Here Mr. Seagull, a rather conservative
baker, despises miners, because they are “dirty”; in the nick of time
he is sent with a group of volunteers to the mines, where in the
comradely subterranean atmosphere he rapidly changes his
opinions. The easy accessibility of Marxism to even the most back¬
ward characters is clearly revealed in the film The Hen and the
Sexton. A group of agitators attempt to persuade some hard-boiled
villagers to stop farming privately and form a cooperative. They en¬
counter interference from the local church authorities, who are in
cahoots with the kulaks. The villains are ruthlessly apprehended,
and the more folksy types among them repent. The most en¬
thusiastic repenter is the cleverly stupid sexton, played by the
repentant, almost-collaborator with the Nazis, Vlasta Burian.
These, and similar heavy-handed didactic fairy-tales, were served
to an audience, who from their own experience knew the real
problems of the transitory period, aggravated by the bloody eccen¬
tricities of the declining Stalinism. This points towards the fourth
factor in the game: the audiences lost interest in Czech films and
crowded in to see the few imported samples of French, Italian and
British comedies, and the erstwhile rare, but later more frequent,
products of Italian neo-realism.
A truly dialectical situation developed: never before did the
technical and artistic education of the young film-makers reach such
high standard—the amount of material resources at their disposal
was also unprecedented; on the other hand, with the exception of
the Nazi occupation, there were never so many aesthetic and
political restrictions. The inevitable result of such contradictions is,
of course, revolution.

The revolution was preceded by some colourful and complicated

developments. In the early post-war years Barrandov production
rose quickly from three films in 1945 to ten in 1946, eighteen in
1947, sixteen in 1948 and twenty-one in 1949. This was still con¬
siderably less than the pre-war thirty to forty films per annum; the
30
Jiri Krejcik in studio

decrease indicated more than anything else the shift in emphasis

from quantity to quality, although the latter still wasn’t over¬
whelming. Production was concentrated on comedies and war
movies. The first international success came when Karel Stekly
received the Golden Lion at Venice for a social drama of striking
workers called The Strike (1947). Besides the middle-aged
generation of artists represented by Vavra, Krska and Fric, five new
names came into prominence in 1947. Young Jan Kadar wrote the
story and scenario to a witty comedy Know of a Flat? Elmar Klos,
eight years older, authored the script of a psychological drama
Dead Among the Living. Jiri Weiss, who had worked before the
war as a documentarist, and as a British soldier worked with the
Crown Film Unit during the war, made his first feature The Stolen
Frontier, which dealt with the mobilization of the Czechoslovakian
Army during the Munich crisis. This surprisingly mature work
began a long career which was consistently marked by perfect
professionalism {Romeo, Juliet and the Darkness, 1960, Ninety in
the Shade, 1964). Jiri Krejcik, who also started out as a documen¬
tarist, directed a lively version of Jan Neruda’s classical book of
short stories A Week in the Quiet House. Some of his later films
ideologically foreshadowed both the first (Conscience, 1949) and
second (Awakening, 1959) revolt against the canons of socialist
realism of the mid-fifties and early sixties. The fifth of these new
film makers was Jiri Trnka, who in 1947 made the puppet feature
The Czech Year. To do justice to the achievements of Trnka, one of

31
the greatest artists of animated film, one would have to write a
separate book.
A year later the Communist Party took over the country and
its Cultural Department presented the film-makers with two re¬
quirements: the majority of films should be set in the present, and
all the films must stress the educational aspects of a work of
art—they must have a propagandistic value. The film-makers
followed the “true direction” so enthusiastically that after seeing the
results of two years’ production the Party was forced to issue a
declaration. It stated, “it is necessary not to take the problems from
schematic theorems but rather from real life”—which would have
been nice if the same theorems were not always used to evaluate the
“real problems”, provided that some mad dare-devil wrote them
into a script. In addition, everything had to pass through an intricate
network of approval commissions, which invariably confused
dramaturgy with censorship. It is difficult to assess to what extent
the catastrophic harvest of socialist realism was attributable to the
cynical drive to fulfil Government orders, and how much should be
contributed to the general aesthetic insanity of naive zealots. Both
factors certainly added to the cause. It is quite possible to believe
that young Vaclav Gajer was serious when he created the model
kulak in The Smiling Land (1952); it is certainly less possible to
give the same benefit of sincerity to someone like Mac Fric who
went from anti-fascist satire with V + W, to German films for the
Nazi companies during the war (The Second Shot, 1943, and Out
of Love for You, 1944)*, to socialist realism (It Happened in
May, 1950).
The same applies to Vladimir Slavinsky who was, according to the
Nazi press, considering making German movies under the name of
Otto Pittermann. (He actually made two: in 1943 and 1944.) The
fact remains that at that point the desire to serve the people or the
Party (this was synonymous) was not just an empty expression;
the big axes had not yet stricken, and the radical youth still be¬
lieved that revolution was made of poetry, flowers, enthusiastic work
on voluntary projects, and an evening of love in a communal dorm¬
itory. Many a head was muddled by enthusiasm. Under the relentless
barrage of hypnotising propaganda many film-makers chose to learn
from zealous bureaucrats rather than from the fathers of modern
*1 have not found this aspect of his career satisfactorily explained in the official
apologetic histories of the Czech cinema under Nazism.

32
Jana Brejchova in Krejcik 's Awakening (1959) which foreshadowed the New
Wave.

33
cinema. There may have been cynics even among the bureaucrats,
but I believe that an overwhelming majority of them were sincere.
Quite a few were ex-workers; the directors saw in them the true
authority, and listened to their wise voice of class instinct, in keeping
with the sanctified slogan, ‘i am a miner and who is more?” The
directors themselves did not possess that particular instinct: they, as
almost everybody who ever meant anything in Czech culture, came
from the petit-bourgeoisie. Some interesting stereotypes developed
in their subconsciousness; these led to the habit of public
autocriticism (a Marxist term for flagellantism), and to the practice
of solving all kinds of problems (including private marital problems)
at Party meetings under the watchful eye of the collective (this
progressively satisfied their needs for exhibitionism). When the
bureaucrats later became old and cynical, they consciously attacked
these subconscious stereotypes during the first clashes between the
new revolting forces and the old conservatives.
Despite all their unintentional comedy, it would not be fair to
assume that the strange adventures of Joey Hillbillies and walking
dredgers did not have some foundation in reality. Shock-workers
did exist, although the endings of their real dramas were usually not
as happily optimistic as the films would have it. The women
weavers in my home town would literally run the soles off their
shoes, and ruin their hearts in the process, as they tried to service
eighty looms; at the ripe age of forty some were forced into
disability retirement. The wealthy peasants who sometimes
sabotaged things also existed—even a few retaliatory murders oc¬
curred—and once in a while an angry ex-businessman probably
poured some sand into the gears of a fine lathe. The films, however,
gave the impression that the country was faltering under the terror
of the kulaks, while at the same time developing successfully. The
real dramas of a truly dramatic period were reduced by the
socialist-realists to a crude puppet show. Its characters were
squeezed into stereotypes with unchangeable attributes: class¬
conscious workers, understanding Party officials, wavering small
peasants, intellectuals who started out as reactionaries but soon
unerringly recognized the truth, villainous kulaks and factory
owners—the real incarnations of Satan. The workers wore caps,
while intellectual noses were adorned by spectacles; Party officials
always appeared tired and chain-smoked cigarettes—their fatigue
coming from over-devotion; kulaks had bristles in their hat-bands
34
and thermometers in their pockets—they used the mercury to
poison cows at the collective farm. The former factory owners
secretly listened to records of Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
After some time the characterizations deepened: shock-workers
were allowed a few human weaknesses such as a mild indulgence in
beer or an occasional curse; the kulak was given a son who saw
the light and became a progressive.

People in the cinemas laughed at dramas and slept through

comedies. The workers complained that their arms ached from
watching Czech films, and the Party’s Central Committee had to in¬
tervene in 1950 with the declaration in support of real life problems.
Official surveys of Czech film often call this proclamation “the great
impulse to further efforts” or “the great initiative”. If it was any
kind of an impulse at all, then it was towards greater thoroughness;
the production in 1951* fell from twenty one films in the previous
year to eight—the lowest number ever, including the period of the
Nazi occupation. Of the eight movies, four were based in the
present and they managed to surpass the standards of socialist-
realistic imbecility—if that is possible. Road to Happiness was
about a female tractor driver, who discovered the inevitable kulak
and persuaded the peasants to form a cooperative. In We Love, a
group of mining apprentices apprehended a band of saboteurs, and
The Pike in the Pond showed a young female bricklayer teaching
the stupid old bricklayers how to lay bricks progressively. In the
following years the production volume rose, but it nevertheless
remained far below the capacity of the studios; the number of con¬
temporary films fell, and seldom constituted half of the total output.
The following was the approximate score-1952: 14 historic to 5
contemporary; 1953; 15 to 8; 1954: 13 to 7; 1955: 14 to 5; 1956:
18 to 9. It should also be pointed out that the present was almost ex¬
clusively represented by escapist comedies, in which the socialist-
realistic theme was replaced or touched-up by the usual boy-meets-
girl scheme (Word Makes a Woman, 1952, It's Still Before the
Wedding, 1953). Another acceptable variation was the espionage-
detective entertainment {The Nuremberg Express, 1953, The
Northern Port, 1953). Contemporary reality simply trickled out of
^Figures cited do not include the Slovak films which were made since 1947. Their
numbers are: 1947—1; 1948—2; 1949—1; 1950—3; 1951 — 1; 1952—2; 1953—3;
1954—1; 1955—2; 1956—3; 1957—3; 1958—5; 1959—5; 1960—4; 1961—8;
1962—6; 1963—6; 1964—7; 1965—7.
35
Otakar Vavra shooting The Hammer Against Witches

the films, and the better directors retreated en masse into the past,
both historical and literary.
Vavra retreated farthest, although at first he took only a small
step backward into year 1945 in The Drive (1952), a drama about
the resettlement of the Sudeten region of Northern Bohemia. Then
he leaped straight into the Middle Ages; in the trilogy consisting of
Jan Hus (1955), Jan Zizka (1956) and Against All (1957), he
created an incredibly dull spectacle inspired by the worst side of
Cecil B. de Mille, complete with battling armies of knights on
horseback. He secured three years of full employment for the
Barrandov wardrobe. On the other hand a few of his equestrian
draftees crippled themselves by falling in full armour off galloping
horses. In the late 1950’s, when the first critical wave arrived, Vavra
dared to move all the way up to 1949. He made Citizen Brych
(1958) which deals with the transformation of a reactionary into a
communist in the course of a few months after the takeover. A year
later he back-tracked to 1937, but he made up for it by choosing a
work of Karel Capek, a friend and admirer of Masaryk; at that time
Capek was not quite kosher, but Vavra compensated for that by
selecting from the multitude of the author’s works an appropriate
mining drama The First Squad. After a further relapse into the past
with The Closing Hour (1960) Vavra finally arrived at the deman¬
ded present. He filmed a play by František Hrubin (A Sunday in
August, 1960), which two years earlier constituted a bold thematic
experiment on the stage of the National Theatre. It spoke about

36
what was really happening in the minds of people during the tran¬
sitory period, instead of presenting the “how-little-Johnny-
imagined-it” view. But at that time the first impact of the New Wave
was rapidly approaching. Members of the New Wave were mostly
Vavra’s somewhat unruly students from the Film Academy.

Although a succession of directors undertook the popular pilgrimage

into the past, a number of them did not really help themselves.
The almost insignificant, but nevertheless unforgettable, retreat
of Ivo Toman into the last months of the war, resulted in The Tank
Brigade (1955). Its memorability is attributable to the fact that for
the first time since The Czech Heaven (1918) statesmen appear
in a film, with similar results. At this time Soviet cinema indulged
in showing Lenin and Stalin, along with other historical person¬
alities who were frequently still alive. For that purpose, the
Moscow studios had actor-specialists who resembled the living and
the dead, so that with a little bit of good will from the audience the
total fantasy was completed. Following the fashion of his time,
Toman bore in mind the Soviet example*, and included in the
screenplay the figure of Klement Gottwald, the first worker’s
President and Chairman of the Communist Party. When a double
could not be found, the part was given to an actor from the National
Theatre, who performed in a face mask made of the material used in
Hollywood for Frankenstein’s. The mask was very stiff and permit¬
ted the actor to move only his lower jaw. It was rather like Chaplin’s
A King in New York.
*The limits of “learning from Soviet examples” were reached by the
Czechoslovakian Sound Newsreel; it had been sounded since the 1930 introduction of
sound film. A shot of workers dragging a fiery noodle out of a blast furnace would ap¬
pear on the screen accompanied by an enthusiastic voice saying, “The workers in
Nova Hut carry out a record-breaking cast” or something of this sort. In the 1950’s,
two newsreels began to be shown in Prague—the Czech one and one produced by the
Soviet Novosti Dnia (Daily News). The Soviet newsreel also had sound, but it
retained the introductory titles from the silent era. A title in a Victorian style frame
would appear on the screen with the words: “The workers in Krasnodarsk carry out a
record tapping of a furnace”. The writing remained for a while, soundless, to give
everyone an opportunity to read it, and was then replaced by moving images of the
workers with the fiery noodle. For some time the two newsreels appeared in suc¬
cession. Then one day I went to the movies, the lights went out, and the well-known
credits of the Czechoslovakian Sound Newsreel appeared, only to be followed sud¬
denly by subtitles in a Victorian frame which read: "The Delegation of the Supreme
Soviet visit Prague". To make doubly sure, it remained on the screen a little longer
than the Soviet newsreel. This was followed by the shot of the delegates kissing each
other like aged homosexuals. This was when I first realized that the greatest enemies
of even the best things are toadies.

37
 Vaclav Krška directing

Mac Fric* was carried by the time machine much further into the
past, albeit on an incomparably higher level. In a two part comedy,
The Emperor’s Baker and The Baker’s Emperor (both parts were
made in 1951), he went all the way to the seventeenth century. The
movie kept the year following that of the Resolution of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party from being a total disaster. It
was undoubtedly the best comedy of the socialist-realistic
period—mainly because it had nothing to do with it. The scenario
was written by Jan Werich and Jiri Brdecka, who later gained
renown in puppet films and who also wrote the Western spoof.
Lemonade Joe (1964). Amidst the female bricklayers “educating”
the old hands and the escapades of walking dredgers, this
*First names went through an interesting development. Before the war it was
fashionable to use English names or to anglicize Czech ones, Mac for Martin, Fred
for Bedřich, etc. Harry Macourek, a good and very well known composer of popular
melodies, went through the following development: after the communist takeover in
1948 he started to sign his name as Karel Macourek and, though a one time advocate
of jazz, became its enemy, because of the association of jazz with capitalism. Years
passed, Macourek once again turned from a jazz-hater into a jazz-lover, and started to
use the name Harry. 1 don’t know which name he uses currently, but the piquant part
of the story is that his real name is Harry. The jazzmen, however, adopted another
name for this eminently adaptable musician. 1 think it was invented by the
saxophonist, Strudl, who died in a car accident in Mongolia on the day of the In¬
vasion: Strudl called him “Karel-Marx Courek née Harry Mac Courek”. Needless to
say, it caught on.

38
 Vladislav Vančura

humanitarian and common sense movie appeared like a message

from another world. It was based on Maharal, a sixteenth century
Prague legend of the Golem, a clay robot made by Rabbi Low ben
Beaalel, and it was the greatest box-office hit of the fifties. En¬
couraged by the success Fric moved three hundred years forward
and made an excellent biographical film set at the turn of the cen¬
tury, The Secret of Blood (1953), about the Czech doctor, Jan Jan¬
sky, who discovered blood groups.
Often “Time’s winged chariot” didn’t help. Vaclav Krska, a
delicate artist, began during the war with two films related to the
somewhat irrelevant present: the sensuous Fiery Summer (1939)
and a children’s film, Boys on the River (1944). Then he devoted
himself exclusively to the past. First he made a series of
biographical films about great men of the 19th Century, (for in¬
stance The Messenger of Dawn, 1957, about the Czech inventor of
a steam car); later he produced two film adaptations of works by the
greatest Czech erotic poet of the early twentieth century, Frana
Sramek. The first was Moon above the River (1953), the second
The Silver Wind (1954)—which was where he ran aground. The
film was found to be overly erotic, and even homosexual motives
were discovered, (naked behinds of youngsters swimming in the
river flashed across the screen)* and a ban followed; it lasted several
*The late Mr. Krska, one of the really great directors of the fifties, apparently was a
homosexual. What is paradoxical about the troubles of The Silver Wind is that a few
years afterwards Czechoslovakia became one of the first countries in the world to
legalize adult homosexuality.

39
Alfred Radok The Long Journey “the motions of actors changed
into a terrifyingly poetic danse macabre.”

months, if not years, before the work was finally released for
showing. Krska quickly returned to the great men of Czech history
and made Of My Life (1956), about Bedřich Smetana, after which
he “spun” a Turkish fairy-tale, The Legend of Love (1957).
The expression “difficulties” gradually became a house-hold word
in the Czech film industry, and those who were having "difficulties”
carefully changed the subject of their conversations in front of those
without them. A children’s film, The Green Notebook, based on a
novel of the pre-war communist author Vaclav Rezac, had them,
because it featured a good-humoured policeman—and socialist
realism did not grant capitalism the right to have good-humoured
cops. As late as 1960 Jiri Weiss and I wanted to escape into the
future with a fiction against nuclear war, Where Will You Be,
When that Trumpet Sounds?, which was to take place in a coffin
factory. Barrandov dramaturgists finally threw the project out,
fearing trouble from the elderly comrades in key positions: what
would those comrades say if they had to watch coffins for two
hours? It wasn’t always as funny. The most tragic victim of
difficulties was a man, who was the immediate, highly influential,
predecessor of the New Wave. He was, and probably still is, the best
director of the Czech theatre—Alfred Radok.

Radok’s first film The Long Journey (1949) was as much of a

40
“Iam not aware of any comparable work created at that time in world cinematography. ”

revelation to all of us as were the films of Vera Chytilova, Milos

Forman or Jan Nemec fourteen years later. It was a tragically
premature and anachronistic work of art. It dealt with the fate of the
Jews in the Third Reich; as far as artistic influences are concerned
one might perhaps find traces of German expressionism. I am not
aware of any comparable work created at that time in world
cinematography. The film presented highly unorthodox camera
work by Jan Střecha, non-realistic nightmarish stylization of the
phantasmic world of warehouses, where the Nazis accumulated
stolen Jewish property. Years later these scenes still inspired
Brynych in The Fifth Horseman Is Fear. The motions of both the
individual actors and the extras became a terrifyingly poetic danse
macabre. In addition, the socialist-realist critics said that the film
reflected “only” humanitarian philosophy. It possessed as little
“class approach” as the Nuremberg Laws. It was simply not com¬
parable to anything else produced at that time. The appropriate
official places exploded: the film was labelled “existential” and “for¬
malistic”. After a very brief run, it was withdrawn from public
showing and for almost two decades was locked away in the Barran¬
dov vault.
Only twice was Radok able to return to the Studios. In 1952 he
made The Magical Hat, an adaptation of an early 19th Century
classical comedy, and in 1956 he directed Grandpa Motorcar,
about car races from the beginning of this century. Both were very
good films, which far exceeded the contemporary average; never-
41
The film “possessed as little class approach as the Nurenberg Laws.

theless it was hardly what Radok—by nature a very serious ar¬

tist—wanted to do. The latter film could probably still surpass the
much later and costlier Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying
Machines, which resembles it in time, action and setting. Radok’s
assistant for this movie was a young graduate of the Film Academy,
Milos Forman. When Radok started the Laterna Magica, he took
Forman with him and entrusted him with the direction of some of
the sequences.
Laterna Magica became one of the greatest triumphs of Czech
cinema: in 1958 it amazed people at the Brussels Expo, and nine
years later it was still one of the major attractions at Expo 67 in
Montreal. For all these laurels Radok did not receive many thanks.
For the second program of Laterna Magica, Radok filmed a magical
story The Opening of Springs inspired by the music of Bohuslav
Martinu. The film was previewed by the influential stalinist
minister Vaclav Kopecký, who banned it on the spot for being the
quintessence of pessimism. Radok had to leave Laterna
Magica—the show which he conceived and created. He suffered his
first heart attack and then, while directing in the small Chamber
Theater in Prague, he had two more. In 1968, tired and disgusted,
he left the country after the Soviet Invasion, and is currently
working in Sweden. The Laterna Magica was taken over by more
“reliable” people, who converted it into a commercial attraction for
foreign tourists.

42
 “as much of a revelation to all of us as the films of the New Wave. ”

The Long Journey was not the only example set by Radok: his per¬
sonal influence was certainly just as important. People like Milos
Forman, Ivan Passer, Vladimir Svitacek and Jan Rohac (End of the
Clairvoyant), as well as the dramatist Zdenek Mahler, all learned
from him; his ingeniousness inspired Raduz Cincera (Kinoautomat)
and many others. However, in 1956, new and important factors en¬
tered the game: the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist
Party caught the advocates of pure Stalinism so badly off guard that
they remained groggy for years after. This opportunity was seized
by some of the more daring film-makers (among them were some of
the first graduates of the Film Academy), who quickly made the
first socialist films about the “real” reality. The cultural and political
bureaucracy was so punch-drunk that it awarded the National Prize
to one of them.
The film was The School of Fathers (1957), made by young
Ladislav Helge, who had earlier assisted Jiri Krejcik. It told a story
of a teacher who, after discovering certain discrepancies between
the ideal theory and the somewhat less ideal practice, took a rather
unorthodox ideological stand. As a result he became (almost—at the
end a deus ex machina in the form of a gentle Party secretary inter¬
venes) the victim of a well organized “will of the people”. The
award convinced Helge that his was a step in the right direction;
consequently he made another ideologically courageous film. The
Great Seclusion, a psychological portrait of a communist director

43
Blažek in Crime in the Night Club Ladislav Helge

of a village cooperative. The director is a devoted worker and an

honest communist, with an incurably dictatorial personality: he
arranges a number of improvements in the cooperative, but in doing
so behaves ruthlessly, hurts and offends all the villagers, and finds
himself in a “great seclusion”.
Another graduate of the Film Academy, who forgot about the
pink colour when he made his first film, was Vojtech Jasny. The film
was September Nights (1957), and showed various abusive prac¬
tices in the Army. It was based on Pavel Kohout’s play, which the
Minister for National Defense, General Cepicka, failed to ban only
because he was named Head of the Office for Inventions before he
managed to do so.
Even ancient Vaclav Krska emerged from the safety of the
costumed past and, lo and behold, dared the farthest. Hie Sunt
Leones (1958) was a story of an engineer battling against stupidity
and the ill-willed bureaucracy. The bleak and harshly portrayed
cheerless environment made it one of the most realistic films of that
period. An essentially similar rugged picture of contemporary life
was offered in Zbyněk Brynych’s first movie, The Local Romance
(1958) which bore visible traces of neo-realistic influence. The
socialist-realistic critics tolerated the trend in Italian films, but were
allergic to it in Czech cinema.
These serious, even tragic, films may be linked to a comedy made
in 1958 by Kadar and Klos. The Third Wish was the film version of
a play by Vratislav Blažek, which dealt with the problem of per¬
sonal morals and the conflict between an individual’s conscience and
the knowledge that things which were not supposed to be done were
44
being done. Similar problems were, of course, at the centre of The
School of Fathers, The Great Seclusion, as well as September
Nights and Hie Sunt Leones. Unlike these films however, The
Third Wish presented similar themes in the form of a musical enter¬
tainment, which was considered especially dangerous. The film has
a tairy-tale plot: a young man in a street car offers his seat to a
senior citizen, who is so surprised by the unusual courtesy, that he
rewards the young man with a small bell. He may ring it three times
and the old man will fulfil any three wishes. The young man first
takes the old man for a fool, but is soon convinced of the opposite,
and uses the bell's magical powers to achieve a miraculous career. A
strange transformation occurs with the increase in his income. The
enthusiastic critical socialist gradually turns into a conservative sup¬
porter of the status quo. Then his best friend loses his job for
criticizing the management. He asks the hero—now an important
comrade—to intercede on his behalf. The official rings the bell, but
the quota of three wishes is exhausted. Despite that, the Grandpa of
the Bell promises to help—naturally at the hero’s own risk. The im¬
portant comrade asks for time to consider it. He calls a family
gathering, where all contemplate whether to ring or not to ring.
The film ends without disclosing the resolution of this dilemma.
The novelty of all these films did not lie in experimental form, as
was the earlier case with Radok, but rather in their realistic view of
the situation. Although their method may have been archaic, it was
important in the given situation to simply discover truth, and history
shows that it is always more important for the artists to show the
truth of human suffering rather than the truth of what is in order.
Eulogies are most frequently written by senile laureates or by
sycophants. Artists hold out the mirror to the bruises on the face of
the world.

All the creators of the Ur-Wave were members of the Communist

Party; this is why they took the questions of public conscience more
to heart than the non-members, who, having no claim to the merits
of the revolution, did not feel responsible for its less meritorious
facets. Although later, under the influence of the New Wave, some
of the old guarders did experiment with form, their predominant
concern was always “what”, and not “how”. The question of
personal conscience remained till the very end their trauma and
obsession; fundamentally it is the old dilemma of obedience,
45
Vojtech Jasny Helge’s Shame: the hero committed so much evil in
the name of the Good that he changed into a Mr. Hyde.

voluntarily promised to the Party, coming into conflict with the

impossibility of obeying the Party, when it either demands unethical
action, or orders its members to remain silent. The bureaucrats
resolved the dilemma quite simply: whenever something positive
took place it was credited to the Party; if something negative hap¬
pened “certain individuals in the Party leadership were guilty”.
Politicians have an easy life. Artists don’t.
As seems to be the case with all revolutionaries, the lives of these
Solzhenitsyn souls with party membership cards affirm the tragic
formula. In 1960, Helge’s Great Seclusion received the Prize of
Czechoslovakian Film Critics. However, after the prize was award¬
ed to the film, two cultural correspondents and the Cultural
Attaché of the Soviet Embassy arrived, and explained to the com¬
mittee the impropriety of their decision so thoroughly that one female
jury member rescinded her vote, and the prize was finally cancelled.
Then a special committee viewed the film. Helge was not invited to
the showing, but hid in the projection booth and listened. His
testimony speaks for itself: “It was dreadful. I had the feeling that I
would never make it home that night, that they were certainly

46
waiting for me somewhere. The word ‘anti-communist’ was
probably the mildest term used. In time they persuaded me to
reshoot the end. Originally, the hero remained alone and started
weeping. Instead, the film presents a mockery of which I am still
ashamed: the members of the cooperative come for the director, and
accept him into their midst....” The officials finally got their
dens ex machinet, and the stereotypes planted in the early fifties
began to function: "Worst of all was the feeling inside me. Today it
would be no longer possible, as the developments and experience
immunized us, but at that time I really started to think that maybe I
had really done something anti-social. Mlikovsky and I had finished
a script about the pseudo-nihilism of the young, called The Tower;
you should have seen how they set us straight . .at that time I
was.. .a walking complex...”
That is when, as Helge says further, the trouble really started: the
next films were catastrophic. Only in 1964 did he attempt to express
his obsessions—under the influence of the New Wave—with the aid
of the magical camera of Western formalism. He made The First
Day of my Son—but he exaggerated so badly that the movie turned
into a parody. Depressed, he for several years looked for a theme,
and as the saying goes, “devoted himself to organisational work”.
He became the spiritus agens of F.I.T.E.S. (The Union of Film and
Television Artists). In 1968 he finally returned with a new film,
Shame, a thematic variation of The Great Seclusion. (Helge even
contemplated giving the hero the same name.) Once again there is a
political functionary alienated from his fellow citizens. The honesty
which so significantly characterized the hero of The Great
Seclusion is present in a pitifully derelict form in the protagonist of
the latter film. He had committed so much evil in the name of “the
good cause” that he changed into a Mr. Hyde. Then came the in¬
vasion, and Helge, the citizen, adhered to the convictions he
professed as an artist: with a truly super-human effort he organized
the “Coordinating Committee of Creative Associations”. This
organisation was for a long time the main stronghold of the ideas of
that idealistic enterprise, whose viability in a world governed by the
politics of super-powers, was probably a self-delusion. What Helge
now had to listen to far surpassed the private discussion of the
cultural overseers in the Barrandov projection room. He became
one of the “leaders of the counter-revolution”. He did not manage
to shoot either the script about Czech political prisoners, which he
47
was preparing together with the “Czech Solzhenitsyn” Karel Pecka
(who, unlike his Russian colleague, at the last moment managed to
publish his works at home), or another script How Bread Is Made
written by the screenwriter of his film The Great Seclusion and
other films, Ivan Kriz. According to unconfirmed reports, the new
rulers of Barrandov prepared several lists ranging in political
colouring from white, past several shades of gray, all the way to
black. Helge is on the blackest of them all.

As far as the advent of the young film-makers in the early sixties is

concerned, the most important member of the Ur-Wave was Vojtech
Jasny: all of the young ones considered him an older brother. In his
second film, Desire (1958), he abandoned the formal traditionalism
of the September Nights, and made a film-poem. Although based
on the conventional parallel between the four seasons and the four
ages of man, it nevertheless utilizes modern forms of expression.
For the first time since Radok, the camera was used as a poetic and
metaphorical device; after a long pause non-actors appeared, and
for the first time “a topical social theme” based on contemporary
material retired into the background. Then followed a concentration
camp drama, I Survived my Death (1960), where in the crucial
scene of the film an imprisoned opera singer sings Gounod's “Ave
Maria” instead of the usual “The Internationale”. I thoroughly
disliked Jasny’s next film—the anticlerical Pilgrimage to the Virgin
(1961) which is highly valued by the Czech critics. The first period
of his work culminated in That Cat (1963), which had Jan Werich
in the lead. Under the stare of the cat’s magical eye, people changed
colours according to their concealed vices. It was a nice idea, which,
somewhat incongruously, combined poetry with satire; the film was
successful abroad and brought Jasny a contract for the international
super-film based on Erenburg’s The Pipes. According to an adver¬
tisement blurb, “It was shot on locations all over Europe, and
boasted a cast of the greatest international stars”. All of this only
proved the old holistic finding, that the whole has to be more than a
simple summation of the parts. The Pipes bombed, and Jasny with¬
drew into himself.
He returned to the subject on which he had started to work after
Desire; first he could not see it through due to “difficulties”, and
then, overwhelmed by his rise and fall, did not dare to. The film was
All Those Good Countrymen; at Cannes in 1969 Jasny received

48
Werich in Jasny’s That Cat — people changed colours according to their
concealed vices.

for it the prize for best direction. Once again it was a directorial
poem, but this time lyrico-epical, with the theme of socialist realism
having been transposed onto a level of wise sophistication. This was
at last the film which actually fulfilled the demands of the Party
resolution of 195 1 about the portrayal of the present in its struggle
for the future, which "extracted problems not from the schematic
theorems, but from real life”. However, Novotny’s cultural arbiters,
having thrown their ex-protector overboard, were once more back
in their positions, and they again preferred theorems to reality. F.I.
T.E.S. gave Jasny its annual prize for the film; it was the last
gesture of the organization. The Cultural Secretariat took it as a per¬
sonal insult, and F.I.T.E.S. was dissolved. Jasny, unlike Helge,
was too well known abroad, and never really did get involved
organizationally; he was therefore allowed to make another film—
this one about the relation between men and dogs. It is difficult not
to recall in this context a saying attributed to Madame de Sévigné:
“The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.” It appears that
while dealing with dogs. Jasny could no longer bear his knowledge
of people, and in the summer of 1970, without finishing the film, he
left Czechoslovakia.

Vratislav Blažek, another important member of the Ur-Wave, is not

a director, “only” a screen-play writer. However if anybody besides
Voskovec and Werich ever tried to lead Czech comedy out of the
trashy forest of inanity, it was the stubborn Blažek. As a small boy
49
in my home town of Náchod he performed the duties of the local
enfant terrible. Our friendship was somewhat symptomatic of
Blazek’s later relation to the Communist Party and its doings. It did
not prevent me—a conforming boy from a good family—from being
the frequent target of this habitual dissident’s full-blooded humour.
Naturally I was not the only one. Blazek’s first literary problems
began after the war, when he published in a literary magazine a tew
Leacockian stories in which some of his friends appeared under
their real names. A number of them promptly ceased to be his
friends.
Blazek’s scholastic career at the Náchod gymnasium ended rather
abruptly when he was kicked out of the fourth grade for in¬
sufficiency in the then most important language, German. I have
the feeling that his ill manners also had something to do with it. He
became a druggist’s apprentice. Following a series of mishaps
reminiscent of film gags*, he was caught smoking on a barrel of
gasoline, and finally fired by the owner of the store. Then he took up
amateur painting; the local minister of the Church of
Czechoslovakia (a kind of an equivalent of the Church of England)
commissioned him to paint a picture of his church, but Blažek made
it too experimental.
The ensuing litigation concerning payment was won by the
minister, after expert opinions by various parties were submitted.
Blažek got back at him in a venomous story about an acolyte, whose
singing surpassed the priest’s performance during mass. The story
failed to have the necessary impact because Blažek, unfortunately,
was ignorant of the fact that acolytes do not sing during mass, and
that the Church of Czechoslovakia does not have acolytes. After the
war, Blažek became a Party member because its dissident character
appealed to him. He studied painting at the School of Arts and
Crafts in Prague, which is where he seems to have embarked upon
the career of a dramatist. At this time the Czech forests were being
attacked by the bark-scarab. University students had to battle the
harmful bug during their summer vacation as a part of their com¬
pulsory summer work. Blažek was sent to the Ore Mountains where,
*The best one would have been suitable for coloured film: for some reason car¬
bonated soft drinks were stored, at that time, lying flat on high racks, which were
stacked one above another. On top of the racks the druggist kept cans of paint. Stan¬
ding high on the ladder, Blažek tried to get one of the cans for a customer He slipped
and dropped the can, which, as it was falling, knocked off the necks of about fifteen
bottles in a vertical row. Blažek, whose body followed the can's progress, was dren¬
ched by a multi-coloured carbonated fountain, and then was sent to sweep excelsior in
the yard as a form of punishment.
50
in a smail village with the charming name Mountain of St.
Catherine, he wrote a play. Had it been shown in a professional
theatre instead of a student camp, it would have been termed
pessimistic and therefore noxious, if not outright anti-socialistic. In
Tragedy of the Bark-Scarab (1946) it is the scarab and not the
socialist work-force, who finally wins. The bug’s victory is quite
convincing along with the forest, he devours the workers and the
gamekeeper.
Even this student farce is indicative of a soul that was not created
to praise. In Prague, Blažek established close contacts with the
semi-professional Theatre of Satire, the post-war sensation of the
capital. Many of the famous creators of comedy began there: men
such as the directors Ladislav Rychman {The Hop-Pickers, 1964)
and Oldřich Lipsky {Lemonade Joe, 1964), his brother, the actor
Lubomír Lipsky, and the comedians Vlastimil Brodsky and
Miroslav Horniček. The latter is known in Canada as the host of
Kino-automat at Expo 67. Blažek wrote for the theatre a comedy
The King Dislikes Beef (1967); it was essentially a conglomerate of
satirical sketches which were the specialty of the theatre, and which
the actors of this collectively talented group wrote themselves. The
most famous, created in 1947 by Miroslav Horniček, was Duna
Latrína Zaryetchnaya, one of the very earliest contributions to the
socialist-realistic thematic range: the Theatre was as a rule either
clairvoyant or premature. The heroine, Comrade Zaryechnaya, in¬
spired by the shock-workers’ movement also decides to come up
with an improvement. She is a Public Toilet Assistant, also known as
a washroom attendant. In order to raise the productivity in her
working area, she organizes the work in the following manner:
she collects the money from all the customers, but she admits them
into the booths only when their number guarantees the full
utilization of the toilet’s capacity. With a special device she then
simultaneously opens all the doors, the customers enter and sit
down. After a precisely limited time period (three minutes, I
believe), the assistant presses a button, and all the toilets
simultaneously flush. Another precise time period elapses and the
mechanism reopens the doors. A new shift of customers take their
places.*
;iThe deadly serious shock-workers’ movement was accompanied by all kinds of ex¬
cesses, which turned this economically dubious enterprise into mockery. Everybody
cited—rather maliciously—an ode on the Pig-Feeder, which equated the vision of
Communism with that of workers’ faces glistening with the fat of the eternal por¬
cine spread; evidently a vision of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain" taken seriously.
51
 While the Theatre audiences laughed, the bureaucrats were
frowning. This assumption is born out by the fate of Blazek’s second
full length play. Where Is Kutak (1948). Both the play and the
Theatre of Satire survived only the first preview for the “worker’s”
cultural officers. The heroes of this allegory based on the Biblical
story of the Flood, are building an Ark. They are using the well-
known method of late Stalinism: incapable unqualified idiots make
decisions from stem to stern, self-appointed characters review
people and decide who will be left behind; a class of new aristocracy
emerges, which only gabs and never does anything. Three months
after the communist takeover, the play presented delightful songs,
such as the following:

To make the new gentry

Help with the sails
Is what our new counter-plan
Briefly entails

The metaphor was more than clear; what Milován Djilas much later
understood and described in his book. The New Class, Blažek
saw—in the tradition of Mayakovsky’s farces The Bedbug and The
Bathhouse—much earlier through his satirical eye. Like Miroslav
Hornicek’s piece, Kutak was, to say the least, a somewhat
premature piece of satire, written twenty years before the
economists began discovering similar practices in the Czech
economy. It was taken off the repertoire and the theatre was closed.
For a while it appeared that the author might go the same way, since
one of the songs proudly presented:

Captain or Private
Make him do the dishes
Who muddies the water
Feed him to the fishes.

With a little bit of good will the most ardent toadies or faithful wor¬
shippers could have equated the Captain even with the Head of
State. Fortunately the First Worker’s President must have, after all,
been a better man than the later Novotny, that is if he was ever in¬
formed of the affair, and so the numerous and talented group of the
Theatre of Satire was spared the Uranium experience of the concen¬
tration camp. Many of them went on later to create works which
spread the tame of socialist Czechoslovakia throughout the world.
52
he Hop-Pickers, popularly known as The Hop Side Story - this great Czech musical turned into a kind of
ranifesto of the young generation who placed character above class origin. Later they supported Dubcek.

In 1954 Blažek tried a safer topic in the play Karlstein for Sale,
about an American millionaire who is conned into buying the four¬
teenth century dwelling of the Czech kings and wants to take it apart
and transport it stone by stone to the United States. Blazek’s second
attempt at screen-play writing was the scenario for Music from
Mars, directed by Kadar and Klos. (His first script was Katka,
1950, directed by Klos alone.) Music from Mars was a story about
the problems of a factory dance band (called after the Soviet fashion
“a variety orchestra”). It gave the impression of refreshing novelty,
mainly because for the first time in many years it used something
vaguely resembling jazz. After a string of comedies, the best of
which was The Third Wish, Blazek’s film career culminated in
1964 with the film The Hop-Pickers, which was directed by
Ladislav Rychman, his old friend from the Theatre of Satire. In the
context of Czech musical comedies, The Hop-Pickers (or Hop Side
Story as it was called in Czechoslovakia) bore the same weight as
the first films of the New Wave in the area of serious films. The
theme is typical and well known: a story of human character, of
honour and principle, taking place during the late summer hop har¬
vest. Instead of killing the bark-scarab, the students gather
hops—the product so eminently important for the manufacturing of
that eminently important export article, Pilsner Urquel Beer. The
film presented a fresh and fast moving entertainment, full of rock
music with Blazek’s excellent lyrics. The songs reached such
popularity among the young people of Czechoslovakia that their
aesthetic and philosophical impetus became comparable to the
effect of the best songs by the Beatles. The film turned into a
53
manifesto of the young generation, which later supported Dubcek,
because the leader emphasized the questions of human character. In
the crisis accompanying the end of Novotny’s era, this was ob¬
viously more important than political theories.
Blazek’s progress was marked by an almost incessant chain of
greater and lesser mishaps. His three heart attacks at the age of 42
are symptomatic of the life of this born satirist who, even under
socialism, could not have become anything else. In 1968, true to his
own high moral standards, he supported the Director of the Barran¬
dov Studios, Alois Poledňák, whom some ultra-radical radicals
wanted to oust, but who, although with a hesitance understandable
in a general director working in a country with a long history of con¬
tinuous “difficulties”, nevertheless facilitated the emergence of the
New Wave. The arrival of the Soviet tanks was as great a shock to
Blažek as it was to so many other communist idealists. He left the
country and works now in West Germany.

Just as the New Wave of the early sixties did not spring from a
cultural desert, so the wave of socially critical films of the 1957-59
period was not an isolated occurrence within the context of Czech
culture. In all branches of art the artistic common sense gnawed at
the glazing of officious socialist-realism from the very beginning.
The representatives of Novotny’s regime naturally interpreted the
development their own way: they liked to talk about the wise direc¬
tions provided to culture by the Party (by which they meant them¬
selves). The fact remains—and let someone try to disprove it—that
anything positive produced in Czech culture during the twenty
years of socialism had to surmount the stubborn resistance of the
Party (it we mean by it the Stalinist and Novotnyist bosses). The
Party was of course an historically unprecedented benefactor of the
arts; unprecedented also was the way the Party imposed its taste on
the artists. The cultural bosses bestowed their true love only on the
performers for the most part, and even there only when they per¬
formed works of the dead and recognized classics. Lillian Heilman’s
comment on Soviet cultural life is very appropriate in this context:
“Russian production, directing and acting is often wonderful. But
that's a dead end. When the major talents are directors, actors and
set designers—that’s dead-end theater. Fine to see, but it ain’t going
nowhere. You have to turn out good new writers.” The banning of
one new outstanding satirical play is more significant in the cultural

54
life of a nation, than a hundred performances of Beethoven’s sym¬
phonies. Alter all, the classics flourished uninterruptedly (and in¬
deed unprecedentedly), even in Nazi Germany.
The culture of the fifties had to battle the resistance of people,
who knew everything better, and besides that also wielded the pow¬
er. The best example was the fate ot jazz, whose most extraordinary
property is that it is considered subversive wherever it is played.
After the Communist takeover and the acceptance of
Zhdanov s canon, jazz was naturally declared to be bourgeois and
decadent music. This was argued even with Langston Hughes who
defended jazz during his visit to Moscow. His counter-argument: “It
is my music!” (which reminds one of LeRoi Jones’ reasoning), was
not considered marxistically sound. How then could the Czech
imitators of the Soviets ascribe any validity to the argument used by
band-leader Karel Vlach, who walked out of a “model performance
of Czech dance music” (with limited syncopation and predominant¬
ly in major), with the comment that if they didn’t give him anything
better than Stan Kenton, he would keep on playing Stan Kenton. As
a punitive measure he was forced to leave the theatre where his
band had an engagement, and perform in a circus.
During the first years jazz survived only in dixieland form. An im¬
portant and influencial communist stage director, E. F. Burian, (in
his younger days a jazz singer and theoretician) liked it, and a few
enthusiasts headed by the apostolic personality of Emanuel Ugge
succeeded in persuading the suspicious officials that dixieland is
really folklore, which cannot be decadent. Its limited practice was
permitted, together with Polynesian music and the Society of
Medieval Instrument Players, with the provision that each perfor¬
mance of bands such as The Czechoslovak Washboard Beaters
would be preceded by a scholarly lecture on the subject of the
class roots of dixieland among the impoverished New Orleans
creoles. And so dixieland somehow survived.
Swing had a much harder time. When, during a concert at the
Prague “Lucerna” Hall, the naive queen of Czech swing, Inka
Zemánkova, (after a five year absence during which she studied
singing techniques) permitted herself a little scat, she was not
allowed to return on stage after the intermission. She disappeared
for fifteen years into obscure provincial nightclubs and more liberal
Poland. The reverence for the securely dead classics affected even
55
the work of the Czech pioneer of jazz, Jaroslav JezekA It led to the
founding of what was probably the only orchestra in the history ot
jazz founded by bureaucrats and not by enthusiasts. Karel Vlach
played new arrangements of Jezek's old compositions and swung.
The bureaucratic orchestra was strictly ordered to obey Jezek's
classical heritage. That is, it was supposed to play his songs in their
original arrangements, the way they sounded on the old records.
Jezek wrote his arrangements in the early thirties, before the swing
era. In the 1950’s, after the war-time swing craze, which deeply
affected the generation of young musicians, the imitation of the
thirties sounded ludicrously anachronistic. Wild opinions were
ventured: some glum theoreticians decided that the use of mutes
in brass instruments was decadent because it perversely deformed
their healthy timbre. According to others, the hybrid sound ot the
saxophone was a typical product of the decayed bourgeoisie, and
they recommended that it be replaced in the dance orchestras by
cellos. So, for a while, the bureaucratic band tried to harmonize
the fortissimo of the unmuted trombones with the intimate whisper
of cellos; it didn’t last very long since nobody, including the musi¬
cians, was interested.
Jazz is an exemplary pars pro toto; similar grotesque trends were
(officially) perpetrated in all areas of art. In the creative arts this
trend culminated in the well-known sculpture of Stalin, which is said
to have been born under the strangest circumstances. The creator, a
young sculptor, relied on not winning the closed competition and
submitted a slap-dash proposal. The more distinguished artists,
however, made even worse proposals, and the young man was
awarded the prize. When he saw the completed sculpture, towering
over Prague like King Kong, he committed suicide. All of this might
be a typical Prague underground story—except for the suicide. Pro¬
posals were made for ballet performances in which the General¬
issimo would celebrate himself in pirouettes, but fortunately were
never realized. Composers of classical music wrote symphonies
which were indistinguishable from the works of Bedřich Smetana
(The Bartered Bride, etc.); nobody imitated Anton Dvorak (New
World Symphony, etc.), because he was disliked by the ancient
Minister of Culture, Professor Zdenek Nejedly. Dvorak supposedly
did not allow Nejedly to marry his daughter, who preferred the
composer, Josef Suk. This might have been another story from the
:i!Jaroslav Jezek died in the United States during the war.

56
Czech underground, if it were not true that Nejedly did indeed
dislike Dvorak pathologically.
Beneath all of this the creative souls of the country industriously
corroded the absurd foundations. Without government support and
against the wishes of the bureaucrats, the important movement of
the small theatres emerged. Among the founders of the movement
was the mime, Ladislav Fialka, who abandoned a lucrative engage¬
ment in order to perform pantomime, which at that time was also
suspected of formalism; others included the absurdist writer and ac¬
tor, Ivan Vyskočil, the dramatist, Vaclav Havel, and above all the
duo of Jiri Suchy and Jiri Slitr, whose songs helped to form the
emotional world of the young generation of the 1960’s in a truly
revolutionary fashion. Their revolution—perhaps for the first time
in history—lay in the separation of their songs from any political in¬
volvement. It was a natural reaction to the compulsory political
awareness, which was so brutally demanded by the bureaucrats.
Underground literature also flourished. Stories by Bohumil
Hrabal (author of the novel Closely Watched Trains, which Men-
zel later made into a movie), by the avant garde Vera Linhartova,
and others, were read at private and semi-private gatherings. The
first abstract painters crawled slowly out of their cellar studios.
Once in a while they exhibited, and then quickly disappeared back
into the cellars after the angry explosions of Novotny’s guards in the
press and radio. Typed anthologies were put out by the under¬
ground surrealistic group of Vratislav Effenberger which existed
throughout the period.
The Stalinists were, however, slowly recuperating from the blows
inflicted by Khrushchov, and planned a counter-attack. Events
ripened in 1958. The counter-attack was prepared, and the forces
waited for the proper pretext, a truly exemplary case. In a closed
competition two submissions reached the final round: my novel
The Cowards, and a parcel of films by the first critical wave.
The Cowards fell under the well organized attack of a battery of
cultural officials in January of 1959, and the films were crushed a
month later at the film conference in Banska Bystrica.
The Cowards* and the defeated films had to compete for the un¬
wanted prize with other works. Karel Ptacnik had published earlier
a novel, The Town on the Border (1956), which was also con-

*An English translation of The Cowards was published by Grove Press in the United
States in 1970, and simultaneously in London by Gollancz.

57
sidered for the prize. It described the deportation of German
settlers from the Sudeten region to West Germany, and the simul¬
taneous influx of a mixture of idealists and carpet-baggers into the
region and the Party, accompanied by the rise of careerists in the
Party hierarchy. The book contained all kinds of murders of Czechs
by Germans and vice versa, with the score in favour of the Czechs
(there were more murdered Germans than Czechs). Ptacnik sup¬
posedly refused to correct the score to at least half and half, and
thus became a serious candidate for liquidation. Since Ptacnik had
already received the State Prize for his first novel, and was a Party
member, the committee selected a beginner who had, among other
things, translated from English an ideologically unbalanced satire,
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. And so it exploded. For two
whole weeks, day after day, I was pummelled by a succession of
reviewers; some indicated sinister connections with Tito’s
Yugoslavia, and Radio Free Europe. One day the President himself
spoke about me at a private meeting of Party Secretaries. While the
speech was still in progress one friendly lady official phoned my
mother-in-law, who immediately rushed to my apartment (a one-
room sublet with the landlady occupying the kitchen—a typical
dwelling for a young married couple) to at least salvage the savings-
books. My mother-in-law was a simple woman who went through
the hard school of the Great Depression, the poverty during the
Occupation when the Nazis jailed her husband, and the poverty
after the People’s Takeover when her son was given a ten-year
sentence for helping a boy-scout friend of his across the border,
and her husband, after getting out of jail, defected to the U.S.A.
where he lived on welfare.
In the end her precaution proved unnecessary. I was only fired
from the position of editor of a literary magazine. Along with me
went the director, the editor-in-chief and a few other editors of the
publishing house which published my book, as well as Jiri Lederer,
a reviewer for an evening paper, who dared to support my book in a
short review.
In February they attacked the film-makers.

As with The Cowards, the final film nomination was preceded by

some cunning reasoning. Helge’s School of Fathers was eliminated
because like Ptacnik's book it held the State Prize. (The Great
Seclusion had not yet been completed.) The choice fell on Jasny: he

58
came in handy, since Desire could be attacked for its decadent
formalism, which was more reasonable to attack than social criti¬
cism in a country whose regime was, after all, the product of the
greatest socially-critical movement in history. However, in Novem¬
ber of 1958, Novotny’s henchman, Jiri Hendrych, previewed the
first print of The Third Wish, and the strategic plans were imme¬
diately revamped. It was decided to carry out the campaign as a
“battle against the remnants of bourgeois thought”. This had an in¬
teresting consequence: it was logical to accuse of such a sin people
who remembered the bourgeois society, such as Kadar (then 31
years old), Klos (39), and particularly Vaclav Krska (49 years) for
Hie Sunt Leones. It did not make such sense to accuse the 24-
year-old Jasny. Besides, both leads in The Third Wish were
played by Yugoslavian actors. This was an expression of ancient,
pre-Tito, sympathies towards the southern Slavs, traditionally
held by the Czechs, and facilitated by Khrushchov’s rap¬
prochement. Meanwhile Khrushchov’s relations with Tito cooled,
and the whole thing could now be interpreted as an expression
of the influence of Yugoslavian revisionism. As strange as this
reasoning may sound, it pales in view of a performance given by
another maniac, who attacked Hie Sunt Leones on the grounds
that the actor Karel Hoger playing the part of a frustrated
engineer performed his part too well, thus gaining sympathies
for the not quite unequivocally positive character.
The main speeches of the Conference were delivered by the Min¬
ister of Culture, Vaclav Kahuda, and the film “theoretician”, Jan
Kliment, invited to provide theoretico-aesthetical justification to Jiri
Hendrych’s strict commands. It will be useful to remember
Kliment’s name, since it emerges in similar roles several times
throughout the next decade. Kahuda used the generally accepted
scheme, and first brought out the “successes”, before passing on to
the mistakes and insufficiencies. The successes were unquestionably
present though Kahuda of course spoke only about the harmless
ones: Zeman’s An Invention for Destruction (1957), a charming
work made through a sophistication of Melies’ style, which
received the Grand Prix at Brussels’ Expo 1958; Weiss’ Wolf
Trap (1957), a psychological drama based on Jarmila
Glazarova’s pre-war novel was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at
the Venice Festival of 1958. But the Minister was more in¬
terested in the mistakes, which he saw mainly from a
59
The beautiful Madia Drahokoupilova in Vaclav Gajer’s Flirting with Miss
Siberstein (1969). With this story of a modem Antigone based on my novel The
Lion Cub I said goodbye to Czech film.

sociological point of view. First he accused unnamed directors

(it might have been Brynych for The Local Romance, 1958, or
Vaclav Gajer for The Guilt of Vladimir Olmer*, 1956), of
limiting their contemporary films “to themes taken almost exclu¬
sively from private life” (the Minister did not ask why this was the
case) and of using “stories which are not exactly optimistic. It would
be an interesting and simple statistical account,” he added further,
“which would show how many films find their contemporary setting
exclusively among old decrepit tenements, where life goes on in
corridors and dirty flats.” In the portrayal of that milieu the Min¬
ister recognized the definite influence of Italian neo-realism. It did
not occur to him that it also might have been the influence of Czech
*1 said my involuntary good-bye to Czech movies with a film directed by this
director of the now middle-aged generation. It was Flirting with Miss Silberstein,
made in 1969-70 and based on my novel The Lion Cub. to be published in
English by Grove Press. The freudian girl-of-everybody’s (or mine, at any rate)
dreams was played very convincingly by Madia Drahokoupilova.

60
 reality, one of whose main features at that time was a hopeless
housing crisis.*
Kahuda was followed to the lectern by Jan Kliment who
delivered an exemplary speech. He simply read the socialist-
realistic formula (positive hero, optimism in every situation, and
joyful discipline, instead of independent thought), applied it to
the films selected for condemnation, and found them to be, let
us say, unsatisfactory.
The third speaker, Stanislav Zvoniček, then tried to combine ser¬
ious aesthetic thought with the demands of the Cultural Secretariat,
but since no one has ever been able to square a circled he became
* This was captured very realistically in The Third Wish, where the family shares
a one-bedroom apartment in the following fashion: Grandpa and Grandma live
in the kitchen. Mom and Dad in the living room, and the Granddaughter in the
bedroom. Housing projets were practically non-existent, the allocation of apart¬
ments was riddled with corruption, and only too frequently did the young
couples' only hope of getting their own apartment rest in the early departure of
the grandparents. When I began writing detective stories, and carried out some
criminological research, 1 discovered several cases where children speeded up
their parents' exit to the eternal resting grounds.

t Zvoniček tried to square the circle again in 1970, in a booklet entitled Czechoslovak
Film 1945-1970. There are two interesting passages in this mellowing transcript of
the rough stalinist clichés of the Soviet White Book on Counterrevolution in
Czechoslovakia into a quasi-serious politico-esthetical evaluation. One deals with
Schornt’s Courage for Every Day (see page 143) and Zvoniček bases his arguments
on a real gem of establishment philosophy: “The objective truth. . .is but one. . .”
but “a ruthless truth, if said at an improper time, in an improper place and in an im¬
proper manner can betray its objective . . and so “the screenwriter and the direc¬
tor found themselves in the situation of their hero who tries to alarm in vain the
people in the tavern .... Not even half a million of cinema-goers went to see their
film." To my mind, this very fact shows how exact were the observations of Schorm
and Masa. And as for the appropriateness of time, place and manner, however in¬
terestingly aristotelian this may sound—who was to decide what was appropriate in
the arts at that time in Czechoslovakia? Novotny? Would there ever have been, for in¬
stance, the excellent Forman whom Mr. Zvoniček (and after the triumph of Taking
Off at Cannes in 1971 also Mr. Kliment) cautiously praises, had Novotny’s Cultural
Department been in full control of what was, and what was not, proper at Barrandov
in the early sixties?
The second interesting passage (a little contradictory to the one mentioned above)
is from the Preface where Mr. Zvoniček, with a symptomatic air of exhausted
resignation, expresses his doubts as to whether there is “anything objective in the
world in general, and in the world of art in particular". I am glad he has his doubts
because this, to a certain extent, exonerates my book from the sin of subjectivism.
However, if this is so—and perhaps Mr. Zvoniček has come to his sad conclusion af¬
ter reading Lenin’s definition of the “objective truth” in Materialism and empirio-
criticism—is it not a strong argument for artistic freedom which alone guarantees that
ideas freely enter the dialectics and artistic revolutions are real revolutions, not
pogroms on the artists?
As for Mr. Vrba: this excellent translator of, among many others, Geoffrey
Chaucer and Ernest Hemingway and one-time film critic of the Literami Listy,
was—according to underground sources in Prague—sentenced to four years in jail, in
the spring of 1971.

61
contused. One of the attacked critics, František Vrba, pointed out
the injustice of being chastised for a positive review of Hie Sunt
Leones, while Zvoniček went unpunished, despite writing an
equally positive review of the same film in the Party newspaper
Rude Pravo. The confused Zvoniček told him to read the review
more carefully. Vrba didn’t bother, but Jiri Hendrych did, and shor¬
tly after the conference Stanislav Zvonicek’s association with Rude
Pravo ended.
Despite all of this, one important reality came out at the confer¬
ence: Khrushchov had deprived the militant Stalinists of the most
potent arguments which could have transposed the aesthetic con¬
troversy to the level of treason and counter-revolution. No one was
accused of intentional enmity, or of plotting schemes injurious to
socialism; the Jews, Kadar and Jasny, were not accused of a Zionist
plot, and even the well-worn CIA failed to get into the speeches.
Everything was reduced to the remnants of bourgeois thought,
represented by Yugoslavian revisionism, and influenced by Italian
neo-realism. Even so, the campaign shook many of the Communists;
it consciously attacked the old stereotypes formed during the period
of socialist realism and based on the conditioned reflex of guilt.
When a conditioned artist arrived at a dilemma between the official
truth as it was proclaimed by the Cultural Secretariat, and the
concrete truth as he experienced it in everyday life, he began to
doubt not the proclaimed truth but his own progressiveness. “Do I
have enough class-consciousness? ” he would ask himself according
to the account of one of the film critics, Jaroslav Boček. “Are not
my doubts just the remnants of intellectualization, or some other in¬
dividualistic anachronism, which I must negate? ”
Naturally these disrupted souls were for several years incapable
of further struggle; “they turned into walking complexes, into any¬
thing other than crystalized characters” (Helge). The fight was con¬
tinued by others—and the fact that members of the New Wave did
not suffer from these feelings of metaphysical guilt was one of the
main reasons for the surprising freshness with which the New Wave
arrived on the scene, traditionally overburdened by such complexes.
For the New Wave, socialism was not something new and
desperately fought for. It was not the great divide of their lives,
but rather the status quo; they saw no reason for calling rot “in¬
sufficiency”, a gangster “an atypical exception”, and incom¬
petence “developmental difficulties”, nor why they should
62
 An Invention for Destruction — a charming work made through a sophistication
of Méliés.

repent tor liking beautiful things (including naked girls) because

they are ''only” beautiful. Unlike the film makers of the Ur-
Wave, tew ot the New Wave were Party members. Of the thirteen
leading representatives of the group only four belonged to the
Party, and of the leaders (Forman, Passer, Schorm, Chytilova,
Nemec, Menzel, Krumbachova) none were Communists. This
had a greater importance than is generally admitted. It does not
mean that these young men and women were not socialists. They
were socialists without complexes. The Fathers of the
Revolution are members of strict brotherhoods, bound by the
inhibitions of their beliefs for which some of them
died—ironically, in greater numbers after the revolution than
before it. The Sons of the Revolution are protestants who want
to marry life.*
In Banska Bystica social criticism was no longer considered
treason, but the penalties were nevertheless hard. The manufacture
of further copies of The Third Wish was stopped, and it was
prohibited to show the film to anyone; consequently most of the
delegates never actually saw the work—still they rejected it. The
censorship banned any mention of the film in the media, and
removed it from the list of Barrandov productions for 1958—even
today, it is missing from the statistics. Radar and Klos were not
allowed to direct for two years, and Blažek was fired from his
‘Similar phenomena are evident in other areas. The tone of renaissance is given
by non-Communists, and surprisingly frequently by Catholics. For instance, in
prose, FIrabal, Linhartova, Paral, Fuks, Vyskočil; in poetry, Flolub, Zabrana, and
Holan; in drama, Havel, Topol and Smocek; in the area of musicals and pop-
music, Suchy and Slitr, and of course a slew of rock composers, musicians and
singers.

63
position as a Barrandov screenplay writer. * The production unit
responsible for the banned film was dissolved, and the General
Director of the Studios, Jiri Marek, was replaced by Alois Poled¬
ňák.* The film Hie Sunt Leones was immediately recalled from
distribution. September Nights and the School of Fathers were also
carefully manoeuvered out of the cinemas. The distribution of The
Star Goes South was also stopped. (This was a rather unimportant
musical comedy, but it was shot in Yugoslavia.) The new manage¬
ment of the Barrandov studios upheld the decision made earlier by
the fired director, Jiri Marek, not to show the comedy The End of
the Clairvoyant made by Svitacek and Rohac, who had once
assisted Alfred Radok.
This typical product of Czech humour follows the tradition which
began in the olden days with the bark-scarab and washroom atten¬
dant dramas, continued in the sixties through some of the thesis
films produced by the directors of the New Wave (for instance, Sch¬
midt—Juracek: Black and White Sylva), and led to comedies such
as Rychman’s Six Black Girls (1969). Unlike those rather unsuc¬
cessful movies The Clairvoyant was one of the funniest things ever
made in Czech cinema. It ruined the careers of Svitacek and Rohac
so severely, that they did not manage to direct another film until
1965 when they made the musical If a Thousand Clarinets.
Svitacek remained faithful to the genre of the medium length farce.

* He was re-hired soon after.

t The end—let us hope not the definite end—of this administrator of orders is parti¬
cularly bitter. He hesitantly permitted the realization of the films of the New Wave.
For this hesitation he was almost liquidated by the radicals during Dubcek's era, and
survived only due to the interventions of people like Vratislav Blažek. After the in¬
vasion, he permitted (whether explicitly or quietly I don't know) the use of Barrandov
Film laboratories for the development of footage shot by Czech cameramen during
the days of the tanks. He was arrested in September of 1970 for “anti-socialist ac¬
tivities” and held in jail without trial until the summer of 1971. In June 1971, at the
Cannes Film Festival, a group of internationally known film-makers drafted and
signed a petition urging the Czechoslovak government to release the man who “has
helped greatly in the development of the most brilliant generation of directors”.
Among those who signed were Dalton Trumbo, Luchino Visconti, Joseph Losey,
Nagisa Oshima, Dusan Makavejev, Louis Malle and others. Nevertheless, in July
1971, Mr. Poledňák, along with five other defendants, was sentenced to two years in
jail; some of the co-defendants, for whom no international petitions had been signed,
got twelve years. His crime: “endangering state secrets”. The nature of the “en¬
dangering”—at least in the reports I saw—was not specified. Prague underground
has it that Mr. Poledňák endangered those secrets by being intelligent enough to
remember them—most of the others who are in the know lack such a memory and
present therefore no security risk. According to Radio Yerevan (sec note to page 252)
the mysterious crime of the Barrandov director is strongly reminiscent of the Pen¬
tagon Papers Affair: he sold the figures of attendance at Soviet films in Czecho¬
slovakia to the “Tirana Times”.

64
 He successfully returned to it in 1969 with a “schizophrenic
metaphore”, In the Train, about a phenomenon called double-think.
Miroslav Horniček, the author ot the ancient satirical magnum opus
about the supervisor of the public toilets, plays a double part of a
schizoid passenger. The film is, according to reports from
Czechoslovakia, a worthy continuation of the spirit of The End of
the Clairvoyant. According to the same reports, the new feature film
by Svitacek's co-director Jano Rohac, The Long White Road— his
first since If a Thousand Clarinets—is also a worthy continuation of
the Clairvoyant: it was finished and held up in the spring of 1971.
Any normally thinking mind would have seen The End of the
Clairvoyant as a satire against the declining morale of the nation¬
alized tradesmen. The Novotny clan interpreted it as an attack on
the very foundations of nationalization. They used an old Stalinist
trick based on the theoretically insufficiently defined distinction bet¬
ween so-called “constructive” and “destructive” criticism.* The
hero of the movie owns a clairvoyant business: everything in the
store is flawlessly elegant, the service is personalized and excellent,
including oriental incense, mysterious dim lighting, and the clair¬
voyant’s exquisite costume. Every customer receives a prediction of
happiness, health and success. Then comes February of 1948, and
the clairvoyant business is nationalized. The clairvoyant takes off
the costume of the Indian magus, and works in a crumpled cor¬
duroy suit; the service is suddenly sloppy; the customers have to
stand in line and after filling out a number of idiotic questionaires,
are treated to a group prophecy. The predictions are now very brief
and frequently pessimistic. However, after working hours, the
Prophet hurries home, puts on his oriental robe and lights the in¬
cense. Then he receives private customers, who once again get first
class private service, including the happiest predictions.
*In practice the difference is simple: constructive criticism deals with insignificant
things related to the population as a whole rather than to the people’s represen¬
tatives. It attacks absenteeism, the malfunctioning of public services, or, at best, it
might ridicule a self-important lower official, obsessed with his miniscule powers.
On the other hand, to criticise anything significant is destructive. Some of the
tabus were, for instance, the mess in the nation’s economy, erroneous party
resolutions, etc. It may also be expressed as criticism en detail as opposed to
criticism en uros. Constructive criticism is however susceptible to a certain
danger. It might be “en detail" and affect “insignificant things", as is certainly the
case with the decline of the morale in the nationalized small businesses. If
however it passes the level of the so-called “communal", that is artistically
irrelevant, weak satire, and moves into the realm of art, which means that it
acquires a somewhat more general or metaphorical significance, it might easily
turn into “destructive" criticism. Such was exactly the case in The End of the
Clairvoyant.
65
 i-KjgS I

sSSwII
Vladimir Svitacek (End of a Clairvoyant) starts a game of strip-poker in the
Leningrad underground. He never told me how the game ended; possibly because
the blond on the right is my wife.

In one of the scenes the bored nationalized soothsayer looks out

of the window, then he quickly reaches into a drawer for a pair of
binoculars and stares through them at the terrace of the house
across the street. There, basking in the sun, lies a beautiful girl in a
tiny bikini (which may well have contributed to the banning of the
film). It was as if the soothsayer had looked into the future. The girl
was played by a student of the Film Academy, Vera Chytilova.

66
3/A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTISTS AS YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN

The School of Milos Forman

In the beginning was a black anecdote, which no one made up.

In a small town in Eastern Bohemia, the Gestapo arrested a
member of an anti-Nazi underground organization. He wasn’t a
professional conspirator, just an ordinary villager, who con¬
sidered it his duty to do something against modern bestiality.
After the Gestapo gave him a few good lectures on modern
bestiality, he came up with what he thought to be a clever idea.
The interrogators wanted to know the name of his contact in the
underground network, and so he told them; however, the man he
named had nothing to do with the organization. The villager acted
according to his pre-Nazi ideas about the police. He assumed
that a person who knows nothing can disclose nothing, and
that the Gestapo will let him go because he will prove to be
useless. The Gestapo did indeed arrest the unsuspecting and
totally innocent victim. He was a Mr. Forman.
He did not disclose anything, but they did not let him go. In
addition some racial flaws were discovered in the family, and so
they arrested his wife as well. The man later died in Buchenwald,
the wife in Auschwitz and their eight-year-old son Milos was
cared for by a succession of kind uncles; one of them was a Mr.
Svab in the Eastern Bohemian town of Náchod.
This uncle was a rather obese, middle-aged gentleman, who
owned a grocery store, and as a hobby practised mountain clim¬
bing on the nearby sandstone rocks. I was a member of the same
mountain-climbing club—not so much for the love of the sport,
as for the love of a pretty mountain-climber— and I often stop¬
ped by the good uncle’s store. A little black-haired boy used to
sit on the barrels of sauerkraut (a terrible rogue according to his
uncle) and watch the customers intently. I didn’t pay much at¬
tention to him, and later I forgot him altogether. Years later,
when Socialism came to Náchod, the good uncle abandoned his
easy life and his mountain-climbing and, at a rather advanced
age, became a miner. It was hard on him, but it helped his pretty
daughter to a metamorphosis from a bourgeois progeny to a
miner’s girl, and eventually enabled her to study at the Dramatic
Conservatory. The little boy, who used to sit on the barrels of
sauerkraut, meanwhile studied script-writing at the Prague Film
Academy.
67
Milos Forman Náchod, my native town, where the kind Mr. Sv
sheltered the young Milos.

Sometimes I feel that this original black anecdote embodies

all of Forman, his poetry and his philosophy. It contains the
cruelty which so enraged some West German critics when they
saw The Firemen’s Ball. It expresses the melancholic loneliness
of a small boy surrounded by the dreary world of a grocery
store. It incorporates in a nutshell the old story of the cruel
clash of youth with the adult world—one which Forman, luckily
for the cinematographic art, will probably never be able to get
rid of. “The critics expect,” he said during the shooting of The
Firemen’s Ball, “that a new work is totally new. That’s im¬
possible. Throughout his life a man retells the same story over
and over again.”
When a man begins his life the way Forman did then it might
really be impossible. Too many members of his generation en¬
tered the world the way he did, whether they lived in that par¬
ticular corner of the world or elsewhere. The formanesque story
cannot lose its actuality because the world takes care to carefully
and constantly update it.

I had long forgotten the little boy from the shadow of the
sauerkraut barrels and was working on my own loves. I was of
the generation obsessed with film and jazz. Every day I went to
the movies (my father was the director of one of the two Náchod
cinemas, and I was admitted free, even to the competitor’s
68
“I opened the door, and there stood the most famous
Czech star, Jana Brejchova, smiling at me . ... I was
completely overawed....”

house). Every day I listened to the big swing band of Miloslav

Zachoval in Cafe Port Artur, or blew the tenor saxophone in a
student band called Red Music, (which got its name through
misinterpretation of the name Blue Music, at that time an impor¬
tant professional swing group). The country was ruled by the
Nazis, and the beautiful melancholic music— swing— connected
us with that distant world of freedom and beauty, where fifteen -
year-old Judy Garland sang in movies we were not allowed to
see.
Náchod, with its student jazzbands and mountain-climbers, its
timid young men and its well brought up young girls wary of
their virginity became the subject of my first novel, whose
catastrophic fate is described in the previous chapter. Another of
the victims of that explosion was the then recently published first
Almanac of Jazz and Dance Music, which carried my story A
Word / Shall Not Withdraw, later published under the name of
Eine Kleine Jazzmusic. The story originated alongside the novel:
ideologically a completely innocent tragicomical tale about a
student band which in spite of the Nazis gives a swing concert in
a small town. The not quite Aryan trumpet player pays for that
provocation with his life. By that time, however, it was my ex¬
communicated name that forced the decision, and not the con¬
tents of my writing. The Jazz Almanac went into the shredder; a
malicious printer saved a few copies, which then circulated
through the Prague underground. And so one day someone rang
69
the bell; I opened the door, and there stood the most famous
Czech star, Jana Brejchova, smiling at me. I have preserved from
the earliest age an unweakened adoration of beautiful women;
and as 1 was—for better or for worse—reared by Hollywood
and the cult of stars, a beautiful woman who acts in movies will
turn me, despite all my life experiences, into a stuttering idiot. I
was completely overawed by Jana, and it took me a while to
realize that the black-haired fellow accompanying her was
talking to me. . .guess you don’t remember me. I would really
like to make a movie of The Cowards. But as it is right now im¬
possible, 1 would at least like to write a script of A Word / Shall
Not Withdraw, if you would allow me to do that.”
What a question! The husband of that beautiful star I would
allow anything. His name was Milos and he was the now grown¬
up little boy from the shadows of the sauerkraut barrels. At that
time he had already had some kind of a him career but his
greatest success was Jana. He graduated in 1955 from the script¬
writing department of the Film Academy, but his ambitions and
interest lay higher than to be a supplier of raw products, which
him scripts certainly are. Not that he would not have wanted to
write—he did. He was one of the young men who made
pilgrimages to the small house on the Prague island of Kampa
where, on the second floor, Jan Werich chaired meetings of ar¬
tists and where, on the hrst floor, lived in self-imposed seclusion
(as a protest against what was happening in the world) the great
modern Christian poet Vladimir Holan. At that time Milos
wrote poetry, and he scintillated with ideas for scripts—but he
wanted to shoot them himself.
His school certificate did not entitle him to do so, and he
became an assistant to Alfred Radok (in Grandpa Motorcar
he even played a small part) and took part in the experiment of
Laterna Magica. However, his obsession with art was the only
thing he had in common with the expressionistic and technically
daring wizard of effects, Radok. Milos saw the world differently.
Radok’s explosive personality was certainly a good school, but it
prevented the full expression of another remarkable personality
at the same time. Therefore, the real Forman appeared for the
first time alongside another, much lesser director, in a film of
much smaller acclaim than the spectacular Laterna Magica. The
director’s name was Ivo Novak, and the film was called Puppies.
70
It was a gentle and humorous story of young people, offering
here and there a few glimpses into the real life of young people.
After years of socialist-realistic fairy-tales this was a complete
novelty, and the critics predicted a great future for Ivo Novak.
He inexplicably failed and never became more than an average
director. Nothing in his second film, The Main Prize (1958),
resembled The Puppies. Whereas in the first film one could feel
the touch ot real life, the second one simply displayed the well-
worn formula of the situation comedy in which a pauper wins
the grand prize in a lottery. While in the first film Jana
Brejchova practically forgot that she was an actress, in the
second one the actors just performed the prescribed motions of
well rehearsed puppets. The difference was incredible.
It isn't any longer. One of the old nuisances of film-making is
that the result of what is basically a collective effort is credited
wholly to the director. Very few people noted at that time that
the theme of The Puppies was conceived by one Milos Forman,
who also co-operated on the script and worked as an assistant
director. His greatest achievement in the film was the seventeen-
year-old heroine, whom he later successfully lassoed and led to
the altar, at a time when she was already receiving more than
500 letters monthly from admirers, some from as far away as
Mao’s China.
This greatest star of post-war Czech film lived in lodgings, and
after the wedding she moved into Milos’ apartment. It was a
single room divided by a locked door from some kind of an
office. During silent moments spent over the drafts of the script
for Eine Kleine Jazzmusik, we used to hear voices negotiating the
debiting per contra of lumber. Instead of a bed, the room had a
low home-made nest consisting of blankets and pillows, from
which protruded the head of the greatest Czech film star sleeping
after a night of shooting. Around noon the film star tumbled out
of her boudoir and, while I discreetly turned away, retired in her
pajamas to the bathroom. They shared it with the clerks who
negotiated on the other side of the door. The bathroom door
was secured by a rather flimsy latch. After the star had returned
and dressed behind a screen, she would cook something on a gas
stove. Sometimes it was even edible. At times, when she wasn’t
shooting, she had to go and type in the Studio offices.
And so we sat there in the room with a view at the Vltava
71
river, contriving a story on a nowadays world-acclaimed tor-
manesque theme about young people, who even during the most
difficult times thought mainly about jazz and pretty girls, and
mercilessly (and in our story tragically) clashed with those in¬
sisting that young people have mainly other things in mind. The
script contained a number of typical Forman scenes; such as an
argument between the young hero of the movie and his father
about whether it is possible to fight the Nazis with songs; or a
ruse which helps two members of the jazz band escape from a
precarious situation in the German barracks. The two get away
through the showers, where a German company is just taking a
bath. The clever disguise which the two assumed—they strip¬
ped—rendered them indistinguishable from the members of the
superior race. In those magical days when we were enchanted by
our own fantasies, Milos dreamt that we could play the parts of
the two youngsters ourselves. If it were not for what happened
later, we would have probably been the world’s first male nudies
(at that point we still had the figures to do it) and Czech film
would have had another first. It didn’t happen because the Great
Assembly of Dramaturgists did not rejoice over our script.
This Assembly was a body of monstrous proportions, and its
unmanageable size prevented it from passing anything smaller
than the proverbial telephone poles which, according to a well
known Moscow underground joke, are in fact well-edited trees.
Once the august body spent four hours pondering a single sentence
in a certain script. In it a policeman, who had just participated
in a bloody suppression of a strike, walks over to a fence and
urinates. Questionable was the urination: doubts arose as to
whether this aesthetic element should be considered an acceptable
functional expression of the policeman’s loathsomeness or if it
wasn’t after all overly naturalistic. The second opinion prevailed,
the authoress was summoned and advised to substitute the
abominably urinating cop with something more appropriate, for
instance a drunken priest. But in the end the cop remained in the
film. It appeared that the typist had made an error, and the sen¬
tence should have read: the policeman walks over to the fence
and stands silent (in Czech mlci—he is silent; mod—he urinates).
To this Assembly we submitted our musical comedy from the
Protectorate The Band Won, to which we added the epithet anti¬
fascist (in accordance with the better judgment of cleverer
72
 friends). It helped nothing. The script came back with a fascicle
of comments, and I felt like a character from a Hollywood
muck-raking novel. Being young, inexperienced and helpless, we
began to comply with the suggestions. We re-wrote the script and
submitted a new version. Back it came. And so like a boomerang
it travelled between the Assembly and ourselves, until the jazz
band was replaced by a symphony orchestra, then a brass band,
and finally disappeared altogether. Instead of Forman’s
humourous scenes, the work now boasted some classical pictures
of the plentiful problems of workers’ sabotage in Nazi fac¬
tories—though, as I recall, even those were not strictly classical
(like the one with the workers, resembling a gigantic centipede,
who carried a just completed body of a bomber to the railway
station, but the fuselage would not pass through the local Arc de
Triomphe, erected in honour of the Fuhrer). Well, it was after
the conference in Banska Bystrica.
At approximately that stage of development came a sudden
reversal. One of the members of the Assembly, who seldom at¬
tended the numerous meetings and was therefore quite uninfor¬
med, demurred at the following puzzle: why is the script called
The Band Won if there is no trace of a band in it, and why does
the subtitle read antifascist musical comedy, when it is clearly a
tragedy?
We naturally acknowledged the comment and the scenario
once again turned into a boomerang. This time we cunningly
skipped the brass band, and returned the symphony, which we
quickly transformed into a jazzband. Then we cut the majestic
sabotage scenes, justifying this by their exorbitant cost. Instead,
we smuggled back the naked shower scene, this time however
with the German soldiers wearing towels around their waists. I
don’t know whether this is a custom in any army, but it was in
our script.
So, with the help of the Assembly, we managed to return the
script to something like its original form. The world around us
was also experiencing various changes; the counter-attack of the
stalinist guard began to falter due to the breakdown in hin¬
terland operations, and it slowly turned into a retreat. The
whole campaign resembled the Ardennes operation. Two short
years after the first submission of the script and with the most
persistent commentators being happily absent, the Assembly
73
finally okayed the film. I remember that evening as if it were
yesterday. We were walking down the illuminated Wenceslas
Square and could not believe reality.
Well, we didn’t have to believe it for long. Someone
hurried—undoubtedly with the best intentions—to Radio
Prague, and the evening news reported: “The latest from Barran¬
dov! A new film in the making: a musical comedy about a
student band from the Protectorate based on a work by Josef
Skvorecky.” Damn it, I said to myself. They didn’t really have
to... so soon... and on the radio...
Sure enough—first thing in the morning the phone rang, “For
Christ sake, come immediately to the Studios.” And that’s where I
was given the good news. President Novotny, my old friend and
critic, had listened to the radio that evening and was very angry.
It did not even occur to him that a musical comedy from the
time of the Protectorate could be something other than The
Cowards. Neither Milos, nor myself, nor the dramaturgists of the
production group were able to explain to anybody that the work
in question was the innocent Eine Kleine Jazzmusik. When Milos
fought his way to some highly placed party officials and finally
managed to persuade them, it was too late. To explain the
problem to the President was, at that time, still a feat belonging
to the category of tight-rope walking without a safety net.
Nobody found the courage. And so I returned to the translation
of American literature (the mark of Cain still prevented me from
attempting to publish further artifacts of my own), and
Milos...

That was in 1961. Laterna Magica was affected by interventions

from above and Milos, together with Jano Rohac (End of the
Clairvoyant), lived off writing burlesque sketches under an
assumed name for the Prague Alhambra, which was secretly
frequented by Soviet tourists, who considered it the den of
depravity.* He was offered the position of an assistant director
in an idealized war fable called There, Beyond the Forest (1962),
and depressed by all the calamities (which were topped by his
*ln one of the shows written by Milos, the theatre experimented with strip-tease, but
after a few performances the vigilant Mr. President once again intervened, and so
they returned to dancing in bikini. The Soviet tourists “officially" considered even
that to be an antisocialist depravity.

74
divorce from Jana) he accepted. To gain relief from the
dreariness, he would visit his friends at the Semafor theatre,
frequented at that time by many others. That was where he got
an idea. “Suchy and Slitr, and all of us,” he said in a subsequent
interview, “admired Voskovec and Werich; but their early begin¬
nings, particularly the legendary Vest Pocket Revue from 1927
we knew only from hearsay. It suffered the fate of all famous
theatrical production—it disappeared into oblivion, changed
into a legend, and no-one will ever know what it really looked
like. I used to say to myself that Voskovec and Werich would
have been happy to have their Vest Pocket Revue on film.” So he
went and, with the money made from the obscene burlesques, he
bought a 16mm camera; then he approached Suchy and Slitr
with an offer to make a documentary about the Semafor.
It happened. Semafor announced sham auditions for a female
singer and crowds of unsuspecting misses flocked to be captured
on the malicious sixteen. When the first few hundred yards of
rushes of this privately made film were developed and projected,
the screen revealed a documentary hitherto unequalled in
Czechoslovakian cinema. It was a cruel record of embarrassing
female self-love, conceit and dreams of fame. The
machine—camera—revealed the grotesqueness of a life that has
illusions of its own beauty. It functioned in this instance as Leo
Tolstoy’s famous eye, watching the performance of an opera, not
in the context of the fictional action, but as an action of its own.
It revealed the ordinary and banal. Later, when The Audition
was shown to the public, same of the critics commented on the
film’s cruelty. Milos later wrote, “the cruelty which glares at you
from the screen is present in the very nature of the audition...
to film an audition and deprive it of that cruelty, would mean
depriving it of its essence. The essence of the audition is still not
the real battle. It is merely the induction procedure. And I know
nothing crueller and more embarrassing then the induction
procedure.. .even the greatest future hero goes through it naked
like all the others.”
Cruelty mercilessly joined with the grotesque. How can one
avoid remembering the man whom the Gestapo first mistakenly
arrested, and then, to make sure, beat him to death.
The private producer, Forman, showed the first rushes to the

75
representative of the government studios, Vladimir Bor, who
had earlier kindly but unsuccessfully defended Eine Kleine Jazz-
musik, and was finally overruled by the President. It was a happy
choice because Vladimir Bor, who was one of the founders of
the recese movement*, had throughout the difficult times a
feeling for things defying any norm. When he saw Milos’ rushes,
he immediately bought them with government money, had them
blown up to thirty-five, and financially encouraged the director
to complete the documentary short.
However, in the end, it wasn’t a pure documentary: Milos is
too much of a natural story-teller to be satisfied with something
that does not contain at least a reflection of that oldest dynamic
art form, the story. At the sham audition he noticed a dark¬
haired girl with a beautifully large mouth, who sang with one of
the two hundred or more Prague rock groups (in English,
although she didn’t know the language—a practice common in
such groups; he also picked an inconspicuous blond, then added to
the documentary a subsequently manufactured simple plot. A
department store sales-girl asks her boss for permission to leave
work so that she can attend the audition. When he refuses, she
skips work and goes to the audition, where she “bombs out”. The
dark-haired girl, toughened by the hard training given to her by
the first guitar player of the amateur rock group, upon seeing the
blond’s failure, succumbs to an attack of self-criticism and
although she is practically in front of the microphone, turns
around and proudly leaves. She was one of the successes of
Milos’ first independent directorial endeavour. Soon after, she
became his second wife and the mother of twins, Peter and
*The movement, although it was founded earlier, flourished particularly during
the second world war. In its provocations it is ideologically related to dadaism,
French pataphysics, surrealism and similar harassments of originally the
bourgeois, later in the case of the recesists, the Nazis and finally ail the
rhinoceroses. From innocent jokes, such as all-day following of randomly selec¬
ted pedestrians who eventually tried frantically to run away from the pursuers
(the director Jiri Krejciic as a young man specialized in that), the recesists
proceeded towards feats which are probably world records in the harassment of
the mighty; sometime in 1942 two of them, with the help of home-made forged
documents, penetrated into the winter recreational resort of the SS units in the
Alps. They spent a week skiing with the embarrassed SS-men, pretending to be
Czech employees of some secret department of special tasks. It is unnecessary to
stress that they could have lost their necks. The whole story, supported by the
originals of the forged documents and by documentary shots from the SS nest is
contained in a book about the recesist movement, compiled by the same Vladimir
Bor. Just before it was to be published in the spring of 1970, it was stopped by the
Czechoslovakian censorship.

76
The Well-Paid Stroll: an S + S jazz opera, later made by Forman into his only TV
movie.

Matey; she also became a successful Czech film star, with which
I, if I may flatter myself, helped her a little.*
At the time when he was editing his foolish singers into one of
the most fantastic sequences of Czech film, Milos brought me the
manuscript of a novel written by the sculptor, Jaroslav
Papoušek, called Peter and Paula. He asked me to read it and
give him my opinion, as he would like to shoot it. I read the
book, and it was as Milos would have written it, if he were a
writer. It resembled his style in all aspects: the hero was a
grocery-store apprentice (the good uncle came to my mind),
shyly in love with a high-school student. The illogical dialogues
between the human pups and their inner monologues, reminded
me of my own novel, The Cowards, from which Milos used the
following sentences as an epigraph to the screen-play of Peter
and Paula: “Suddenly it struck me that I should be thinking
about Irena, if I loved her. So I started to think about her. At
*Milos brought his camera into the Semafor theatre once more in 1966 when he
made a TV film based on a successful “jazz opera” called The Well Paid Stroll,
written by Suchy and Slitr, who also starred in it.

77
Forman’s greatest non-actor, Mr. Vostrcil, as Father in Peter and Paula: a work¬
ing class Czech version of Mr. Babbitt.

first it didn't go so well, so I remembered how I recently at the

pool caught a glimpse of her breasts, and all of a sudden I was
doing fine.”
The battle with the Barrandov dramaturgy began. The story of
the grocer’s apprentice contradicted everything demanded of
films about the young by the socialist-realistic aesthetics. The
boy got no satisfaction from his work; he was really supposed to
be a kind of a watch-dog, because his job consisted mostly of
preventing the customers from stealing. But when, in one of the
best scenes of the film, he finally notices a shoplifting old lady,
he does not find enough courage to intervene. He follows the old
lady out of the store, and along the street all the way to the
suburbs, where he finally lets her go. This naturally arouses the
displeasure of his boss and of his father. The father’s pompous
78
preaching only further alienates the perplexing son, whom the
old man tries to approach.
Once again then, the theme is the cruelty of the inconspicuous
clashes between the young person and the adult world. This ob¬
sessive theme of Forman’s was so powerfully expressed in the
grocery attendant s drama, that one of the last remaining
socialist-realistic critics, Trapl (who still dared to publicly
defend the discredited canons), completely failed to see all the
other, frequently very acceptable qualities of the film (e.g. Peter’s
triend, Cenda, a bricklayer's apprentice, likes his work very
much because it makes him a real worker, not a variation of a
house dick), and he condemned the film as decadent, pessimistic
and reactionary. Some Soviet critics did the same. The Soviet
Union is possibly the only country with a developed film in¬
dustry where Forman’s films were never publicly shown.

Kolin is a medieval town in Central Bohemia, famous for its

brass band, founded at the end of the nineteenth entury by Fran¬
tišek Kmoch. This man was a kind of a Czech Philip Sousa;
although not responsible for the deformation of the helicon into
a more convoluted shape, he did compose a large number of
popular marches, and when he died that band lived on, and sur¬
vives to the present. The town organizes an annual brass band
competition, which carries Kmoch’s name. Milos’s staff arrived
in Kolin in the middle of one of these festivals, and the at¬
mosphere of the brass band world enchanted them. It penetrated
the definitive script of Peter and Paula; the conductor of the
Kolin band, Mr. Vostrcil, got the part of Peter’s father and
another semi-documentary was made. It was called If It Weren’t
for Those Bands; later it was merged with The Audition and, after
the premiere of Peter and Paula in 1963, shown as a feature film.
The method was similar: into the footage of the documentary
Milos edited a simple anecdote. Two friends, both of them trom¬
bone players in competing bands, have to choose between going
to an important rehearsal or attending motorcycle races. The
motorcycles win, and the conductors of the respective bands,
after long sermons, fire both the delinquents. The only thing that
really happens is that the boys switch bands. In the final scene
the motorbikes are once again forgotten and the young men are
happily blowing their trombones in the competing bands.
79
 The well-known theme: the clash of the two mutually uncom¬
prehending worlds of the old and the young. The well-known
method: a simple anecdote in the form of a documentary. All
received grander proportions in Peter and Paula. The elements
of style and method were for the first time united into a great
totality.

The danger inherent in the extraction of events from their

spacio-temporal context is generally recognized. We must first
fully understand the implications of realism, which was called
“socialist”, to be able to comprehend the importance of neo¬
realism and of cinéma vérité for the young Czech film-makers;
why it influenced them perhaps more then their Western
colleagues. It affected even Milos, but he was too much of a
story-teller to submit to the incalculable elements and the
passively registering camera. Of the vérité finally only the non¬
actors remained in his films, and if we are to talk about direct
influences, then it might be proper to mention the almost forgot¬
ten film // Posto by Ermanno Olmi, which Milos admired and
which is related to Peter and Paula both in motive and in feeling.
“I think we are somewhat confusing the terms,” Milos wrote in
his directorial confession. “We speak of the tendency of cinéma
vérité as of a method: the point seems to be that the word
“vérité” means that in films lies should be challenged. This is
most important, and not the style and method. It had ap¬
proximately the following development: years back they used to
say, ‘That’s just like in the movies’ (meaning that it is un¬
believable); then came, ‘He filmed it’ (in the sense of someone
fooling another); and now comes the third phase, when we want
the viewer to believe what he is being told from the screen.”
Evidently a rather unorthodox understanding of cinéma vérité,
but typical for the New Wave of Czech cinema. One of the oldest
questions is being considered here. “A writer’s job is to tell the
truth,” wrote Hemingway, and none will understand that
banality so well as people who, because they were denied the
freedom of artistic expression for most of their lives, do not find
it banal.

The directors of the Ur-Wave were of course also concerned

with truth. Unlike them, the New Wave soon realized that the

80
truth also is—and in the final analysis, is foremost—a technical
problem. Naturally what—but from there came how.
Many people in Czechoslovakia thought that Forman was over¬
coming this fundamental problem of form through improvisation
“on location”. The directness of dialogues, including the fumbling
search for words evident in the non-actors, would seemingly sup¬
port such an assumption. In fact Milos is probably the slowest and
most careful screen-play writer of all the directors. Peter and Paula
took him a year, and the script for Firemen’s Ball eighteen months.
His first American film. Taking Off, took just as long. Despite that,
Milos’ films seemed to uphold the finding of William Faulkner:
“The moving-picture work of my own which seemed best to me was
done by the actors and the writer throwing the script away and
inventing the scene in actual rehearsal, just before the camera tur¬
ned.” The reality of Milos’ films is somewhere in between: “Every
creative work is fundamentally an improvisation. Even when we
write screen-plays we imagine every situation from all angles, we try
to make up this or that. . . ideas come and go without any particular
preconceived order, and the resulting scene is therefore the final
product of the continuous improvisation of ideas. The consistent
adherence to the screen-play during the shooting (if the film is to be
in the style of cinéma vérité) is an expression of conceit on the part
of the authors, who imagine that they managed to create characters
with all the specifications of their personalities, character, thought,
with all the unpredictable variables... However, improvisation
alone is not able to make the film, it may at best improve it; there¬
fore, it is necessary to have a script of such quality, that even if
nobody manages to come up with anything else, the work will
have meaning and a certain standard.”
The vérité element in Forman’s films lies predominantly in the use
of non-actors. “There are basically two types of non-actors,” says
Milos. “Those who are only able to be themselves—for instance the
Mother in Peter and Paula—and others who can act, but these have
to be at least one degree more intelligent than the characters which
they are playing. This is the case with Peter and his father.. .they
aren’t really playing themselves, they are doing a deadly straight
parody. They reach a ceiling, determined by their own intelligence,
while actors are able to spiritually live a role above their own
ceiling_It is very advantageous to combine a good actor—it must
be a really good actor—with a non-actor. It helps both of them. On
81
Loves of a Blond. I was to get the part of the soldier in the center, but Milos found
me too “intelligent” for it and gave it to Vladimir Mensik.

the one hand, (the actor) gets from the non-actors that (indefinable
ability to express himself without affectation. He in turn inoculates
them with the very important feeling for rhythm and the expression
of a point, which the professional actor possesses.. .the value of
non-actors lies primarily in their inimitable originality. They have
one other tremendous advantage: if I write a bad dialogue or a
whole scene, that is if I write it naively, or even untruthfully, an ac¬
tor is able to provide it with the illusion of truthfulness, and thus
cover up my mistake. The better the actor, the easier it is to conceal
my stupidity. In the performance of a non-actor, who remains
constantly himself, my naivety protrudes like wires out of a broken
umbrella. The non-actor is a kind of seismograph. Every stupidity
which I commit is to him an earthquake, which causes him to lose
his footing.”
Naturally using non-actors also has its disadvantages. They not
only function as a seismograph of the expressiveness of the dialogue,
but also of many other things. Early in the shooting of Firemen’s
Ball, Milos noticed that the performance of the man portraying the
fireman who steals the headcheese from the raffle was growing day
to day worse: as if the person were changing from a talented non-
82
actor to the worst amateur hack. It appeared that the gentleman’s
wife always rehearsed with him the scene which was to be shot the
next day, and very authoritatively directed him. Consequently,
Milos took the scripts away from his non-actors, and acquainted
them with the contents of the scenes and dialogue according to the
Faulkner method: “just before the camera turned”.
A major problem is to find suitable non-actors. Eighty percent of
the candidates will not do. Once, during an Autumn day in 1964, I
myself wouldn't do. In the room where debates about debiting per
contra could be heard, Forman's team, Milos, Ivan Passer and
Jaroslav Papoušek, met with three men: two of them were clerks,
Ivan Kheil and Jiri Hruby, and one was a writer—myself. The
situation was explained to us: three middle-aged reservists at a
dance are trying to pick up some girls sitting at the next table. Since
they are a little afraid, they encourage one another. One of them has
a wedding band, which he drops on the floor. Milos described the
embarrassing situation graphically and then added: “Well, gents,
now act!”
I choked up. and couldn't think of a single thing. I managed
to utter a few hysterical cries, and then I simply listened to
Messrs. Kheil and Hruby, who argued so well, that they almost
ended up realistically bloodying each others noses. Later, as we
were going for dinner through the misty streets of Prague’s Old
Town, Milos told me: “You know, you are too intelligent for
that part.” According to his own theory, I should have been just
the man for the part. However, Milos—in keeping with another
principle of his—finally gave it to an excellent professional ac¬
tor, Vladimir Mensik. To tell someone that he is too intelligent to
be an actor is a very nice way of letting him know that he should
stay with screen-play writing. Milos is a very considerate person.
The fact that he so gently threw me out made possible the
greatest scene of Loves of a Blond (1965).
The Blond helped Milos to get out into the world. Those who
envied him maliciously claimed that he used a well tested for¬
mula: a young girl with love problems. But even such masters as
Edgar Allan Poe, certainly one of the fathers of modern art,
used the formula quite unashamedly, because they knew it to be
one of the most moving formulas in life. After all, as Chaplin
says, “who on principle avoids cliché, faces the danger of
becoming a bore.” Milos wrote: “One morning I met a young
83
girl, sadly standing with her carpet bag in front ot a Prague
railway station. She travelled from some village to Prague to
visit a boy. She had his address, but she couldn’t find him, since
the address was false.” Here in a nutshell were the Loves. The
important thing, Milos stresses, is the basic situation. It is easy to
develop a story from it, which “I then try to tell so that it pleases
me. It must also please and move those for whom it is meant.”
“To tell an entertaining story” in the age of sophistication,
probably does not resound too ambitiously. But Milos goes on
to say: “I think that all that which is noble, and which has
remained in art and literature since ancient times.. .and which
is also significant for strong contemporary works of art, has
always concerned itself with injuries and injustices perpetrated
against the individual. That is because we always perceive the
work of art as individuals. There, at the bottom of all those great
works, are the injustices, which no social order will eliminate.
Namely, that one is clever and the other stupid, one is able and
the other is incompetent, one is beautiful while the other is ugly,
another might be honest, and yet another dishonest, and all of
them are in some way ambitious. And it indeed does not matter
that we are arriving at eternal themes.”
It may be that at this point we are quite far removed from con¬
temporary sophistication, but we are close to the tramp in a
bowler hat. I personally will always prefer the tramp. Milos in
his films approached the desired state where his work speaks
both to the man in the street, and to the intellectual. I see this as
an indisputable sign of an art, which is by no means minor.
This sensitive person drew upon himself from the very begin¬
ning of his career the hatred of people who, irrespective of what
they are saying, always demand that art be the servant of
politics, and not its partner and companion, or, in case of great
art, even its teacher. The Audition was accused of anti¬
humanitarian callousness. Peter and Paula, of choosing from
among the millions of theoretically happy young socialists the
atypical story of a decadent grocer's apprentice. Loves of a
Blond, according to many, adversely affected the morale of the
young, because in one scene it revealed to them the state secret,
that during love-making people usually undress. At that time
Milos received scores of anonymous letters. In one of them the
writer threatened to kill him and “all those other kikes, when

84
Jana Brejchova’s sister, Hana, in Loves of a Blond.‘7 am bored with beauty, really
said Milos in an interview. “I find more beauty in unrepeatable faces. ”

we’ll once again start doing things the right way.” By the
majestic plural this radical did not mean the Nazis but those
“marxists” who, during Dubcek’s era secretly, and after the
Invasion publicly, gathered around the antisemité Jodas (a
single typing error would make the name into an interesting
nomen-omen), and who now seem to be conspiring against the
“revisionist” Husak. Then came The Firemen’s Ball.
Until that time nobody thought of Forman as a social critic.
Suddenly came a story whose philosophical core is an expression
of cruelty of inter-human relations: ruthlessness of man to man,
dullness and callousness, which survive even in socialism and
are sometimes simply transformed into new shapes. A dying old
man is to be given a commemorative pick-axe at the firemen’s
ball, because the firemen have discovered that he has cancer.
They speak about it with complete nonchalance. A group of
pitiful beauties is uninhibitedly ogled by a bunch of lewd mid¬
dle-aged men. A grandfather whose house burns down, is
85
y|i
Two unrepeatable faces: the one on the left is Vera Kresadlova's in Audition, the
second is that of an anonymous Greenwich Village teenager in Taking Off.

displayed on stage during the ball in his long underwear,

and an enterprising waiter utilizes the gathering of the crowd at
the fire to increase his beverage sales. The charity raffle is
pilfered by the people, and when the cancer-afflicted old man
(who was all evening prevented from going to relieve himself,
because the firemen aren’t sure when they will perform the
presentation) finally goes to receive his pick-axe, it is discovered
that someone had stolen it.
A startling picture of society. It disgusted in a strangely
similar way the American writer Phillip Bonosky, the Moscow
critic Bolshakov, the reviewer for the West German Der Spiegel
and the famed humanitarian* Carlo Ponti, who reportedly first

’Western film tycoonery seems to be swarming with humanists. When Milos offered
his first American script to Paramount they refused it, attacking Milos on the very
same terms leveled against him by the philosophers from Mosfilm, from the Novot¬
ny ite apparatus and from the CP of the USA. The script, they said, ridiculed ordinary
people. Jay Cocks, writing in another organ of the international humanists, Time,
described the method of Taking Off (the movie made from the refused script by the
less humane Universal) as "simplistic misanthropy". Well, let us suppose that Milos is
a misanthrope: if any of the contemporary film-makers has a right to be one, would it
not be the boy whose parents were, on the strength of a very simplistic radical theory,
done away with by the rather sophisticated cremating equipment in a little Polish
village? So maybe he really is a misanthrope, and maybe the way the Czech directors
make films is simplistic: unlike some of their Western colleagues, such as Godard and
others, they certainly do not seem to care much for the sophisticated concepts of “the
people" to whom “all power" should be given. However, they have been taught not
only their theoretical lessons, and so, perhaps they can be forgiven for having
outgrown both 18th century romanticism and the children’s disease of slogans made
up from undefined terms. Milos, like the rest of them, probably does not have much
understanding for “the people"; he only happens to have some understanding of the
people. That is perhaps why, in Taking Off, he was able to make all “those beautiful,
flawed, lovely faces singing those sad songs" (Newsweek magazine) speak for a thou¬
sand political treatises.
Milos shooting his first American film,Taking Off. The man lying beside him on
the floor is his excellent cameraman, Miroslav Ondricek. g7
Firemen’s Ball: Should Frank have returned the stolen headcheese, or shouldn’t
he have? — The greatest political metaphor in Czech cinema.

protested against the selection of types for the beauty contest (he
wanted prettier girls) and in the end found the film anti¬
humanitarian. Consequently he refused to distribute it. In all
these condemnations one could hear, as the film critic, A. J.
Liehm, pointed out, the echoing of the words of the long depar¬
ted Czarist critic F. Vigel, written about an author, who “inven¬
ted some kind of an unreal Russia, in it a mythical town, into
which he gathered all the evils, which you would hardly find in
all of real Russia”. The critic had Gogol, and his play Govern¬
ment Inspector in mind; Count Tolstoy-American, in accordance
with Vigel, then suggested “sending the author shackled to
Siberia”.
When President Novotny saw the film at a regular private
screening, he, according to his son’s alleged words, “climbed the
walls”. Due to his intervention (the second one in Milos’ career),
the film was for a long time not distributed. The President of
course disliked other aspects of the film than those that irritated
Mr. Bonosky and the West Germans: namely the scene which, in
the Czech context, is the most brilliant example of allegory—so
magnificently inconspicuous, that a foreigner would miss it.
There is a power failure, and in the ensuing darkness people
pilfer the raffle prizes. The Fire Chief becomes exasperated: he

88
Milos’s American crowd in Taking Off: “I really don’t think people are so
different (in the U.S.) that they should cry or laugh at different things. ”

orders the lights turned off again, beckons the people to return
what they have stolen, and promises not to search for the
culprits. The lights go off and soon come on again—to reveal a
single person putting a stolen item back on the table: the
Assistant Fire Chief is returning a headcheese. A quick meeting
is called, during which the firemen split up into two camps. One
side maintains that Frank, once he had stolen, should not have
returned anything, because he only embarrassed the fire-brigade.
Others object that Frank was right in returning the headcheese
because, in doing so, he confessed his crime and thus con¬
tributed to the honest image of the firemen. It is all a hilariously
naturalistic argument of village bumpkins over a stolen head¬
cheese. And it is all a metaphor, well understood by all in
Czechoslovakia. The President was the head of the Party faction,
which for a long time refused to admit the truth about the frame-
up of Slansky and his co-defendants.
The President was not the only one to climb the walls as a
result of Firemen’s Ball. The voluntary fire-fighters also hit the
ceiling, and Novotny found in them some unexpected allies for
one of his last campaigns against the artists. The devoted mem¬
bers of the fire-brigades univocally related the philosophical
metaphor to their unphilosophical corporation. They declared
89
Firemen’s Ball: “I find more beauty in unrepeatable faces. ”

that if that is how the film-makers see it, they in turn will not
fight fires. In a country where, with the exception of large cities,
fire-fighting depends almost exclusively on volunteers, this could
have meant a catastrophe. As a result, Forman’s team had to
embark on a strange tour of the country, explaining to the
indignant fire-fighters that they had had no ill intentions.
Suddenly the dormant sparks of political upheaval erupted
into a fast-spreading fire. Novotny fell, and Dubcek came to
power. We met once again with Milos and decided that the time
had come to do what the deposed President thought we wanted
to do when he intervened against Eine Kleine Jazzmusik. We
decided to shoot The Cowards.
Milos, however, already had a contract with Paramount to
write and shoot a film about American youth. So we only draft¬
ed a synopsis and decided that while Milos was in the United
States making his film, I would write the first draft of the script.
Upon his return we would complete the screen-play and shoot it
in the summer of 1969 in the town where the good grocer uncle
once gave Milos shelter.
That was in the spring of 1968, and in August the tanks
arrived. We seem to have had little luck in our co-operation. All
the same I am happy to have met Milos, and both his beautiful
90
wives; to have been bound to him by friendship, the most
precious thing in life, and I nostagically recall how he rejected
me at the auditions for Loves of a Blond, in a way that really
didn’t hurt.

That is how it was with my friend Milos Forman. I am not a him

aesthetician to attempt any kind of an exhaustive recapitulation.
One important aspect of his work, was I believe best described
by the surrealist Vratislav Effenberger:
Cynicism for the sake of cynicism, wrote Rene Crevel, is
cynicism against truth...but Milos Forman’s cynicism is not
directed against truth. Forman managed to preserve the type of
humour, which is vicious, dangerous, concealed and explosive.
He dared to do something for which he should not be forgotten,
if he will find his way to a more acceptable climate: he hit the
petty Czech citizen. He aimed at cowardice, apathy, football
fanaticism, brutality, avidity, goodnatured emptyheadedness,
parochialism, tap room philosophy, and egotism, and he hit the
bull’s eye: he struck exactly those centers of spiritual wretched¬
ness, from which spring essentially all kinds of Fascisms and
Stalinisms.. . in (his) active understanding of reality, in this
feeling for contemporary forms of aggressive humour, and for
the critical functions of absurdity, in the fanatical anger, which
in his case can only be a function of some new inner light and
freshness, that is where Forman's work meets the most advan¬
ced functions of modern art.
Reminiscing about Milos, one of his characteristics comes to
my mind: he knew how to preserve his integrity even in
situations where he risked everything. Rather than assist on hints
with which he disagreed artistically, he left his sate job and
freelanced. In a socialist society this is a complicated ploy.
Rather than begin a hint with an incomplete screenplay, he
ignored the possibility that the producer might wish to find a
readier man. Rather than give in to the taste of a famous foreign
moneybag, he gambled that he might have to somehow repay
him eighty thousand dollars which, for a citizen of a socialist
country, is a task about as simple as walking around the world
on the meridian. Rather than accede to the dramaturgical ideas
of a large American corporation, he risked an even greater
dollar debt in a situation which for him, as a Czech, was ex-
91
tremely uncertain.* I remember how once during the shooting ot
Firemen’s Ball he gave me an American screen-play, and asked
me to read it and give him my opinion—at that time he did not
yet speak English well. I told him what I thought ot the script,
and Milos returned it. That precious screen-play was brought by
a gentleman who took first a transcontinental, and then a trans¬
atlantic flight straight from Hollywood. When he could not
reach Milos in Prague, he chartered a plane and flew after him to
Spindleruv Mlyn in the Giant Mountains, where the Ball was
being made. Milos refused it. The gentleman boarded the char¬
tered plane, then the transatlantic and finally the transcontinen¬
tal plane, and once back in Hollywood, he entrusted the
property into more reliable and willing hands. Remembering it,
I must always think of the little boy from the shadow of the
sauerkraut barrels. Somehow he never did become anyone else.

Milos is the only director of the New Wave who created something
that might be called a school. All his films up till now are the result
of excellent team-work, and both his colleagues have already made
their own films. When someone becomes very successful, others
begin to prove that he actually plagiarized. When Passer, after mak¬
ing the medium length study of football fanaticism Dull Afternoon
(1964) made the poetic, refined and musical Intimate Lighting
(1965) with Papoušek, but without Forman, it was said that he out-
formaned Forman. When Papoušek, after the thematically refresh¬
ing, but directorially unmanaged, The Most Beautiful Age (1969)
came up with the cruel philosophical farce, Eeco Homo Homolka
(1970)—having written and directed both the films himself—the
thing to ponder was whether Forman really equals Passer plus
Papoušek, or whether Passer and Papoušek are only Forman’s epi¬
gones. Fortunately, their friendship was never in the least affected
by these strange ponderances.
The truth seems to be rather simple. Although Forman would
never say this about himself, he is the primary source, the original
vision. A long time before the empty-headed sage offered his hard-
headed son banal pearls of wisdom in Peter and Paula, Forman
thought of the situation of a pompous father and his stubborn son
for Eine Kleine Jazzmusik. Already at that time he had filled it with
*''How 1 Came to America to Make a Film and Wound up Owing Paramount $ 140,000.”
Milos Forman Taking Off, Signet, 1971.

92
Bored with feminine beauty, Milos chose this particular
unrepeatable face to become that of his second wife:
Vera in Passer’s Intimate Lighting. Ivan Passer in America

the characteristic contrast between life and the petrified ideas about
life, with those unusual cadences that later sprang from the
mouths ot his non-actors. Already he was inventing the conversa¬
tions about nothing for “human pups”; in Eine Kleine Jazzmusik,
Suzi Braun, the swing singer was to have them with the fellows from
the student band, though in the end they took place between the
blond and the piano player. Incidentally, this blond was played by
Hana Brejchova (the younger sister of his first wife), who was sup¬
posed to star as Suzi Braun at the age of fourteen, and who later ap¬
peared as the naked model in Papousek’s The Most Beautiful Age.
Essentially, however, the work of Forman’s team is teamwork. “It
was only later,” says Papoušek, “that I began to formulate my own
aesthetic position regarding cinema. I never had the feeling, in¬
cidentally, that the boys [Forman and Passer] were expert film
makers while I was only a sculptor who got in the way. Nor did I
feel that they contributed more than I. Each of us was an equal
among equals.”
The three friends resemble somewhat the mystery of the Trinity
on a rather secular level. Forman’s original vision was, I would
say, enriched and deepened by the sensitivity of his congenial
friends. Collective creation, which is one of the specific properties of
93
the art of film, was ideally realized in the co-operation of the trio.
When the three directors parted, each of them emphasized in their
own works their contribution and their particular subject: their
specific nuance of the school.

It seems to me that Ivan Passer is the philosopher of the trio. He is

also the laziest—although Milos is also a very staunch advocate of
hypnology. Often during the work on Eine Kleine Jazzmusik, I
thought he was thinking hard, and then I discovered that he was
sleeping. But Ivan is the Oblomov of the three. “I dread the idea,”
he wrote, “of making a film every year. I am convinced that after
three years I would be no longer capable of making one.”
As a philosopher he is somewhat existential. “I am not interested
in the story, but in the state of being,” he said, about Intimate
Lighting. “To find the meaning in life, means to find the ultimate
task of which a person is capable. It means that he must find his own
upper limit, which will always destroy him a little, but which will
force him to use the best properties that he possesses. . . .The hero
of Intimate Lighting is a person who probably understood it. I
would say that he is a modern hero.”
Intimate Lighting is a study of all of that. A cello virtuoso arrives
after ten years to visit an old friend who teaches at a small town
music school. He brings with him his beautiful fiancee (played by
Forman’s second wife, Vera); both friends get drunk together,
remember the old times, raid the refrigerator, and play in a quar¬
tet—in short, nothing unusual happens. This is an exact expression
of Passer’s aesthetics: “I don’t like ambitious films, which end in a
compromise. I like those little films, which are as if by accident im¬
portant. Those which you suspect of being more important than they
at first glance appear to be.” Elsewhere he says: “A man might live
through momentous events, or important encounters, which influ¬
ence his life. But it doesn’t happen too often. We are rather influ¬
enced by everyday banal situations. These situations cannot be
uninteresting, that is unworthy of interest, because after all the
human life is made up of them. I think that.. .the physics of elemen¬
tary particles provides answers to questions regarding the stars.”

Unrepeatable or not, Ivan does not look bored by the beauty of Karen Black
while directing her in Born to Win, his first U.S. movie.

No, Ivan certainly does not look bored: Born to Win

94
<gs??r

Jaroslav Papoušek directing

Herein lies the principle charm of that inconspicuous film, that

won for Passer the New York Critics’ Prize in 1970.

This is to date the high point of a career which, in several aspects,

resembled Milos’. Wrong racial background—troubles during the
war. Son of wealthy parents—troubles after the war. Thrown out of
high school, he worked as an unskilled laborer, bricklayer, caster,
learned tool-making, and after a severe case of hepatitis became a
clerk. When he recovered, he travelled for two years as a circus
hand. Through a happy coincidence he was accepted to the Film
Academy, but two years later when his class background was
discovered, he was thrown out again. But he stayed with film: first
as Helge’s assistant on The Great Seclusion, with Brynych on Skid,
with Jasny on The Pilgrimage to the Virgin and That Cat, as well as
working with Alfred Radok in the Laterna Magica. Finally he
became assistant director to Milos Forman, whom he had known

96
since the age of thirteen when they were at a boarding school
together; later they collaborated on the writing ot Forman’s screen¬
plays. Taking all ot this into account we should understand another
idea from Ivan s directorial account: “A peculiar contradiction
exists between the maturity of a person as an individual and the in¬
fantility ot a person as a social creature. In every gang, in every
club.. .the person behaves a little below his dignity. In every pilgri¬
mage, in every festival, in every uniform, and—with your per¬
mission—in every consistent realisation of philosophical ideas, I
suspect a greater or smaller dose of infantility.”

The third member of the triumvirate, Jaroslav Papoušek, was

originally a piano tuner, then he completed a degree in sculpting at
the Academy of Fine Arts, and made a living from caricatures and
cartoons. He wrote Peter and Paula, met Forman, and finally
became a director. The film. The Most Beautiful Age, had a magni¬
ficent screen-play—one Prague structuralist counted over two
hundred gags in it—but as a film it wasn’t very successful. The
reasons were partly vis maior. Along with the spirit of Forman’s
films, Papoušek took over some of his actors, the blond and
Peter’s father, as well as the Old Fireman with cancer. This kind old
gentleman had one of the lead parts in The Most Beautiful Age, but
unfortunately died of a stroke when the Russian tanks arrived in
Prague. At the time the film was only half finished. The screen-play
had to be quickly and drastically rewritten, and although the result is
still certainly worth seeing, it occasionally goes beyond the point
where the peculiar charm of a non-actor’s expression turns into
diletantism, accompanied by an aftertaste of something unsuccess¬
ful.
However, in Ecce Home Homolka Popousek outlined his contri¬
bution to the works of the trio, in the disguise of a folksy farce. The
film begins with a Sunday afternoon petit-bourgeois idyll of Mr.
Homolka’s family: Grandpa, Grandma, the son the daughter-in-law,
and the twins, (Peter and Matthew Forman in their second
film appearance) are getting set to enjoy a picnic in a forest full of
vacationers. Suddenly they hear a woman desperately calling for
help from the nearby bushes. The Homolkas act quickly and
energetically. They pack up their sausages and beer, and gallop out
of the forest. They don’t want to get involved with anything like
that.
That is what the film is all about. “Other people” are for
97
The symbolism of this still looks to me almost medieval: but it’s just Vera in Papousek’s
The Most Beautiful Age.

Ecce Homo Homolka: a petit-bourgeois idyll seen through the sardonic eyes of Papoušek.
The new Barrandov bosses reportedly liked it, except for the cross on the wall.
Homolka s family “they”; something almost generically different.
The Homolkas live encased in their ultra-humble world, self-
sufficient in their stupidity, conceited in their ignorance, profound
in their emptiness, continuously revelling in their never-ending
batra-chomyomachia. They are ideal objects for dictators and
manipulators. We cannot but identify a continuation of the satire on
man, which was the subject ot Firemen’s Ball. Papoušek, who is
the most industrious of the three (a resolute enemy of hyp-
nology and a slave-driver), seems to be the socially critical whip
of the school, trend, team, or whatever you want to call the
phenomenon, which through the harmonious efforts of a story¬
telling observer of life, a philosopher, and a satirist, gave the
New Wave its most remarkable characteristics.

Vera Chytilova

The first of the two ladies of the New Wave is, in my mind, asso¬
ciated with disaster. It all started somewhat in the manner of my
meeting with Milos Forman. The doorbell rang, and at the door
stood another beauty—this time a stranger. She stunned me; I
didn’t stammer, as in the case of Jana Brejchova (she wasn’t a
film star), but instead I completely misjudged her age, and took
her for a young unsuspecting kitten. That afternoon, while sit¬
ting on the terrace of the Film Club Cafe, I managed to give a
sterling performance of the father part from Peter and Paula.
Had Forman seen it, he would have undoubtedly given me the
role.
The kitten that sat facing me was thirty-one. By way of in¬
troduction she told me that for her admission examination to
the Film Academy she wrote a screen play based on my story
The Racial Question. This naturally pleased me, since at that time
I was under constant attack in the papers. Then she asked me if I
could help her with her thesis film. The script was written by her
colleague Pavel Juracek, with whom she supposedly argued
because she wanted the film to be more philosophical.
The thing was called The Ceiling, but I unfortunately liked
Vera more than her script, and did not supply any philosophy. It
was after all she, not I, who was the philosopher; in the end I
had a very courteous argument with her, as I found the screen¬
play to be a rather tedious moral tale, considerably tributary to
99
Vera Chytilova

socialist-realistic “philosophy”, which evaluated human efforts

according to the governmental tariff of “social usefulness”. In
the screen-play a pretty medical student takes a part-time job
modelling at fashion shows, and gets herself a stylish lover. Then
she drops out of medicine and begins to alternate between her
lover’s bed and the shallow world of the fashion shows. Finally,
disgusted by all of it, she boards a train, where she meets simple
country people. Cleansed by this Rousseauvian communion, she
decides to start a new life by returning to the study of human
maladies. The kitsch bore an obvious ideological resemblance to
the then fashionable “return to the people for cathartic pur¬
poses”, as it was represented for instance in Jiri Fried's
celebrated novel Time Squeeze, which I found particularly
repulsive. The whole theme was nothing but a formally
sophisticated re-birth of the reactionary baker, Mr. Seagull, un¬
der the influence of the miners (in the previously mentioned film
Seagull Is Late, 1950) and this in turn was just a “progressive”
modification of an identical theme which once had been a
favourite of some of the worst Catholic writers. Both themes had
a villager corrupted by the city, both contained a train ride to
some village in the mountains, in both there appeared those full-
blooded simple folk, as healing as the spring of life. The only
difference was in the reactionary treatment given to the material
by the Catholic writers, as exemplified by the introduction of the
good parish priest, a character omitted from the “progressive”
version, or replaced by some ponderous village communist.
Notwithstanding all that, I have always had a soft spot for
100
fashion models, and so I refused to belittle their eminently
beneficial work. Vera in the end stubbornly made the film, but
instead of the injection of even the wisest philosophy, she did
something much more clever. Although the schematic morality
remained, the director blunted it by completely shifting the em¬
phasis to form: and very formalistic form at that. It was possibly
the first formalistic film of the New Wave, discounting Vlacil's
The Dove (1960), but that was protected against any criticism by
the acceptable peace symbolism. Ceiling was a pure succession of
beautiful objects—from the actress who played the model to the
nature shots, rendered by the precise camera work into a twilight
display of light and shadow. Vera later declared that “beauty is
the means and not the end”, but she quickly added: “If we were
to forget that, we might say: if formalism, then beautiful.”
The film bore noticeable traces of cinéma-vérité. It did not make
much use of a hidden camera, but it utilized a concealed micro¬
phone planted in the models’ dressing-room, where Vera herself
would start conversations with the changing girls. The shots of the
fashion show were thus accompanied by a phantasmagorial
unrehearsed cackle of girlish noises, with the director’s character¬
istic voice, identifiable by her peculiar pronunciation of “r” sounds,
outstanding. She pronounced those sounds as the English do, which
to a Czech ear is delightfully comical.
Vera made her second film, also a medium-length feature, A Bag
of Fleas (1962), in my home town Náchod, which is famous for its
role in the Czech labour movement. Some of its numerous cotton-
mills still use the English milling machines bought at the turn of the
century. The cotton industry always preferred women; after the war
the factories built large dormitories and filled them with girls. At
one time there were young females living there from all over the
world. Besides Czech and Slovak citizens and girls from Poland,
which is only three miles away, one could see, promenading on the
square, Greek beauties from families that fled their country after the
defeat of the Communist guerillas, Korean girls learning the trade,
some Chinese and, I believe, even a few curious American students
who worked there on summer jobs. This abundance had a shady
side to it: the ratio of girls to boys in my home town changed since
the days of my youth to 5 to 1 to the advantage (or rather disadvan¬
tage) of girls—a situation typical for several Czech textile towns and
also, if you recall, the starting point of Loves of a Blond. A Bag of
101
Fleas is about the clash between what the adults call working
morale and the natural needs of sixteen-year-old females, needs
which are hard to satisfy in a feminized milieu. So the heroine ot the
film skips work because of her precious boyfriend; she is conse¬
quently summoned before the Works Committee, and severely
chastised.
The film was staged from beginning to end; but through the
improvisation of the given dialogue, particularly in the scenes
with the worker-officials, Vera achieved an immediateness
resembling Forman’s films. The accent on form and the Fart
pour Fart beauty temporarily receded; content became prom¬
inent—and that is where Vera’s disasters started.
As it was, the film employed strictly non-actors—the real foremen
and officials of the Náchod cotton-mills. The camera showed them
realistically, that is unfiatteringly; one of them was even introduced
while performing the function of a self-appointed controller of
morality at a dance in a local restaurant, where the youth indulged
in “eccentric western dances”*. The non-actors, some of whom had
political influence, spoke out against the showing of the film, and it
took a full year of negotiations before A Bag of Fleas reached the
cinemas.
Meanwhile Vera worked on a new movie, which proved to be
very important in her future development. In it the vérité style (con¬
sequently abandoned by Vera) penetrated the formalistic style of
the symbolic, stylized, generalized “philosophical” statement—and
that subsequently led to approaching the work as an independent
objet dart in its own right. The film was called About Something
Else (1963) and it really consisted of two juxtaposed films, captur¬
ing side by side two independent and unrelated lives of two thirty
one year old women: A world famous gymnast, and an insignificant
housewife. One of them sacrifices everything to a given goal: the
Olympic gold medal. She neglects all that a woman, as a woman,
should have—children, a happy family life—and ends up in a crisis.
The other one sacrifices everything to her family. She neglects
*The dance in question was a variant of rock’n'roll, and the interesting point is how
peculiar were the ideas about decent dancing, as reflected in the activities of the con¬
troller. Dancing with the bodies of the partners not touching, or dancing individually,
each on his own, as it was occasionally showed in the newsreel shots from the “deca¬
dent West was considered immoral. Consequently one could sometimes see volun¬
tary protectors of morality, forcing the bands to play tangos, and making the young
couples on the dance floor slither around glued to each other breast to breast and
belly to belly.

102
everything that a woman should attain as a human being—the
desire to become something, to achieve something, to assert oneself
in society, not only at home—and also reaches a crisis. Both lives,
seemingly diametrically opposed, lead towards the bitter feeling of
vanitas vanitatum—although Vera herself said about the film, that it
is “a drama of the eternal struggle for immortality amidst the finality
of human powers”. But after all, Vera is a philosopher.
In About Something Else, Vera’s most prominent artistic trait
became evident: her almost militant feminism. Sometimes I feel that
Vera is first a woman, and only after that a human being—a charac¬
teristic which became clear in Daisies (1966).
However, before she started to shoot Daisies, we met once
more for a joint effort which, in the end, again failed. It was at a
time when Novotny’s cultural department continued its Holy
War against jazz and pop music by waging an artful attack
against popular singers. A reflection of that war was evident in A
Bag of Fleas, but in real life it was carried much further—all the
way to several public trials.
At the first one, a group of “hooligans” was ceremonially con¬
victed for secretly indulging in the perverse western dance of
rock’n’roll in the hall of the Manes Club, which they had
properly rented. They each served several months in jail for
their anti-socialist activities. The leader of the group, if I remem¬
ber correctly, was sent up for a year. Within a short time these
perverse dances were performed publicly with the Young Com¬
munist League organizing the events, but that was all right,
because as the Marx-acknowledged Hesiodos says—panta
rei—everything develops.
I got involved in the Holy War on the side ot the pop
musicians with an article, “Who Takes Baths in Champagne?” I
gained popularity with the singers, burdened my already over¬
drawn account at the Cultural Department, and aroused once
again Vera’s interest. The war culminated in the banning ot the
three most popular singers from public performance. The three
singers, Eva Pilařova, Waldemar Matuška, and Karel Gott, were
accused of some rather spectacular infamies: while on a trip in
Karlsbad, Eva and Waldemar supposedly urinated from the
balcony ot the Hotel Pupp on the heads ot some workers
delegation, while Karel Gott provided musical accompaniment
by singing the favourite melody The Bubbling Stream . Ad-
103
Eva Pilařova: according to the novotnyite Cultural Waldemar Matuška: according to the same source
Dept, urinated on a workers’ delegation. directed traffic, clad in a pair of socks.

ditional misdeeds were revealed during interrogation:

Waldemar, clad only in a pair of socks, was supposed to have
directed traffic at an intersection and thus caused a traffic jam,
while Eva was seen somewhere playing poker for “Tuzex”
coupons*. It did not help the “perverts” that Eva had an iron¬
clad alibi for the urinary night (she was not in Karlsbad), and
that the poker she was supposed to be playing was the game of
Monopoly, (unknown to the informer) brought by the bass player
Ludek Elulan from a trip to Switzerland (and the “Tuzex
coupons” were really the paper money that comes with the
game). The Cultural Department outdid Vyshinsky, and didn’t
even bother extracting a confession from the accused. A similar
penalty was handed out to another excellent jazz singer, Eva
Olmerova (whose case was worse because in her youth she spent
a year in the house of correction); in a state of inebriation she
reportedly fell off stage into the audience at the Alhambra night
club, probably also onto a delegation—here most likely a
foreign one.
At that point I considered writing a novel about all of that. It
was to be called There Must Be Something Wrong, a quotation
from A Minor Bird by Robert Frost. I saw Vera at a meeting of

*Special money obtainable in exchange for dollars, pounds, West German marks,
and other hard currency. In special Tuzex stores one can get otherwise inaccessible
Western products for the coupons (including Coke and Swedish cars). One can also
buy girls with them called in the Prague slang “Tuzex girls”.

104
Karel Gott: “The Golden Voice from Prague", sang ‘‘The Bubbling Stream” to
the urination.

the Preparatory Committee of the Czechoslovakian Par¬

ticipation at Montreal Expo, where Vera managed to embarrass
the well-known minister Kahuda by suggesting that diabolical
screaming and grinding of teeth should emanate from the
Czechoslovakian Pavilion in order to bring out the contrasting
heavenly beauty of the interior. During intermission I told her
about the intended novel and recited Frost’s poem:

I have wished a bird would fly away,

And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door

When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.

The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong

In wanting to silence any song.*

Vera evidently liked the poem better than the novel—in it the
singer battling the administrative interference was in the end

*From The Poetry Of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright
1928, (c) 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright (c) 1956 by Robert
Frost. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York.

105
Eva Olmerova, the greatest Czech scat-singer: fell from a night-club stage on a
Soviet delegation.

supposed to really lose her voice after an operation on her vocal

cords. A few days later Vera once again knocked on my
door—accompanied by the sociologist of the pop-music milieu
Milan Schulz—and we started to concoct something according
to Frost. One of the two suppressed singers, either Eva Pilařova
or Eva Olmerova, was to star in the movie. At the studios they
naturally threw out both us and the screen-play. One thing,
nevertheless, is worth noticing. Once during a working session I
told Vera about the principle of the blues—the three-verse struc¬
ture, where the second verse is usually a varied repetition of the
first; this gives the time to make up the third verse—and Vera,
the formalist, became all ears. Under her somewhat autocratic
leadership the screenplay took on a tripartite form—the second
part being a varied repetition of the first; to one of our meetings
Vera dragged the famous modernistic composer of serious
music, Jan Klusak, and forced the already highly overtaxed
musician to promise some very special score for our film. Vera,
106
Daisies: “If the world ruins everything, let us also ruin everything!” says Marie to Marie at the beginning. ..

who in the typical philosophical manner goes from the

generalized to the specific, described her vision of that musical
accompaniment as a “symphonic blues”. If I understood her
correctly, it was supposed to be some kind of a three-part sym¬
phony built on the structural principle of the blues verse (not on
their harmonic formula), which, I think, Klusak, who does not
like jazz, failed to understand. But the script was refused,
anyway, so Vera cast Klusak as one of the leads in Daisies, thus
co-discovering for the New Wave a very expressive actor. (He
subsequently appeared in Nemec’s The Party and the Guests, The
Martyrs of Love, and many other films.)
The feminist Vera possesses something of the provocative
aggressiveness of the suffragettes. Our unsuccessful attempt at
the film blues did not diminish her energies; first she pressured
into co-operation the absurdist writer, actor and psychologist
Ivan Vyskočil (also the co-founder of the “Little Theatres”
movement), and when he resisted her too strongly, she found
107
 another woman, Ester Krumbachova, who is, I am afraid, as far
as feminism is concerned, an exact opposite of Vera. That is how
began the fruitful co-operation, which has so far culminated in
the movie We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise (1970). Around
that time Vera married the best Czech cameraman, Jaroslav
Kučera, and immediately put him to work. The result was possibly
the most brilliant camera achievement in the history of Czech film.
The newly wed directress finished the shooting in a considerably ad¬
vanced state of rotundity, that possibly enhanced the tone of a cer¬
tain mocking acrimony, with which the film treats the majority of
male characters.
According to Vera’s words, Daisies was supposed to be “a
bizarre comedy with shades of satire and sarcasm oriented towards
both the protagonists”. It certainly was a bizarre comedy, but I am
not sure whether the satirical quill really aimed at the two impish
main characters. Also, I am not sure that the film really is “a
parable on the destructive force of nihilism and senseless provo¬
cation”, but it certainly is an excellent, rich, boldly and
mischieviously made film. It begins with a montage: a nuclear
explosion, tanks destroying houses. I suspect that the authoresses
added the grandiose introduction* as a counter-measure against
probable later criticism (their intuitions were warranted). Then
two girls in bathing suits appear, sitting at the side of a swimming
pool; they make robot-like motions with their hands (the process
of formal stylization advanced a step further). Both have the same
name—Marie—and except for appearance, they are totally inter¬
changeable. This is how they speak: “We know nothing.” “Nobody
understands us.” “The world ruins everything.” “If the world ruins
everything, let us also ruin everything.” And they do. The subse¬
quent action consists of a chain of scenes; some of them are about
elderly gentlemen, who treat the pair in fashionable restaurants and
night clubs, expecting rewards for their kindness. Each time, how¬
ever, the girls only gorge themselves with expensive delicacies, then
they take the elderly gentlemen to the station, make them board the
train, and run away. One of the two arouses a younger Don Juan by
stripping in front of him, and then refuses his advances (the Don
Juan was played by Jan Klusak). They cause a disturbance in a

Tt bears strong resemblances to Jires’ thesis film The Hall of Lost Footsteps, which
is a short built completely around the contrast of the horrors of war and the beauty of
young love.

108
 and at the end they are justly punished for such cynicism.

night club, by dancing a violent version of the Charleston. They pro¬

voke wherever they go by reacting always contrary to what is ex¬
pected. The spectacle culminates when the girls manage to stuff
themselves into a food elevator in a hotel and get into a banquet
hall, obviously prepared for some official overindulgence. They
begin by eating and end in a cream-cake battle. At this point comes
the final joke; it is de facto self-ridicule aimed against the moralistic
end of Vera's first film Ceiling, about the reformed model. The girls
realize what they have done, and instantly reform. In a dream scene,
the girls, whose effect is enhanced by decelerated camera action,
dressed in clothes made out of newspaper (symbol of “proper con¬
victions”), sweep up the mess in a deadly tempo, arranging the
ruined remnants of the hors d’oeuvres and cakes on the soiled table¬
cloths.
It was an instant catastrophe. A deputy of the National Assem¬
bly, a Mr. Pruzinec (the name is a beautiful onomatopoetic nomen-
109
We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise: an objet d’art.

omen, and could be translated as Mr. Jack-in-the-Box) rose and

protested against the wastage of food, “at a time when our farmers
with great difficulties are trying to overcome the problems of our
agricultural production”. Pruzinec ended with a pathetic call to the
Minister of Agriculture, and to the Minister of the Interior, to take
measures against the film and its directress.
Pruzinec’s unbelievable interpellation circulated through Prague
in a number of copies, and when it was read from the stage of the
Paravan Theatre, the audience took it for a successful skit written
by the manager of the Theatre, the satirist J. R. Pick. The film was
held and shown for the purposes of damnation to selected
“workers”; but they rather liked it, so it was finally released. The
force of public opinion was by that time so strong that not even the
President could stop the development, let alone Deputy Pruzinec,
who quickly retreated into his box.
Vera made another short film before Daisies, Snack-Bar
“World”, a part of the New Wave’s omnibus film Pearls in the
Abyss (1965). Her feministic hand reached for a story with a bridal
motif, and she created, along with Menzel, the most visual part of
this five story feature. After Daisies she embarked, together with her
husband and Ester Krumbachova, on We Eat the Fruit of the Trees
of Paradise (1970).
It was shown, and generally misunderstood (the fashionable ap¬
peal of the Czech New Wave having subsided), at the 1970 Cannes

110
We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise: God dogmatically forbids, the Devil
rationally tempts . . .

Festival, but constitutes, I would say, a Kantian opus in the work of

the philosopher, Vera: an extremely complicated work, built around
the structure of a crime novel, framed by dramatic quotations from
the second chapter of Genesis, about God who dogmatically forbids
people to eat from the tree of knowledge and about the Devil who
rationally tempts them to do so. The quotations are transformed into
cantata, and complex musical as well as colour compositions signifi¬
cantly transcend the whole film. 1 remembered Jan Klusak, whom
she had persuaded once to create a symphonic blues, and also the
old experiments with the “coloured piano” made by the Czech
Poetists of the Twenties. In this case the composer Zdenek Liská
accommodated Vera: his music structures the parables and un¬
derlines each exchange. The film is really an opera, the symbolical
plot being facilitated by the colour symbolism (Ester Krumbachova
was originally a painter); everything fits into a bizarre and astound¬
ing unity, and is miles removed from the early flirtations with the
cinema vérité. It is an independent objet d’art, “a reality equal to
any other created in the world”, as it was described by the struc¬
turalist Jan Kučera, (not to be confused with Vera’s husband
Jaroslav). The emphasis is conspicuously on beauty, although the
ambitions remain philosophical; and if anything is formalism, then it
is this. But, it is as madame directress always required it to be, a
beautiful formalism.
The last time I saw Vera, she was very strictly criticizing the for-
111
mal mistakes of Crime in the Girls’ School, and the director, Jiri
Menzel, blushed like an apprehended schoolboy. She had started
as a student of architecture (that might be where the architectural
qualities of her best films came from), then she worked as a
draughtsman (viz. her sense of form), then she turned into a model
(emphasis on beauty and feminism), finally she got a small part in
The Emperor’s Baker, and the film world swallowed her. First she
worked as a clap-stick girl, then as an assistant, and finally she was
accepted by the Film Academy. She went on to become one of the
leading, and indeed truly revolutionary, personalities of the New
Wave. She is the first important Czech directress; of her pre¬
decessors, Thea Červenkova, an early pioneer, never made a film
worth mentioning; and Zet Molas, alias Zdena Smolová, shared
Vera’s avant-garde creed but lacked her talent, and ended as a pro-
Nazi informer. In a true feminist tradition Vera combined intensive
intellectual effort with a feminine feeling for beauty and form. I
believe that in her last film she escaped the danger of mere eclec¬
ticism, of which she is accused by Vratislav Effenberger. Besides,
she has been accused of appropriation and imitation from the very
beginning, and not only by orthodox surrealists. “Of course, if you
do things the old way,” Vera answered them once, “no one will ac¬
cuse you of being an epigon, of copying those who did it that way
long before you. But just you dare to try it another way!”

According to newspaper reports, Vera is currently working with

the writer Iva Hercikova (script writer for Schorm’s Five Girls to
Deal With), on a screen-play about Božena Nemcova, a classical
Czech authoress, who was a contemporary and admirer of Charles
Dickens. It is not, as it might seem, an escape into the past, so well
known from the recent history of Czech cinema, because it points
towards a combination of Vera’s traditional feminism with the most
sympathetic feature of her philosophical statement: “The artist may,
and indeed must express only what he knows and what concerns
him, because he thinks it should be changed. We want to create a
new social morality and in the same breath we—artists—lie. Lying
in art should be outlawed... .What more could we lose as
artists, if we lost truth?”
Božena Nemcova was a very lonely nineteenth-century female
rebel; despite the Victorian morality of her time, she had several
known lovers, and dedicated her life not only to the fight for
112
women’s rights, but also to the rights of her humiliated country. In
an unhappy marriage (which was forced upon her by her parents),
exploited by her publisher, she vegetated, surrounded by a hypo¬
critically patriotic society, until she finally died at the age of forty-
two of tuberculosis, before she was able to carry out her plan of
emigrating to the United States. In the hands of Vera Chytilova, a
philosopher and revolutionary of form, it could be a story “of some¬
thing else”, rather than a depiction of the fate of one unhappy nine¬
teenth-century, woman writer.

Jan Nemec and Ester Krumbachova

Jan Nemec is the enfant terrible of the New Wave. Practically all the
members of the movement had what were euphemistically called
“problems”. As we saw, they enraged the President himself, and
Deputies raised hell over them. The troubles of Jan Nemec, how¬
ever, reached new heights.
Nemec is an irritable hothead. Although, unlike Forman and
Passer, he had not until recently had first-hand experiences with the
terror, cruelty, cynical apathy and injustice of the world, he reacted
against them in perhaps all of his films with the greatest intensity.
“There exists one everlasting conflict,” he said, “the hopeless
struggle between intelligence and stupidity, between the individual
and the totality, and one eternal problem: the fundamental un¬
willingness of people, or of humanity as a whole, to deal with
problems which concern them.” Elsewhere he remembers: “I resent
one thing: that I was not allowed to shoot as my thesis film a screen¬
play based on Arnošt Lustig’s story ‘ The Street of Lost Brothers ’.
It was about elderly parents who believe in the return of their
missing son, because his death in a concentration camp was never
confirmed. I had a detailed screen-play, an idea how to make it
.. .but one of the well-known creators—then a professor at the Film
Academy—objected that it was undignified to make a film about
deranged members of the bourgeoise, who are incapable of joining
in the building of socialism.” This rather frequent form of parlour
perversity evidently substituted for the shock of direct experience,
and forced Nemec to take an intensive interest in problems which
concern even those who are not directly affected.
While at the Academy—where he was considered the worst
113
 Jan Nemec

student—he selected as the subject for his third-year film a story of

the Polish non-conformist, and probably the most prominent literary
talent of the Polish “thaw”, Marek Hlásko, called The Most Sacred
Words of Our Life, and for the first time he clashed with the
authority. He knew Hlasko’s story from a manuscript trans¬
lation—the book in which it was to appear was later confiscated by
Czechoslovakian censorship—but the professors found the thing in¬
decent, and allowed him to make it only after an intervention by
Vaclav Krska. The entire story is a conversation between lovers
lying naked in bed. Nemec started to shoot in the school studios and,
surprisingly, all the students wanted to come and watch the worst
student at work; probably for the first time since Extasy, naked
people were being filmed in Prague. When Nemec finished shooting,
somebody stole the negative and so no one, with the possible excep¬
tion of the thief, ever saw the result.
Vaclav Krska had the greatest effect on him at the Academy.
Nemec considers Krska’s Moon Above the River to be an avant-
garde film of its time. It is a story about feelings, full of emotions
and desires, and as Nemec says, for the first time in Czech cinema
it reveals the personality of the director. In that sense, to Nemec,
Krska is a predecessor of Antonioni, and he may be right. Krska had
the misfortune of producing his best works at a time when virtually
no Czech films were being sent to festivals abroad.
That is probably the only misfortune that Nemec did not have.
114
Diamonds of the Night. “Ominous powers that awaken in a person when he
becomes a member of a crowd’’: from hunters of hares into hunters of Jews.

His thesis film, The Morsel (1960), received the Silver Rose at the
Festival of Student Films in Amsterdam. The theme came once
again from Arnošt Lustig, who also co-operated with Nemec on the
latter’s first feature, The Diamonds of the Night (1964). Earlier,
Nemec worked as an assistant with Krska and Fric. A compilation
film which he made during military service was a poetic confron¬
tation of the spring of 1963 and the last days of the Second World
War. He named it Memory of Our Day (1963), and won the Army
Film Prize for it.
Diamonds of the Night (1964), based on Lustig’s fiction Darkness
Casts No Shadow, tells the story of two youngsters trying to escape,
in the last days of the war, from a “death march”.* They are run¬
ning through a forest, hungry and exhausted, but manage to beg a
piece of bread from a peasant woman; in the end they accidentally
encounter a group of old men, long past military age, who had gone
out hunting; now, instead of hunting animals, they begin to hunt the
two people.
So much for the story. Nemec, however, did not film the story; he
filmed the mental states of the two boys—their hallucinations, day

* At the end of the war, in an attempt to delete traces of the crimes committed in
concentration camps, the retreating Nazis evacuated prisoners from some of the
camps and moved them further into Germany. The prisoners, all of them in extremely
poor physical condition, were forced to waík long distances without food or water.
Those who were too weak to continue the “death march” were usually shot by the SS
guards.

115
dreams and nightmares, their notions and ideas. He simply tried to
express their inner world during the attempted escape from death.
That is the essence of the originality of the film, which was
welcomed by the European film critics as the beginning of a new
style. In fact, it is reminiscent of a single predecessor, Bunuel’s An¬
dalusian Dog, in which the director tried to film dreams. Nemec’s
work is noted for its bold editing, mixing reality with visions,
delusions and dreams. In the final sequence, which shows the
transformation of the old German men from rabbit hunters to
head hunters, the film changes into a metaphor about the omin¬
ous psychological powers that awaken in a person when he be¬
comes a member of a crowd. Those apparently normal German
grandfathers become murderous beasts, while the fleeing boys
become the hunted game. Diamonds received the Grand Prix at
Mannheim in 1964, and the Critics’ Prize at Pesaro in 1965.
That year, Nemec took part in the omnibus film Pearls in the
Abyss for which he made The Impostors. It is a story with ab¬
solutely no action: two old men in hospital are exchanging tall
stories about their past. One used to be a famous opera singer, the
other a racing driver. Nothing happens—the two just talk and talk.
The only action is a pictorial epilogue: the barber, who is shaving
both the old fellows as they lie dead in the morgue, tells the hospital
attendant that the two were absolute zeros, who kept boasting of
imaginary careers.
To film something so totally devoid of action presents a problem.
Nemec solved it basically by editing. He shot only two very long
close-ups of the faces of the talking old men—which he alternated
by rhythmical cutting, so that he achieved an unreal nightmarish ef¬
fect. He might have been simply testing the method which he used in
his second most famous film to date, Report on the Party and the
Guests (1966), where faces play the most important part.
With this film began his short, but very important, co-operation
with Ester Krumbachova, as well as my friendship with both of
them.

Truly, I don’t know how old Ester is. Once I impolitely asked her
and she answered, “Well, I’m certainly not as youthful as you are.”

“. . . I’m certainly not as youthful as you are.” One of Ester's lies during the
shooting of Report . . .

116
it* - m M ./
pljk % / ■ ', / - .
'• '^.. jt*'"p»A^ ^7 i/i
She is an uncommonly beautiful woman; I first saw her in the Viola
café, where Ivan Vyskočil tried to persuade her to appear on the
stage of his literary cabaret, because he had heard that she wrote
stories. Readings were fashionable at that time and a number of
writers, including myself, turned into entertainers once a week.
Ester, a perfumed elegant lady in a costume made by the best
Prague couturier, shook from premature stage-fright, and the per¬
formance never materialized. Instead we began to visit her regularly
with my wife (who knew her from my TV musical The Banjo Show,
for which Ester had designed the costumes) in her apartment in Krc,
where the fragrance of Ester’s perfumes mingled with those that her
tomcat Pete exuded into an ill-definable olfactory cocktail. She
found Pete on a rain-soaked street, took him home, and because she
couldn’t bear the thought of somebody hurting him he is still a full-
fledged male, and in the accustomed manner of tomcats he lures the
ever-absent females. The eau-de-Cologne and sandalwood only part¬
ly neutralize the penetrating odour with which Pete impregrates
Ester’s carpets.
Everything in her apartment is aesthetic, elegant and pleasant,
and in the middle of it all sits Ester in a low-cut dress speaking to
Lindsay Anderson about her father, who was (according to her ac¬
count) an unbelievable mixture of a Gypsy and Hungarian with a
Slovak, and a dandy of the old school, complete with gardenia,
monocle and walking stick, and a serious advocate of quieta non
movere to boot.
Ester's own life was rougher—even before she started to make
Czech films. As a young girl she joined the anti-Nazi underground
and spent some time in a Gestapo prison. After the war she at¬
tended the Academy of Applied Arts and became a costume
designer, first in theatre and then in film. Her rise was not very
smooth, and was interrupted by several falls caused by Ester’s ex¬
cessive outspokenness. At one time she worked as the proverbial
female brick-layer on border-region construction projects. Finally
she established herself in the Barrandov studios, where she designed
costumes for a large number of films.
Being an unusually strong personality, Ester affected many a
good Czech film with her finery and millinery more than is usually
presumed. Film is after all a visual art and the way the actors are
dressed may sometimes speak while the director is silent. I remem¬
ber Ester’s passionate elaborations on the concept of costumes for
118
One of Madame Krumbachova’s hats. Though this one was not “a triumph of the
art of costume design in a certain, rather negative sense, ” it is a fine specimen.

such unusual films as were Kachyna’s The Coach to Vienna or

Jasny’s All Those Good Countrymen, in which the costumes always
intelligently helped to create the characters. Sometimes even against
the will of the character, because Ester is, like Vera Chytilova,
(whose English ‘r’ Ester splendidly imitates—in Vera’s absence, that
is), one hundred percent woman, but unlike Vera she is not a
feminist. Once, for instance, two directors were desperately trying to
figure out why a well-known film star (also, frequently and with
lusty hatred, parodied by Ester) looked somehow undefinably
abominable in the most important scenes of their super-spectacle.
My wife discovered the cause but did not tell the directors. In those
particular scenes, the star was wearing a hat designed by Madame
Krumbachova. It was a triumph of the art of costume design in a
certain, rather negative, sense.
She actually met Honza (the Czech diminutive for Jan) Nemec
through costumes—she designed his Diamonds of the Night—and
although Nemec is far more youthful than I, a great love developed;
also an exemplary, although often explosive, co-operation. Nemec
was always a great writer of screen plays. He produced them almost
as fast as the watchful overseers threw them back at him. (They
managed to throw back a goodly number of them, among others a
script based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis and one on Dostoyevski’s
Wet Snow). Before this Ester had started to write philosophical
short stories and gentle sketches about cats. In the screen-play of
Report. .., Nemec’s violent resentment of social ills merged with

119
The Banjo Show: Madame Krumbachova's sexy costumes (worn here by the
Incognito Quartette).

Ester’s elegant venomousness and her sense of design to produce

one of the most important movies of the New Wave; at this point
Nemec achieved a completely original, theoretically justifiable style,
which stands in direct contrast to the style of Milos Forman.
Anyway, the New Wave was never a movement that would follow a
clearly defined programme (with the exception of its obvious
humanism) but simply an example of what an intelligently managed
socialist cinematography could achieve.
"I believe, that a movement striving to achieve the most accurate
external copy of life,” says Nemec, “is only one of the develop¬
mental stages. It will certainly enrich the film language, but I
maintain that the trend should be towards stylization. It is
necessary for the author to create in a film his own world,
which is totally independent of reality as it at that particular
moment appears. The world of a composer is created of tones
and chords, the painter’s world is made of colours and lines, but
when we consider film, we may talk of very few authors who
managed to create their own film world. We may certainly
speak of Chaplin and Bresson, and Bunuel. Why do I consider it
so important? If I were to aim in my films predominantly at an
external similarity with the world, I would waste a lot of energy
and divert the viewers attention from the crux of the matter
with which I am dealing. The viewer then necessarily asks, how
life-like the work really is, whether it resembles life the way he
120
experiences it, whether it duplicates it exactly, or only
approximately. However, it is evident from the very first shot,
that external similarity is of no relevance, then the audience is
forced to give up its favourite comparisons, and has to concen¬
trate on the meaning and the author’s intentions. So, for instance,
with Chaplin you cannot tell where and when his adventures take
place. You recognize fundamental elements: a city, morning,
rich man, beggar.... And in a world, which is only the world of
Charlie Chaplin, you may follow his bitterly ironic testimony.”
It is probably good to be acquainted with such thoughts of the
director, if one is to fully understand films such as The Report on
the Party and the Guests, or the Martyrs of Love. In the
Report.. . seven guests are walking to a garden party. Suddenly,
while walking through a forest, they are surrounded by a band of
men, who begin to interrogate them. When one of the guests objects,
he is attacked by the ominous gang and knocked to the ground.
Unexpectedly, the Host appears and explains everything: the in¬
terrogation was only a joke organized by other guests, also invited
to the party, and led by the Host’s adoptive son. Everybody is
reconciled, and each guest takes his place at the prepared tables,
located in a beautiful secluded spot near a pond. During the feast
the Host ventures his opinions, the guests speak and twaddle, and
some of them gradually adapt their own opinions to those of the
Host. He constantly reassures them of his only wish, which is that
they should feel happy with him. Eventually all of the guests, with
one exception, assure the Host of their happiness. The dissenter gets
up unnoticed and disappears. When his absence is discovered the
Host permits his adoptive son to head a group of guests to look for
the fugitive, bring him back, and also “make him happy”. The
whole company rise and leave, accompanied by monstrous dogs, to
pursue the victim. The screen darkens; we can only hear the
barking, and then the angry growling of the huge police dogs as they
capture their prey.
It is evidently a parable about the process which takes place in all
modern societies—the adoption of a dominant ideology—and about
the destruction of those who do not adopt it. Nemec tried to express
the parable by the linkage of verbal and facial reactions of the
characters. The characters posed the main problem—and
Report... was to a great extent a communal endeavour of the
Prague intellectuals. Most of those who participated were non-
121
Report on the Party and the Guests: the Host (Ivan Vyskočil). “Not intended to
resemble Vladimir Ilyitch ...”

actors, and usually friends of Jan and Ester: I appeared in the film
as the Gourmand completely oblivious to the surroundings; my wife
played a Coquette; Evald Schorm had the part of the Man Who
Escapes from the Party; the psychologist Jiri Nemec was the
Yesman; the writer Ivan Vyskočil played the Host; Helena
Pejskova, a dancer, played the Sexy Girl; her sister, Irena, a
medical student, the Homely One; the part of the Unhappy
Bridegroom was given to the photographer Milon Novotny, while
the puppeteer Jana Prachařova played a Hare-brained Woman,
and the composer Jan Klusak became the Host’s Adoptive Son. The
pop writer Karel Mares was the Protesting Guest knocked down in
the forest, and there were many others. We were all carefully (and
maliciously) selected according to appearance, as each character
was to appear only in situations typical for the particular character
and speak in clichés characteristic of the type. The entire film was a
composition of minute details, a kind of a movable pointilism, in
which people keep talking and talking—yet the resulting mood of
the film is a strange deafness, an appalling apathy, and a peculiar
alienation. The appearances of the characters are usually contrasted

Report on the Party and the Guests:

The Coquette (my wife). “Faces carefully (and maliciously) selected ...”
The Host’s Adoptive Son (Jan Klusak).
The Sexy Girl (Helena Pejskova from the Ballet of the National Theatre).
The Guest Who Refused to Be Happy (Evald Schorm).
123
The Protesting Guest (Karel Mares): “Many scenes were arranged according to
well-known photos...”

against their personalities: so, for instance, Jiri Nemec, who looks
like a very decent person, finally proves himself to be the most
active ally of evil, because he always manages to condone it,
while giving the impression of sincerely disagreeing with it.
The final effect was of a nightmare, a strange combination of an
unreal framework with realistic details of speech and action. The
influence of the designer. Ester, was evident from the strong “pic¬
torial” conception of the film. Many scenes were arranged accor¬
ding to well-known photos or paintings. Thus the opening of the film
reminds one of the impressionistic “déjeuner sur I'herbe". The fight
between the objecting guest with the host’s son Karel resembles
news shots from Vietnam and elsewhere. The guests, eagerly
listening to the host, bring to mind the photographs of Nazi officials
listening to the Fuhrer; finally, the arrangement and setting of the

Report on the Party -.“The influence of the designer Ester was evident from the
strong ‘pictorial’ conception of the film. ”
Top: the Coquette, the Sexy Girl and the Hare-Brained Woman.
Bottom: the Guest Who Refused to Be Happy, the Foul-Mouthed Guest (Pavel
Bosek) and the Protesting Guest.

124
tables, with the flowers and candelabras, is composed after the
banquets given on the occasion of the Nobel Prize announcements.
Everything is a mirage, and yet you feel that it is also reality.
I recall nostalgically the days in Teptin, where the film was made.
Ester, with the expression of a martyr (she belongs to that kind of
creator who suffers while she works), ran from table to table in her
short dress (a creation by Podolská—comparable to Dior in the
western world), adjusting the baroque candelabras and, with her
fragrant fingers, arranging the withered rose in the crystal vases,
while we pretended to be enjoying the stale food on the gilded plates
(for economical purposes the food was changed once every three
days although it was summertime; not even Mr. Jack-in-the-Box
would have a cause for criticism). More often, and with considerably
less nostalgia, I remember how we once sat with Honza in the
Barrandov projection room, watching the rushes of Mr. Vyskočil,
and Honza suddenly paled and said, “Jesus! On the screen he looks
like Lenin!’’ And I suddenly realized that this was exactly what
gave the scene a kind of flavour of impending horror, whose source,
until then, I could not put my finger on. Ivan Vyskočil really looked
like a carbon copy of Vladimir Illich. “Shit,” I said, “I think you’re
in for it!”
He was. Mr. President hit the ceiling, and stayed there throughout
the screening. A deadly white Honza, with a somewhat wilted Ester,
visited me one evening to inquire about the details of my own
disaster with The Cowards: what terms were used against me, what
methods, and whether I really spent some time in the cooler—a
rumour which was mistakenly circulated throughout Prague.
Nothing so radical happened, either to me or later to Honza and
Ester; the premiere was only delayed until the President cooled off,
which had become almost customary with the films of the New
Wave. This time it took him an unusually long time, and before he
recovered, the busy-bees Honza and Ester whipped up another
delight for the personal pleasure of the head of state, The Martyrs of
Love. This time it was not an attack on a political climate, or its
methods, but it was guilty of something almost as obnoxious: it was
incomprehensible.

Jan Nemec at work on my wife and Karel Mares in Report on the Party and the
Guests.
Report . . . the Gourmand (myself) among Ester’s candelabra.

126
Martyrs of Love. “A defence of the unsuccessful person”: the adoration of Marta
(Kubišova) by the shy operator.

Mr. President was also famous for his distaste for everything that
he could not understand; Majakovsky probably wasn’t one of his
favourite poets. When the Odeon publishing house, where I worked
for some time as an editor, printed for its friends New Year’s
greetings with clever calligraphy by Jasa David, the director (who
used to be the personal secretary to Klement Gottwald) proudly
presented them to the President. The handsome statesman climbed
to his accustomed place; the caligraphies were confiscated by the
censor; and the director had to pay their production cost from his
own pocket, upon a direct order by the President.*
Learning from such experiences, Nemec decided to follow the

*This was one of the rare instances when the President displayed something
resembling black humour. Another case was reported in relation to the demotion of
the Minister of Education, Mr. Cisar, in 1966 or ’67. Cisar’s daughter, a student at
Charles University, was arrested during the May Day student demonstrations. The
severely embarrassed minister was summoned to the Prague Castle, and the
President asked him where he wished to be sent as an ambassador. "To Paris,”
replied the minister. The President chuckled maliciously and decided, “You will go
to the Paris of the East!" And he sent him to Bucharest, which is how that city was
referred to in Czechoslovakia before World War Two. It is difficult to decide
whether this is true or whether it is just another Czech story. The fact remains that
Miss Cisarova served her time in prison, and her father really did go to
Bucharest.

128
example of Majakovsky, and launched a preventive war in support
of exclusive art. He handled it rather sophistically: “I am convin¬
ced, he wrote, “that a certain kind of exclusiveness will fulfil its
positive role in the evolution of the desired harmony... by evoking on
the part of the creators the desire to make more communicative and
accessible films.” His quick reply to the frequent hypocritical ob¬
jections referring to the unfeasibility of art films (the “exclusive”
Czech films made more money abroad than ten folksy films at
home) was somewhat demagogical: “The question is, whether a film
is really a film—as Chaplin, Bresson, and others say—only if the
auditorium is full.”
The resistance to the incomprehensible Martyrs of Love was an
inexplicable mistake. In the three stories, united by the common
theme of shy lovers, there is about as much incomprehensibility as
in the poems of Sergei Yesenin—and as much beauty. The authors
of the stories said about them:

These aren’t pictures of or from life, but three stylized love -

adventures. Rather than attempting to show the world as it is,
these are fables or songs, The first story, called “The Tem¬
ptations of an Operator”,is intended as a silent comedy; it has
practically no dialogue, and it aims to be funny with a bit of
sadness. If somebody gets put off by the somewhat gloomy
character of its milieu, let him kindly remember the places
in Chaplin’s comedies—the huts, dives, hovels, and
dumps—which as everybody recognizes do not serve to
nauseate life, but rather are a backdrop for the spirit of the
work; the work itself being almost exclusively a defence of a
withdrawn and unsuccessful person. This should also be the
meaning of the three stories: the grotesque confession of the
operator, Nastenka’s sentimental dream, and the wonderful
nocturnal adventures of Rudolf the orphan.

That is indeed what the film is like. I think we can apply to it

Saint Exupery’s words: “The important things we can see only
through our heart: eyes cannot perceive them.” Once again the
author’s affinity towards Bunuel comes out: if in the Diamonds of
the Night Nemec filmed nightmares, here he captured daydreams,
just as Bunuel once filmed dreams. The film again boasts excellent
design, with the stress on visual effect. Again it contains a succession
129
of pictorial compositions, with the actors’ faces being selected with
great care in order to create atmosphere, character, symbol and
parable. It is once again a predominantly lyrical film, affecting the
innermost centres of the viewer, his feeling and emotions, and not
his reason. The particular emphasis on emotions and mood, and
the lyrical approach make Nemec’s work an organic part of the
great tradition of Czech art; it it were necessary to determine the
Czech contribution to world art, its major offerings would be
found in the realm of poetic and lyrical presentation of reality.

After The Martyrs of Love, Honza’s and Ester’s collaboration en¬

ded, as did their marriage soon after. I suspect them of going
through that bourgeois formality only because of Ester’s apart¬
ment; they were far too romantic as lovers to need an official
document for their love. Soon after the disaster with The Party
and the Guests, Ester’s nosy neighbours warned the appropriate
authorities that the idle (i.e. free-lancing), coquettish, perfumed,
divorcee Ester was occupying a one-bedroom apartment all by
herself, in addition to having a frequent over-night male visitor,
a fact which caused moral indignation. Both problems, that of
occupying excessive living quarters and that of immorality, were
resolved by a short official ceremony at the Old Town City Hall,
and the neighbours, for a change, began to complain about mewing
cats. They were referring to Pete and his companion, Snail, which
was a kitten whose heartrending cries Ester heard one night at
Slapy, where she and Honza bought a cottage. She ventured into the
forest and, by successfully imitating feline sounds, managed to
lure the abandoned creature into her kind embrace.
In that particular cottage, we spent the New Year’s eve of
1967. Honza was currently experiencing new “difficulties”,
having made a film in Holland without the approval of the Czech
national film authority. In any event, the film Mother and Son
(1967) could not have been very popular with the President,
despite the grand prix from Oberhausen. It dealt with the birth of
fascist sentimentality: an ex-convict murders a plainclothsman,
who once tortured him. The grief-stricken policeman’s mother
sits at the grave and shoots at the pigeons who defecate on her
son’s tomb stone. Although still deeply in trouble, Honza was
already contemplating a film about the so-called Strahov events*,

*He indeed made it in the spring of 1968.

130
during which the police brutally attacked the striking students, and
chased them all the way into the dormitories. The result was a num¬
ber of students injured, and one crippled for life. The event did not
lack the absurd touch. There were constant power failures in the
dormitories, which made it rather difficult to study. The students
took to the streets chanting, “Give us light!”, which the overtaxed
police brains, stupefied by the constantly discussed ideas about the
ambiguity ot art, interpreted as subversive slogans demanding the
freedom of press and import of foreign literature. So they reached
for the billy clubs.
It was an idyllic, snowy night at Honza’s and Ester’s cottage in
Central Bohemia. In nearby Prague, the President was trying to
save his skin by plotting with the conservative generals. By this
time he was only President; the position of First Secretary of the
Party had been taken over by someone called Dubcek. Ester
cooked a traditional lentil soup; we baked sizzling hot-dogs im¬
paled on her knitting needles in the fireplace; Ester’s beautiful
eyes glistened; she wept. Ester is thoroughly feminine, and New
Year’s Eve is a sentimental time. Ester loves the Bible. She took it
from below the darkened television set, inserted a finger into it as
if she were probing a wound, and the pink fingernail pointed at a
verse: “And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for
an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third
part of men. And the number of the army of the horsemen were
two hundred thousand: and I heard the number of them. And thus
I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having
breast-plates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads
of the horses were the heads of lions; and out of their mouths
issued fire and smoke and brimstone.”
It was not exactly an encouraging superstition in the early mor¬
ning hours of the first day of the year of our Lord, 1968.

After that I saw Ester very infrequently. I remember meeting

her after she returned from abroad, where she had been attending
some coproduction negotiations. With her typical healthy hatred,
she described the course of a party, and in the same fashion in
which she once imitated the English V of Vera Chytilova, she
parodied the fantastic conversational leaps of Western socialites,
who would in one breath deliver a cool compassionate speech
about the tragedy of a distant nation and, after another sip of
131
Ester

Scotch, describe, with humourless humour, some bedroom

gossip. Ester presented the West, or at least the circles into which
an interesting foreigner is introduced, as a domain inhabited by
neurotic idiots, and she did it very convincingly. Through the win¬
dow of her apartment, we could see long lines of shabbily dressed
citizens of a counter-revolutionary nation waiting in front of the
butchershop and dairy. The beige lady harmonized beautifully
with the dusky Prague setting, and I realized that Ester loves our
ill-fated country more than all its official lovers.
I met her for the last time in January of 1969, a few days before
Jan Palach’s suicide*. Together we attended a friendly meeting
with the workers of the largest Prague metal-works, where the
ex-president, Novotny, used to have his fifth column. A huge
poster hung at the gate, resembling the shock-workers’ posters of
the fifties: an oversized face of a man in a flat cap, with a tear in
his eye. When we came closer we noticed it was a bloody tear
with the date 21,8,1968 in it. We taped the discussion and the
factory paper reprinted it. In September of 1970, Rude Pravo
wrote about the meeting, that on that occasion right-wing oppor¬
tunists met with their friends, the reactionary writers. That was
the last time I saw Ester.

*A student of Charles University who immolated himself in protest against the

Soviet occupation of the country.

132
The Murder ot Engineer Devil — “gently ridiculing the amorous dreaminess of
gentle women. Vladimir Mensik (who stole my part in Loves of a Blond) and
Jiřina Bohdalova.

I didn't even get to see her directorial debut. Honza had

collaborated on the screen-play, but that terminated after the
separation. We printed the script in the magazine Plamen which
was banned soon afterwards. Judging by the scenario, the film
should bear no traces of Chytilova's feminism. It is a phantasmic,
dream-like story, gently ridiculing the amorous dreaminess of gentle
women. A story not of this world, full of magic, miracles, and of
very original humour: the protagonist falls in love with an engineer
called Devil, who in the end turns out to be a real devil, who once
in a while turns into a kind of an abominable snowman. The whole
thing cannot be described in traditional and rational terms. It con¬
tains a touch of surrealism, with its delight in sentimental campy
kitsch. Once again everything is conceived very visually, with an
overwhelming display of colours, shapes, costumes, objects, hair,
etc. All told, The Murder of Engineer Devil (1970) is a portrait of
Ester’s soul, which is just as feminine as Vera’s.
The part of the dark-haired object of the operator’s erotic dreams
in the Martyrs of Love was played by an attractive Czech pop-
singer Marta Kubišova. In the spring of 1968, Nemec made with
her a series of short films for television later released as A Necklace
of Melancholy, a work of great artistic purity combining the beauty
of Prague’s baroque architecture with the beauty of Marta’s face,
and with the aesthetics of modern rock. After the arrival of the
tanks, Marta daringly recorded several of the best protest songs,
and became the idol of Czechoslovakia. During a reception at the
Prague Castle, she kissed the First Secretary Dubcek, who at that
time was no longer greeted by his former friends. As a result she
was prohibited from appearing in public, banned from television,
133
 i - j
m

mmV. uK:
wSlm

Marta in A Necklace of Melancholy. She kissed the same man as Mr. Brezhnev
did - yet she had to go while he stayed. Was it because...

radio, and records.* Later, Nemec married her. They live at the
cottage where Ester’s pink finger found the Apocalypse; Marta is
expecting a child, and both of them are supposed to be living on
their home-grown vegetables.’^ They are living in much the same
way as, on the other side of the world, does Allen Ginsberg, who
was also banned under President Novotny after he was elected King
of May by the students of Charles University.

*in connection with this a malicious anecdote circulated around Prague: “Do you
know why Brezhnev so seldom appears on TV? It's because he kissed Dubcek in
Cierna (the place of the final pre-invasion negotiations between the Czechs and the
Soviets).

fin late 1970, Marta suffered a miscarriage and nearly died. The singing trio of
which she had been the star, The Golden Kids, ceased to exist. First the other two
members, Helena Vondráčková and Vaclav Neckar, reportedly refused to break
with Marta after they had been shown the notorious pornographic photographs
(see footnote on page 238); they claimed that Marta’s private life was her private
life, and that anyway the photo was not authentic (which it was not). Later Vaclav
Neckar (the young railway apprentice, Milos Hrma, from Closely Watched Trains)
was reportedly banned from television by the former president’s former in-law Jan
Zelenka, now general manager of Prague TV, for having refused to cut his long
hair. He is now used mainly for export to the East. Vondráčková, was forced to
give concerts in the USSR where, according to eyewitness reports, she shocked the
Party puritans by appearing on the stage bra-less. Early in 1971, she was sent by
the State Concert Agency on a one year tour abroad. The rationale behind this
decision is again understandable: the absence of the extremely popular Helena
will facilitate the process of forgetting the better old days on the part of the young
audiences; on the other hand, under the present conditions, Helena herself cer¬
tainly welcomes a long trip abroad. And, last but not least, her sweet beauty may
create a favourable image of her native country, and identify it with the Czech
government in the minds of the very forgetful Western audiences. This is an old
trick: the handsome, somersaulting officers of the Red Army Ensemble thrilled the
Toronto society ladies in their minks and miniskirts, not so long ago, so that they
refused to accept leaflets distributed by Latvian immigrants in front of Maple Leaf
Gardens. The business was good in spite of the efforts of the immigrants, as the
Canadian promoter of the event wrote in the papers with satisfaction, and all was
right with the (Canadian) world.

134
 i&M*'

all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?

Before the arrival of the tanks, I met with Honza over two projects.
The first was to be a film version of my novel The End of the Nylon
Age, written in 1950, confiscated by the censor in 1957, and finally
published in 1967. It describes the course of a carnival, given in
1949 by the American Institute in Prague, and is full of dreamy
debutantes, gilded youth and frustrated young men and women of
the time of the great social turning point. It also shows the snobs of
the international cocktail circuit observing the agony of a particular
society. An ephemeral dance before the Fall of the Great Axe.
Honza was attracted to it by its atmosphere of the lost world, and by
135
its background musical motifs containing melodies of Glen Miller,
Count Basie, and Chick Webb. Everything went smoothly; the new
president either wasn’t interested in film, or he was friendly, and the
only “problems” that we encountered came from the United States.
The swing melodies which Honza wanted to use to create an at¬
mosphere were all copyrighted, and the rights would have cost more
than the rest of the production. We left the negotiations up to the
agencies and started on the second project, which was offered to
Nemec by an American producer.
It was to be a documentary about the Czechoslovakia of 1968,
and Honza made it in a very erudite fashion. It showed prisons
whose only inhabitants, after the political prisoners had been re¬
leased, were criminals; it showed churches in which the liberated
clergymen once again held services; it was about the Prague hippies
and their friendship with foreign flower children, who during that
summer journeyed to Prague from all over Europe; it was also
about a folk festival, where Dubcek and Smrkovsky danced with the
people; and about the general happiness, which spontaneously af¬
fected the masses: a point counterpoint of time which was rather
pleasantly out of joint. I wrote the commentary, we edited it on the
136
 19th ot August, 1968, at the laboratories in Vodičkova Street. On
the twentieth I left for a vacation in France.
I saw the film in Paris in October. It had changed and was then
called Oratorio for Prague (1968). Tanks smashed into the idyllic
counterpoints. Next to the dancing Smrkovsky, lay a boy shot by a
machine-gun. Next to a priest raising a chalice, stood two boys with
a bloodied flag. Next to Dubcek waving to the crowds, a Soviet
political otficer waved his revolver at the crowds from a tank turret.
One of the cameramen who had made the film was, at that time,
lying in a hospital with his jaw shot off.
I met with Honza in a hotel in the Latin Quarter; he seemed to
be deranged. We got desperately drunk on pastis, and Honza left
tor a film festival in West Germany, where the progressive German
students booed the Oratorio for Prague. The film contains a shot of
Czech people who, for the first time since 1948, were permitted to
decorate the graves of the American soldiers who had died on
Czechoslovakian soil while driving out the fathers of the booing
youths.
Later on I spoke to Nemec in Prague. He had returned from
the Soviet headquarters where he demanded to see the White
Book on Counter-Revolution in Czechoslovakia because some¬
one had told him that he was mentioned in it. The Soviet officers
willingly showed it to him, and when the choleric Honza, who got
mad over the appropriate paragraph in the text, accused the
officer of spreading lies, the latter was quite embarrassed. Just as
embarrassed as the boys in the tanks had been, when nobody
welcomed them, although they had been told they would be
showered with flowers.
Still later, Honza supposedly asked for permission to make a
film about Lenin. I don’t know the outcome of his supplication,
but 1 doubt that he will be making it in the forseeable future. It is
a shame. Lenin is nowadays, depending on one’s inclinations,
either God or Satan. I would say that, in Nemec’s film, he would
probably turn out to be the man who, towards the end of his life,
warned the Party about Stalin.

Evald Schorm

Besides an attractive exterior, cleverness and stubborn will, Vera

Chytilova is well known for her hysterical fits. The most famous
137
Evald Schorm in Report on the Party

one was during an acting class while she was still at the Academy.
Under the guidance of an expert, the student directors were sup¬
posed to perform a love scene. At first glance, the two were a nice
pair: the slim, dark-haired gypsy-eyed Vera, and a tall blond
Scandinavian type, who could have served Alfred Rosenberg as
an example of the best of the Nordic race. But when the professor
beckoned them to begin their scene, the gentleman took a few
elephantine strides and stepped on Vera’s foot. The fit followed:
the actor was showered with an overabundance of English ‘r’s and
Vera was assigned a more erudite Jiri Menzel.
However, neither philosophers nor opera singers are usually re¬
nowned for their flexibility of limb and, although Evald Schorm is
quite justifiably considered a philosopher of the New Wave, it is less
well known that he began his career as an opera singer. He was a
member of that peculiar product of late Stalinism—the army opera.
I don’t know where the army got the idea to start its own opera en¬
semble, when not even Russia ever had anything like it. However,
Russia never had a General Cepicka either, who profitably married
the president’s daughter, and then went on to prove his reliability by
actively participating in the torture of Slansky and Co. In order to
gain popularity among his soldiers, the lawyer-turned-general im¬
proved the quality of the mess hall chow to that of the succulent
repasts of the international hotels: all of this at a time when the
civilians were living on rations. They threw him out shortly after he

138
ordered the officers to wear sabres as a part of their uniform; the
sabres were too long and the officers kept tripping over them. He
tailed to accomplish his greatest dream, which was to dress all
troops in ceremonial uniforms. The bright red, baby blue, turquoise
green and pious purple breeches would differentiate the various
sections of the army.
The opera was probably a product of the terpsichorean fantasy of
a parlour-room General, and I am desperately trying to imagine
the six-footer Evald attired in turquoise breeches and singing an
aria from La Traviata to a platoon of bombardiers.
When the opera went the way of the cashiered general (who
became the head of the Patent Office), the washed-up maestro tried
to get into the Film Academy. He was accepted but embarked on
his film career with peculiar scepticism: “I have failed in several
professions, and I doubt that I will succeed in film. Yet, directors
are often recruited from among failures. Kozintsev expressed it
once beautifully when he said that anybody is a director who does
not prove that he is not.”
Overly sensitive and slightly superstitious people defend them¬
selves against their own fear of the world’s cruelty by assuming the
identity of a simpleton. “Pepiček, Pepiček, Tm coming to a bad
end!” With this petrified sentence delivered in the pitiful tone of a
lamenting village pauper I connect Evald Schorm. He always and
everywhere repeated it: in my apartment when we wrote the screen¬
play to End of a Priest; in the studio when he tried to make himself
invisible behind the camera; in the hotel room which we shared in
Pocepice, where the film was made; and on location, in the morning
while he was taking an overdose of sedatives in order to remain
calm. “Oh no! Not me! How can they want instruction from me? I
don’t know anything!”
Naturally it was self-stylization, a subconscious defence. 1 know it
well. It is an insurance against that final failure which awaits almost
all of us, when we are removed from the list of those who still have
something to say. So that when the time comes, we will be able to
say, “But gentlemen, I kept telling you, I am an idiot.” Or, if this
should be more in your style, “How could you idiots understand a
genius like me?” In either case you end up shooting yourself, just
like Hemingway.
An artist needs such self-stylization: it serves him as a protective
thick skin, which is something William Faulkner knew so well. “The
139
world is terrifying,” says Evald Schorm, “and yet it is beautiful, and
that’s how it is with everything; things exist so close together, that
between love and cruelty, between one thing and another there is
but a tiny, negligible distance.”
With Christian humbleness he began to make documentaries and
semi-documentaries from the milieu recommended to the attention
of the artists several years earlier: Blok 15, about the construction
of a high dam; Ground to Ground about miners in the Ostrava coal
mines; Trees and People, showing the work of lumberers in the
mountains. Years earlier “masters” of literature and direction gave
that world a quick glance, then stuffed it into the appropriate for¬
mula, and received the State Prize in appreciation of their mastery.
“This theory of mastery,” said Schorm, “caused so much damage in
all spheres, that it makes me afraid: mastery has become a catch
phrase; any nonsense, if it pretends to be masterful, allegedly turns
into a work of art. For example, if a bad film employs only trained
Distinguished Artists,* it will be great.”
His own documentaries were not made in the “quick glance”
style. They provided him with a profound and authentic know¬
ledge of the worker’s life, prevented him from going down the
usual road towards naturalism or comedies of the “folksy” kind.
His vision is too democratic to allow him to see workers “as
grotesques or as pastoral decorations”, as they were seen, accor¬
ding to Evelyn Waugh’s assessment, not only by artists of past
centuries, but also by a number of socialist realists. Schorm says
the following about naturalism: “I don’t believe in the future of
empiricism, because then the greatest writers would have been
cops and lawyers. I find that the key to everything lies in great
perceptiveness and an open, approachable soul, which is able to
re-live also things that happened to other people.”
To other people. After the documentaries about the life of the
working class, he made a poetic documentary, To Live One’s Life
(1963), about the photographer Josef Sudek; a film about loyalty
to an idea, and about sacrificing one’s life to art. Sudek is a
typical Prague character: a one-armed (he lost his arm in World
War I), hunched old man, whom you can see dragging a gigantic
plate camera on a tripod up the steep streets of the Old Town.

*The title of Distinguished Artist was invented in the Soviet Union, and is usually
bestowed upon excellent senior artists, or upon those who serve fearlessly in the
field of ideology.

140
Evald’s To Live One’s Life: Mr. Josef Sudek . . .

However behind the cliché of a “typical Prague character” hides

one of the few true artists of photography. The skill with which he
managed to capture the magical beauty of the medieval city with
his old fashioned camera was never equalled by anyone—painters
not excepted.
Schorm was attracted to Sudek by the photographer’s ob¬
session with art, since that happens to be Schorm’s own personal
vice. “I would say to myself.. .you lose a book, you lose a life,”
he likes to quote Jerzy Andrzejewski {Ashes and Diamonds).
“Life? Isn’t that too much? Maybe not. Don’t think that such ideas
are forced upon a writer by weakness, by hysterical exaltation or
by shortsightedness. When a person.. .loses what he really loves
from the bottom of his soul, then he cannot suppress the idea, that
he is also losing a part of his own life, that inside him some kind of
an inner light is irreversibly dying out, that an indispensable tone
is being silenced forever....”
It was becoming more and more evident that the New Wave
was joined by a true philosopher. His documentary work
culminated in two films: one about birth. Why? (1964), the other
about extinction, Reflections (1965). The subject of Why? was the
catastrophic drop in the birth-rate in Czechoslovakia. After the
legalization of abortions, it became a rarity to see a pregnant
woman entering a hospital to give birth, and the sociological
statistics indicated darkly that the nation was heading towards

141
 PPI
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Courage for Every Day: “resembles the tirades from Osborne’s Look Back in Anger”.

dissolution. This sociological affair became, in Schorm’s hands, a

meditation about motherhood and the meaning of life. The same
question brought him to the hospital for the incurably sick in
Reflections. Here he created a film-symposium, inspired by the
poetry of Vladimir Holan (who used to listen to the poems of
Milos Forman), a poetic danse-macabre, a totally black creation,
entirely pessimistic, mercilessly capturing the desperate desire of
the moribund to live; it also showed how the proximity of death
awakens long forgotten moral and philosophical questions. Of all
the Czech film-makers, only Schorm could have made such a film,
because, despite his great admiration for Bunuel, he is an intrin¬
sically Christian artist. “As far as my future is concerned,” he
wrote, “my heart sinks when I think about it. These are pathetic
words, but I am a pathetic person.”

His first feature film, Courage for Every Day (1964), is indeed

... and Prague photographed by his plate camera.

143
pathetic in a certain sense. It captures the working-class reality
fifteen years after the revolution. Schorm doesn’t present it as a
socialist-realistic fairy-tale, but neither does he sceptically shrug
his shoulders over it, in keeping with the ex post critics of the
revolution: “This of course is not how we imagined it!” The film is
a frontal attack against the betrayal of ideals, and the fact that the
President and his advisors labelled this truly revolutionary work
of art as a slander against the revolution, is just another
Czechoslovakian paradox. Euphemistically, Courage for Every
Day had the usual “problems”. First it couldn’t be shown, then
the film critics (who now openly opposed the President’s taste)
awarded it a prize—but Schorm was forbidden to receive it. After
ten months of wrangling, he finally got it but, for a change, the
film was banned from participation in any foreign festival. When
it finally appeared in French and Italian cinemas, the local critics
understood what the socialist president was unable to com¬
prehend. “Schorm passionately and without prejudice attacks the
problem of the human consequences of what is usually sum¬
marized under the term ‘stalinism’,” wrote the Italian Communist
paper L’Unita; and Schorm received the Critics’ Prize at the
Pesaro festival.
It was a story of a man in his thirties, who in the early nineteen
fifties became an enthusiastic shock-worker. He was a true socialist,
disregarding all personal interest and motivated only by the idea of
working for the good of the people. As such he was praised,
decorated and honoured. But times changed. Many of the “eager
socialists” of the early fifties advanced to become officials, bureau¬
crats and directors. When the post-revolutionary visions of the
pork-eating workers’ glistening faces disappeared, and the ideas of
proletarian brotherhood and love went the way of all premature
utopias, the traces of idealism vanished from the factories. Workers
have good eyes. They noticed that the loudest advocates of unselfish
work frequently received lucrative positions as a reward for their
unselfishness, which they then protected selfishly.
The film’s hero, shock-worker Jarda Fukas, becomes, amidst this
inconspicuously changing world, a somewhat comical remnant of
the past. He gets into a spiritual crisis complicated by a breakdown
in his relationship with his girl, and slowly awakens: he discovers that
reality is not identical with his vision. However, and this is typical
for Schorm’s moral attitudes, he does not become a cynic, as was
144
the case with so many others: he does not take advantage of his
medals or his outstanding character references in order to join the
ranks ot the satiated prophets ot equality, who criss-cross the coun¬
try in their luxurious Tatra 603 limousines—that peculiar symbol of
“the more equal among equals”, manufactured especially for
‘government representatives" and totally inaccessible to “ordinary”
people.* Instead, in one ot the film’s final scenes, he delivers an
angry speech to workers sitting in a tavern. The intensity of his
oration resembles the tirades of Jimmy Porter in Osborne’s Look
Back in Anger—but it aims at much more clearly defined goals. He
accuses them of betraying the revolution. However, by now the
workers don't give a damn about the old slogans; they work in order
to be paid, to feed their families. They far too frequently go by a
new unofficial slogan: “Who doesn’t steal from the state, steals from
his family.” Jaroslav throws it all into their faces: he maintains that
they have exchanged the zeal of the revolutionary for an abundance
of beer and soccer. But nobody in the tavern listens to his raging
philippic. At that moment he is a truly comical but, at the same
time, pathetically sterling character of the past. The workers have
more interesting things to discuss over their mugs—the recent soc¬
cer match for instance.
The subsequent “difficulties” of this ideologically pure work are
fully understandable, if we realize that the author sinned against one
of the fundamental taboos of socialist realism, namely the rule: “of
the workers nothing but the best”—with ominous suggestions of a
devious governmental method rooted in antiquity (panem et cir-
censes). The work bore the trademarks of Schorm’s style with
negligible traces of cinéma-vérité, and no signs of the formanesque
smile at reality. The film used only professional actors, and not even
the most malicious critic could find in it any formalism, be it
beautiful like Vera’s or otherwise. It displays an austere, structural
direction, which is economical and stylistically pure, which does not
depict but creates. The general concensus of the Czech critics was
expressed by one of the sharpest theoreticians of Czech cinema,
Jaroslav Boček, who said, “We are dealing with the profoundest
talent of the generation.”
Evald's second feature film The Return of the Prodigal Son bears
‘Czech humour interprets the 603 as follows: Tatra 603 is a car which ac¬
comodates six people, who do zero and collect three thousand crowns monthly. At a
time when Courage for Every Day was being made, the average monthly salary was
approximately 1400 crowns.
145
The Return of the Prodigal Son: “What is normal?" (Jana Brejchova with Jan
Kacer).

all the markings of his style, polished to excellence by greater

directorial experience. From the statement of betrayal of the revo¬
lution, Schorm advances to the psychological and philosophical
analysis of the causes of this betrayal. The Osbornian hysteria of the
working-class hero from Courage for Every Day is replaced by sub¬
dued questions with which a suicidal intellectual confronts himself
and others.
Outwardly this man is a happily married, successful, young
architect: he attempts suicide, but is saved and treated in a mental
institution. From there, after an uncertain love affair with the wife
of his doctor, he returns to his own wife and starts working again. At
a party given to celebrate his return, the director of the company
“rewards” him with a “philosophical” speech about life, which
makes the young architect rudely and without explanation leave the
room, faint, and subsequently return to the institution. The reasons
leading to his suicide are not disclosed; we can only assume them
from the discussions between Jan, the architect, and his doctor. The
theme is: What is normal, and what isn’t? Jan tells the doctor about
his conviction that a person should act in accordance with what he
considers right, irrespective of whether it will damage his career or

146
complicate his life. The doctor asks him whether he, himself, is
capable ot acting in accordance with such maxims, and Jan admits
he isn't. “But is that normal?” he asks.
And another question: “1 would like to know, if I would be
capable ot not betraying, under torture. You've never actually
thought about it, have you?” he asks the doctor. “If they tore out
your nails and burned your skin? I have often thought about it. You
say that you've never thought about it. Which one of us in normal?”
This is obviously a great and topical Central European theme
(naturally not only Central European, but hardly Canadian), and
causes the audiences to hold their breath. In contrast to such, in a
sense, absolute questions the director’s sophistic “philosophy”
sounds all the more provocative. “You categorically reject any
compromise,” exclaims that sage, “but look here, isn’t that the
easiest approach to life? I am really convinced that the rejection
of any kind of compromise stems from fear, uncertainty, and
from suspicion of the value of the cause for whose benefit the
compromise is to be made. It is obviously always important to
consider why we are compromising, and further, not all com¬
promises are alike. There are certain things which overreach the
private realm.. .certain great and pure ideals....” At this point
Jan leaves the party without uttering a word. The director booms
after him through the hall, “which are worth pursuing, and which
require of us.. .even compromises. I am simply convinced that a
great, supra-personal cause somehow sanctifies the com¬
promise. ...”
But is that normal? Jan does not ask the question at this part¬
icular point, but it is suggested by the confrontations of this pro¬
found film. The company director’s speech once again awakens
in a Central European viewer associations and echos, which
resound throughout the recent and not so recent history. There is
no clearcut answer to these questions—however, if people cease to
ask them, or are forbidden to ask them, everything is possible and
and the less pleasant possibilities have a much greater chance of
occurring.
That is why everything in the film is in half-tones—from the
camera to the dialogue. There is a kind of bewitching magic of
absolutely serious art about it, the cathartic effect of a classical
tragedy.
Schorm’s method became even clearer after The Return of the
147
Prodigal Son: to give questions and provoke by thought, and not
by formal exclusiveness. It is important to provoke, to be a pike
among the lazy carps in a pond. “I believe that in life one should
assume the most radical position. As it is written in the Bible: yes,
yes—no, no. Quiet agreement and compromise produce dreadful
results. Things either have to be run to a head, or left alone, but
once a person begins to reconcile himself with something, the out¬
come is usually bad.” His third feature, Five Girls to Deal With
(1967), again posed a provocative question: How are we? Why
are we that way?
It is a story about five teenagers, and about the strains that exist
in their apparently close friendship. The heroine, a gentle and
sensitive girl, is the daughter of an important local functionary in
a large town, who is the head of the housing bureau. The family
obviously belongs to the “new class”: and the father, from the
position of the director of housing, was privately able to solve the
public housing shortage. They live in a beautiful villa, originally
built and owned by someone else. The other four girls clearly
come from other circles; one of them is a proletarian, and her
family’s flat is a far cry from the official’s house. Measured by the
canons of orthodox socialist realism, the basic situation of the film
is profoundly sarcastic: in the old melodramas of the fifties, it
would be the girl from the villa who would be moody, malicious
and evil, while her poorer girl friends would display good-
natured kindness. Here we see the gentle and sensitive daughter
of an influential official, trying to please her socially less lucky
companions by feeding them potato salad and lemonade from the
family fridge, while her parents are absent. The girls whom life pre¬
ferred less are malicious and evil. Their basic feeling towards the
“lucky” Natasha is envy. They hurt her in all kinds of minor ways,
so that Natasha finally seeks spiritual protection in an innocent love
relationship with the son of the castle custodian. Her friends are
jealous of it and destroy it by means of a nasty intrigue. Natasha
first romantically considers suicide, and wants to jump in the river,
but when she sees the cold current she is overcome by a natural,
child-like fear. She thinks everything over and slowly changes her
mind. Ultimately, she comprehends the Great Social Truth: if they
attack you, you have to fight back, and in this fight anything goes.
She stops being the good girl who wanted to please her friends
because she desired their friendship. She complains about them to

148
her influential father, tells him what they did to her and asks him to
visit the school principal and demand that they be punished. She
wins, and perhaps she has just taken the hrst step towards becoming
a malicious, moody and evil member of the new ruling class.
Schorm emphasized the urgency of the message by adding a
new element to his work: throughout the framework of the story
runs, as a romantic parallel, Karl Maria von Weber’s tale of “Der
Freischutz and it serves as a pathetically mocking moral com¬
mentary. The drama of the five girls takes place in Liberec, a
large provincial industrial city with a repertory opera company.
In such cities, the opera still retains the romantic function which it
used to have in the nineteenth century. Night after night, the
gallery swarms with adolescent girls, all in love with the first
tenor. Four of the Five Girls are also permanent visitors of the
gallery while Natasha sits in her parents’ box. Taking advantage
of her father’s connections, Natasha arranges that the girls meet
their idol in her parents’ house. Instead of gratitude, she receives
only further envy. The opera which the goggle-eyed girls watch
night after night is the romantic drama of “Freischutz”. Its final
chorus:

Let us lift our eyes towards Heaven, and let us solidly build
on the Eternal One’s direction: he, who is pure of heart and
without sin can childishly rely on the mildness of the Father!

makes, in the content of the action, a derisively ironical point.

Schorm made prolific and original use of his own operatic back¬
ground. While enriching his up till now straightforward method with
a special kind of symbol and allegory, he triumphed also in another
way: he proved that even the oldest elements of art—plot, tendency,
morality—have their place in the most modern art—if it is, of
course, art.

A single guest in Report on the Party and the Guests refuses to

submit to the game of happiness, which the Host with menacing
kindness orders his guests to play. He is the only one who does not
compromise, who “brings his situation to a head”, and leaves
followed by the kind Host’s police dogs. I was originally supposed
to play this silent idealist (it is a silent part, so I might have
managed, despite my intelligence), but then Honza gave the part to
Schorm, and it proved to be a correct and logical decision. Honza
149
End of a Priest: Evald instructs Vlastimil Brodsky (the Priest) and Jana Brejchova
(the Village Mary 'Magdalene) how to struggle . . .

indemnified me with the small part of a gourmand, who in one scene

is passionately embraced by the sexy girl (Helena Pejskova—but
the scene unfortunately fell victim to the editor’s scissors). Despite
the fact that I missed my second big chance in the movies, I don’t
regret it, because during the shooting of the Report... I told Evald
the story of the fake priest.
It later became the subject of our joint effort, the film End of a
Priest. For two years we worked on the screen-play, then during the
President’s last attack against the intellectuals in the fall of 1967, it
was “held up”, but in the spring of the year of ungrace 1968, it
finally went into production.
It was in fact a realisation of an older promise that Evald and I
once gave to Jana Brejchova, and her husband, the actor Vlastimil
Brodsky (her second husband after Milos), that I would write a
comedy for them, which Evald would direct. For a long time I
couldn’t come up with anything, until Evald took a liking to my
story of the false priest. I had read it in the papers sometime in the

150
 t&M
PM 4

and this is how they struggled — with John Lords (Vaclav Kotva) — in the

fifties: an adventurer passed as a priest for about eight months in a

mountain village in Eastern Bohemia. He lived entirely off the
generosity of the unsuspecting parishioners, who were happy to
have a Father, at a time when a disproportionally large number of
priests worked at digging of ditches and in the uranium mines.
We would meet, and I saw nothing more than a comical story, of
which I am a fairly accomplished weaver. Evald kept lamenting
“Oh no! Not me! What can I come up with! Just you write it your¬
self, Pepiček!” So I wrote, reinforcing myself with Bols vanilla
liqueur, which I would offer to Evald, and he carried on, “Oh my
God, Pepiček, don’t give me any of that stuff! I’ll get drunk! I’ll turn
into an alcoholic! I’m coming to a bad end, even without booze!”
Then, after emitting a most heart-rending lament, and in between
two glasses of the vanilla liqueur, he gave my somewhat barren
story a twist, which filled it suddenly with meaningful overtones. As
was the case with anything touched by Evald’s blessed hand, it
finally turned into a philosophical parable about the world we were
151
End of a Priest: the parable of the Wedding The parable of the Cured Incurable (Josefa
(Zdena Skvorecka and Jaroslav Satoransky). Pechlatova and Vlastimil Brodsky).

both interested in, because it was our home, and its foolishness and
injustices hurt us. A parable about the world after the revolution.
Once upon a time and once upon a place, in a village, there lived
a priest, who was really a runaway sexton, and a school-master; a
man of the concrete, and of the abstract—the priest who likes people
en détail, and the school-master who likes them en gros. “Men are
good,” says the school-master in the scene of the Temptation on the
Mountain. “They just have a few faults.” The Priest replies, “Men
are evil. They just have a few good qualities.” The two mock-heroic
characters represent thereby two principles of vital dialectics. At
that time we believed that in their interaction and love-hate relation¬
ship lay the concept of the village.
Under the large peasant hand of the ex-opera singer, the story
began to gain counterpoint; we implanted in it the ancient legend of
Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who loved him, the sym¬
bol of the she-ass, the parable of the wedding and the adulteress to
be stoned by those who are without sin. Everything changed into a
platonic idea of a Czech village, permeated by the reality of secret
police as if by thorns, and framed by the pattern of a chaplinesque

End of a Priest: the Actors and the Gendarmes. “Everything changed into a
platonic idea of a Czech village, permeated by the reality of secret police as if by
thorns”.

End of a Priest: the village Vanity Fair.

153
The parable of the Reformed Sinner. The Temptation on the Mountain (Jan Libicek
as the Teacher, Vlastimil Brodsky as the Priest).

farce. Upon the school-master’s instructions, the priest is stopped

while driving from one village to another, between masses,* and
forced to take a breathalyzer test. He fails to convince the police
that he has not partaken of alcohol, but rather of the Blood of our
Saviour. The police chief has no understanding for the meta¬
physical variants of chemistry. The Priest has drawn attention
to himself. Another catastrophe appears on the horizon: two
bishops, one black and the other white, who for the lack of any
other common language, dispute in Latin. The white one is show¬
ing the black one the desolate parishes of the “once upon a time—-
once upon a place” country—and in the most desolate of them all
they discover a priest—-who doesn’t know Latin. At that moment
the secret police arrive, interested in further details about the
man who confuses blood with alcohol. It all results in a classical
The motorization of the clergy became a peculiar characteristic of that almost
clergyless country. It was not unusual to meet a black-helmeted man on a motorcycle
tearing down some country road, pursuing with the speed of a Hell's Angel his holy
calling: to manage three or four masses in a single day in three or four different moun¬
tain villages.

“Under the large peasant hand of the ex-opera singer the story began to gain
counterpoint”: Evald, my wife and myself during the shooting of End of a Priest
in Pocepice.

154
 Mack Sennet chase scene. Finally, we see the priest moving hand
over hand along a roof-beam of the dome; from the right side
approaches, in similar fashion, the school-master, whose con¬
science stirred him to repentance when he realized that it was
the priest, and not the cop who is his real ally. From the left side
carefully edges the policeman. The three of them hang there next
to each other on the beam. Then the priest, turning his eyes to¬
wards Heaven and crying out in a smallish voice, “My Lord, why
have 1 forsaken three?” lets go and falls towards his death—God
knows, maybe the death of a martyr.
But we must have used an incomprehensible code. At the Cannes
Festival, the film passed without much attention, and the positive
American reviews later considered it to be a fairly successful, if
somewhat malicious, joke. The female reviewer of a very influential
New York weekly thought that the school-master, who kept repeat¬
ing the wildest Party clichés, was actually quoting Chekov.
It was made in the village of Pocepice; night after night Evald
lamented and moaned in the hotel room, and then doped himself to
sleep—everything was suffused with phantasmic, almost medieval,
coincidences. The village was discovered, independently of me, by
Evald’s excellent cameraman, Jaromir Sofr. It was a beautiful,
typical village with a baroque cupola crowning a charming small
church; during the first shooting day, one of the extras, a local old
lady, came up to me and showed me an ancient photograph of a
handsome young priest, who turned out to be my uncle. Unwit¬
tingly, I had returned to Pocepice, which fifty years earlier had been
his first parish. Storks kept circling above the camera; the bird
family has lived in this corner of the world since the time of the
Crusades. Pocepice inherited the stork in its coat of arms from its
feudal lords. It holds a sealed letter in its beak. In the twelfth cen¬
tury, the master of Pocepice set out with Richard the Lionhearted to
free the Holy Lands, and was captured by the infidels. One day,
while still among the infidels, a friendly stork ran up to him—and
the knight recognized in the bird one of the members of the Poce¬
pice family who, in his bird-like freedom and without the autho¬
rities’ approval, spent the winters in the sunny south. The knight tied
a letter to the bird’s neck, which the bird delivered to the Lady in
Pocepice, and subsequently the Lord was ransomed.
The local Father read and approved our screen-play, but then he
almost chased the stage hands out of the temple because they ate
156
roll-mops on the altar steps and discussed, in improper language,
the short skirts ot Jana Brejchova. Apparently the church finally had
to be re-consecrated, and the pious old grandmothers, who
naturally didn't understand the film Oust like the President’s
dramaturgical overseers, with whom it wasn’t so natural), wrote to
the bishop of Prague. This otherwise intelligent priest had to write a
pastoral letter, which forbade any future use of churches for the
purposes of film-making. Gueye Cheick, the African student who so
brilliantly performed the part of the Latin-speaking black bishop,
was killed in a car accident, during the last day of shooting.
As 1 listened to my own dialogue being spoken by the actors
facing the cameras, I was gripped by fear. The ancient war traumas,
and those from the fifties, were suddenly returning to claim their
rights, and I began to have the uncomfortable feeling of being a
prophet. Five miles away from Pocepice, in the neighbouring
Sedlčany, I discovered the graves of my ancestors. Josef Skvorecky
died there a hundred years ago, and rests under a leaning tombstone
in the shadow of a medieval church. The Central Committees of the
various Parties were exchanging angry niceties and then they met at
Cierna. The students in Prague assembled daily at the Old Town
Square, and the nerves of the population were stretched taut. Mr.
Libicek, in the part of the school-master, was telling Mr. Brodsky,
who played the priest, “I am all for dialogue, Father, but it isn’t
very possible that you should have the lead in it. Considering my
position in the village, this would seriously endanger its life.”
The final scenes of the film were completed on the 20th of
August, 1968, the day after I finished mixing the dialogues for
Nemec’s optimistic documentary. In one of the last sequences, the
chief policeman gives the signal to begin the raid of the village with
the suspicious priest. I saw the finished film in January of 1969.
These were days which began with terrible depressions. Once while
walking with a friend along Wenceslas Square, 1 met the painter
Emanuel Famira, who was a leading member of the Jodas ultra-
Stalinist group. Fie knew my friend and gave us a pleasant smile,
“You are still here? Well, you aren’t running away this time. We’ll
get you all! Not one of you is getting away. We'll close the borders
and it’s 'Goodbye Charlie’!” Suddenly, I once again felt the putrid
vapours of the anonymous letters which Milos received after Loves
of a Blond. I went to the Film Club, and survived the day with the
help of Miltown and alcohol. Time went by; each day began in a
157
Five Girls to Deal With: “measured by the canons of orthodox socialist-realism,
the basic situation of the film is profoundly sarcastic”.

158
darker depression, and dragged on, goaded by alcohol, toward the
unnatural euphoria of the evening resounding with Evald’s lamen¬
ting, “Death is reaching out for us, Pepiček! All of us are coming to
a bad end!’ The gentle hand of Jana Brejchova, the star who once,
in better days, used to stick her ruffled hair from the nest on the
floor, filled my glass. The ghost of my poor old mother-in-law
visited me, and feared for the savings books.
Before the arrival of the tanks we had another plan: to write a film
where the two pairs of comedians would appear side by side, each
of which—in their own generation—shaped the young people’s
poesy and attitudes towards life. We wanted to make a film with
Voskovec and Werich, and Suchy and Slitr. Eva Pilařova, the sym¬
bol of the ideal girl of the sixties, was to join them in a kind of pen¬
tagon. The subject was a tiny motif from the detective story, Murder
for Good Luck, by my friend, Jan Zabrana, a poet and translator of
Isaac Babel and Ginsberg. We had written a synopsis once before
with Milos Forman, but at that time the dramaturgy did not grasp
the idea.
The beginnings were promising: in the house at Kampa, the kind
Mr. Werich promised to appear with pleasure in a musical detective
story if Mr. Schorm directed it. Mr. George Voskovec, who was by
now a distinguished film and Broadway actor, wrote from New
York that if there were work for him at the Barrandov Studios he
would be happy to come. Jiri Suchy was far too great an admirer of
the older duo to refuse, and Jirka Slitr was my old friend from the
jazz country of the Eastern Bohemian foothills.
The tanks arrived, then they hid in the forests and the garrison
towns, and the director of Mosfilm who came after them spent his
time buying writing pads and felt pens (unknown in Russia) all
over Prague. I kept hoping, while I wandered through America
—the country which I loved as a boy, but where I arrived too late.
Then at Christmas of 1969 Jirka Slitr died of gas poisoning. So
now, even if a miracle should occur, we couldn’t do it. We will never
be able to do it.
In the spring of 1970, Schorm completed another feature called
Seventh Day, Eighth Night. The screen-play was written by Zdenek
Mahler, Radok’s original dramaturgist from the Laterna Magica
and the nephew of the famous composer. Zdenek Mahler wrote in
his play The Mill that “every idea when realized is terrible”. The
film was a study of fear. “The greatest malefactor of modern life,”
159
Jana with her daughter Terezka - at about the time when “hergentle hand used
to fill my glass”.

says one of the moribunds in Evald’s Reflections, “is fear. Fear is a

natural gift, but the excessive fear which we find in modern society
annihilates a person, hurts him and, simply speaking, is cruel.”
Seventh Day, Eighth Night has not had its premiere yet. Together
with three other finished films, (and about twelve unfinished ones) it
was seized in the spring of 1970, when the Barrandov management
changed. However it was not destroyed—and this is where the
situation differs from the fifties—but only deposited in the famous
Barrandov vault for eventual later showing. I cannot avoid remem¬
bering a story told to me by a very important Czech painter—a pre¬
war Party member. Once, while in Moscow, he was permitted to
visit galleries closed to the public. There hang in constant (hopefully
not eternal) darkness, thousands of modern paintings. They did not
destroy them as Hitler’s Reichsmaler-fuhrer Adolf Ziegler, who
evaluated the works of die entartete Kunst by kicking holes through
them with his well-polished jack-boot, would have done. The
ancient Russian paradoxical irreverent reverence towards spiritual
accomplishments contains a mystical foreboding that despite all
the simplifications of the great revolutions, things in the end remain
complex; that reductio ad quotationem is a temporary thing, and
that the revolution will eventually have to deal with all its conse¬
quences if it is to remain the spiritus agens of progress.
While this book is being written, Evald is completing a film for
Vojtech Jasny about the relation between dog and man, and is
160
Jiri Menzel in Capricious Summer

apparently preparing a film version of Janacek’s opera The Step-

Daughter. Evidently an escape to youthful loves. I am reading from
his year-old directorial confession: “Everybody would like to rely
on some form of revenge, everybody would like to believe in it.
However the field of liberty and freedom lies possibly beyond the
borders of expediency. The notion of Liberty may be related to the
feeling of futility, and to the knowledge that whatever a person does
has no meaning, but despite that he does it fully and with pleasure.”

Jiri Menzel

I am convinced that the reason Jiri Menzel did such a superb job
with Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains lies in the fact that he himself
is essentially Milos Hrma, the shy apprentice who unsuccessfully
tries to make love to the pretty conductress Masa. I am not trying to
say that the Oscar winner still doesn't have a way with women, cer¬
tainly not. “Every time he feels tired, he puts his head on a girl’s
161
Kill Kitten Klan in Six Black Girls: “The new faces were prettier but it was not
our old Klan dominated by that contemptuous beauty, Mrs. Kresadlova-
Formanova”.

shoulder, and now that he is who he is, the girls are always there to
put his head on.” According to Alan Levy, this is what Jiri Slitr said
about Menzel, and as the latter directed two girl-filled shows at the
Semafor for Slitr, it is certainly based on first-hand knowledge.
There are, however, libertines who even after fifty years of amorous
adventures can still respond to moonlight. Hemingway belonged to
this breed; I suspect that he married four times only because he fell
in love four times, and didn’t quite know how to solve the problem
otherwise.
In a certain sense, Menzel is also a member of that family,
although he does not solve his erotic dilemmas in such a radical
way. He will always remain the schoolboy who turned hot and cold
when the strict Madame Directress Chytilova chastised him for
the mistakes in The Crime in the Girls’ School, and who even after
several years of friendship never addressed me other than “Sir”.
We conceived the farce of The Crime in the Girls’ School* during
the spring of 1965 in the garden of the Břevnov monastery in
Prague. In the garden stands one of Prague’s most beautiful
baroque shrines, a basilica minor, consecrated to St. Margaret. It is

‘The film released under this title consisted of three separate stories. Only the one
about the Kill Kitten Klan was directed by Menzel.

162
Kill Kitten Klan in The Crime in the Girls’ School: Misses (from the left)
Savonarola, Judas, the Imperial Dragoness, Jackie Ripper, Dracula. Miss Herodes
is missing from the photo.

built on the remnants of a romanesque church dating back possibly

to St. Wencesias’ time, that is to the tenth century, which in turn was
built on an old pagan burial ground that could have been ten
thousand years old. On that prehistoric site we dreamt up the
trivial story of a girls’ gang called the “Kill Kitten Klan”.
We based it on a story from my book The Mournful Demeanor of
Lieutenant Blueberry, a tale about the mysterious disappearance of
a math teacher, about signs of a struggle in his cabinet, and about
suspected murder; all of which is in the end explained by the
teacher’s absent-mindedness. Nevertheless, there was a crime, but
of an entirely different nature: the seduction of the detective’s
daughter, a student of the graduating class, by the chemistry
teacher. The original version did not contain the “Ronald Searle”
style gang; this was conceived by our joint dirty fantasies. At that
cloistered garden, in the presence of ancient traditions, we got the
right idea: we correctly assumed, that the true charm of the film
would lie in the combination of feminine beauty with death—exactly
according to Poe’s ancient philosophy of poetic composition.
Following the example of another KKK, the “Kill Kitten Klan”* was
to have its Imperial Dragonness: in that connection I forced Menzel
*The Math teacher was named Kote, which in English means Kitten.

163
 Petr and Matěj Forman in The Crime in the Girls’ School (with Miss Judas).

(who didn’t really need much forcing) into a decision he later did
not regret, to give the part to Vera Kresadlova, Forman’s new wife.
She is as the saying goes “a great girl”, a very unassuming female;
outwardly however, she presents an almost ideal personification of
contemptuous feminine beauty: a true Imperial Dragonness. The
fact that she is slightly bow-legged only enhances the image. Then
we made up roles for her and Milos’ twins, the one-year-old Petr
and Matej. (This was their first part; since then they have become
stars in Papousek’s Ecce Homo Homolka.) We had yet another
idea. All six members of the Klan were given phantasmic names:
Miss Judas, Miss Herodes, Miss Babinska, (something like Miss
Jackie Ripper), Miss Lomikarova (in an English film this could be
Miss Dracula), and Miss Koniasova (Miss Savonarola).
The charming brunette who played Miss Jackie Ripper enriched
the film with her own gag, which was not in the screen-play. Not
even Mr. Director could have come up with it. In one of the scenes
Imperial Dragoness I. (Vera in The Crime in the Girls’ School).
Imperial Dragoness II. (a sweetened up version in Six Black Girls).
165
Madonna with Twins: Vera, Petr and Matěj Forman (not even she knows who is
who).

the members of the Kill Kitten Klan are interrogated by staff mem¬
bers. When all of them are turned away, Miss Jackie Ripper sticks
out her tongue at the Head-mistress. It was astounding, and after
the premiere the Barrandov specialists asked Menzel through what
trick he had achieved it. Well, it was not a trick. The delightful
mouth of the black-haired girl concealed the tongue of a full-grown
ant-eater. She could literally touch her forehead with it.
During the tongue scene, a friend of mine, whom I recommended
to Menzel for the part of a lecher and Playboy reader* because I
knew he would be suitable for the role, became very interested in
Miss Jackie Ripper. I saw him giving her a long line behind some
props, and then he badgered the production manager for her phone
number. Three days later, when he came to the studio to finish his
scenes, I asked him, “How are things with Miss Jackie Ripper?” He
cautiously looked around and then disgustedly declared, “Nothing
doing, man. I think the Director’s after her.”
*The English teacher confiscates the magazine during the interrogation, but since he
has never been to any English-speaking country he translates the name as Play, boy!
and assesses it tor the benefit of the assembled teaching staff as a magazine for the
sporting youth.

166
 Maybe he was. About twice I saw them together at the movies. I
could not help remembering Menzel’s own description of his novice
years, when instead of going to the movies he would rather go to the
theatre. In his bitter experience, the cinema was a place where
couples held hands, but whenever he tried to hold his date’s hand
she would not allow it. Our famous compatriot, Dr. Freud, comes to
mind, too, although at that time I did not know that soon Menzel
would be playing the part of a psychoanalyst in Closely Watched
Trains.
He told me about his novice years on the memorable day when he
finally became the proud owner of an object which is certain to
heighten male sex-appeal. He bought an East German automobile
“Trabant”, manufactured predominantly from plastics, run by a
power plant which is used in the U. S. to propel motorized wheel¬
chairs.* With some misgivings I consented to join him on the
maiden voyage that was to take us to Jirka Slitr’s cottage in Zdar
nad Sazavou.
Zdar is about forty miles outside of Prague, and we covered the
distance in less than five hours. On the way there we didn’t really
talk much. I was holding onto the plastic door-handle, ready to
jump if Menzel left the road and drove into the river; Mr. Director
tried to change gears every hundred yards or so and, whenever he
succeeded, we advanced a little further. Five hours and seven fines
later we arrived at Slitr’s cottage, where we cheered up over wine
and new songs, which Jirka sang for us to his own piano accompani¬
ment (they were from the show The Devil from Vinohrady which
Menzel was to direct in the near future at the Semafor), and around
six in the evening we set out on the return trip. We arrived at
Prague just before midnight. The traffic wasn’t so heavy, and
Menzel used me as his psychoanalyst.
It was one of the nicest nights I have ever experienced, and I am
grateful for it. There was a warm wind and above the gently rolling
hills of Central Bohemia hung a giant operatic moon. Nothing
brings men closer together than talking about women; not in the
sense of enumerating bedroom victories, but rather the romantic
defeats.
Later, in the studio, I found him even younger and more boyish
than before. During shooting he lost weight and turned green. The
*After the success of the Closely Watched Trains he became so affluent that he ex¬
changed the self-propelling buggie for a Swedish SAAB, and smashed himself and it
up a week later south of Prague. They were both put together again, but the rumour
has it that the SAAB later ended its worldly days under the caterpillars of a tank.
167
last day he resembled a corpse; his chlorophyll cheeks permeated
by a posthumous yellow. The cleaning lady advised me to take him
to a doctor, as she was sure he had stomach ulcers. Her late
husband had them and looked just like that.
He did not have ulcers but rather creative pains, maybe
multiplied by other sufferings. He regained his natural colour only
after the strict Madame Directress Vera criticised him for The
Crime... .At that time he first assumed the colour of a freshly
boiled lobster and then paled into the normal grey of the white race.
I liked the film, although Vera didn’t, and I was not the only one.
When Menzel showed the film to a group of famous directors in
Paris, they were much kinder to him then the perfectionist Vera.
Miss Jackie Ripper married the assistant director, and Menzel the
gentleman gave her the part of the conductress, Masa, in Closely
Watched Trains. The Trains is certainly his magnum opus, at least
to date, although the anecdote, The Crime in the Girls’ School, is not
too bad at all. The Grand Prix, Menzel’s contribution to the omni¬
bus Pearls in the Abyss, is probably the most filmic of all Hrabal’s
filmed stories; The Capricious Summer continued, in a more than
dignified manner, the Czech lyrical tradition, while Crime in the
Night-Club was one of the best attended films of the post-invasion
year, and is still running.
Pearls in the Abyss (1965) was in a certain sense the Manifesto of
the New Wave. With the exception of Milos Forman, who was at the
time working on Loves of a Blond, all the major representatives of
the movement took part in the film. Vera Chytilova contributed a
phantasmagoria about a suburban wedding called Snack-Bar
World; Ivan Passer made a study of the “football soul” in The Dull
Afternoon; Jan Nemec added the dialogue of two dying braggarts,
The Impostors; Evald Schorm remained faithful to his document-
artistic background in The House of Happiness about a real-life
primitive painter, while Jaromil Jires’ contribution was a love story
of a young labourer and a saucy Gypsy girl called Romance. Juraj
Herz shot a weird tale, Salvage of Cruelties. Passer’s and Herz’s
stories were left out of the omnibus, which was in any case too long,
and were shown separately.
Menzel selected Hrabal’s story The Death of Mr. Baltisberger*,
which was inspired by the tragic death of a young West German
motorcycle racer during the Czechoslovakian Grand Prix in the
*The story was clandestinely circulated under this title in the early fifties. Later
Hrabal renamed it to The Death of Mr. Baltazar, and in the film it is called
Grand Prix.
168
early fifties. In both the story and the film, the race is seen through
the mythologizing eyes of a few motorcycle fans; it is really a chain
of folkloric narrations with the motorcycle race turning into a
legend. This is fairly easy in literature, and Hrabal is a master of
that genre, but it is more difficult to accomplish in film, because of
its rather uncinematic quality. Menzel’s solution had the touch of a
genius—and it was purely cinematic. He selected a section of the
circuit, where the race led down a hill towering against the horizon,
and placed it in the centre of the frame. Then he filmed it with a
telephoto lens and fast-action camera. Fantastic silhouettes appear
on the horizon and slowly descend along the winding road down the
hill in a perpetual front shot. The machines and riders in
crashhelmets move in a somewhat ghastly but very elegant, slow
ritualized dance—in the rhythm of Bach's B-minor Fugue. The
resulting effect lies somewhere between a poem, a danse macabre,
and a legend. The Angels of Death are coming to claim Hans
Baltisberger.

Closely Watched Trains is so good that even the merciless Madame

Directress Chytilova should not make Menzel blush. Upon recep¬
tion of the Oscar for it, he very humbly attributed most of the credit
for the film’s success to the novelist Bohouš Hrabal, which is some¬
thing that directors don’t usually do. In this particular case Menzel
actually deserves more credit than directors usually do. Under his
courteous supervision Sir Hrabal arranged the novel’s complicated
time relations into a synoptical order, and then Menzel’s keen eye
selected an incomparable cast. Closely Watched Trains is, from an
ideological point of view, the culmination of the anti-heroic trend,
which began so catastrophically with The Cowards. In the latter, the
author took the liberty to suggest that, even in times of revolutions,
young men, besides being preoccupied with the sacred matters of
the nation, also give some thought to the well-guarded sanctuaries
of their girls. Hrabal developed this heretical idea to its logical con¬
clusion, when within the framework of a trivial sabotage story, he
elaborated upon the horrors of ejaculatio praecox. The heroic
death* of Milos Hrma, who blows up the Nazi munitions train, is
*The sentimental Menzel made two endings, one of which was optimistic. The explo¬
sion blows Milos high up into the air and he lands on top of a blossoming cherry tree,
whose fragrant embrace saves him. The callous and foul-mouthed Hrabal talked him
out of this one. Carlo Ponti, who wanted to distribute the film in the West under the
emasculated title of A Difficult Love, fortunately did not see that version or the
history of the Czech-American Janosik could have repeated itself.
169
Closely Watched Trains: the Judas kiss of Miss Jackie Ripper.

preceded by the hero’s unsuccessful suicide attempt, which is

Milos’ reaction to his premature emissions. In the Soviet Union the
film was found to be an insult to the anti-Nazi resistance movement
and, because of the Oscar, Menzel was accused of plotting with the
Hollywood Zionists. This is, however, understandable as it is well
known that in the Soviet Union children are brought by a stork.

The audiences, the critics and Jiri Menzel all liked The Crime
in a Girls’ School, and because, as Ivan Passer says, “a man should
make movies that he himself would like to go and see,” we started to
write a sequel. It was called Crime in the Library of Manuscripts,
and it was a comical horror about a diabolical twelfth-century
psalter in a university library, and about the disappearance of a
scholar, the only person able to read the secret script and medieval
Latin of the book. He was kidnapped by the good old Kill Kitten
Klan, whose members had heard that the Psalter contained the
recipe for a love potion. Since in the present days of feminine erotic
dictatorship men are generally sexually dissipated, the poor girls
under the leadership of the Imperial Dragoness wanted to help
themselves to an artificially potent lover. They tried the love potion
on the asthenic scholar with such success that they fell madly and
170
‘Y/»v”'cof;re«Smer: disproportion between the “grand" literary style and the

immediately in love with him. I am not sure whether the Women’s

Liberation Front would enjoy the film.
We had a problem: the original cast of the Kill Kitten Klan was
almost completely out of commission. Miss Herodes got married
and was expecting a baby in Denmark. Jackie Ripper was in
Prague, but was also expecting. Miss Judas, who appeared briefly
in.. . Trains, succumbed to the tragic Czech passion of gluttony and
gained too much weight. Miss Savonarola meanwhile became too
famous and refused to appear as one of the group. We had to post¬
pone the project and instead, Menzel began shooting The
Capricious Summer. He took a liking to another idea I had called
Crime in a Night-club, and then the five friendly powers arrived.
Crime in the Library of Manuscripts was made by Ladislav Rych-
man in 1969 under the name Six Black Girls by which he meant Six
Brunettes. My strong objections against the change of the title went
unheeded. The original Kill Kitten Klan was by that time totally
decimated by further pregnancies, weight acquisitions and
emigrations, and so Rychman recast it completely. The new faces
might have been prettier, but it was not our old Klan, dominated by
that contemptuous beauty, Mrs. Kresadlova-Formanova.
Capricious Summer was not too successful at the New York
Festival, and it never should have been sent there in the first place.
Its strength lies in the literary original of Vladislav Vančura, which
is based on a single, but poetically effective, trick. The story is about
nothing: three ageing burghers spend their days at a swimming pool,
171
Menzel learning to rope-walk in Capricious Summer. Menzel rope-walking in Crime in the Night Club

and at night admire a columbine performing with a tight-rope

walker.* They carry on endless and totally idiotic conversations; but
the conversations are written in a baroque metaphorical language
which might have been appropriate if they were dealing with topics
of eternal relevance. The verbal humour springs from the dispro¬
portion between the “grand” literary style and the “tiny” contents.
It is a strictly literary affair which, from a cinematic point of view,
couldn't be significantly improved by telephoto lenses or Kodacolor.
Menzel’s treatment was flawless and reverent and, with the
assistance of an excellent cast, he exploited the text to its full poten¬
tial. Among the film-makers Menzel must be the most ardent
servant of modern Czech literature and, were Vančura still alive,
Menzel would probably address him as “Your Highness”. In
dealing with the author of Markéta Lazarova this would be quite
appropriate.
My ideas about Crime in a Night-Club were a combination of
Chaplin, W. C. Fields and Jean Harlow, and were fully shared by
Menzel. I started with Jean Harlow and helped the distrustful
youngster to another decision which he once again did not regret: I
had him give a screen test for the lead singing part to Eva Pilařova,

“Mr. Director himself played the part of the tight-rope walker. He is very popular
as an actor and has appeared in several Czech films, for instance The Ceiling, The
Accused, If a Thousand Clarinets, Courage for Every Day, Nobody Shall Be
Laughing, Hotel for Foreigners, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Closely Watched
Trains: he repeated the part of a tight-rope walker in Crime in a Night-Club.

172
Menzel directing Eva Pilařova and Jitka Zelenohorská, with myself kibitzing in
Crime in the Night Club

the Queen of Czech pop music and a phenomenal singer, who was
said to be one of the greatest thespian anti-talents of our time.*
Novotny’s cultural department continually harassed her. Not long
ago, the Prague Metropolitan Court sentenced both her and her
boyfriend, Pavel Sedlaček, to prison terms for buying 60 American
dollars on the black market, and giving Sedlaček 2,900 crowns
(which is about $414 at the official rate or $58 at the real rate of ex¬
change) to "illegally purchase an automobile in West Berlin”. She
received a one-year suspended sentence and Sedlaček eighteen
months unconditional. The fact that, by that time, the state had
already earned about $190,000 from exporting her records did not
help her in the least. A glorious trial took place, embellished by an
impressive claque of janitors and cleaning-ladies, who were in fact
police informers and who ventured their profound assessments as
Eva left the court-room in tears: “And for such whores we toil!”
Whether condemned or publicly disgraced, I will never cease to
admire her; to write a film for her was always one of my dreams.
She confessed to me the insurpassable difficulties she encountered
in the musical Cancan, where she was not only supposed to act,
but also to dance. Nevertheless, I had faith in her and it inspired
me. Being well acquainted with Eva’s vocal cadences, I managed
to incorporate them into the dialogue; consequently I must claim

*Menzel had earlier used her in The Crime in the Girls' School, but there only as the
invisible singer to the musical accompaniment. Her scat singing increased the at¬
mosphere of the grotesque tension in the most mysterious scenes with the Imperial
Dragoness, Mrs. Forman.
173
Some individualities of the state’s elite in Crime in the Night Club. The heel holding
the hat is Mr. Valenta, the station master of the Closely Watched Trains.

a little credit for the fact that from the moment Director Menzel
saw and heard her screen-test, he not only started to call her
“lady Eva”, but every day before she left the studio he kissed her
hand, as if he were a Pole. He arranged to have several beautiful
skin-tight evening gowns made for her, designed from pictures
of Jean Harlow, and Slitr with Suchy composed for the picture
some of the best songs she was ever to sing.
Naturally I was also writing the movie for Suchy and Slitr. They
had, for many years, been incessantly plagued by Novotny’s boys,
as, after all, was everything that was alive in Czech culture, and that
the people liked. Once they “arranged” for the Semafor group to
move from the theatre where they had found shelter, because the
tenants in the house “suddenly” started to complain about the noise
after 10 p.m. The group was forced to shift for more than a year
from one small place to another, both in and out of Metropolitan
Prague. With a persistence well worth a better cause, Novotny’s
boys accused them of spreading decadent moods among the youth,
until they could no longer get away with it; the will of the people
was too strong and the sombre characters from the Secretariat were

174
Pavel Sedlaček, who accepted 2.900 crowns The incomparable Eva “Fitz” Pilar who
and went for 18 months to the cooler. embezzled $60 belonging to the State.

finally forced to acknowledge the existence of Semafor.* To create

even the humblest vehicle for the art of Suchy and Slitr also
belonged to my day dreams.
Unfortunately, things did not work out as well during the shooting
as we had imagined. Eva did indeed star both vocally and
physically, and Suchy and Slitr were as irresistible in the filmed
songs as they were on the Semafor stage. The court-room scene, in
which Slitr through brilliant argumentation got himself condemned
to death, was an excellent example of his acting abilities which were
to some extent related to the art of Stan Laurel. However, the
‘Recently, the same sombre characters, no longer posing as Novotny’s boys but
now under the banner of the “true leninists”, resumed their Holy War against the
people’s will. After the tragic death of Jiri Slitr on Christmas 1969 they deprived
Jiri Suchy of his post of director of the Semafor theatre which he had founded—
ostensibly because of his signature on the 2000 Word Manifesto, something he
refused to apologise for. In the summer of 1971 Suchy was foolish (and courageous)
enough to ask permission to cast Marta Kubišova, the singer who was the first to be
ostracised after the coming of the tanks, in his new musical. Soon afterwards this
gentle and humane artist, who in the last fifteen years gave the nation more
intelligent entertainment than anyone else, was reportedly banned from
Czechoslovak Radio.

175
 ■ST1**

The Gallows Song: “Let’s go across the barbed wire where the meadows end in
the far-away land ...” Jirka Suchy and Jirka Slitr in the final scene of The Crime
in the Night Club.

Barrandov technical arrangements failed absurdly. For instance,

they could not get a sufficiently springy trampoline: the trick which
was to enable the Minister of the Interior to fall out of a third floor
window, bounce off the trampoline and enter a second floor win¬
dow, failed. The whole action had to be transferred one floor lower
and consequently the logical sequence of events was disrupted. Fur¬
thermore we discovered that Jirka Suchy, notwithstanding his other
excellent artistic qualities, lacked Chaplin’s pantomimic abilities,
and so most of the fancy number with a jack-in-the-box in the shape
of a life-size policeman had to be cut. During the shooting Jiri Men-
zel turned alternately green, white and purple. The film was half
finished; we were still missing an end and I, for the life of me,
couldn’t come up with it.
Then history provided us with one.
Crime in the Night-Club is the story of a singer, Clara Regina,
Eva in the Night Club: Menzel arranged to have beautiful skin-tight evening
gowns made for her, designed from pictures of Jean Harlow.

This is the face that launched a thousand bureaucrats on a girl-hunt: Eva deciding
to sing “just for the Minister of Interior".
Jirka Slitr almost implicates the Minister Jirka Suchy struggles with the Jack-in-the-box
of the Interior into the murder. (not to be confused with the deputy).

who is endowed with a very jealous husband, a trampoline artist.

The action takes place in an unidentified country at an unidentified
time. The country’s Minister of Interior falls in love with the singer.
Night after night, he sits in his private box in the night-club and,
night after night, he sends roses to the singer with a note that says,
“May I hope that you will sing just for me?” Night after night, the
singer keeps the roses and replies to the Minister that “hope he
may”.
One evening the Minister adds to the roses a pearl necklace,
which is promptly stolen by the juggler, who was one of the singer’s
old suitors. Suspicion falls on the simple-minded porter, played by
Jiri Suchy. Being accused of theft, he retains a lawyer, Jiri Slitr. For
the lawyer this is his first case; he had studied law for a quarter of a
century and managed to graduate only after his high-school friends
became professors at the Law School. What follows is a somewhat

The Crime in the Night Club: Minister of the Interior (Vlastimil Brodsky) with his
body-guards.
Jiri Suchy and the late Jiri Slitr: “Their songs helped to form the emotional
world of the young generation of the 1960’s in a truly revolutionary fashion ”.

179
complicated detective story. The Minister’s personal murderer is
sent to the night-club to murder the juggler, because the pearls were
false and the juggler has therefore turned into a potentially
dangerous witness. However, when the personal murderer climbs
into the juggler’s dressing-room, he finds the juggler dead. And so
forth. To everybody’s surprise, the dull-witted lawyer presents such
a brilliant defense, that he almost implicates the Minister in the
juggler's murder. Unfortunately, the cunning Prosecutor interprets
his arguments just as logically, makes them point at another
criminal, and accuses the lawyer and his client of the murder. The
decision now depends on the testimony of the singer, who is eviden¬
tly in favour of the victimized duo. At that point, the Prosecutor
reverts to demagogy and puts the case to the jury with the following
question, “Do you believe the Minister—or this damsel from the un¬
derworld?” Naturally the damsel cannot withstand such competition
and the lawyer with his client is sentenced to hang.
During the trial, however, the singer falls in love with the lawyer,
and now wants to save him. She consents to the Minister’s old wish
and “sings just for him” in his bedroom. As a reward, the Minister
pardons both the condemned and sends a special foot-messenger
with the reprieve to the prison. He also immediately dispatches his
personal murderer to take appropriate care of the foot-messenger.
Both the condemned men are standing under the gallows awaiting
the messenger’s arrival. When the executioner inquires about their
last wish they ask to sing a song—and they sing a long, endless song
about “the country on the other side of the barbed wire, where the
meadows are fragrant and green”. They sing and sing until they lose
their voices and continue in a whisper—the foot-messenger slowly
approaches the gallows—the personal murderer rapidly approaches
the messenger—and this is where the film ends. Alan Levy wrote,
with reference to the end, that it is “the perfect political metaphor
for present-day Czechoslovakia: still singing with a noose around its
neck, and the end just a little in doubt.”

We were sitting in Forman’s Paris apartment near Bois de

Boulogne, when the radio announced that Jiri Menzel had resigned
from the jury of the 1968 Locarno Film Festival in protest against
the Grand Prize nomination of a film made in one of the countries
which declared that they knew the wishes of Czechoslovakian
people better than the people themselves, and contributed at the
180
same time to the Orwellian dictionary by calling an armed interven¬
tion brotherly assistance. The horror, which throughout that autumn
had filled my Paris stay, grabbed at my throat, and I said to myself
that when I once again meet Jirka in Prague it will be me who will
be calling him “Sir!”
"Mummy don't drink so much from the fat uncle!” Matthew For¬
man suddenly addressed his mother. “Don't drink from what,
Matty?” asked Vera. “From the fat uncle,” repeated Matty, poin¬
ting towards the pot-bellied gallon bottle of wine on the table, while
simultaneously looking at me. I understood the uncomplimentary,
but very fitting comparison. Children don’t know the concept of
“rudeness”, just as they don’t understand the deadly and maybe
ridiculous arguments of the adult world. Despite the seriousness of
the moment Vera giggled and then said she was sorry. I also smiled,
and I was sorry that I was not Matthew’s age, or that I was not
dead.

Vera then played in Menzel’s last film, Skylarks on a String

(1969) based on Hrabal’s book of short stories Pabitele.
The few who saw the film maintain that it is the best work Menzel
has ever done. Skylarks on a String was, in the spring of 1970,
locked in the Barrandov vault for an indefinite period, together with
Schorm's Seventh Day, Eighth Night, and some others.

The Others

The Forman—Passer—Papoušek team, Vera Chytilova, Jan

Nemec, and Ester Krumbachova, Evald Schorm and Jiri Menzel
are the best known and most characteristic representatives of the
New Wave. No movement, however, is adequately described by an
enumeration of its major personalities, and the Czech New Wave is
no exception. The group of young people who moved the Barran¬
dov mountain* was larger than the world might imagine, and it in¬
cluded artists who are unknown to the world, due either to
unusually bad luck, or because they worked for a long time as
“mere” screenplay writers, before they began directing.
*The non-Czech name of the mountain where the Studios are located comes from a
French paleontologist, Joachim Barrande (1799-1883), who there discovered rich
deposits of trilobites, large extinct Silurian arthropods characterized by a three-lobed
body, which were one of the oldest highly organized creatures on Earth. The annual
Barrandov prize, the Prague equivalent to the Oscar, is called the Golden Trilobite.

181
Jaromil Jires

If we consider Milos Forman the most characteristic represen¬

tative of the New Wave, then Jaromil Jires is certainly the most
unlucky of the group. Yet it was his thesis film, The Hall of the Lost
Footsteps*, completed in 1958 and distributed shortly afterwards,
that first indicated to the public that something completely new was
happening at Barrandov; his first feature The Cry was released in
February of 1964, two months after Chytilova’s About Something
Else, and six months prior to Forman’s Peter and Paula. While the
others successfully made their way through the intricate web of
dramaturgical snares, Jires and his projects became trapped in them
for five years. Except for his contribution on the omnibus Pearls in
the Abyss and a short documentary about the 19th-century Czech
journalist, K. H. Borovsky, he did not return to the cinema until
after the Invasion with The Joke (1969). The surrealistic pictorial
poem Valerie and the Week of Wonders appeared in the spring of
1970.
The Hall of the Lost Footsteps was a harbinger of something en¬
tirely new; it was a political film aimed at the apathy with which a
majority of people accept great military and political catastrophes,
and learn to live with the atom bomb under their pillow. “I respect
Camus’ La Pestef wrote Jires at that time, “because it states that
* Jires first studied camera and only later switched to direction, so that he photo¬
graphed the film himself.

182
evil lies within the people who due to cowardice either don’t react to
evil at all, or react nonsensically.” As a political issue the Hall was
of course no novelty by 1958; Czech film had already produced
Helge s School of Fathers and Jasny s September Nights, with the
ominous clouds rapidly gathering above The Third Wish and Hie
Sunt Leones. But all these films were made in the traditional
realistic style of a straightforward narrative. The Hall of the Lost
Footsteps, on the other hand, was an experimental vision combining
colour and black and white film, shocking the viewer by radical
cuts, and placing, side by side, the emaciated prisoners of a concen¬
tration camp and pretentious love chases through blooming
meadows.
Consider the paradox: Jires who entered the scene with a strongly
developed sense of formal experimentation and the feeling for the
small gentle pleasures of life, as he proved in The Cry, wasted five
years battling for socially-critical scenarios, only to make in the end
the stylistically rather traditional work, The Joke, a classical
political film about grave injustices and cruel revenges. The
paradox of an artist in a paradoxical time, as Jires himself realised
while working on The Joke in 1968: “ ‘Engagement’ in the form of
an exposé will probably disappear. But the exposé of scandals does
not constitute a true artistic value in itself, it is merely a symptom of
an unhealthy society. When art must concentrate on uncovering the
diseases of society—as was the case in recent years—art is tragically
diminished. Such a period, when the main artistic value is courage,
represents a dark age. Anyway, the only kind of courage that exists
is tolerated courage. You are always restricted to filming those
things which are permitted. Real courage manifests itself in public
life*, where it is needed more... .Art alone can never win against
brute power. People who hold machine guns either laugh at the man
with the pen, or else they shoot him down.”

The Cry was a simple story narrated in a highly complex non-

chronological pattern. The finesse of treatment given to the simple
events provided the film with great subtlety. Two young people
meet, marry, and expect a child which is born. Jires proved to un-

*Here Jires points to a frequently neglected fact that not only the leading personalities
in art and philosophy, but also the tens of thousands of unknown democratically-
thinking common people, provincial intellectuals and functionaries, deserve credit for
the liberalization of Czechoslovakia. Without them there might have been a palace
revolution, but never the tremendous mass movement of 1968.

183
 Eva Limanova (now a U. of T. professor’s wife) in
Jires’s The Cry.

derstand life as it is, and to have completely avoided the motifs

which, anachronistically, began to be required after the conference
in Banska Bystrice—such as the superiority of “public affairs” over
private ones, such as giving birth to a child. It was Jires’ misfortune
that, along with his film, came others which offended the socialist-
realist norms far more than by simply concentrating on private, but
nevertheless “fundamentally positive” motifs. The political mani¬
pulators reverted to an old trick: instead of trying to subdue the
“noxious” by the “good”, they began fighting it by using the “less
noxious”. In fact it was a reflection of an older socialist-realist
theory about the battle between the “good” and the “better”. They
went to war against Schorm’s “pessimistic” Courage for Every Day
using Jires’ “optimistic” The Cry as their weapon. Jires at that time
imitated the President in the latter’s affection for the ceiling position.
Pushed by the unwanted countenance, he feverishly began to
tackle political themes par excellence. In the assumed role of a
political philosopher he wrote on the subject: “Everything is a
question of the human qualities of the people in leading positions
being greater than the positions themselves.... I believe that this is
the problem inherent in the building of socialism, which as a system
is more viable than capitalism, as long as the leadership is able to
creatively exploit the true principles of development. Whenever a
184
person who is unable to wisely utilise power manages to attain it, the
advantages of a controlled system turn into negative obstacles. I
would be interested in reading a study: The Effects of a Public
Office on the Dehumanization of the Human Being.”
Together with Arnošt Lustig, the Jewish author who provided the
New Wave with outstanding material such as Diamonds of the
Night and Transport from Paradise, he wrote a screen-play based
on Lustig’s novel White Birches in the Fall. It dealt with the life of
the so called “black units”, which were military units made up of
“unreliables”. Men were sent to the units because the degree of their
“unreliability” did not warrant sending them directly to the concen¬
tration camp. The life in the “black units” ditfered from the
“uranium” camp about as much as the prison in Solzhenitsyn’s The
First Circle differed from the camps in Northern Siberia. It was not
the worst, but certainly not the most pleasant, set-up; the mass
presence of drafted priests provided at least some guarantee in case
of the worst emergencies.
The screen-play was rejected on grounds of amorality, and
dabbling in morass and dirt. The cultural overseers then advised
Jires of the theory according to which the artist must carefully assess
the “impact” of the truth he is proclaiming—that is, will the truth
harm socialism. In view of the revealed circumstances surrounding
the murder of Kirov and similar cases, the theory sounded some¬
what archaic, but they nonetheless adhered to it. As the maxim to be
followed by the artists they chose, “If the enemy praises you for
something, you were wrong.” This slogan was supposed to be
coined by Stalin, and it is indeed true that the generalissimo’s less
advertised Siberian accomplishments were praised only by his syco¬
phants, the Beria’s and Rusanov's.
Jires, disgusted with the futility of his efforts reasoned uncompro¬
misingly, “It is necessary to believe in the power of truth; and it is
just as important to realize that there is never enough truth. The
theory which claims that up till this point it is a useful truth, but
from there on it is useless is absurd and dangerous, because every
expurgated truth immediately becomes a lie.... If we succeed in
saying the truth about a person, irrespective of its external ‘impact’
or ‘utility’, this has an immense social importance, although the truth
itself might well be negative. The very tact of its disclosure is in it¬
self positive and indicates a healthy society.”
I would run into him at meetings where he fluttered from table to
185
The Joke: the soldier-artist with his mural that was found “indecent” by
the military ideologues.

table and spoke enthusiastically about socialism. While others made

films, he was turning into a kind of a tribune of the New Wave, and
an artist turned into a cultural-political theoretician, whether
through his own fault or not, tends to become a little ridiculous and
people begin to doubt his talent. What Jires was lacking was not
talent but opportunism; at least that mild form of it which enables
artists to turn out bitter attacks on injustices perpetrated abroad, at
a time when the home-supply of injustice is quite adequate. Assisted
by the author Karel Michal {Honour and Glory, The White Lady),
Jires embarked on another quixotic venture, and told me about it
once in Břevnov, in the garden where Menzel and I had invented
the Kill Kitten Klan. I think it was an excellent idea and I hope that
one of the young radical American film-makers, at least, borrows it
from him. The film was to be called Azure Rapids, and Jires later
wrote about it: “It was supposed to be a film about the totalitarian
method of thinking. I was interested in the way Nazism utilized so-
called ‘good, decent citizens’, who actually make up the backbone

186
of every totalitarian system. I wanted to show how big and beautiful
words can be exploited to fool the public. For the purpose of
examining totalitarian deception 1 chose Nazism deliberately, for
this system had already been clearly judged by history and everyone
knew its nature.”
This does not disclose how Jires wanted to do it, which is exactly
where the greatness of the idea lies. It was to be an UFA-Film,
Berlin Production, or so it would have said in the credit. Just as
Orson Welles pretended to be serious when he broadcasted the sham
report about the Martian Invasion, this was to be an exemplary
Nazi film produced by Goebbels' manufacturers for the exemplary
Nazi audiences: something in the style of Veit Harlan or Leni
Riefenstahl. The almost imperceptible microscopical transfor¬
mations of emphases were to eat away the shiny veneer of the
propagandistic product, as if you edited into one film three frames
from a different film, here and there. Thus the film would gradually
reveal to the audience the lies behind the Truth, horror behind
Nobility, inhumanity behind Gemiitlichkeit of the Nazi show pieces.
Naturally, the idea was of the category of Michael Romm’s later
Ordinary Fascism and they threw him out with it. He flew for two
years until he finally landed in the studios in 1968 with the screen¬
play of The Joke. He based it on a novel by Milan Kundera (it had
already appeared in English, and it was in a sense a partial return to
the motif of the “black battalions” from the White Birches in the
Fall). “The Joke” in the title is a slogan “Long Live Trotsky!”, writ¬
ten by a young philosophy student on a post-card to his girlfriend:
he wanted to needle her for being an ardent Communist of the
stalinist era. The post-card is intercepted by the Faculty’s Party
Secretary Zemanek, who takes the joke seriously: the student is
thrown out of school and sent to the “black units”. Years later, when
the storm has blown over and the protagonist has managed to
achieve a fairly good position, he gets an opportunity to revenge
himself on Zemanek by seducing his wife. The revenge fails. Too
late, the hero discovers that Zemanek and his wife are being divor¬
ced, and that Zemanek, who has turned from a radical stalinist into
an equally radical liberal, is marrying a beautiful young student
(Mrs. Kresadlova-Formanova). The importance which the story has
for some people in Eastern Europe might be difficult to comprehend
for the average Westerner.
Jires intended to achieve maximum authenticity by a completely
187
Valerie and the Week of Wonders: the creators know where to turn “but they
simply don’t want to”.

unorthodox and unusually naturalistic method. He gave the part of

the seduced wife to Jana Ditetova, an actress who in her younger
days had made a name for herself as an avid warrior of the Com¬
munist Youth—a perfect case of type-casting. Mrs. Ditetova accep¬
ted the bitter role and did an excellent job. For the part of
Zemanek, Jires wanted the poet and playwright Pavel Kohout. The
latter entered literature with poems and verse plays in which the
temporary insanity of his time reached an unusual degree of con¬
centration: then, shaken by the political trials, he wrote a play, used
later by Jasny as a basis for September Nights. At the Writers’
Congress in 1967 during the last days of Novotny’s era, he publicly
supported Israel, and later involved himself in a prolonged friendly
polemic with Gunther Grass in which he defended liberal-revolu¬
tionary Communism against the latter’s social-democratical
approach.* After the Invasion he hastily produced The Diary of
a Counter-Revolutionary, a work which was symptomatic of the
mood of many Party members; by doing so he placed a noose
around his own neck, which he further tightened be giving per¬
mission to a theatre in Vienna, Austria, to produce his play War on
the Second Floor which has never been done in Prague. In spite of
his admirable courage, he found the part of Zemanek in The Joke

*It was published in book form as Gunther Grass. Pavel Kohout: Briefe Uber die
Grenze. Letters Across the Frontiers, 1968.

188
untenable and refused it. The shooting was interrupted by the Inva¬
sion, but despite that the film was completed and with tremendous
success distributed in Czechoslovakia, where they knew what it was
about.
The history with the racket surrounding The Cry repeated itself.
Milan Kundera, the author of the novel, was at that time branded as
one of the intellectual leaders of the creeping counter-revolution.
Nevertheless, Jires was not. As during Dubcek’s era, he avoided
going to meetings because he was shooting at last. Jan Kliment, the
chief theoretician of the Banska Bystice conference in 1959, and a
trusted servant of Novotny’s cultural department in all its develop¬
mental phases, decided once again to peruse the “noxious” to fight
the “ultra-noxious”, and wrote a review which could have served as
a paradigm of sophistry. He commended Jires for correctly maxi¬
mizing the “positive” traits of the story in his film, thereby coun¬
tering the “basically negativistic” attitude of the novel.
Jires first wanted to follow the past presidential practice and hang
on to the rafters, but then he had a better idea. Following the
maxim, “If the enemy praises you for something, you were wrong”,
he blasted Kliment by declaring that if the film failed to transmit the
intentions of the novelist it was bad, and he did not wish to be
applauded for a bad film. The kind Mr. Kliment must have been
hurt by such blatant ungratefulness, and he soon proved that he
would not let Jires get away with it.
Only then did Jires get the opportunity to do work befitting a per¬
son of his poetic and sensitive nature. Together with Ester Krum-
bachova, he wrote and later shot a film based on the “black” novel
of the greatest Czech surrealistic poet, Vítězslav Nezval, Valerie
and the Week of Wonders. In it Jires finally rose from the swamp of
the world and entered the realm of beauty, which is—or should
be—an important part of being human.
The film won the Grand Prix at the 1970 Bergamo Film Festival.
Jan Kliment, who was sent there as the Czechoslovakian represent¬
ative, made the rounds of the ecstatic reporters, expressing disdain
at their bad taste. He was undoubtedly acting on the basis of the
necessity to distinguish the “bourgeois” and “proletarian” brands of
patriotism, using the “class” approach as his guideline. Upon retur¬
ning to Czechoslovakia, he produced another brilliant burgeoning of
his elastic soul. In it he qualified the one-time praise of The Joke by
observing that “the film outgrew the obvious efforts of its creator,
189
The Joke: the less poetic side of the “class justice” — the “unreliables” of the
“black units”.

(i.e. Jires) and against his will [the emphasis is mine] aimed not only
at the deformities of socialism, but also attacked the various
Adamek’s (sic) who although they once fully supported those defor¬
mities, years later set themselves up as idolized leaders of the
fanaticized young people, and began to criticize what they them¬
selves had once perpetrated.”
In the original review of The Joke he still attributed this merit to
the director; now be discovered that it was thanks to—it is not quite
clear to what, maybe the novel?—and that the director desperately
but unsuccessfully tried to prevent it from happening. This
discovery, of course, helped Kliment to understand how the seem¬
ingly “true marxist-leninist” Jires could produce Valerie, a film
which transgressed two of the main canons of socialist realism: it
was too erotic and totally incomprehensible. Kliment masterfully
by-passed the treacherous shoals of the fact that the novel was writ¬
ten by the great Communist, Nezval, by pointing out that “the
revered poet wrote the book at a time when he was overcoming the
feeling of loneliness.. .in the year when he visited the Soviet Union.
This greatly affected him.” Kliment, unfortunately, forgot to men¬
tion whether Nezval visited Russia before or after he got those
feelings. This was a mistake, as someone might have placed the
events into an incorrect chronology. Kliment rectified the oversight
in his weighty conclusion: “Although the subject (of the film) is a
190
me JoKe: Jana Vitetova as the seduced one-time avid warrior of the Communist
Youth. A perfect case of type-casting

surrealistic novel by a great poet, this is no reason why it should

today prove through its existence that its creators don’t know where
to turn. Or they do, but they simply don’t want to.”
Another great poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky once wrote in a poem
called “ Incomprehensible to Masses” the following lines:

I ask
the writers
who pall with fear
Quit
spewing poems
for the beggar’s ear.
Concerning art
the working class
Is no less smart
than you.
Mayakovsky, however, debased his work by a pessimistic suicide,
motivated supposedly by unhappy love. Kliment’s notice was sent to
me by an American Czech, a film afficionado and a retired railway¬
man, who visited the Old Country at the time when Valerie and the
Week of Wonders opened. On the margin of the clipping he added
in his shaky handwriting: “In my opinion the best film in the history
of Czech cinema. Made so well that Felinni (sic) in comparison
191
Pavel Jura cek

comes out as a bungler. I saw it 2x in a single day, and I would go

again if 1 had an opportunity.”
Of course a retired railroad man cannot match the aesthetic class
insight of Jan Kliment.

The second man who stood at the sources, but for a long time
remained in the background, is Pavel Juracek. He worked tor
several years as a screen-play writer, and when it finally seemed
that he might become a director after all, he accepted the position of
artistic director of a new Barrandov production unit. The whole of
the New Wave was to be concentrated into this single unit; however
the Invasion killed it before it could produce anything.
It was Juracek who once so dreadfully argued with Vera
Chytilova over the screen-play of Ceiling, that he forbade her to in¬
clude his name among the credits. (I don’t know what the fight was
about.) His thesis screen-play, Black and White Sylva, directed by
another graduate of the Film Academy, Jan Schmidt, was a some¬
what immature work, but indicative of the current militant mood at
the Film Academy: it parodied the one-time popular films which
“made the workers’ arms ache” and its heroine, a comely female
bricklayer, Sylva, was an unswerving optimist and a shock-worker
to boot.
After that, Juracek was drafted, and became one of the ghost¬
writers for General Sejna, a military man who continued in the
peculiar tradition of the admirer of coloured breeches. General
Čepička. Instead of introducing sabres and multicoloured pants into
the Army, this high-ranking officer wanted to become a writer. He
had great potential: a major influence in the Army, all the necessary
connections in the Army press; the only thing that he was missing
was talent. This was easily provided by Private Juracek, and others,
who in exchange for furloughs provided the General with
manuscripts, which the latter published under his own name in the
military press. He was well under way towards literary fame when,
at the turn of 1967, he became entangled in the military and
political machinations of President Novotny, so that when Dubcek
arrived the good General was confronted with some black-market
activities related to large quantities of industrial seeds. The General,
accompanied by one female student of directing from the Film
Academy (who a year before had made an appalling film based on a
rather good screen-play written by my wife), and with a large num¬
ber of secret documents belonging to the Warsaw Pact, fled to the
United States, where he resumed his literary career by contributing
to the Reader’s Digest.
Fortunately the General ran away a long time after Juracek had
finished his military service and returned to Barrandov, where he
produced the scenario to a successful science-fiction movie Ikaria
XB-1 as well as to the Jester’s Tale, which was an original story
from the Thirty Years’ War written for the famous director Karel
Zeman, whose films combine animation with live acting, as well as
film tricks and special effects. (An Invention for Destruction, A
Journey to Primeval Times, Baron Munchhausen, The Ark of Mr.
Servadac, and others). In 1963 he wrote the scenario to a medium
length film Joseph Kilián, which the authorities first contemplated
for a year and then rejected, after Nikita Khrushchov delivered his
oration on culture. The Czechoslovakia of 1963 however, was not
the Czechoslovakia of 1953. Nikita’s speech had effects contrary to
his intentions, and the scenario was finally rehabilitated. Then
another problem arose: Juracek wanted to direct the film himself
but, according to some regulation, trained screen-play writers were
prohibited from doing so. He joined forces with his old friend Jan
Schmidt and they made the film together; Juracek acted more as a
theoretician, while Schmidt looked after the practical side of the
movie. In the credits only Schmidt was listed as the director. “He
really risked more than I did,’’ Juracek later wrote. “If Kilián would
have been a failure, he would have been solely responsible, and
193
Josef Kilián: “Where Orson Welles Jailed, Juracek succeeded

nobody would have been interested whether I got him into it.”
Finally Juracek paid Schmidt back by writing the script for
Schmidt’s first feature film, The End of August at the Hotel Ozone
(1966).
Josef Kilián is one of the best known works of the New Wave’s
early tide: it won the Grand Prix in Oberhausen, and both the
Western and Czech critics recognized in it purely Czech,
Kafkaesque characteristics. It is essentially a satire on bureaucracy,
which is indeed in the Kafka tradition; despite all its philosophical
interpretations, The Castle may also be read as a joke about the
Austro-Hungarian bumble-dom. While walking through Prague
streets, Josef Kilián, whose initials are of course identical to those of
the hero in The Trial, notices a strange store which bears the sign:
Cats for Rent. He enters and rents a cat; just like that, without
thinking why. The next day he wants to return it, but the store has
meanwhile disappeared. As the rental fee doubles each day, Josef
Kilián, with dubious assistance from the bureaucracy, tries
desperately to locate the mysterious store, without success. Juracek
really managed to create a Kafkaesque atmosphere—one Swiss
194
 ... It is a film worthy of Kafka. ”

critic went as far as to write that “where Orson Welles failed,

Juracek succeeded. It is a film worthy of Kafka.”
Encouraged by success Juracek reached into his military exper¬
iences (not the literary ones), and made his first feature, Every
Young Man (1965); it consisted of two unequally successful stories.
The first was really an experiment with silent film, that is
“naturally” silent. And old hand is ordered to escort a recruit to a
military hospital. Being profoundly against such activities, he takes
his anger out on the recruit by completely ignoring him, and not
saying a single word throughout the journey. The other story was a
somewhat expressionless conglomerate of episodes revolving
around manoeuvres; it ended with a story about soldiers who
organized a dance to which the girls didn’t arrive in sufficient num¬
bers. A four-year pause followed; Juracek organized his production
unit in 1968, and after the arrival of the tanks he still managed to
complete A Case for the New Hangman (1970), to which he wrote
his own scenario based on the third book of Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels. Juracek maintains that it is not a satire, but
rather a film “about the certainty and security provided to the
stupid by stupidity”. During his travels, Gulliver encounters a large
number of politically diversified people. As a foreigner he divides
them only into the most fundamental categories—the good or the
bad. Whatever higher interests they might serve is outside of his
horizon, and therefore does not concern him. The film is conceived
as a dream and, although it is not supposed to be satire, it contains a
195
Juracek's The Case for the New Hangman: “A very strange type of a humane hero

few of the most scathing scenes that can be seen (or rather, currently
cannot be seen) in Czech cinema. One of the best sequences is
called "The Ceremonial Execution”. A group of condemned people
is brought to a crowded stadium where they are to "test” a new
executing machine. The Executioner, a servile civil servant fearing
his professional reputation might be damaged, stops the girl who is
to be executed first, and says, "I’ll save you for the end Miss, when
I’ll know what the machine does.” He reveals similar humanitarian
consideration a minute later when a condemned poet, before putting
his head into the machine, cries out, “Friends! Long live the....”
The Executioner courteously waits, but the poet cannot remember
who is supposed to live. The Executioner gently beckons him
towards the machine, and the poet cries out again, “I shall die,
but...”, and again he forgets the “but”. The Executioner amiably
steps aside; for a few moments nothing happens, then the
Executioner puts his hand on the poet’s shoulder, and the latter
yells, “I am happy to die because ...”, but he does not know why
he should be happy to die. The Executioner shuffles, the crowd
murmurs restlessly, and the considerate civil servant politely
whispers to the poet, "Excuse me, sir, are you going to do any more
proclaiming?”
I am not at all surprised that this type of humane hero was not en¬
tirely to the liking of the Barrandov censors in the spring of 1970.
196
The Case for the New Hangman reportedly* joined the Seventh
Day, Eighth Night, and Skylarks on A String in the spacious
Barrandov vault. Pavel Juracek once wrote: “Nonconformity is not
counter-revolution, because it does not reject the ideal, but rather
questions the practice. It sometimes happens that practice negates
its ideal, and this can often be tragic.”

Juracek’s friend, Jan Schmidt, was born in my home town of

Náchod where his family belonged to the greatest exploiters, or so it
would seem from Schmidt’s later difficulties with the interpretation
of his class origins. His Dad was an absolute ogre. Being the coun¬
ty’s medical examiner he would year after year reject my under¬

wit is almost impossible to find out with absolute certainty which films were banned,
which were withheld and which may have slipped through the Big Ban in the spring
of 1970. My data may not be entirely correct, and so I run the danger that this may
be used against me in Prague when my book is described there in the usual terms as
defamatory, slanderous, misrepresenting the facts, etc. Such an incorrectness,
however, must not be blamed on me but on the absolute absence of any kind of, even
relative, freedom of press in my country. When this is the case and when the official
sources keep silent about the exact size of the Big Ban of 1970, rumours and private
information remain the only source of knowledge. According to the International
Film Guide 1971 the following finished features were banned: Schorm’s Seventh Day,
Eighth Night, Menzel's Skylarks on a String, Kachyna’s The Ear, Sirovy’s Funeral
Rites and Jakubisko's Birdies, Orphans and Fools. According to the same source the
fate of Bocan's The Decoy, Balada's Pavilion No. 6 and the Czechoslovak-Bulgarian
co-production by Vulchanov, Aesop, were questionable (Vulchanov's film had
already been banned in Bulgaria). The Decoy, however, was only half-finished in the
spring of 1970 and, according to very reliable sources, Bocan was not allowed to
complete it. Another unfinished film of promise was certainly banned (my wife wrote
one of the three sceenplays, so she should know): The Visits, a three-story feature
which was to be the debut of three young graduates from the Academy, Vladimir
Drha, Otakar Fuka and Milan Jonas. Another certainty in that category is Flow
Bread Is Made by Ladislav Helge. Drahomíra Vihanova's Killed Sunday was repor¬
tedly withdrawn from public showings. Approximately twelve features were stopped
before completion, in addition to the five or six films banned after completion.
"Within a single year,” writes Jan Zalman, the author of the entry in International
Film Guide 1971, “there have been more bannings than during the whole twenty-
five-year period after the war—yet in no other period has (the Czechoslovak film in¬
dustry) produced so many outstanding works as in 1969-70. After the International
Film Guide 1971 was published and the employees of the Ministry of Interior, en¬
trusted with following western publications, read Jan Zalman’s assessment of the
newest trend in the cultural politics of the Party, Mr. Zalman (the pen-name of Dr.
Antonin Novak)was duly relieved of his post as editor-in-chief of the Film&Doba
Magazine, and replaced by a hack whose name,another interesting nomen omen,
makes me feel that the perhaps non-existent but certainly sardonically just God has a
significant sense of humour. The new editor-in-chiefs name, Jiri Hrbas, associates
strongly with “hunchback . Add to it the Messrs. Jodas, Jack-in-the-Box, Cop, Purs
(the new general manager of the Barrandov Studios whose name means, in military
slang, “The officer’s bootblack") etc., and there can hardly be any doubt that the
same ironical force is active here which made only three readers of the World
Literature Magazine protest, when we printed there, in 1957, a “decadent novel by
Francoise Sagan; their surnames were Pošmourný, Protiva and Lokajicek, or
Messrs. Murky, Nasty and Little Lackey.

197
Jan Schmidt

handed attempts to obtain a medical certificate exempting my lazy

body from gym classes. For this I cordially hated him. In 1950,
when the ogre’s son thought he would be going to college, I gave
him private English lessons. Naturally they did not accept him, and
so he played professional soccer, then made a living as a musician
and in the theatre; in 1957 he finally managed to wheedle his way
into Film School.
For a long time following Black and White Sylva and Josef
Kilián, he could not get started, until finally in 1966 he made The
End of August at the Hotel Ozone, an extremely cruel vision about
a group of girls who are the only people to have survived the
nuclear holocaust, and are wandering through the radioactive desert
looking for a man. Its effect in 1966 was somewhat anachronistic;
after On the Beach and similar dark prophecies people became
accustomed to the A-bomb. This of course was not altogether
Schmidt’s fault; the screen-play was submitted to the Studios in
1958 and went through the usual prenatal complications. Imme¬
diately after the premiere, Schmidt accepted Barrandov’s offer
to make The Lan fieri Colony (1970), based on a romantic short
story by the Russian novelist Alexander Grin, who died in 1932.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone: “An extremely cruel vision about a
group of girls who are the only people to have survived the nuclear holocaust. . .
. . . which was submitted to the studios in 1958 but made only in 1966, due to
the usual prenatal complications. ”

198
It was supposed to be a purely Czech film, but required high
mountains and the sea. After long negotiations, a co-production
with the Soviet Union was arranged. The Soviets were to provide
the mountains, the sea, and actors according to the director’s consider¬
ation, but an argument developed about the script. “The drama¬
turgical unit ‘Junost’,” wrote Schmidt, “wanted to emphasize the
adverse effects of gold on the character and morale of an individual.
On the other hand, old Mr. Zarkhi, the Chief Director of the
unit, doggedly insisted on a single thing: T ask you to remember that
this is to remain Grin.’ Grin of course does not contain the emphases
required by the Soviet Dramaturgists.”
Schmidt and Zarkhi won the argument, but the shooting was in¬
terrupted by August the 21st 1968, and “the film ceased to have a
meaning. I finished it only for the sake of finishing it,” says the
director. The news of the Invasion caught the Czechs high up in the
mountains. Schmidt describes the ensuing events: “At 5:30 a.m.
Prague time, which was 8:30 a.m. local time, we stopped shooting
and told them we wanted to go home. It was a strange situation,
with the Russians maintaining that we had doubtful information. By
tuning the radio to every conceivable station available in the moun¬
tains we proved the opposite, but they still insisted on the doubt¬
fulness of our information, and waited for orders from above. This
we could not accept and together with my cameraman we went that
afternoon to Suchumi, where we were officially assured by the
highest Party authorities that not only was there no shooting in
Czechoslovakia, but that everything was in the best of order. Mean¬
while all the members of the Czech staff arrived at Suchumi; the
Russians stayed behind in the mountains, hoping we would return.
We tried unsuccessfully to phone Prague. We were worried about
our families, while they were disturbed over the millions invested in
the unfinished film... After endless negotiations, cameraman
Machane and myself were summoned to Moscow to resolve the
situation at Mosfilm headquarters. Before a committee of all parties,
including the Communist Party, I had to justify the interruption of
the shooting. Finally they decided: They understood that we were
worried about how those counter-revolutionaries were carrying
on at home. They let us go, but could not guarantee plane trans¬
portation. Finally we managed to secure it ourselves, and all of
us arrived in Prague on August 29th.”
Later they returned to the Soviet Union, “because agree-
200
 One more Jana: in Schmidt’s The Bow of Queen Dorothy.

ments completed before August according to the Moscow pro¬

tocol* had to be honoured; so in order not to encourage further
conflicts we completed the film. What happened with it later I
don’t know. In the Soviet Union it will of course be shown.”
It was even shown in Prague, but I don’t know with what
response. At that time Schmidt was making his next feature The
Bow of Queen Dorothy based on Vancura’s short stories. This was
one of his earlier plans, which he postponed because both Menzel’s
The Capricious Summer and Vlacil’s Markéta Lazarova, which
were simultaneously in production, were based on Vancura’s prose.
Before he started to work on The Bow of Queen Dorothy he ap¬
proached me with an offer. He wanted to film my Song of the
Forgotten Years\ a story about a jazz singer whose life takes a
radical turn for the worse when the band she sings with decides, as a
joke, to present a swing adaptation of the Russian military song
“Marshal Budenny”. An interviewer wondered whether the whole
affair wasn’t more related to my own rather than to Schmidt’s
*That is: a friendly, voluntarily reached agreement between some abducted repre¬
sentatives of a smaller nation and the government of a larger nation, reached in the
capital of the larger nation after the armies of the larger nation and its allies attacked
and occupied the territory of the smaller nation (Ambrose Bierce).

t It was published in English in the anthology Writing Today in Czechoslovakia

(Penguin Books).

201
generation. (Schmidt is exactly ten years younger than I am, which
means that at the time of the Budenny affair he would have been
only fifteen years old.) Schmidt’s reply was characteristic. “In a cer¬
tain phase this might have meant a certain generation. Nowadays, in
view of the present situation, it seems to concern more than one
generation. It no longer pertains to that one only, but also to many
others.”
Obviously, I am not in any position to grant anything to anybody
in present-day Czechoslovakia, although I would be delighted to
place my story in Schmidt’s hands. He is an unassuming and honest
artist with a great future. “I don’t compare myself to any of the
world-renowned personalities,” he said, “that is if we don’t consider
Schorm, Menzel, Forman or Juracek world-renowned. I just want
to make films in such a way, so that the other fellows wouldn’t say:
‘What’s that you made, you idiot?’ ”

Another script-writer-turned-director is Antonin Masa; for those

who are so inclined, he may be labelled the politican of the New
Wave. One of the side effects of the artificially created inflation of
political themes in the fifties was an audience trauma, which instinc¬
tively upheld the ageless superstitution that “politics have no place
in art”. This superstition was strangely enough maintained even by
some of the realists without the epithet, who otherwise opposed the
202
 ' SI ' %%
~[1fiiiiin»fiiiiiigili
«*>«*«>

Antonin Masa

socialist-realist limitation of the permissible subject-matter,

justifying their position by Terentius; “Homo sum: humani nihil a
me alienum puto." For years Masa carried on his relatively lonely
battle for the recognition of the fact that some people really do live,
that is suffer and rejoice, principally through politics. That is what
his, until now, last film, Looking Back (1969), is about.
It was preceded by a script-writing career which reached its
zenith in the screen-play for Schorm’s Courage for Every Day.
Masa’s independent directorial debut was the film Wandering
(1965), which reminds one somewhat of Antonioni in the way it
creates an atmosphere. In a story related to the generation gap, he
in effect returned to the subject of the betrayal of ideals, or at least
their suspension. Then, as if deviating from his own trend, he made
the non-realistic, slightly absurdist Hotel for Foreigners (1966), a
dream play about incarnations of love. It starred Miss Savonarola
from The Crime in the Girls’ School, and it spoiled her so that she
didn’t feel like doing small parts anymore. The “problems” that
Masa expereinced with the screen-play of Women—Our Fate were
203
 atpr i

T’llSai IP! mm §

Masa’s Looking Back: “for those who lived through the times a moving and purifyingly relevant filn

of the usual variety: the rejection of this once again unrealistically

oriented film was explained on aesthetic grounds, but the reversal of
the decision after January of 1968 convinced Masa that “the real
reasons lay elsewhere”. (I cannot help remembering the banning of
my chaste, yet political, novel, The End of the Nylon Age, in 1957
for being “pornographic”.) Before he started on Women . .., Masa
read Milena Honzikova’s novel Looking Back, and was so taken by
it that he dived headlong into the current, so well known to him.
Looking Back is a political statement par excellence. The story,
which is formally based on a brutal combination of time sequences,
is a confrontation between the life experiences of two lovers: an
authoress approaching middle age, and a considerably younger
screen-play writer who is supposed to convert her novel into a film.
The heroine lived through Gestapo prisons, fought in a guerilla unit,
witnessed the killing of her father by the Nazis, and also the deport¬
ation of some of her guerilla comrades to Siberia by the NKVD
after the victory over Hitler.* When the war ended, she
*The Soviet soldiers who fought in the guerilla units were frequently escaped POW's.
After the war, Stalin declared all soldiers who were taken prisoners to be “traitors".

204
enthusiastically participated in Party work, in the Communist take¬
over and the first years of the building of socialism. Obviously a
historial period well known to people in the Socialist countries. The
hero was ten years old when the Communists came to power: the
socialist state is the only reality he knows. In keeping with the
ageless laws of human nature he opposes the status quo and, besides
that, personal problems, particularly emotional ones, play a much
more important role in his life than they once played in the life
of the heroine.
I don’t know whether this film would appeal to an audience who
knows all of this only from reading or hearsay, but for those who
lived through the times it is a moving and purifyingly relevant film: it
tells the story of the events that gave birth to the “creeping counter¬
revolution” (as Walter Ulbricht of East Germany called it), which I
cannot help considering a hesitant, error-laden, threatened-from-
abroad, attempt at a music of the future, resembling nevertheless in
its deadly sincerity, the first stage of socialist revolution. “Godard
fascinates me above all by the degree of freedom and courage which
he permits himself, and which is tolerated in his country,” said
Antonin Masa in an interview. “Godard is a child of fortune. As
a romantic he is so free, that even responsibility burdens him. The
difference between Godard’s romanticism and that of the Czech
films lies in the fact, that—besides a certain Slavic heaviness—we
have also the disadvantage or advantage that whether we like it or not
we consider ourselves much more responsible for the fate of our
country. I know that these are big words, but despite that I believe
that it is true.”

The most inconspicuous member of the New Wave is Hynek Bočan.

He is a true child of film; when he was thirteen he played the leading
child part in The Leaden Bread, which featured another debutante
in the eleven-year-old Jana Brejchova. After graduation he worked
for a long time as an assistant director (for instance in Nemec’s
Diamonds of the Night). He did not produce his first feature film
until 1965, when he made Nobody Shall Be Laughing, based on a
story by the author of The Joke, Milan Kundera; the screen-play
was written by Pavel Juracek. The ironic story combines spiteful
anti-feminism with the motif of a struggle against human stupidity,
and it would not be liked by either the Women's Lib or those who
205
Hynek Bočan

believe that after an accomplished revolution people should adopt

the slogan Maul halten und weiter dienen*.
Then Bocan, in keeping with his admission that he is unable to in¬
vent his own story and that his goal is to shoot epic works of other
authors, filmed Vladimir Paral’s novel, Private Windstorm (1967).
The novel is a very experimental work affected to some extent by
the French roman-nouveau. By comprising the text from repetitive
particles with an almost imperceptible degree of variation (in
dialogue, characteristics, and paragraphs), Paral created the at¬
mosphere of the mechanical monotony of modern life, which relent¬
lessly deadens everything including sex life. The film version lost the
experimental touch, and what remained was a clever comedy, which
filled cinemas in Czechoslovakia, and got some acclaim even
abroad.
For his third film, Honour and Glory (1968), Bocan used a novel
by Karel Michal, the writer, who together with Jires once wrote the
model UFA-Film. Honour and Glory takes place during the Thirty
Years War, after the Catholic armies of the Habsburgs had defeated
‘Shut up and keep on serving!

Bocan s Private Windstorm: "a clever comedy which filled cinemas in Czechoslova¬
kia and got some acclaim even abroad

Bocan's Honour and Glory: the director is not to blame for the malicious
interpretations to which the film may now be subjected.

206
the Czech Protestants at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620,
and the, until then independent, Kingdom of Bohemia became a
subservient part of the Habsburg empire. The battle, however, did
not end the war; it started it, and the English, the French, but par¬
ticularly the Swedish, armies for thirty years, successfully fought the
Catholic monarchs of Europe. For the defeated Czechs, the
prolonged war was a source of hope that the Catholics would in the
end lose and the Kingdom of Bohemia would regain its indepen¬
dence. Bocan’s film is a microscopic picture of that macrocosm; it
tells the story of a poor Czech nobleman, who is contacted by two
emissaries of the Czech Exiles. They try to persuade him to arm his
subjects and rise against the Habsburgs, promising that the Czech
uprising will be synchronized with an offensive of the Protestant
Armies in the West. The lord finally agrees—but at that moment
the news arrives of the peace treaty which ended the thirty years
of hostilities, and according to which the Kingdom of Bohemia
remained a vassal of the Habsburg monarchy. But the knight has
decided and will not withdraw: abandoned by all at home and
abroad, he leads his sorry troops to fight the Habsburg Empire.
The film was completed in the summer of 1968, before the In¬
vasion. Bocan cannot help the malicious interpretations to which it
is now subjected. His next film was to be a Schweikian comedy
based on my novel, The Tank Corps. The publication of the novel
written in 1955 was several times rejected, postponed, and set aside;
a few excerpts from it appeared, and a shortened version was read
on the radio in 1968, by Miroslav Horniček. In the fall of 1969 it
was finally set, corrected and prepared for publication, and then
once again postponed, this time indefinitely. So far it has only been
published by Gallimard in Paris, and so unless Bocan goes and
makes the film there.. ..

Somewhat apart from the New Wave stands its immediate pre¬
decessor and brilliant fellow-traveller, František Vlacil. Age-wise,
he belongs to the generation before the New Wave (born 1924), and
unlike most others (except Eister Krumbachova and Jaroslav
Papoušek) he did not attend the Prague Film Academy. He studied
aesthetics and the history of art in Brno. In the fifties, he got into film
and collaborated on a large number of puppet and popular science
films. Beneath the popular scientist lived an aesthetician, who finally
came to the surface in 1960 with a film called The Dove. It was a
208
 František Vláčil

visual poem heavily dependent on various Western formal influen¬

ces, but in the Czech context which, except for Radok’s The Long
Journey and Jires’ short The Hall of the Lost Footsteps, was totally
devoid of that type of film, it appeared highly innovative. Vlacil
made the film in accordance with Chytilova’s maxim, “If form¬
alism—then beautiful”, and was protected from the wrath of the
vigilantes-against-incomprehensibility by the fact that the symbol of
the peace dove, popularized by Picasso, was understood by every¬
body. With his next feature, The Devil’s Trap (1961), he even
gained support from the sombre overseers, mainly because this time
they really misunderstood him. A simple miller from the “time of
darkness”, i.e. counter-reformation, uses his own findings gained by
the study of nature to fight against clerical dogmatism as it was pro¬
claimed by the disciplined and well-organized Jesuits. Formally it
was a very sombre film, and the parallel to the other, more contem¬
porary dogmatism, was still somewhat timid. But the motif of anti¬
dogmatism remained in Vlacil’s work and later he twice returned to
it. After The Devil’s Trap, the aesthetician and art historian once
again came into prominence. He tackled a historical novel of
momentuous importance in the history of Czech literature. In the
genre, which was up till that time filled with “patriotic” historical
portrayals, this was the first “non-ideological” story, thoroughly
permeated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. It was written by the
Communist writer and one of the first director-artists of Czech film,
Vladislav Vančura, and it was called Markéta Lazarova.
209
The shooting of The Devil’s Trap: “the parallel to a more contemporary
dogmatism

Vlacil’s struggle with Markéta lasted some four years, and it

almost killed him. At the beginning he was thinking of a two-part
film, but then as if seized by the same madness as his medieval high¬
waymen, he shot endless miles of footage; the film swallowed
millions, and it began to look like four parts instead of two.’ Vlacil
deteriorated, reinforced himself with alcohol, and broke down; he
turned into a bearded skeleton. With similar vengeance he began
editing, and he cut and cut until he ended up with two parts con¬
sisting of the most beautiful and wild spectacle in all of Czech
cinema. Its only equivalent might be found in the early superfilms
of D. W. Griffith, or Bergman’s Seventh Seal, (and in my own
opinion in Fellini’s Satyricon).
It is the story of a family of highwaymen who in the twelfth cen¬
tury revolted against God and the King; the cruel action of the film
suffused Christianity with the remnants of pagan ritual, with un¬
restrained love and, even more uninhibited, death. The fiery beauty
of Vancura’s narrative was not always translatable into visual
imagery, and the film arose, like a phoenix, from a gigantic editorial
undertaking; this is why it consists of a progression of barbarously
independent sequences, each preambled by commentaries from

Markéta Lazarova: “no ideology, or even ‘an idea' in the literary sense.

.. .but simply the most perfect evocation of the Middle Ages”.

210
Antonin Prazak in Vlacil’s Valley of the Bees: a 13th century crusader discovers
unpleasant contradictions between the dogmas of his order and real life.

Vancura’s text (which one American reviewer took for fragments ot

a medieval legend). It has no ideology, or even “idea” in the literary
sense. It is simply the most perfect evocation of the Middle Ages
ever achieved in Czech film: a four-hour-long intense revitalization
of a long forgotten age; herein lies the film’s sole purpose.
It cost an incredible amount of money and, as a malicious
Barrandov rumour has it, Vlacil had to make another “medieval”
film to pay for the cost of costumes and buildings. However, in the
Valley of Bees (1968), Vlacil returned to the motif of The Devil’s
Trap which he this time utilized in the story of a thirteenth-century
crusader who discovers unpleasant contradictions between the
dogmas of his religious order and real life. Meditations on a similar
theme save Vlacil’s last film, Adelheid (1970), from triteness; in it a
demobilized officer of the World War II Czech Army in Britain falls
in love with a daughter of a Nazi war criminal; the story also con¬
tains murder and suicide. The trademark of Vlacil’s art is that he
did not reduce this potential banality to a soap-opera.

Somewhere here the so-called New Wave ends. A few names could
be added, but they either stopped producing after promising debuts,
or they failed to live up to the expectations. Among those we might
name, Cestmir Mlikovsky, who after a fairly original, although not
overly successful, Cucumber Hero (1963), quit film altogether and
became a custodian at a castle in Southern Bohemia; Miroslav On-
212
Adelheid: a potential soap-opera, saved by
Via oil’s art.
\
Juraj Herz in The Lame Devil

draček, who first directed a charming medium-length Slippers

(1962) and then after a feature experiment, The Final Stretch
(1962), in which he combined the style of reportage with drama,
went into television; or Zdenek Sirovy who has so far produced a
poetic short feature The Boy and the Roe, followed by a flop called
The Dealers (1963) and an average psychological drama The Fin¬
nish Knife (1965), and whose latest film Funeral Rites was banned
by the censors in the spring of 1970.
A director who certainly belongs to the New Wave although he
has so far directed only short documentaries, is Karel Vachek. His
Moravian Hellas (1963) unmasked the fraudulent hocus-pocus
surrounding folklore so ruthlessly, that it shocked even a number of
the supporters of the New Wave. It was fully defended only by
Zbyněk Brynych (“I admire that bomb-attack”) and by Jiri Menzel,
who refuted the objection that Vachek mocked the folkloristic con-
men with excessive cruelty by saying, “I am all in favour of fair
play, but only with fair people.” In 1968, Karel Vachek authored
another bomb attack: a head-long, completely unadorned, but all
the more convincing documentary about the democratic revolution
of Czechoslovakian socialism called Related through Choice.
Finally one ought to include Juraj Herz (another one of those who
213
did not attend the Prague Film Academy), although he himself says,
“I cannot say that I have the sense of belonging to the Wave, I
rather feel that I am at one with certain individuals—with Jires, or
Schorm, but not with the Wave.” Nevertheless, Herz participated in
the Wave’s Manifesto, The Pearls in the Abyss and, like Menzel and
Forman, co-operated closely with the Semafor theatre. After the
socially-critical detective story, The Sign of the Crab (1967), which
pilloried anti-intellectualism then officially nurtured, he made,
directed and starred in (he looks a bit like Groucho Marx) a
musical revue, The Lame Devil (1968). His major contribution to
the film history of the blessed sixties is the macabre The Cremator of
Corpses (1969), made after a novel by Ladislav Fuks. It is a phan-
tasmically deranged tale of a man who having been impressed by
National Socialism decides to increase the productivity of the
crematorium where he works. The film is made in a grotesquely
horrific style which brings back memories of The Cabinet of Doctor
Caligari. Together with Schorm’s End of a Priest and Jasny’s The
Countrymen, The Cremator of Corpses was the best attended
art film of the post-invasion year. For the time being, Herz seems
to be the only one of the New Wave directors who, though he
remains in Prague, is allowed to make films. The price, of course is
the well known Time Machine, heading for the past. After Sweet
Games of Last Summer (1970) based on Maupassant’s story The
Little Fly, he is now working on The Kerosene Lamps from a novel
written in 1935 by Jaroslav Havlicek. This remarkable writer cer¬
tainly was not a model of socialist realism: other -isms, like
psychologism, naturalism and a predilection for decadent themes,
all of them pejorative in the socialist realist vocabulary, are better
applicable to his^work. But he has one advantage. He has been
safely dead since 1943 and did not get himself involved in any
counter-revolutionary nonsense, such as the New Wave.

Juraj Herz starring in his own The Lame Devil.

Herz’s The Cremator of Corpses: “I feel that I am at one with certain individuals
- with Jires and Schorm, but not with the Wave ”

214
4/A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTISTS AS MIDDLE-AGED MEN

The young men and women of the New Wave carried out an
aesthetic-philosophical revolution in the Czech socialist cinema.
“The young fool”, that is how a middle-aged director, well known
in the West, spoke (in a private conversation) about Milos Forman’s
stubborn early efforts. The older man had always played it safe with
the authorities and now he wanted to make Milos co-script a mildly
anti-war scenario which would be acceptable to the Czech
ideological supervisors, and yet remain saleable to the Western
merchants of fashionable film topics. Milos refused. Revolution¬
aries, however, have always appeared as fools to members ot
establishments, the stalinist establishment being no exception.
Yet these fools set new standards at Barrandov, in view of which it
was not only no longer possible to survive on uninspired hack-work
but not even on the traditional craftsmanship. The Wave over¬
shadowed even such solid middle-aged artists as Jiri Weiss or Jiri
Krejcik; it forced the old pioneer Otakar Vavra* into a new creative
upsurge, which resulted in the films The Romance for the
Fluegelhorn and The Hammer Against Witches. It also inspired
several middle-aged men to become better directors than they
possibly might have been without the competition.
Above all there is the somewhat enigmatic Zbyněk Brynych, the
author of some of the best and some of the worst films of the sixties.
The critics explain the unbelievable vacillation by his “never ending
searching”; I tend to believe that it is rather the result of Brynych’s
nature, which he himself did not always respect.
He produced several total disasters: an imbecile attempt at a
screwball comedy, Every Crown Counts (1961), a somewhat sick¬
ening flirtation with the socially-critical trend, Don’t Hide When It
Rains (1961), and an embarrassing attempt at a parody of James
*Some of his overly talented pupils finally cost Vavra his job. One of the foreign
students at the Department of Direction of the Film Academy reportedly made in
1970 a thesis hint called The Unwanted Guest. The story goes as follows: an unin¬
vited guest suddenly moves into a household occupied by a newlywed couple, and
refuses to leave. He shares their table, and even sits by their bed observing them. The
newlyweds timidly suggest that he might want to go home, but the goodnatured guest
encourages them not to pay any attention to him and carry on as if they were alone;
he doesn't mind it in the least. The film was seen by an informer, and the students
were investigated by the Secret Police. As the director was a foreigner paying in hard
currency, old Mr. Vavra was selected for the scapegoat. Although the circumspect ar¬
tist publicly proclaimed himself in support of the new Barrandov leadership, the
Ministry of Culture, the Party, and the Nation, he was nonetheless fired from his
position of Chairman of the Film Academy—the school whose founding he proposed
in I 939, whose guidelines he secret ly worked out during the Nazi occupation, which
he founded in 1947, and where he brought up all those clever artists.

216
 Zbyněk Brynych directing

Bond movies called Transit Carlsbad (1966); (with reference to the

last film it should be mentioned how peculiar it was to expect an
audience to appreciate a parody, since no James Bond movie was
ever shown in Czechoslovakia). Had Brynych only made films of
that quality he probably would have been through filming by now.
If he had only made films like The Local Romance (1958), The
Spider’s Web (1959), or A Place in the Crowd (1964), which were
poetic studies of working class environment, or if he kept on pro¬
ducing good,albeit politically rather black and white, thrillers such
as The Skid (1960), or even continued with slightly Formanesque
comedies, Constellation of the Virgo (1965), he would belong to the
solid average film-makers, and even be patted on the back once in a
while. Since he also made I, The Justice (1968), the expressionistic
The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1964), and above all Transport from
Paradise (1962), he fully deserves to be counted among the impor¬
tant modern Czech directors.
Brynych’s best three films have two important common charac¬
teristics: they are all inspired by the Nazi period, and two of them
deal with its political principle—brutal dictatorship—on a general
and non-realistic level.
The least successful is I, The Justice, based on a novel by a good
Czech novelist of the older generation, Miroslav Hanuš. Hanus
217
I the Justice: “a strange anti-utopia”.

wrote the book during the Nazi era and published it after the war. It
is an unusual political fantasy: at the end of the war Adolf Hitler
does not die, but is kidnapped by a group of German officers who
realized that Nazism had been a crime against humanity. They con¬
demn Hitler to death, but they want to kill him slowly and painfully,
because only such death complies with their perverted ideas of
justice. As well as Hitler, they kidnap a Czech doctor, of whom they
demand the invention of some especially painful method of slow tor¬
ture. However the doctor is a humanitarian: he cannot reconcile
himself to the idea of repaying sadism with sadism, and he gives
Hitler an injection of a fast-acting poison.
At a first glance, this moralistic parable does not appear attrac¬
tive, but the film really isn’t bad: moreover, its central idea reflected
among other things the ideology of the unique Club 231, an
organization of released prisoners of the Stalinist era camps founded
in 1968, whose programme was in effect a reconciliation with their
former jailers. The cold, highly modernistic camera of this strange
218
Brynych’s The Fifth Horseman Is Fear: “I am convinced that fascism is an inter¬
national disease; its symptoms may be traced . . . even in our own country. ”

anti-utopia creates an unreal and oppressive atmosphere of a night¬

mare, and covers some of the naíveté of the plot by a suggestive
semi-darkness.
The same atmosphere, based on the creative camera work of the
cameraman Jan Kalis, is the prominent feature of The Fifth Horse¬
man Is Fear. The birth of this film is interesting. It was made from
the novel by Hana Belohradska (author of the screen-play for
Herz’s The Sign of the Crab) Without Beauty, Without a Collar.
The novel submits a realistic portrait of a Jewish family, in a coun¬
try which was forced to follow the Nuremberg Laws. The original
scenario written by Belohradska and Brynych, was also realistic.
They situated it in Prague, with typical Czech and Nazi characters.
Then Brynych got an idea, and with the help of Ester Krum-
bachova, he rewrote the scenario, eliminating all historically real¬
istic elements. The representatives of the totalitarian regime in the
film do not wear Nazi uniforms, the city is not Prague, and the im¬
punity of the Nazi public notices is exaggerated into a paradoxical
grotesque. (By a timely denunciation you are assuring your own
security.) Rather than achieving a simple condemnation of Nazism,
they managed to create a parable: a legend that attacks the disease
219
called Fascism, of which Brynych says, “I am convinced that it is an
international disease; its symptoms may be traced in countries other
than Germany; even in our own country.”*
The strictly controlled stylistic unity of this excellent film is
broken by a single inexplicably long sequence from a Nazi military
brothel. It first presents about twenty completely naked prostitutes
taking showers. The Prussian rigidity of the highly contrasting
camera, suddenly turns into an erotically evocative and lyrical
mellowness, which indulges in long caressing shots of wet breasts
and bottoms, After some time, the scene is invaded by German
soldiers in realistic uniforms, who have come to satisfy their needs
with the Jewish prostitutes (which in reality undoubtedly would
constitute a flagrant violation of the Nuremberg Laws). After this,
the film returns to its hallucinatory vision and strict stylization.
When I first saw the film in Prague, this rather nice, yet unfor¬
tunately quite illogical sequence was not included. Later I saw it
again in Toronto, and suddenly abracadabra, it was there. Then I
remembered Belohradska telling me once that a foreign distributor
wanted Brynych to shoot some additional footage, and I realized
that the naked bottoms were the contribution of Mr. Ponti, who had
*When the friendly tanks came, Brynych accepted offers from West Germany and in
1969-1971 directed six TV films and three feature films in the Bundesrepublik. Of
the TV films, two are serious work: Kafka's America and Remarque’s A Night in
Lisbon. The rest are parts of a crime-series. Oh, Happy Day!, the first of the three
feature films, is a psychological analysis of a teenager; Angels Who Burn Their Wings
tells a social-psychological story of tenants in a big apartment house, and The Little
Women is a horror film with an international cast. Maybe Brynych, the director of
Transport from Paradise and The Fifth Horseman Is Fear, will spend most of his
time in the near future as a successful entertainer of the West Germans. But he
probably won’t. The official Barrandov bulletin for the fall of 1970 announces that
Brynych will direct the first Czechoslovak 70mm superfilm Oasis, a psychological
story set in the African Desert during World War II. The gist of the story is a
conflict between groups of soldiers of the French Foreign Legion and Nazi troops.
It is to be shot on location, in the Republic of Mali. According to a Prague underground
story, Brynych negotiated this deal himself while still in West Germany, in order
to be able, upon his return to Prague, to leave immediately again for Africa.
Some recent political developments in Mali, however, endangered the project
and shattered completely Brynych's dream of spending the next year in the African
desert rather than Prague. But he wasn’t allowed even that: in repentance for his
West German kafkaesque sins he was forced to accept a commission and is now
shooting something somewhere in the deserts of Russian Asia This, of course, is
just a malicious underground yarn which reached these shores through channels
which—for obvious reasons—I cannot disclose. It may very well be that it is of the
category of tales the Good Soldier liked to tell under the picture of the Emperor,
desecrated by Mr. Palivec’s flies. But because the Bretschneiders—be their names
Kliment, Toman or otherwise—are so busily alive in Prague, Josef Schweik, too,
was risen from the dead. His stories, after all, even if sometimes they were utter
fiction, told the most profound truths about his times.

220
Transport from Paradise: “the combination of nightmare with semi-documentary
style”.

not been stimulated by the beauty queen of The Firemen’s Ball. I

hope he had a good time, this time.
Despite this absurd intermezzo it is a great film, full of intense
human situations in which death threatens all the protagonists. The
intensity of the situations is conveyed by equally intense means. The
expressionistic label is in this case quite appropriate, and Brynych
himselt accepts it. He said, “I have been criticized for being ex¬
pressionistic. I am. I don't deny it. I don’t believe that this style is
outdated.”
Strong expressionistic elements appear in Brynych’s best film,
Transport from Paradise. The combination of nightmare with a
documentary or semi-documentary style*, brings back the
memories of Radok’s Long Journey (although these are much
stronger in relation to The Fifth Horseman Is Fear). Both Brynych’s
and Radok’s films take place in the Terezin ghetto in Northern
Bohemia.
The result is a truly marvellous film—whole sequences give a
documentary impression, which elevates the urgency of the drama
*1 first encountered the idea of an artificial documentary when I began writing with
Forman one of his unrealized scenarios. It was to be a film about the tragedy of
Lidice (a village which was totally destroyed by the Nazis, and whose male citizens
were all murdered). Milos wanted to shoot the film in 16mm, with a hand-held
camera, and then blow up the print to 35mm to get the impression of an old newsreel.
This was sometime in I960, and we never did complete the screen-play.
221
written by a witness of the Nazi purgatory, Arnošt Lustig ?The
action captures one of the maddest periods of Terezin’s history—
the time when the Nazis expected a visit of the International Red
Cross Committee. For a short while, the inmates of the ghetto were
permitted or rather forced to play and attend soccer matches,
promenade along Terezin’s main street and visit a café which even
featured The Ghetto Swingers, a Jewish swing band. (One of its
members, Erich Vogel, survived and is now an American Jazz
critic.) The minute the Red Cross leaves, the party is naturally
over, and the Nazi commandant orders the Council of Jewish
Elders to compile a list of people who will be transported from
the Terezin “paradise” to the Auschwitz hell. The Head of the
Council, an aged scholar, refuses to participate in the selection
of his own people for the slaughter-house, and is himself included
in the transport. The film ends with an unforgettable scene, during
which the victims of this unfathomable dehumanization of
civilization line up to await the embarkation towards death.
Despite all his vicissitudes and failures, Brynych is a serious
artist—serious in every sense of the word. He has something to say,
and what he has to say is not meaningless. He tried to be humourous
and failed. He attempted to be mildly entertaining and failed again.
His power lies in tragedy. It is no meagre power and has its place

*This excellent writer, having been traumatized by his youthful Auschwitz

experiences, tried for a long time to play it safe with the authorities (who had
similar establishments at their disposal), and carefully avoided contemporary
themes. But in 1968, when a Slovak writer, with obvious antisemitism and dis¬
carding the essential difference between battlefield casualties and old women and
children murdered in concentration camps, commented that “Jews were not the
only ones who died in the war; there were also our soldiers”, the writer finally
came out of his hiding. In a brilliant article in the Writers’ Union weekly he defended
the case of the Jews, arguing in mostly unpolitical and purely humanist terms
and disclaiming any allegiance to Zionism. After the Invasion, Lustig, a typically
Czech Jewish boy from Prague, whose jewishness is of that special brand that
was represented by Hugo Haas and by Mr. Naceradec, (the character Haas so
masterfully embodied in Men Off-Side, see page 19) fled the country for Israel,
with his wife and two children. Soon, however, he left the Jewish state—a Prague
underground anecdote nas it tnat ne did so because in the strictly religious
community he was not able to get pork and dumplings with sauerkraut, his
favourite food and also the Czech national dish. He went to Yugoslavia, where he
took part in a Writers’ Conference. The Prague underground joke was then
surpassed by an article in the stalinist press; according to it, Lustig finally
revealed his true character—which is that of an Israeli spy—by appearing in
Belgrade in the uniform of an Israeli Army officer. The alleged uniform, however,
was an old battledress which Lustig, short both of money and warm clothing
after his escape from Prague, purchased in Haifa in a second-hand dealer’s shop.
In the same battered battledress he, Ahasver-like, arrived in 1970 at Iowa City
where he is currently a member of Paul Engle’s International Writing Programme.

222
Kadar (right) and Klos (left).

in the context ot Czech art, because its moral values are absolute.

The works of Kadar and Klos, the makers of The Shop on Main
Street, the first Czech film ever to receive an Oscar, is not as varie¬
gated as that of Brynych; they never reached Brynych’s lows but,
despite the Oscar, they probably never reached the level of Trans¬
port from Paradise either. They worked together from 1952 (The
Hijacking) till 1969 (Adrift: released 1971). Before and after that,
Kadar made one film on his own; the older Klos had written screen¬
plays and worked in film since Vancura’s times. The duo belongs to
the generation of artists who began directing in the early fifties, were
always highly above the average, and after the New Wave’s
aesthetic revolution were stimulated towards the creation of their
best works. Kadar and Klos are above all excellent craftsmen, who
are careful to select material of topical and temporal significance.
They term their approach to the medium as “film-discussion”:
usually it is simply called cinéma engagé.
One could not describe them as formal experimentors; theirs is
a more or less traditional narrative method, although they obviously
like the modern camera approach. Also one would be hard pressed
223
 to find in their work traces of neo-realism, cinema vérité or of ex-
pressionistic vision. Indeed they do not rely on purely cinematic
elements, but rather on “a good story well told”, and often base
their films on plays or prose work.
Kadar began his directorial career earlier: he made his first film,
the comedy Cathy, in 1950. It was a propagandistic film, tributary
to the socialist-realistic explosion of that time; the story of a young
village girl who goes to the city to work in a factory and under the
influence of the workers gradually—or rather rapidly—changes
from a primitive villager into an energetic builder of socialism.
However, the film for some reason survived in the memories of the
audiences. It must have had some freshness, a flash of more than
just propagandistic truth, maybe a glimpse of art. The collaboration
of Vratislav Blažek on the scenario may have contributed to the
success or the presence of a charming new actress, Božena Obrova.
Anyway, the fact remains that the film was one of the few products
of the early socialist-realistic school which did not make one’s hands
ache.*
In 1952 Kadar for the first time collaborated with Klos; the result
of this first common effort was far more dubious than Cathy. The
Hijacking was one of those shallow and malicious films, where the
authors pretended that everything in the world is either black or
white, or that anyone who for any reason opposed anything that was
going on in Czechoslovakia at that time (the year of the Slansky
trial), was a traitor—unless he finally repented and accepted the
whole and indivisible truth. Desperadoes hijack a Czechoslovakian
plane to West Germany and its passengers are subsequently submit¬
ted to furious inducement, and even blackmail, on the part of the
American and West German officials, to stay in the West. The
passengers are predominantly class-conscious people, who demand
permission to return, which is finally granted. There are a few
wavering characters but, if I remember correctly, only one of them
succumbs to the temptations: a young zoot-suited type with a jazz
trumpet. He wavers for a long time until he hears the music of an
American swing band playing in a nearby restaurant, and decides
* And yet this—if my memory does not fail me entirely—perfectly sweet film
did not meet with too much official enthusiasm. Shortly after it was finished,
the government decided that it was bad policy to advise villagers to move into
towns and become factory workers. The curious logic of those in power held Kadar
responsible for disregarding this new order although it was given only after
Cathy was ready for distribution. As a result of this and other crimes the Slovak
Jew, Kadar, had to leave Slovakia for Prague, and thus became a “Czech" director.
224
 to betray his country for the sounds of swing. One can detect the
motifs of the ex-capitalist secretly indulging in Count Basie, while
the proper young proletarian vigorously whoops it up to the sound
of a dulcimer. At that time of course jazz meant “many things”
besides music, but it there was one connotation that its young af-
ficionados did not assign to it then, it was capitalism.
Both the authors were highly praised for The Hijacking, but only
after an intervention from the old veteran of the very old glorious
days of early Soviet cinema, Vselovod Pudovkin. Before he came
to their rescue, when they approached him in despair, they were
subjected to sharp behind-the-screens attacks from the Party
even for this very subservient Black-and-White-Sylva of a tale.
The official logic, which in this case escapes me entirely, had it
that some scenes in the very red thriller were “bourgeois-
objectivistic”. If it were not for the angel Pudovkin, Kadar
might have been forced to leave Bohemia for—well, Moravia?
There is little film industry in Moravia, mostly animated films.
And Kadar would hardly have been able to make Shop on Main
Street with puppets.
Anyway, the two near-culprits joined forces again with the
dubious Vratislav Blažek and produced what they hoped not only
the people but even the most equal among the more equals would
like: a musical comedy Music from Mars (1964). If one recalls the
*

jazz-motivated traitor from The Hijacking, this film appears almost

as a repentance on the part of the directors. Not only does its title
hint at memories of one of the biggest Czech hits of the swing era,
the foxtrot Music from Mars by Kamil Behounek (who actually left
the country after the takeover to escape the pogroms on jazz), but
one could, for the first time in years, detect in this rather feeble tale
about the troubles of a factory band a few timid and very con¬
voluted, but nevertheless syncopated, songs. But before the
musical was released some industrious official soul came to the
conclusion that the slightly comical hero, a factory director, was
in fact an indirect, and therefore particularly dangerous, attack
on the most equal among the more equals. All publicity for the
premiere was stopped overnight, and it took complicated behind-
the screen diplomacy before the film was released. It had, of
course, a very successful run, although the audiences did not
recognize the cloaked insults of the Highest Comrades.
Next, the two directors dared a psychological drama, At the
225
 sSk -f \li|
li n _ 1 iiTt-M HU i» mb

The Accused- “a warped Antigone theme that unpleasantly touched upon the
basic logical contradiction of the Stalinist justice”.

Terminal Station (1957), which included a suicide attempt. Sur¬

prisingly enough, all was quiet on the Party front: the film did
not include any “public” problems and remained fully in the
sphere of individual love troubles which did not bother the
Central Committee. The real catastrophe erupted in 1958, when
they released The Third Wish. It became the main target of the
conference in Banska Bystrice, and brought both Kadar and Klos
a two-year suspension.
The pause stretched to five years and the couple’s next film did
not appear until 1963, when they made a guerilla epic based on
Ladislav Mnacko’s novel Death Calls Itself Engelchen*. It was an
excellent work, unsentimental and naturalistic to the point of
brutality, which portrayed the guerilla war during the Second
World War, in the Slovak mountains. Cinematically it is probably
their best work.
In 1964 they produced the best example of what they call a
*Mnacko, the enfant terrible of Slovak literature, parted with Novotny’s political
system at the time of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He wrote a novel called The Taste of
Power, which was published in several Western countries, and went to Israel, to
return only during Dubcek's era. After the Invasion, this old partisan and Communist
(well known for his correspondence with Rolf Hochhut, the author of The Deputy, in
which he defended the concept of communist socialism in a style similar to Rollouts’
polemic with Grass), left the country.

Ida Kaminska in Shop on Main Street.

Shop on Main Street: a recreation of the atmosphere of the fascist Slovak state.

226
“film-discussion”: it was a court-room drama called The Accused,
traditionally conceived with an untraditional plot, based on a
screen-play by Vladimir Valenta.* Most interesting is a thematic
comparison with the socialist-realistic approach. An indoctrinated
and selfless power station manager is brought to trial tor paying
bonuses and extra wages to rebellious workers, although he was not
authorized to do so. During the procedings, it becomes increasingly
evident that the director committed the financial “misdemeanours”
quite unselfishly and in a higher interest, in order to complete the
construction of a large new power plant and thus save the country
millions of crowns. The Court “plays a smart game” and gives the
accused a light suspended jail sentence. The accused, however, finds
himself not guilty and refuses to accept the sentence; he demands a
new trial and complete exoneration.
Evidently a warped Antigone theme, a work that touched un¬
pleasantly upon the basic logical contradition of the stalinist justice,
which in “higher interests” often neglected the law. This however,
was tolerated only when the “higher” interest was approved by the
“higher” places—and the accused manager, deserted by the higher
places, who originally promised to back him, acted entirely accord¬
ing to his conscience.
Shop on Main Street (1965) is a combination of an excellent
theme (a novel by Ladislav Grosman), screen-play, outstanding
actors, intimate knowledge of the environment, and a passionate
involvement with the artistic questions submitted by the form. All
of these elements are chiseled into a classical shape by the great
experience of the authors, who managed—like Vlacil in Markéta
Lazarova—to revive the past. They created the atmosphere of the
historical nightmare in the independent fascist Slovak State, which
*The name of this screen-play writer is connected with several important Czech films,
all of which in one way or another contradicted the official trend. He began with the
scenario to the “existential" Conscience (1949), directed by Jiri Krejcik. He spent the
next few years in a concentration camp, as one of the victims of “the personality cult”,
and returned to film by collaborating with Vojtech Jasny on the screen-play for
Desire (1958). The public knows him as a character actor. Among his parts are the
pigeon-raising station master from Closely Watched Trains, the police chief from The
Crime in the Night-Club, and the farmer from the End of a Priest. He in currently
working in Canada as an actor (CBC-TV series “Manipulators”: as guest star
in Nobody Business, 1970; in Promised Land, directed by René Bonniěre, 1970)
and screen-writer (And the Son, directed by Raymond Garceau, with the star of the
Magic Lantern, Maruška Stankova, in the leading role, 1971; Truckdriver, directed
by Bill Reid, 1971).

Vladimir Valenta as the station master in Closely Watched Trains

228
Landed immigrant Valenta in CBC’s Nobody’s Business Karel Kachyna directing

in the years between 1939 and 1945 reproduced a gruesomely

grotesque miniature of the apocalypse of the Third Reich.
In 1968-69, Kadar and Klos made Adrift, a Czech-American
co-production after a novel by the Hungarian novelists Lajos
Zilaly, with American, Czech, Yugoslavian and Hungarian actors.
Such a motley cosmopolitan mixtures had never been success¬
fully handled by any Czech director, since the time of Gustav
Machaty, however, the film is surprisingly good, especially if one
considers that the shooting had to be interrupted for almost a year
due to the coming of the tanks and Kadar’s subsequent departure
for the United States where he used Bernard Malamud’s story to
shoot The Angel Levine (1970). I am afraid that in this film he has
met with about as much American success as the maker of Extasy.

In the summer of 1971 Kadar decided not to return home. In

Prague, in the meantime, his magnum opus, Shop on Main
Street, has been labelled “zionist” by some and so it would be
hard to expect that the anti-zionist Government of today’s
Czechoslovakia would have any work for a dirty Jew. The logic
of subservient minds has, however, turned another interesting
somersault: if Shop on Main Street is zionist propaganda then
230
what stands in the way of a rehabilitation of Parteigenosse, Veit
Harlan s magnum opus The Jew Siiss? Kadar is currently preparing
Lies My Father Told Me to be shot in Montreal from a script by
Canadian Ted Allen, with Zero Mostel in the lead.

Yet another couple created an interesting middle-aged parallel to the

efforts of the New Wave. Only one of them is a director; he is Karel
Kachyna, one of the first graduates of the Prague Film Academy. In
the fifties he collaborated with Vojtech Jasny. In 1954, he co¬
directed a military-espionage thriller Everything Ends Tonight
(which is probably the best film of this genre made in the first half of
the fifties), and he gave the impression that he was going to
specialize in adventure movies—(The King of the Bohemian Forest,
1969). Then he met Jan Procházka, an amazing adventurer of the
Czech cinema, literature and finally even of politics, whose rise
and fall borders on the incredible. Together they made a few films
which deserve to be called artistic, with a capital A.
Jan Procházka appeared from nowhere at the end of the fifties
and, as a protegé of President Novotny, he quickly made his way
not only into film, but also into the top echelons of the political
hierarchy, until he became a candidate member of the Central
Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party. It is not
known why Novotny, who had a phobia towards intellectuals, took a
liking to him. According to one version of the story, he originally
confused him with another Procházka (which is one of the Czech
equivalents of Smith or Jones); this would indeed be in the tradition
of Good Soldier Schweik. Another version has it that Procházka
was delegated to a congress of Communist Youth, where he at¬
tacked an important official, not knowing that Novotny himself was
getting ready to liquidate the wretched comrade. In the middle of
Prochazka’s philippic, Novotny entered the hall, listened to the
speech and, when it ended, kissed Procházka on both cheeks in front
of the whole audience: this is how Procházka received the attribute
which distinguished him from other Prochazkas: Jan Procházka
P P , (President’s Pet).
It probably is a folk legend. The fact remains that, under
Novotny, Procházka really “made it”. I don’t know whether he took
part in the regular Thursday card games at the Castle, which were
allegedly Novotny’s substitute for the philosophical meetings
with writers given before World War II by the first Czechoslo-
231
vakian president, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, every Friday. Any¬
way Novotny was the godfather, or rather the atheist substitute
for god-father, of Prochazka’s daughter, and Procházka himself
produced what might be the most remarkable work of political
servility in modern Czech history. Fie wrote a feuilleton about an
afternoon spent at the President’s summer estate in Lany, in
which he not only described the head of state as a walker with the
endurance of a marathon champion, but also as a captivating
intellectual orator. Novotny might have been a walker, but he
will always remain in the memory of the people as being, among
other things, one of the most stammering deliverers of typed-out
speeches who, on the few occasions when he tried to improvise
a speech, turned into a national joke. After this journalistic coup,
someone coined the following proverb: “Like Masaryk, like
Capek.” To understand its meaning one has to remember that
the important pre-war Czech author Karel Capek (The War with
the Newts, R. U. R., English Letters, etc.), following the example
of Boswell or Eckermann, wrote a book about his meetings with
the first Czech President, called Discussions with Masaryk.
Yet this man, who bore all the signs of a political brigand, was
also an interesting, and sometimes outstanding artist. His output and
general ability were amazing. After some very ordinary comical
scenarios (Bitter Love, 1958, The Wandering Cannon, 1959) he en¬
tered the literary scene with the novel The Green Horizons (1960),
and the decade of the New Wave with a film People Just Like You
(1960). This movie about foundry workers was kind of a swan-song
of socialist realism. From then on, year after year, throughout the
decade, he spouted novels, short stories, film scripts, feuilletons, and
political essays as if he knew that his time was short.
Simultaneously, he managed to head one of Barrandov's production
units, sit on the Party’s Central Committee and later to preside
over the Writer’s Union. There were years when up to six films
would be made from his screen-plays (1963), and relatively little of
that multiproduction turned out to be completely trashy. In 1961 he
joined forces with Karel Kachyna, and through this collaboration
both of them produced their best works: the magically lyrical and
thoroughly Czech Worries (1961), the impudent “anniversary” film
Long Live the Republic! (1965), the beautifully macabre The
Coach to Vienna (1966), and the formalistic study of a very realistic

232
The star of Valenta’s first Canadian screenplay Et du fils is Maruška
Stankova, the girl from Radok’s Magic Lantern.

affair The Night of the Bride (1967) about the class struggle in the
village.
The President probably really enjoyed Prochazka’s first films: the
one about the collective farmers (The Green Horizons, made in
1962 by Ivo Novak, the director of Forman’s Puppies), the love
story from the Spartakiada* (Waltz for a Million, director Josef-
Mach, 1960), and especially the one about the three generations of
steel-mill workers dedicated to the Twelfth Congress of the Com¬
munist Party (The Black Dynasty, director Stepan Skalsky, 1962).
He certainly enjoyed the one about the anti-Batista Cuban “bar-
budos” (For Whom Havana Dances, directed by Vladimir Cech in
Czech-Cuban co-production); he probably liked the one about the
passionately enamoured co-operative farm girl (Vertigo, director
Karel Kachyna, 1963), and he may have even found some merits in
the one about the hooligan, positively influenced by a collective of
workers (On the Tight Rope, director Ivo Novak, 1963), although
the last opus had a little too much drinking and womanizing, and it
also was a bit too formalistic. The Head of State probably didn’t

*The Spartakiada is a nation-wide gymnastic event, which culminates in a mass

exhibition in Prague.

233
Long Live the Republic!: The president, for the first time, hit the ceiling. When the same tanks appear
again in Marathon, the president was no longer a president and his protege was the chief counterrevolutionar

care too much for Hope (director Kachyna, 1963), a love story of a
whore and an alcoholic, framed in an appropriate frame of “A
Great Socialist Construction Project”, or the mildly morbid The
High Wall (Kachyna, 1964), in which the eleven-year-old Jitka
goes to visit a sick youngster, who is separated from the world by
the hospital wall. But after all, the President still remembered
Worries, for which he gave Procházka and Kachyna the State Prize
for 1963; this was a delicate story about the affection of an
adolescent girl for a beautiful horse, and it was set in the amiably
melancholic countryside of Southern Bohemia. The President was
therefore evidently prepared to tolerate many of his protégé’s un¬
dertakings, but in 1965 when Kachyna and Procházka celebrated
the twentieth anniversary of the nation’s liberation by making the
two-part Long Live the Republic!,the President, for the first time in
relation to his favourite, hit the ceiling.
Procházka and Kachyna carefully observed the New Wave and
the formal experimentation going on in the West; first they produced
a cultivated combination of the new methods with the required en¬
vironment and optimistic conclusions, and from there they gradually
worked towards a sense of tragedy, which smacked of pessimism.
234
The enthusiastically political title of Long Live the Republic! at first
glance promised a dignified proclamation celebrating the rounded
anniversary—but instead even the President must have realized the
irony inherent in the title. The film presented a psychological drama
of a child in whose mind the term “liberation” was forever connec¬
ted with images of hoarding and sadism.
Procházka, who despite everything remained the President’s
protege, began to play the part of the film-makers' “fifth column”,
or Barrandov’s “our man” at the Castle. Whenever the President
climbed the walls or chewed the carpets, up came
Procházka—sometimes with considerable effort—to help him down
or prop him up, whatever the situation required. As far as I know,
he acted the role of the good Samaritan for The Party and the
Guests, in which Mr. Vyskočil so unfortunately resembled Lenin.
He may have also intervened on behalf of Daisies, which Deputy
Jack-in-the-Box so poignantly pointed out to the Ministers of
Agriculture and Interior. He managed to placate the President over
the issue of Long Live the Republic! too, but his credit at the Castle
started to diminish soon after this and his usefulness to the film¬
makers became questionable.
The Coach to Vienna (1966) was probably the couple’s best film:
it is a cultured study of human reactions under the most extreme
conditions. Two German deserters force a peasant woman, whose
husband was killed by the Nazis, to take them to Vienna. The
woman first wants to kill the deserters with an axe, but then one of
them makes love to her, and she changes her mind. The group is
ambushed by partisans who brutally murder the woman’s new
lover. The crime novel compression of the improbable turn-abouts
of emotions and plot was neutralized by Kachyna’s brilliant direc¬
tion, and by the equally excellent, almost spectral, camera. It was
probably that which facilitated the recognition that this essentially
realistic drama was an attempt at a “synthesis of all wars, which this
world ever experienced” (Czeslav Michalski).
It is difficult to expect, however, that such syntheses should be
understood by politicians. The film did not contain much criticism
of the Nazis; this was contrary to the norm applied to the war genre.
The partisan who brutally finished oft the wounded deserter said,
“No point in letting him suffer. After all we aren’t Nazis, are we?"

235
Funny Man - Prochazka’s bitter good-bye to life.

This sounded even more ironical than the title of the anniversary
film.
In 1967, the two of them came up with another contemplation of
a decisive moment in history: in The Night of the Bride, they treated
the more or less compulsory collectivization of the countryside. In
an almost gluttonous exploitation of magical photography, the film
sets some great hatreds against each other: the rich peasant stands
against the village pauper, while the religious fanatic (“Christ’s
bride”) despises the Party officials and vice versa—yet no one
seems to be judged. All the characters are victims of the
times—chessmen moved by uncontrollable passions. This of course
was the case in real life, but only seldom since Sholokhov’s The
Quiet Don has the truth been presented in such an unexpurgated
fashion. The distance covered by Procházka and Kachyna since The
Green Horizons was indeed astronomical.
To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Communist
takeover the National Film Corporation opened a prize competi-

236
tion, and Procházka submitted a scenario. For reasons beyond my
knowledge, it was not made by Kachyna, but by Ivo Novak, who
was Procházka s collaborator on two earlier ventures. Marathon
turned out to be an incredibly melodramatic and expensive kitsch
about the liberation of Prague by the Red Army*, crowded with
Distinguished Artists, portraying Soviet Generals, and awkwardly
imitating the bathos of the Russian language. At least one armored
division must have participated in the film: upon seeing the movie
one could not avoid remembering Schorm’s assessment of the belief
that “any nonsense... turns into a work of art... if it employs only
trained Distinguished Artists".
It is doubtful whether Mr. President ever got to see this superfilm.
As a matter of fact, very few people ever got to see it because, ex¬
cept for a private premiere at Barrandov (where I was present), the
film as far as I know, was never released. To show on the screen the
arrival of Russian tanks after the arrival of Russian tanks could
have seriously endangered the projection equipment.t
The second historical arrival of Russian tanks ended Prochazka’s
career. For a few months after the Invasion, he stubbornly persisted
in publishing anti-invasionary articles in youth magazines. Earlier
he had gotten very deeply involved in Dubcek’s cause, and his
journalistic career marked a new high in a panegyric article on T.
G. Masaryk—another astronomical distance covered from the
eulogy on Novotny. Together with Kachyna they managed to com¬
plete their two last films: a comedy Christmas with Elizabeth, 1968,
and a strange, neurotic nightmarish story about a mortally ill patient
recovering after a complicated heart surgery. In this depressing
drama Funny Man (1969) the patient, suffering from nightmares

*The nature of the plot was as follows: one brother arrives in Prague as a soldier of
the Red Army only to find his younger brother, who stayed home, shot during the last
moments of the war by the SS. The beautiful maid, Jana Brejchova, went the same
way.

tAccording to the official Czechoslovak Film 1945-1970, Marathon, after all,

was released, on December 31, 1968. If this is correct, it must have been released
and shown exclusively outside Prague because at that time I was still there.
Anyway, the same source gives the figures for the number of spectators who saw
the film by December 31, 1969 as 94,035. To realize what a trifling audience this is
one has only to compare it with Jasny’s All Those Good Countrymen which,
though released more than half a year later (on July 7, 1969) reached, by December
31, 1969, 948,372 spectators. Even more illuminating are the data about Zdenek
Podskalsky’s The Men About Town, written by Vratislav Blažek. This swan song
of my old friend from Náchod was released as late as October 10, 1969, and yet by
the end of that same year it was seen by 827,464 people.

237
caused by several years in a Stalinist concentration camp, sees one
day a girl through the window of his hospital room. She is feeding
pigeons. The next day the girl fails to appear and the patient is ob¬
sessed with the idea that something has happened to her. He runs
away from the hospital, and with superhuman effort reaches the fifth
floor, knocks down the door, and indeed finds the girl dead. She has
committed suicide. The patient’s heart could not withstand the exer¬
tion of climbing the five flights of stairs and fails. The doctor, who
writes the death certificate, remembers that the dead man had a
daughter, who publicly disclaimed him after he had been sentenced
for “treason” during one of the political frame-up trials of the fifties.
The “traitor” was later fully rehabilitated and the daughter com¬
mitted suicide.

After Dubcek’s removal, Procházka was among the main targets of

the ideological fire. He became the subject of an extremely dirty in¬
trigue which, although it is probably unprecedented, should not sur¬
prise anyone living in the present world. The secret police bugged
the apartment of the non-Communist university professor, Vaclav
Cerny, and from the tape thus obtained they fabricated a scan¬
dalous programme in which Procházka unflatteringly and in rather
obscene terms describes not only his past protector, but also the new
President, and all the leading personalities of the “Czechoslovakian
Spring”. Prefaced by an idiotic story that the tape “was sent to the
secret police by an unknown person from Paris” the impressively
edited “document” was broadcasted on Prague television. The
psychological consideration underlying this legal and constitutional
egregiousness is obvious: such a blatant transgression of a citizen’s
privacy cannot harm the secret police, because everybody hates it
anyway. It can only harm the popular image of an important and
militant representative of “socialism with a human face”*.
Procházka publicly protested—his letter must have been one of the
*The trick belongs to the same category as the one played on Marta Kubišova—the
singer who kissed Dubcek. A photograph (which was in fact a paste-up) circulated
through Prague, showing a naked couple making love. It was supposed to be Marta
and Dubcek (who is incidently a married man). The psychological intention was
once again elementary: the picture was supposed to elicit moral "indignation among
the common people who do not grant their saints the right of human lapses. The case
further presents an interesting example of “jurisprudence” in neo-stalinist Czecho¬
slovakia.
Marta Kubišova started a court action, but the court refused to hear the case
claiming that “the perpetrator was not apprehended". Marta then launched a new
case, this time against the director of the international concert agency Pragokoncert,

238
last published expressions ot dissent. (The reasons were again
clearly tactical: audiatur et altera pars, since the harm was done and
could not be undone.) In the letter he also apologized to the repre¬
sentatives, whom he had called on the tape “kind-hearted idiots”. It
was expected that after the disclosure he would be jailed, but in¬
stead he was taken to the hospital where he underwent a serious
operation. His last film, again directed by Kachyna, The Ear, fell
victim to the Big Ban of 1970. Procházka then died, in February
1971. Pavel Kohout spoke at the funeral, and although the police
closed the roads leading to the Kosire cemetery and tried to prevent
people from attending, a large crowd assembled, including the play¬
wright Vaclav Havel and such leaders of the Czechoslovak Spring
as Josef Smrkovsky and František Kriegel.
In Procházka departs a picturesque, but significant, figure of a va
banqne gambler and artist whom God endowed with art, but not
with self-criticism, or with prudence. Whoever may be judging him
will have to consider on the positive side—besides his considerable
literary achievement—at least three very important scripts:
Worries, The Coach to Vienna, and The Night of the Bride.

Every brief historical survey is necessarily unfair; it neglects certain

people who do not deserve to be neglected. In this book I have
omitted, for instance, such excellent directors of comedies as
Zdenek Podskalsky (Where the Devil Cannot Go, 1959, The
White Lady, 1965, The Men about Town, 1969), and Ladislav
Rychman (The Hop-Pickers, 1964, The Lady on the Tracks
1966). I realize that many underestimate comedies, and some
don’t even consider them art. I am not guilty of either of those
crimes, since I know how difficult they are to make and, after all,
four of my five feature films are comedies. But Czech comedy
would simply require a separate book, and it would necessarily
have to be very different from this one. The same is true of Czech

who showed the pictures to several people as an explanation as to why the agency
cannot represent Marta. At the trial the director of Pragokoncert testified that he
received the photographs “from an unknown anonymous person’ He was followed to
the witness stand hy Vaclav Neckar who told the director to his face what the latter
had told him. The discreet gentlement had confided to him that the pornographic pic¬
tures were provided by the “state authorities”.
After Neckar’s testimony the judge adjourned the case indefinitely. As tar as we
know the trial has so far not resumed; however soon after the first hearing Neckar
began to appear less and less frequently until he vanished trom the TV screens
altogether.
239
animated and puppet film, created and revolutionized by people
like Jiri Trnka, Hermina Tyrlova, Břetislav Pojar, Jiri Brdecka, and
many others; and of documentaries, made by Bruno Sefranka, Pavel
Hobl, Kurt Goldberger, the brothers Jiri and František Papoušek,
Vaclav Táborsky, and also by such feature film directors as Evald
Schorm and Jaromil Jires, often during their times of “difficulties”. I
would like to include all that—but ars longa, liber brevis.

240
5/THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

This then is the story of Czech* film as I saw it and partially lived it.
It would seem that the decade ot the New Wave is a completed
chapter, with the present outlook not too good. After the changes in
Barrandov’s leadership a seemingly more catastrophic repetition of
the Banska Bystrice events took place; the Big Ban in the spring of
1970. The five existing autonomous production units with their
script advisory boards, consisting mostly of prominent directors and
writers have been abolished and seven “workshops” without any
rights to make autonomous decisions have been established. The
scripting and production plan for 1970 has been cancelled and
replaced by a new plan in which detective stories and costume and
light comedies altogether prevail. The chiefs of the old production
units, and many members of their advisory boards, were fired and
replaced by new ones; among them men like Vojtech Cach, one of
the notorious representatives of ancient socialist realism, who when
westerns of this type ceased to be fashionable ^ , tried his luck
with a detective story; Karel Cop, a screen-play writer of two
successful detective movies; Bohumil Smida, an actor whose
biggest claim to art is the portrayal of a petty thief in one of Cop’s
detective films; Vojtech Trapl, a film critic of the Kliment variety,
who left an indelible impression of the minds of the public by
*1 did not include any Slovak film makers in this book. A few Slovak films were made
before the Second World War, but the real upsurge of Slovak cinema came only after
the war, and particularly in the sixties. From that time on, a number of Slovak direc¬
tors achieved a high level of artistry, and the work of some is fully comparable with
the best products of the Czech directors. We can name for instance Juraj Jakubisko
(Christ’s Years, 1967, Deserters and Wanderers, 1968, and Birdies, Orphans and
Fools, 1969: the last two banned in 1970), Stefan Uher (The Sun in the Net,
1962, Organ, 1964), Peter Solan (The Boxers and Death, 1962. Before this Night
Is Over, 1965), or Stanislav Barabas The Bells for the Poor, 1965). The present
day Slovak cinematography is so vast that it would require a history of its own, and
then, this is a personal history, and I know the Slovak directors only superficially.
T 1 use the term because the formula of a cheap pulp-magazine western is sur¬
prisingly similar to the formula of a degenerated socialist realistic novel. In a western
there is a county with a big ranch and a pretty rancher’s daughter (or local school
teacher), with an incompetent sheriff, with a bunch of lazy indifferent cow-hands and
with a band of desperados, stealing cattle from the good old rancher. Out of nowhere
arrives a stranger, gets a job at the ranch, becomes the leader of the roused cowboys,
fights the desperados and, in the end, either marries the pretty daughter, or goes away
to some other neglected county, undoubtedly to repeat his good deeds there. In
socialist-realistic “builders’ novels” you get a factory with an incompetent director, a
bunch of indifferent, wavering workers, a small band of reactionary desperados and
an even smaller, and therefore helpless group of honest progressives—usually a pretty
doctor (sometimes even a schoolteacher). Out of nowhere comes a stranger, gets a job
at the factory, wins over the wavering workers, so that they stop drinking and become
shock-workers. Then he fights the reactionary desperados and in the end either
marries the pretty doctor (teacher) or goes to some other neglected factory, undoub¬
tedly to repeat his good deeds there.
241
Jakubisko’s Birdies, Orphans and Fools: according to The Village Voice “a tour-
de-force of creative camera work and montage which whirls us through a mad
surrealist universe”.

his solo attack on Peter and Paula, at a time when such things
were no longer taken seriously. The new director of the Barrandov
studios announced far-reaching changes; while in the past only
six of the total of approximately thirty films made per year
were coloured, in 1971, the Czech audiences will have the oppor¬
tunity of seeing no less than seventeen colour films made in
Czechoslovakia. The 70mm super-screen, which has so far been
supplied exclusively from the West (Cleopatra, Spartacus), will
receive its first Czech products; Barrandov in co-production with
other countries will manufacture its first super-films—a thing
that Czech directors so far had not dared to undertake.
Barrandov seems to be leaving the road taken ten years ago by
the young graduates of the Film Academy, and stepping out in the
direction of Hollywood. At first glance, this is catastrophic. But only
at first glance; learning from history we can read between the
lines. Panta rei.
He who would have dared to point out in the fifties that the em-
242
peror’s new clothes reveal his private parts would have risked being
included in one of the numerous categories of high treason (Zion¬
ism, social democraticism, Titoism, revisionism, cosmopolitism,
anti-socialism, slander, anti-Communism, Trotskyism, por¬
nography, decadence, counter-revolution, pessimism, modernism,
formalism, disorientation, psychologism, freudism, inliuencialism,
structuralism, fascism, racism, lack of ideology, naturalism, bowing
to the West, etc, etc.) and becoming a personal target of heavily
concentrated fire; he would then go through all kinds of experiences,
none of them too good. Banska Bystica preserved the tradition of
personal attacks, but it replaced the traditional vocabulary lifted out
of the criminal code for a more civilized collection of terms (such as
anti-organical influences of neo-realism, being atypical, black
vision, excerption of partial deficiencies from the complex totality,
and their magnification, etc.); the apprehended criminals were sim¬
ply suspended, and consequently suffered from an increased inten¬
sity of “problems”. The inquisitions of 1970 so far have not reverted
to attacks on individual artists—if we disregard the lunatic fringe
which took over the radio*, and are simpiy repeating some of the
Moscow attacks on the zionist (i.e. non-aryan) Forman, or the por-
nographer Menzel. “Unhealthy Occurrences” at Barrandov are con¬
demned on very general terms, and even the old hatchet-men such
as Kliment (the attack on Valerie was a settling of an old account,
and while it assaults the film on the grounds of incomprehensibility,
it acknowledges the high quality of Jires’ direction) carefully
emphasize that there were only a few “seducers” among the film¬
makers, while the others were simply “seduced” little fools. Not¬
withstanding the warped “Marxism” of such a theory (similarly it is
said of the nation: an infinitesimal number of saboteurs seduced the
completely idiotic masses to all-absorbing enthusiasm), it is cer¬
tainly more pleasant than if it were interpreted truthfully, that is the
other way around. In my estimate the “little fools” will include
everybody from the bearers of international laurels to those who

*The main speaker of these Aryan warriors is a Mr. Karel Janik (supposedly the
pen-name for a group of authors). The level of his writing is best assessed in the
following sample: to celebrate the first anniversary of the Invasion he (with a Mr.
Banik) published a paper-back called They Did Not Pass. Among the pictures of
police dispersing the demonstrating youth with the help of tanks and water cannons,
there is a photo of a group of long-haired youngsters giving the internationally known
V-sign. Mr. Janik's caption below this picture of one of the counter-revolutionary
“groups that were directing the provocations" reads: “The sign they agreed upon: In
two minutes we shall start the attack."

243
really only imitated the New Wave; they should, strictly speaking,
include even Kliment, as he was induced to praise (with reservation)
many an offensive counter-revolutionary work at the time of
Novotny’s decline and fall. The seducers will probably include
Procházka, too deeply involved with the President who was thrown
overboard by his own “Kliments”, they may also include some of
the critics and dramaturgists who fought on the side of the New
Wave, and whose names, devoid of international acclaim, may dis¬
appear more easily through the trap-door. Of course the list will be
headed by those who left the country—which may also be the mani¬
festation of a praiseworthy intention to alleviate the predicament of
those who remained within the reach of the stalinist tough guys.*
The new manager-director of Barrandov also stressed that the
confiscated films will not be destroyed, but only “put on ice”, for
eventual future release, but less than six months passed and he him¬
self was put on ice, and Miroslav Fabera, a fairly good author, and
as far as I know a decent person, was appointed new director of the
Barrandov Studios.
The announced production formula is of course typical for a cer¬
tain type of socialist country; a type which is different from either
the Czechoslovakia of the period of Novotny’s decline, or of the
short era of Dubcek. History took a somewhat ironic stand towards
the old revolutionaries who once assumed that the socialist state
would necessarily facilitate the creation of never-dreamt-of products
of revolutionary artistic endeavour. Instead of the fulfillment of this
ideal the trend of the announced works can be described by a single
word (which at the time of ancient socialist realism belonged to the
list of treacherous activities): escapism. The programme is
*Thus I was uncovered by the Communist Party daily paper Rude Pravo of February
1, 1971, as the man who, together with Ludvik Vacuiik, Dr. Jan Brod, A. J. Liehm
and Professor O. Wichterle, initiated and wrote the notorious 2000 Words Manifesto.
Up till then 1 tried to keep this a secret by maintaining that I read the Manifesto only
after it had been criticized by the Party Conservatives, and only then, out of solidarity
with Vacuiik (whom 1 admire as a writer rather than as a politician) did I attach my
signature to it. Well, now the truth is out, and I might as well alleviate my own
predicament by confessing the whole truth about the famous document; after all, so
many before me did confess even more than the whole truth, and why should the in¬
nocent suffer? Rude Pravo has wrong information on this point: Vacuiik, Brod,
Liehm and Wichterle were not my co-authors. 1 wrote the 2000 Words with Yvonne
Prenosilova, the pop singer, now in Western Germany (she typed it), with Jaroslav
Brodsky, a triple-agent for the CIA, 1CI and CPUS and founder of the Club of For¬
mer Political Prisoners in Czechoslovakia (K231), now in Canada; further with Herr
Graf von Razumowski of the Frankfurter A llgemeine, now in Western Germany, and
with Eldridge Cleaver, now in Algiers, who in the summer of 1968 visited Prague in¬
cognito, disguised as a correspondent for a John Birch Society paper.

244
The socialist film-makers’ escapes: Rangel Vulchanov's from Bulgaria
to Czechoslovakia in The Face under the Mask . . .

.. . and Karel Kachyna’s from Czechoslovakia to Australia via the

Austro-Hungarian Empire in I Can Jump Puddles.
dominated by comedies and detective thrillers*, those well-trodden
paths used to circumvent the true reality, and by films from ancient
or more recent ancient history. Soviet art began to take this type ot
evasive action during the thirties, when Stalin and Zhdanov set forth
the eternal laws. For instance, nowhere in the world would it be
possible to persistently produce as many books and films about war
(Second World or the Revolutionary one of 1917-1920) as in the
Soviet Union. The quality of these products in comparison to those
in other thematic areas is far superior. Practically all ot Soviet crime
novels are either spy stories, or they are related to the Nazi invasion
of the USSR, because the only legitimate, (i.e. accepted by socialist
realism) murder motive in socialist society, is the elimination of a
witness of one’s collaboration with the Nazis. I don’t know what the
Soviet crime novelists will write about, when the generation ot those
who remember World War II dies out.
Other voices typical for the culture of socialist realism have been
heard sounding off around Prague: they complain about the inade¬
quate number of “great, artistically strong and truthful works depic¬
ting our times”, and so on. These “voices calling in the desert” can

*Of the “serious” films announced in the official film bulletin for the fall of 1970,
the most remarkable promises to be Factory of Illusions, a back stage view of the
Barrandov studios, in the old muckraker style. It was written by the new Chief
Dramaturgist of Barrandov, Ludvik Toman (according to a Barrandov underground
story his main dramaturgical accomplishment to date is the suspension of a new Nazi
occupation film on the grounds that the protagonist’s first name is Moritz: the Chief
Dramaturgist is dead set against “Zionist” names for heroes of the Czech
resistance.) The Dream Factory is supposed to take place during the time of “the
terror of snobs”, (which is the name given to the sixties by Stalinists). A young
graduate of the Film Academy, bursting of creative desire arrives at Barrandov,
where he is shocked to find the famous directors drinking and whoring instead
of filming. As nobody bothers to give him any work, he watches the films of his
older depraved colleagues in the projection room. (I hope the story will explain
where they found the time to make them with all the drinking and whoring.)
The viewing in the projection room is to be the experimental part of the opus:
it will provide most of the footage and it will be a montage of authentic shots
and scenes from the decadent films of the New Wave, including the last ones, banned
in the spring of 1970. After a prolonged exposure to such indoctrination the young
candidate also succumbs to whores, booze, and general counter-revolution. The per¬
verts of the New Wave have claimed another decent young person.It s probably un¬
necessary to add what a moving socialist-realist film could be obtained by a clever
editing of scenes from Luis Trenker's The Rebel, 1933, or from the folkloristic
dramas (The Blue Light, 1932) made by Leni Riefenstahl before her famous party
film. Triumph of the Will. 1936. Anyway, whatever changes and embellishments
this story (I recount it from underground sources) may undergo before the film is
released, it is undoubtedly in good hands. Dramaturgically it is supervised by
Dr. Trapl (for whose qualifications see pages 79 and 254) and by Mr. Rudolf Cerny,
one of the original members of the antisemitic ultrastalinist Jodas group. So far, Mr.
Cerny has been probably the only jodasist who suffered at the hands of the censors.
Shortly after the Invasion he was the first to publish a muckraking booklet, according
to underground sources, on the “creeping counterrevolution”.

246
be heard throughout the Socialist bloc—in some countries per¬
manently, in others periodically—since the advent of Stalin. As
recently as the Twelfth All-Russian Drama Congress in 1970, the
well-known voice intimates that, “there are unfortunately few new
plays about the Soviet Man . Ot course, whenever new works
bearing at least one of the above mentioned criteria do appear, the
same voices attack them, and if a sufficient power is on hand, they
liquidate them. In the intervals between the periods the menacing
and melancholic voices pretend that they don’t know the reason for
the paucity. Since the official cultural stand made it impossible to
truthfully explain the mass escape from the present into history, war,
degenerated genres and questions surrounding private sexual ac¬
tivities, a strange tradition developed: not the artists themselves, but
the editors and dramaturgists receive a periodical drubbing from
the bureaucratic spokesmen, for having failed to “discover” enough
great and truthful works. This is supposedly caused by laziness;
instead of going out to places where “the sources of real life” can
be discovered, they sit in their comfortable armchairs in Moscow
(Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, and, who knows, maybe even Tirana).

The chief villain of this opus was allegedly Mr. Jiri Hajek, a well-known party-
hack and a rubber-man of ideology. He was assigned this sinister role by Mr. Cerny
because of an old personal feud. Years ago, Mr. Cerny had been discovered by Mr.
Hajek as a new literary genius. His subsequent fiction, unfortunately, was rather
less than mediocre, and so Mr. Hajek, who has always tried to appear as a literary
arbiter of deep insight and great analytical abilities, revoked his judgement and
disclaimed his protégé. Mr. Cerny's description of Mr. Hajek’s activities was,
however, not unfounded, if by “preparing counterrevolution” we mean efforts to
aid the liberalisation of the humanitites. In the early fifties, Mr. Hajek was one of
the chief theoreticians of socialist-realism; then he developed, and in the sixties he
tried to lead the field once again by eulogizing Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Garaudy and
others of the same sort, and by opening the pages of the Plamen magazine to the
chief ideologues of communist liberalism. After Novotny’s counter-attack in the
Fall of 1967 he lost his nerve and tried to shift his position safely towards the
Novotny boys. Soon after that Novotny fell and Hajek was fired as editor-in-chief
of Plamen. During the Dubcek period he remained cautiously silent, but regularly
attended meetings, listening and taking notes. Soon after the invasion he joined
the ranks of the “true leninists". Being however, unlike the unswervingly faithful
stalinist Mr. Cerny he did not side with Jodas but became what is known as
“centrist" or “moderate”. As such—and also because of his "liberal” international
reputation—he was more useful to the forces which decide in today’s Czechoslovakia,
and so poor old ironguard Mr. Cerny had his book quietly withdrawn from circu¬
lation while Mr. Hajek had his similar book published and translated into several
languages. Mr. Cerny, in just wrath and an inebriated condition, knocked down
another former socialist realist Mr. Stern while the latter was giving a pro-Dubcek
speech at a writers’ meeting. Later he turned his wrath against Jan Procházka
and maintained that far from being ill the tormer President's favourite tried
to save his skin by simulating cancer. I have no doubts that Procházka s death
appeared to this dangerous innocent as another trick committed by the film-maker
for the sole purpose of giving the surviving counterrevolutionaries an opportunity
to assemble at his funeral and thus provoke the true marxists.

247
The editors and dramaturgists are presented as mushroom-pickers.
If they want to gather a lot of mushrooms they have to venture after
them deep into the forest; they cannot remain on the edge where
there aren’t any to be found. Art is the mushroom, growing
somewhere, probably in secret drawers of unknown Solzhenitsyns.
But what will happen to the mushroom-pickers if they pull
something from out of the drawers?
It is, however, indeed ridiculous to ignore what the Marxists call
the super-structure: although he was no Marxist, we must recall the
famous words of Abraham Lincoln about who can be duped, and
how long it can last. The intellectuals, particularly those involved in
the humanities and arts, act as a seismograph of injustices, and
revolutionary art is largely a cry ot' J'accuse! The revolution some¬
times removes the most flagrant injustices: unemployment, hunger,
blatant poverty. But the spectrum of injustices is colourful, and the
revolution does not change the intellectuals according to Plato’s
wish from a seismograph of injustices into a gauge for the measuring
of the nation’s love for their representatives. It would be betraying
its own principles. There is no more hunger and incredible poverty,
but there are unjust convictions, concentration camps, encroach¬
ments in personal assessments, “class” approach to children. Too
often we see what Milan Kundera in his play The Cock and Bull
Story calls “the reign of fools over the clever, of the spineless over
the idealists.” Also: “there at the bottom of all those great works, are
the injustices, which no social order will eliminate” (Forman). This
leads to “pessimism” and “the mucking around with atypical excep¬
tions” and so forth, which is how the socialist realists express the
fact that “all that which is noble and which has remained in art and
literature since ancient times. . .always concerned itself with injuries
and injustices perpetrated against the individual” (Forman).
People, who are no longer hungry and do not have to fear
hospital bills, and yet are forced to live in a spiritual climate created
by the spirit of the Kliments, will not remain endlessly contented
with television serials of the “I Love Lucy” quality in a socialist ren¬
dition. Their ageless cultural tradition going all the way back to the
Middle Ages, far too often resisted simplifications and officious
obedience and will not permit them to accept stupidities particularly
when they live a life dominated by political repression, which makes
culture an important outlet for them. In Czechoslovakia, films and
literature are not just entertainment on different levels of
248
Smluvené znamení: za dvě minuty začne útok.

Yellow Journalism in action: the caption under this photo of Czech Peace-sign
greeting youths reads: “The sign they agreed upon: In two minutes we shall
start the attack.” From Messrs. Janik & Banik masterwork: They Did Not Pass.

sophistication, nor are they the subject of snobbish conversation, as

is all too frequently the case in the West. They play an important
part in the lives of wide masses. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later
Pope Pius II (1458-64), declared once that any Czech old woman
can quote the Bible better than a Roman Cardinal. Similarly, an
average Czech bank clerk, not to mention doctor or nuclear scien¬
tist, knows his Fellini better than many an American film producer.
The socialist state nationalized film and gave the film-makers
much better potential opportunities than other regimes. Not that
they were better paid than Western directors or film stars, certainly
not. That, however, was not what they wanted. They did not have to
seek financial backing for their intentions, or struggle to subsist—as
employees of the Studios they received a permanent salary. Even
the tedious arguments between the directors of the New Wave and
Novotny’s bureaucracy were in a sense more dignified than the
quarrels of the same directors with some of their Western profit-
oriented patrons. They argued aesthetico-political approaches, and
nobody was terribly concerned about the box-office profit, at most
some bureaucrat despaired about the safety of his position. The
graduates of the Film Academy, if they were worth anything, had an
open and direct road towards a career.
The Maecenas State, or rather its cultural bureaucracy, expected
in return from the artists a mass production of adult fairy-tales,
which would be enjoyed by the powerful in this world. This was
something that the artists—I use the word in a qualitative sense, not
249
 as a mere professional label—could not do. Historically, they
always felt the necessity to be loyal to what they considered to be
the truth, rather than to their patrons. No revolution can change
that, because if it succeeded in doing so, it would, in my opinion,
cease to be revolutionary.
Thus another type of uniformity appears in the cinematographies
of socialist states. It is different from socialist realism, because it is
unimposed. The ranks of governmental story-tellers and bureau¬
cratic managers are slowly infiltrated by artists and their friends. It
might even reach the point when the artists take over the leading
positions in the arts altogether; which is what happened, or almost
happened in Czechoslovakia. A strange paradox arose: the State
was financing its own critics*. This was of course pointed out by the
well-known angry voices after the Invasion, in a manner symp¬
tomatic of the feudal souls among the socialist-realistic theoretic¬
ians. But it is natural that in a socialist society the critics are paid by
the state. Who else is supposed to finance them? Unless of course we
were dealing with a brand of socialism which does not wish to be
criticized. That type did exist: it was called National Socialism, and
operated on the so called fuhrerprinzip■ To prove that the
dissatisfaction with the status quo is one of the basic characteristics
of mankind is, I think, unnecessary. If we did not have the need to
criticize we would still be eating caterpillars.
The infiltration of creative intellect into the various levels of
cultural bureaucracy is a natural developmental tendency in social¬
ist states. It is an important and redeeming infiltration, because
the “socialist system is more viable than capitalism, as long as
the leadership is able to creatively exploit the true principles of
development. Whenever a person who is unable to wisely utilize
power manages to attain it the advantages of a controlled system
turn into negative obstacles’’ (Jires).
Sometimes the infiltration takes place too rapidly, in which case
the artists end up with bloodied noses: this happened to some extent
to the Polish “Black Wave”, it happened to brave individuals in the
*In this connection it is necessary to define the term “criticism". I hope it is evident
from what I have written, that the New Wave was not only a socially critical trend.
Social criticism probably was not even its most important feature. Naturally the
Kliments and Jack-in-the-Boxes found the New Wave's social involvement its most
annoying feature. But they were just as displeased by the New Wave’s revolt against
the aesthetic regimentation. In the world of socialist realism, surrealism is almost as
terrible as espionage and, after all, “everything is interdependent" (Stalin): a certain
aesthetic system with a certain political system.

250
Soviet Union (Kalatozov, Chukhray), and it took place twice within
a relatively short time period, and with great intensity, in Czecho¬
slovakia. But the creative spirit always comes back. When it
becomes impossible for an art form which requires backers, such as
film, to attack the “heart of the matter’’, there is a fantastic improve¬
ment in the quality of comedies, (Wajda: The Innocent Sorcerers—if
one may label this delicate study with this epithet), of psychological
drama (Szabo: Father), and excellent war films are produced
(Kalatozov: The Cranes Are Flying). This will happen even in such
seeming cultural wastelands as Bulgaria (Vulchanov: On the Little
Island, or Sun and Shadow; Zheljazkova: The Attached Balloon).
The retreat into the times of the October Revolution (Chukhray:
The Forty First) or into more distant history (Kawalerovicz: Mother
Joan of the Angels) is carried out with formal brilliance, and to
make it completely clear, someone like Andrzej Wajda, in Prague in
1970, declares: “Very many plays and novels, which deal with
historically distant events, frequently possess a greater topicality
than many works set in the present-This is a common occurrence
Excellent compilation documentaries may be created, which at face
value propagandistically attack a defeated enemy, but which also
elicit a memory of Brynych’s quotation: “.. .it is an international
disease; its symptoms may be found.. .even in our own country”
(Romm: Ordinary Fascism). Next to the Kalatozovs and Chukhrays
who are having “difficulties”, works relatively undisturbed, the ex¬
cellent Kozintsev, utilizing materials from Shakespeare and Cervan¬
tes; in the border republics appear various Ibragimbekovs, who
might not be risking political dissent, but whose aesthetics are any¬
thing but the official code periodically ayed by the cultural
congresses, which as a sideline intermittently sanctify or excom¬
municate Nobel Prize winners. When the aesthetics become a little
too overpowering, they go and make their movies in a friendly
socialist country, which reprimands its own artists for comparable
work, but a foreigner who does not belong under that country’s
critical control, is permitted to shoot whatever he wishes.
(Vulchanov: The Face Under the Mask, produced at Barrandov in
1970, after which Vulchanov was reportedly ordered to return to
Bulgaria.) On the other hand if the dramaturgist-censor rejects “un¬
suitable” original subjects from local life, because—to quote the old
expert Kliment—their author “knows which way he should take, but
simply doesn’t want to”—the director may reach out for a theme all
251
the way to the antipodes. This was done by Karel Kachyna, after the
involuntary severance of his collaboration with Procházka. His film
I Can Jump Puddles (made at Barrandov in 1970)* is based on a
charming autobiography by Alan Marshall, an Australian author so
far neglected by Hollywood. In Prague he has the reputation of a
“progressive” due to his friendship with left-wing Australian
writers, and consequently no servile spirit dares to object against
this Anglo-Saxon import; though he may against the importer.
The roads are numerous and varied, but all of them carefully
avoid the thruway of socialist realism, which is, as far as the stalinist
cultural commissars are concerned, the only right route, The feud
between reality and dogmatic fixed ideas about reality sometimes
erupts into a bloody massacre, yet a few years later a Miklos Jancso
produces The Red and the White, a highly formalistic drama of a
revolution “seen through the eyes of a horse” (a description given to
it by an influential Western aesthetician), which Rakosi’s theore¬
ticians would have condemned as persiflage. Even artists learn
tactics, and they combine the organizational infiltration with an
aesthetic indoctrination. Whereas during Stalin’s era the socialist-
*The title under which it was released reads in translation: / Am Jumping Muddy-
Puddles Again. This is—without any doubt unintentionally—a rather nomen omen of
a title indeed, if one considers Kachyna’s career.
And to add a finishing touch to the portrait of the vigilant Mr. Jan Kliment. In a
vitriolic article attached to an interview with Kachyna he reminds the director that he
has never “satisfactorily explained" his long collaboration with the late Jan
Procházka, and urges him to “tell us who, in your present opinion, profited from
such films as The Coach to Vienna and The Night of the Bride? Who would have
profited from The Ear which, most rightly, was banned from showing?” And
finally: “What is comrade Kachyna’s present opinion of the 2000 Words Manifesto
which he, too, signed?”
Whenever 1 read about the unceasing exploits of Mr. Kliment I cannot help
remembering how 1 first met him. That was in the early sixties; I was still
pretty notorious and the times were just ripening for the second round of the
struggle for liberalization. One day 1 went to see an editor in her office in the Radio
Building. On opening the door I saw her listening to a one-eyed man and grinning
uncertainly. As soon as she saw me, she interrupted the narrator and introduced
him to me: “Meet Comrade Kliment.” Behind his back she blinked furiously as if
something had fallen into her eye. 1 did not know then which of the several Kliments
he was—the name is pretty common—but the pathological blinking identified his
kind beyond any shadow of a doubt. 1 sat down and he resumed his interrupted
story. In a second he was shooting away a fiercely anti-soviet anecdote, and then
another and another, with the speed and atrocity of a well-oiled machine gun.
After each anecdote he laughed and remained silent for a while in the hope we
would add some funny story of our own. Every Czech is well-supplied with news
from Radio Yerevan—the mythical Soviet station that spreads slander within the
Soviet Union—but the situation smacked too much of the first chapter of Schweik
in which Mr. Bretschneider hopes the Good Soldier will insult the Emperor. We held
out and did not join the reactionary feast; we just grinned politely, trying to make
the grins look a little disapproving. That’s how I met Mr. Jan Kliment.

252
A reminder of Report on the Party and the Guests (see page 121): In the 1972
Barrandov feature, Black Wolf, the Czech lover of a West German spy (killed
earlier by the vigilant frontier gunmen), is justly torn to pieces by a crossbreed of
wolf and German Shepherd (a breed raised by the Czech frontier police). For the
sake of human interest, a love affair between the doggie and a bitch from across
the border is thrown in.

realistic overseers handed the artists over to the secret police and
ten years later still arranged firings and suspensions, nowadays they
generally restrain themselves to cursing or grumbling. Whether they
like it or not, they are slowly forced to accept the elements of the
aesthetics and philosophy which they continually try to suppress*.
Following the example of Orwell’s Big Brother they will of course
maintain that they always held these views, and only objected
against their "misuse”. Unlike Orwell's Big Brother they are unable
to reprint all the old newspapers.

And so 1 hope and believe, indeed I am convinced, that Czecho¬

slovakia will take the same road. The professors of socialist realism
‘Typical of this process is an interview with one of the new production chiets. Vojtech
Cach, a man who went from socialist-realistic dramas of the fifties (The Duchcov Un¬
derpass. 1950, The Most Strike, 1953), through light comedies and children's books
all the way to detective story (Who Will Collect the Loot, 1968). In an interview
Cach declared among other things: “For instance, we should not renounce certain at¬
tributes offered by the theatre of the absurd—such as irony, sarcasm, nonsense,
shocking, provocation and maybe even paradox. It would be a political luxury it our
society permitted the publication of anti-social literature...but this does not mean that
I opt for a literature “in attention", for a tamed and really "public art; tor the good
of literature we must avoid the canonization ot one opinion, or one poetic system.
The question, of course,is how much ot the "shocking, nonsense and provocation
will Cach be able to put through in practice.
253
among the film-makers are few (or more accurately: I rather doubt
there are any,*) just as there are few worshippers ot permanent dic¬
tatorship in a nation, which throughout its history tought a long and
difficult battle for democracy, and did not forget it after thirty years
of dictatorial regimes. The official ideology theoretically encourages
the artists to honesty and “creative searching”—although in practice
the artists usually get their hands slapped for such activity. Never¬
theless, if theory fights against practice, instead of providing it with
help, it is waging a hopeless war. The length of such a war is
naturally questionable, but even Marx was convinced of its hope¬
lessness, and although he was frequently wrong, he was also
frequently right.
As far as the future of Czech film is concerned, I am optimistic.
Unfortunately, I cannot be so optimistic about the future of some of
its creators (including myself). Vita brevis. There are traumas which
a person cannot overcome, and sometimes there is just so much that
one can take in a single lifetime. It is said, “That is revolution! In a
revolution it can’t be otherwise!” Man has become what he is through
dissatisfaction, which in the end has always made him do everything
differently than it was supposed to be done.

Toronto, Fall 1970 — Spring 1971

*The term itself re-appeared at a meeting of film-makers in Moscow in the Spring

of 1971 in a rather significant way. The Czechoslovak delegates, Mr. Trapl (the same
who once had attacked Forman’s Peter and Paula for pessimism) and Professor
A. M. Brousil of the Film Academy tried to prove to a predominantly Soviet
audience that the refusal of socialist realism by the New Wave was "unnecessarily
radical” — which is a cautious way (they had to go back to Prague) of saying that
we should have stuck to zhdanovism as it does not encourage any funny new ideas.
Whereupon some Soviet delegates rose in protest, demanding, on the contrary, a
new and radical approach to socialist art. This should lay down some very broad
conceptual foundations of a radically new method which would only “utilize the
traditions of socialist realism” and could be described as "post-socialist realism” or
“neo-socialist realism”. Which reminds me of a rather nice Soviet writer who at a
literary conference in the West, in the mid-sixties, after having proclaimed himself
a true and faithful socialist realist, found room enough, within the zhdanovite
esthetical framework, for everybody from Franz Kafka to James Joyce to Evelyn
Waugh.

Alain Resnais, Milos and Ivan in a winter night in New York, 1971. Far away
from the barrel of sauerkraut, but also far away from home . . .

254
255
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST

OF THE MORE INTERESTING CZECH FEATURE FILMS 1898-1970

(with the Names of Their Directors)

Some dates may slightly differ from those given in other reference books. Such discrép-
ancies occur even in official publications by the Czechoslovak Film Institute, and are
due to the fact that some sources give the year of production while others the year of
release. In a few instances the difference may be several years; this usually indicates
censorship difficulties. The number after the year indicates the total number of features
produced that year.

1898 / 3 features______
DOSTAVENÍČKO VE MLYNICI (Rendez-vous at the Grinding Room) Jan Kfíženecký
PLÁČ A SMÍCH (Laughing and Crying) Jan Kfíženecký
VÝSTAVNÍ PÁRKAR A LEPIČ PLAKÁTU (The Exhibition Sausage Vendor) J. Kfíženecký

1899-1909 / no features made

1910 / 3 features _
ARTUR SE ŽENÍ (Arthur Gets Married) Antonin Peck
SEN STARÉHO MLÁDENCE (The Bachelor’s Dream) Jan Kfíženecký

1911 / 5 features
RUDÍ NA KRTINÁCH (Rudi the Godfather) Emil Arthur Longen
RUDÍ NA ZÁLETECH (Rudi the Seducer of Women) Emil Arthur Longen
RUDI SPORTSMANEM (Rudi the Sportsman) Emil Arthur Longen & Antonín Pech

1912 / 11 features
FAUST / Stanislav Hlavsa
PET SMYSLU ČLOVÉKA (The Five Senses of Man) Josef Šváb-Malostranský
SÁTY DĚLAJÍ ČLOVÉKA (Clothes Make Man) Max Urban & Jára Sedláček
(based freely on Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.)
ZUB ZA ZUB (Tooth for Tooth) Antonín Pech

1913 / 14 features
CHOLERA V PRAZE (Cholera in Prague) Alois Jalovec
ESTRELLA / Otakar Štáfl & Max Urban
KONEC MILOVÁNÍ (End of Lovemaking) Otakar štáfl & Max Urban
PAN PROFESOR, NEPŘÍTEL ŽEN (Our Professor, the Enemy of Women) Jift Steimar
PRODANÁ NEVÉSTA (The Bartered Bride) Max Urban (memorable for being a silent
movie based on the opera by Bedfich Smetana)
ŽIVOT ŠEL KOLEM (Life Passed By) Rudolf Mejkal
ZKAŽENÁ KREV (Rotten Blood) Alois Wiesmer

1914 / 14 features
NOČNÍ DĚS (Night Horror) J. A. Paloui
ZAMILOVANÁ TCHYNĚ (Mother-in-Law in Love) Antonín Pech (memorable as the
first film appearance of Josef Rovenský)

1915 / 2 features
AHASVER / Jaroslav Kvapil

256
 1916 / l feature

ZLATÉ SRDÉČKO (The Golden Heart) Antonín Fend

1917 / 4 features

POLYKARP APROV1ZUJE (Polykarp on the Black Market) J. S. Kolár

POLYKARPOVO ZIMNÍ DOBRODRUŽSTVÍ (Polykarp's Winter Adventure) J. S. Kolár
PRAŽŠTÍ ADAMITE (The Prague Adamites) Antonin Fend

1918 / 20 features

ALOIS VYHRÁL NA LOS (Alois Won the Sweepstakes) Richald F. Branald (memorable
for the first film appearance of Gustav Machatý.)
A VÁŠEŇ VÍTÉZÍ (Passion Wins) Václav Binovec
ČESKÉ NEBE (Czech Heaven) Jan A. Palouš
O DÉVČICU (For the Girl) Josef FolprecUt k Karel Deg I
ŠESTNÁCTILETÁ (The Teenager) Jan A. Palouš
UČITEL ORIENTÁLNÍCH JAZYKU (The Teacher of Oriental Languages) J.S. Kolár

1919 / 33 features

AKORD SMRTI (Chord of Death) J. S. Kolár k Karel Lamai

DAMA S MALOU NOŽKOU (The Lady with the Small Foot) J.S. Kolár (memorable
as the first screenplay by Machatý and as the first appearance of Anny Ondra.)
EVIN HŘÍCH (Eva’s Sin) Václav Binovec
KRASAVICE KATA (Katia the Beauty) Václav Binovec (based on A. S. Pushkin's story.)
MACOCHA / Antonin Fend
SIVOOKY DÉMON (Grey Eyed Demon) Václav Binovec
STAVITEL CHRÁMU (The Builder of the Cathedral) Karel Deg 1 & Antonin Novotny
TEDDY BY KOURU (Teddy'd Like a Smoke) Gnsfav Machatý
YORICKOVA LEBKA (Yorick's Skull) Miloš Nový

1920 / 22 features_

MAGDALENA / Vladimír Majer

PLAMENY ŽIVOTA (The Flames of Life) Václav Binovec
SETŘELÉ PÍSMO (The Faded Writing) Josef Rovenský (first direction)
TAM NA HORÁCH (In the Mountains) Sidney M. Goldin (a visiting American)
ZA SVOBODU NÁRODA (For the Freedom of the Nation) Václav Binovec
ZLATA ŽENA (The Golden Woman) Vladimir Slovinský
ZPÉV ZLATA (The Song of Gold) J. S. Kolár

1921 / 39 features__

CIKÁNI (The Gipsies) Karel Anton

JÁNOŠÍK / Jaroslav Siakel k František Horlivý
KŘÍŽ U POTOKA (The Cross at the Brook) J. S. Kolár
POSLEDNÍ RADOST (The Last Joy) Václav Binovec (based on a novel by Knut Hamsun.)
ROMAN BOXERA (Cashel Byron’s Profession) Václav Binovec (based on a novel by
G. B. Shaw)
ŠACHTA POHRBENÝCH IDEÍ (The Shaft of Buried Hopes) Rudolf Myzet
UKŘIŽOVANÁ (The Crucified Girl) Boris Orlický (a Russian director)

1922 / 34 features __
DÉVČE Z PODSKALÍ (The Girl from Podskalí) Václav Binovec
KAM S NÍM? (Where to Put IT?) Václav Wasserman

257
MRTVÍ ŽIJÍ (The Dead Are Alive) J. S. Kolár
ZLATÝ KLÍČEK (The Little Gold Key) Jaroslav Kvapil

1923 / 8 features

ULIČKA HŘÍCHU A LÁSKY (The Street of Sin and Love) Václav Binovec
UNOS BANKÉŘE FUXE (The Kidnapping of Banker Fux) Karel Anton

1924 / 17 features_

BÍLÝ RÁJ (The White Paradise) Karel Lamač

PÍSEŇ ŽIVOTA (The Song of Life) Miroslav J. Krňanský

1925 / 25 features__

DO PANSKÉHO STAVU (Becoming Middle-Class) Karel Anton

JEDENÁCTÉ PŘIKÁZÁNÍ (The Eleventh Commandment) Václav Kubásek
KAREL HAVLÍČEK BOROVSKY / Karel Lamač & Theodor Pišték
LUCERNA (The Lantern) Karel Lamač
VDAVKY NANYNKY KULICHOVÉ (Nanynka Kulichová's Marriage) M. J. Krňanský

1926 / 33 features

DOBRY VOJÁK ŠVEJK (Good Soldier Schweik) Karel Lamač

KREUTZEROVA SONÁTA (Kreutzer Sonata) Gustav Machatý
OTEC KONDELÍK A ŽENICH VEJVARA (Father Kondelík and Bridegroom Vejvara)
Karel Anton
POHÁDKA MÁJE (The May Story) Karel Anton (the first film role of George Voskovec)
VELBLOUD UCHEM JEHLY (Camel throueh the Needle’s Eye) Karel Lamač
WERTHER / Miloš Hajský (based freely on a novel by J. W. Goethe)

1927 / 23 features

BAHNO PRAHY (The Bog of Prague) Miroslav J. Krňanský

BATALIÓN / Přemysl Pražský

1928 / 26 features

PÁTER VOJTECH (Father Vojtěch) Mac Frič (directorial debut of Frič)

POHORSKÁ VESNICE (The Mountain Village) Miroslav J. Krňanský
ŽIVOTEM VEDLA JE LÁSKA (Love Lead Them through Life) Josef Rovenský

1929 / 34 features

EROTIKON / Gustav Machatý

PLUKOVNÍK ŠVEC (Colonel švec) Svatopluk Innemann-
SVATY VÁCLAV (Saint Wenceslas) /. S. Kolár
TAKOVÝ JE ŽIVOT (That's Life) Karl Junshans
VARHANÍK U SV. VÍTA (The Organist of St. Vít) Mac Frič

1930 / 8 features

C. a K. POLNÍ MARŠÁLEK (The Field Marshal) Karel Lamač (first Czech sound comedy,
first talkie of Vlasta Burian)
KDYŽ STRUNY LKAJÍ (When the Strings Weep) Friedrich Fehér (first Czech talkie)
OPEŘENĚ STÍNY (The Feathered Shadows! Leo Marten (from a story by E. A. Poe)
TONKA ŠIBENICE (Tonka, the Gallows) Karel Anton

258
 1931 / 19 features

KAREL HAVLÍČEK BOROVSKY / Svatopluk lnnetnann

MUŽI V OFFSIDU (Men Off-Side) Svatopluk Innentann
PUDR A BENZIN (Powder and Petrol) Jindřich Honzl (first film of Voskovs c +Werich)
ZE SOBOTY NA NEDELI (From Saturday to Sunday) Gustav Machatý

1932 / 24 features “ ~

EXTASE (Ecstasy) Gustav Machatý

PENÍZE NEBO ŽIVOT (Money or your Life) Jindřich Honzl
PÍSNIČKÁŘ (The Songster) Svatopluk lnnetnann
PŘED MATURITOU (Before the Matriculation) Vladislav Vančura & Svatopluk lnnetnann

1933 / 33 features

DÚM NA PŘEDMĚSTÍ (A House in the Suburbs) Miroslav Cikán

NA SLUNEČNÍ STRANĚ (On the Sunny Side) Vladislav Vančura
REKA (The River) Josef Rovenský
REVISOR (Government Inspector) Martin Fric
SVÍTÁNÍ (The Dawn) Václav Kubásek
U SNĚDENÉHO KRÁMU (The Eaten-Up Shop) Martin Frič
VRAŽDA V OSTROVNÍ ULICI (Murder in Island Street) Svatopluk lnnetnann
ZÁHADA MODRÉHO POKOJE (The Mystery of the Blue Room) Miroslav Cikán
ZEM SPIEVA (The Earth Is Singing) Karel Plicka
ZE SVETA LESNÍCH SAMOT (For Forest Loneliness) M. J. Krňanský
ŽIVOT JE PES (A Dog’s Life) Martin Frič

1934 / 31 features

AT ŽIJE NEBOŽTÍK I (Long Live the Loved One!) Martin Frič

HEJ RUPf (Heave-Ho!) Martin Frič
MARIJKA NEVERNICE (The Unfaithful Marijka) Vladislav Vančura
POSLEDNÍ MUŽ (The Last Man) Martin Frič
U NÁS V KOCOURKOVÉ (We at Kráhwinkel) Miroslav Cikán
ZA RANNÍCH' ČERVÁNKU (The Rosy Dawn) Josef Rovenský

1935 / 25 features

A ŽIVOT JDE DÁL . . (Life Goes On) Carl Junghans

GOLEM / lulicn Duvivier (made for a Czech company, with Czech technical staff,
screenwriters and a mixed Czech-French cast)
JÁNOŠÍK / Martin Frič
JEDENÁCTÉ PŘIKÁZÁNÍ (The Eleventh Commandment) Martin Frič
MARYŠA / Josef Rovenský

1936 / 26 features

JÍZDNÍ HI.ÍDKA (The Mounted Patrol) Václav Binovec

TRHANÍ (The Ragamuffins) Václav Wasserman
ULIČKA V RÁJI (A Lane in Paradise) Martin Frič
VELBLOUD UCHEM JEHLY (Camel Through the Needle's Eye) Hugo Haas, Otakar Vávra
VOJNARKA / Vladimír Borský

1937 / 45 features

BATALIÓN / Miroslav Cikán

BÍLÁ NEMOC (The White Illness) Hugo Haas
FILOSOFSKA HISTORIE / Otakar Vávra
HLÍDAČ Č. 47 (Watchman No. 47) Josef Rovenský
259
LÁSKA A LÍDĚ (Love and People) Václav Kubásek & Vladislav Vančura
LIDÉ NA KRE (People on the Iceberg) Martin Fric
MRAVNOST NADE VŠE (Morality Above All) Martin Fric
NAŠI FURIANTI (The Swaggerers) Vladislav Vančura & Václav Kubásek
OTEC KONDELlK A ŽENICH VEJVARA (Father Kondelík and Bridegroom Vejvara)
M. ]. Krúanský
PANENSTVÍ (Virginity) Otakar Vávra
SVĚT PATŘÍ NÁM (The World Belongs to Us) Martin Frič

1938 / 40 features -

CECH PANEN KUTNOHORSKÝCH (Guild of the Maidens of Kutná Hora) Otakar Vávra
POD JEDNOU STŘECHOU (Under One Roof) M. ]. Krúanský
SVÉT, KDE SE ŽEBRÁ (The World of Beggars) Miroslav Cikán

1939 / 39 features___

DÍVKA V MODRÉM (The Girl in Blue) Otakar Vávra

EVA TROPÍ HLOUPOSTI (Eva Is Fooling) Martin Frič
HUMORESKA (Humoresque) Otakar Vávra
HVĚZDA Z POSLEDNÍ ŠTACE (The Star of the One-Night Stands) Jiří Slavíček
KOUZELNÝ DOM (The Enchanted House) Otakar Vávra
KRISTIAN / Martin Frič
OHNIVÉ LÉTO (Fiery Summer) Fratišek Čáp & Václav Krška
TULÁK MACOUN (Macoun the Tramp) Ladislav Brom
VĚRA LUKÁŠOVÁ / E. F. Burian

1940 / 32 features

BABIČKA (The Granny) František Čáp

ČEKANKY (The Waiting Girls) Vladimír Borský
DRUHÁ SMĚNA (The Second Shift) Martin Frič
KATAKOMBY (Catacombe) Martin Frič
MUZIKANTSKÁ LIDUŠKA (The Musicians’ Liduška) Martin Frič
PACIENTKA DR. HEGLA (Dr. Hegl’s Pacient) Otakar Vávra
POHÁDKA MÁJE (The May Story) Otakar Vávra
TO BYL ČESKY MUZIKANT (He Was a Czech Musician) Vladimír Slovinský

1941 / 19 features

ADVOKÁT CHUDÝCH (The Lawyer of the Poor) Vladimír Slovinský

JAN CIMBURA / František Čáp
NOČNÍ MOTÝL (The Night Moth) František Čáp
PALIČOVA DCERA (The Arsonist’s Daughter) Vladimír Borský
PRAŽSKÝ FLAMENDR (The Prague Gallivanter) Karel Spelina
ROZTOMILÝ ČLOVĚK (A Charming Man) Martin Frič
TĚŽKÝ ŽIVOT DOBRODRUHA (The Difficult Life of an Adventurer) Martin Frič
TURBINA (The Turbine) Otakar Vávra

1942 / 11 features

BARBORA HLAVSOVÁ / Martin Frič

MĚSTEČKO NA DLANI (The Village in your Palm) Václav Binovec
VALENTIN DOBROTIVÝ (Valentin the Good) Martin Frič

1943 / 8 features

EXPERIMENT / Martin Frič

ŠTASNOU CESTU (Farewell) Otakar Vávra
ŽÍZNIVÉ MLÁDI (The Thirsty Youth) M ]. Krúanský

260
 1944 / 9 features

PAKLÍČ (The Skeleton Key) Miroslav Cikán

POČESTNÉ PANÍ PARDUBICKÉ (The Honorable Ladies of Pardubice) Martin Frič
PRSTÝNEK (The Little Ring) Martin Frič
SOBOTA (Saturday) Václav Wasserman

1945 / 5 features

REKA ČARUJE (The Spell of the River) Václav Krška

ROZINA SEBRANEC (Rozina, the Foundling) Otakar Vávra

1946 / 10 features

MUŽI BEZ KŘÍDEL (Men Without Wings) František Čáp

1947 / 18 features

MRTVY MEZI ŽIVÝMI (Dead Among the Living) Bořivoj Zeman

NEVÍTE O BYTE? (Know of a Flat?) Bořivoj Zeman
PŘEDTUCHA (Premonition) Otakar Vávra
SIRÉNA (The Strike) Karel Stekly
TÝDEN V TICHÉM DOME (Week in the Quiet House) Jiří Krejiik
ULOUPENÁ HRANICE (The Stolen Frontier) Jiří Weiss

1948 / 16 features

KRAKATIT / Otakar Vávra

O ŠEVCI MATOUŠOVI (Matthew the Shoemaker) Miroslav Cikán
VES V POHRANIČÍ (The Village on the Frontier) Jiří Krejčík
REVOLUČNÍ ROK 1848 (The Revolutionary Year 1848) Václav Krška

1949 / 21 features__

DALEKÁ CESTA (The Long Journey) Alfréd Radok

KATKA (Cathy) Ján Kadár
NEMÁ BARIKÁDA (The Silent Barricade) Otakar Vávra
POSEL OSVITU (Messenger of Dawn) Václav Krška
SVĚDOMÍ (Conscience) Jiří Krejčík

1950 I 21 features

PAST (The Trap) Martin Frič

VSTANOU NOVÍ BOJOVNÍCI (New Fighters Shall Arise) Jiří Weiss

1951 / 8 features __

CÍSAROV PEKAR (The Emperor's Baker) Martin Frič

PEKAROV CÍSAR (The Baker's Emperor) Martin Frič

1952 / 14 features ___

DIVOTVORNY KLOBOUK (The Magical Hat) Alfréd Radok

MLADÁ LÉTA (The Early Years) Václav Krška
NAD NÁMI SVÍTÁ (The Dawn) Jiří Krejčík __
1953 / 15 features______

MÉSÍC NAD ŘEKOU (Moon over the River) Václav Krška

MOJ PŘÍTEL FABIAN (My Friend the Gipsy) Jiří Weiss
TAJEMSTVÍ KRVE (The Secret of Blood) Martin Frič
261
 1954 / 13 features

FRONA (The Sisters) Jiří Krejčík

HUDBA Z MARSU (Music from Mars) Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos
STŘÍBRNÝ VÍTR (The Silver Wind) Václav Krška (banned; released in 1956)

1955 / 14 features_

CESTA DO PRAVĚKU (A Journey to the Primeval Times) Karel Zeman

1956 / 18 features___

DEDEČEK AUTOMOBIL (Grandfather Automobile) Alfréd Radok

HRA O ŽIVOT (Life Was the Stake) Jiří Weiss
NEPORAŽENÍ (The Unvanquished) Jiří Sequens

1957 / 21 features _

LEGENDA O LÁSCE (Legend of Love) Václav Krška

ROČNÍK JEDENADVACET (Born 1921) Václav Gajer
ŠKOLA OTCŮ (School of Fathers) Ladislav Helge
ŠTĚŇATA (Puppies) Jvo Novák
TAM NA KONEČNÉ (At the Terminal Station) Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos
ZÁŘIJOVÉ NOCI (September Nights) Vojtěch Jasný
ZTRACENCI (Three Men Missing) Miloš Makovec

1958 / 24 features

TOUHA (Desire) Vojtěch Jasný

TŘETÍ PŘÁNÍ (The Third Wish) Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos
VLČÍ JÁMA (Wolf Trap) Jiří Weiss
VYNÁLEZ ZKÁZY (Invention for Destruction) Karel Zeman
ZDE JSOU LVI (Hic sunt leones) Václav Krška
ŽIŽKOVSKÁ ROMANCE (A Local Romance) Zbyněk Brynych

1959 / 28 features

KAM ČERT NEMŮŽE (Where the Devil Cannot Go) Zdeněk Podskalský
OŠKLIVÁ SLEČNA (The Plain Old Maid) Miroslav Hubáček
PROBUZENÍ (Awakening) Jiří Krejčík
VELKÁ SAMOTA (Great Seclusion) Ladislav He/ge

1960 / 27 features

HOLUBICE (Dove) František Vláčil

PŘEŽIL JSEM SVOU SMRT (I Survived My Death) Vojtěch Jasný
ROMEO, JULIE A TMA (Romeo, Juliet and the Darkness) Jiří Weiss
SMYK (Skid) Zbyněk Brynych
VYŠŠÍ PRINCIP (Higher Principle) Jiří Krejčík

1961 / 31 features

ĎÁBLOVA PAST (The Devil’s Trap) František Vláčil

KRÁLÍCI VE VYSOKÉ TRÁVĚ (Rabbits in the Tall Grass) Václav Gajer
PROCESÍ K PANENCE (Pilgrimage to the Virgin) Vojtěch Jasný
TRÁPENÍ (Worries) Karel Kachyňa

262
 1962 / 30 features

TRANSPORT Z RÁJE (Transport from Paradise) Zbyněk Brynych

ZELENÉ OBZORY (Green Horizons) Ivo Novák

1963 / 30 features

AŽ PRUDE KOCOUR (That Cat) Vojtěch Jasný

ČERNÝ PETR (Peter and Paula) Miloš Forman
IKARIE XB-l (Tkaria XB-1) Jindřich Polák
KONKURS (The Audition) Miloš Forman
KŘIK (The Cry) Jaromil Jireš
O NÉČEM JINÉM (About Something Else) Věra Chytilová
SMRT SI ŘÍKÁ ENGELCHEN (Death Calls Itself Engelchen) Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos
SPANILÁ JÍZDA (The Glorious Campaign) Oldřich Daněk

1964 / 30 features _

.. . A PATY JEZDEC JE STRACH (The Fifth Horseman Is Fear) Zbyněk Brynych

BLÁZNOVA KRONIKA (The Jester's Tale) Karel Zeman
DÉMANTY NOG (Diamonds of the Night) Jan Němec
HVÉZDA ZVANÁ PELYNEK (A Star named Wormwood) Martin Frii
KAŽDÝ DEN ODVAHU (Courage for Every Day) Evald Schonn
KDYBY TISÍC KLARINETU (If a Thousand Clarinets) Ján Roháč i Vladimír Svitáček
LIMONÁDOVÝ JOE (Lemonade Joe) Oldřich Lipský
OBŽALOVANÝ (The Accused) Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos
STARCI NA CHMELU (The Hop-Pickers) Ladislav Rvchman
ZPÍVALI JSME ARIZONU (We Sang the Arizona) Václav Sklenář

1965 / 32 features_

AT ŽIJE REPUBLIKA! (Long Live the Republic!) Karel Kachyňa

BÍLÁ PANÍ (The White Lady) Zdeněk Podskalský
BLOUDĚNÍ (Wandering) Antonín Máša
INTIMNÍ OSVĚTLENÍ (Intimate Lighting) Ivan Passer
KAŽDÝ MLADÝ MUŽ (Every Young Man) Pavel Juráček
LÁSKY JEDNÉ PLAVOVLÁSKY (Loves of a Blond) Miloš Forman
NIKDO SE NEBUDE SMÁT (Nobody Shall Be Laughing) Hynek Bočan
OBCHOD NA KORSE (Shop on Main Street) Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos
PERLIČKY NA DNE (Pearls at Bottom) Věra Chvtilová. Jaromil Jireš, Jan Němec,
Jiří Menzel, Evald Schorm. Ivan Passer, lurai Herz
SOUHVĚZDÍ PANNY (Constellation of the Virgo) Zbvněk Brynych
TŘICET JEDNA VE STÍNU (Ninetv in the Shade) Jiří Weiss
ZLATA RENETA (The Golden Rennet) Otakar Vávra
ZLOČIN V DÍVČÍ ŠKOLE (Crime in the Girls School) Jiří Menzel. Ladislav Rychman
Ivo Novák

1966 / 31 features _ _
DÁMA NA KOLEJÍCH (Ladv on the Tracks) Ladislav Rychman
DYMKY (Pipes) Vojtěch Jasný
HOTEL PRO CIZINCE (Hotel for Strangers) Antonín Máša
KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZÓN (End of August in Hotel Ozone) Jan Schmidt
KOČÁR DO VÍDNĚ (The Coach to Vienna) Karel Kachyňa
MUČEDNÍCI LÁSKY (Martyrs of Love) Jan Němec
263
NÁVRAT ZTRACENÉHO SYNA (The Return of the Prodigal Son) Evald ScUorm
O SLAVNOSTI A HOSTECH (The Party and the Guests) Jan Němec
OSTRÉ SLEDOVANÉ VLAKY (Closely Watched Trains) Jiří Menzel
ROMANCE PRO KRÍDLOVKU (Romance for the Flugelhorn) Otakar Vávra
SEDMIKRÁSKY (Daisies) Věra Chytilová

1967 / 33 features

HOŘI, MÁ PANENKO! (Firemen’s Balí)) Miloš Forman

JÁ SPRAVEDLNOST (I the Justice) Zbyněk Brynych
MARKÉTA LAZAROVA / František Vláčil
NOC NEVÉSTY (The Night of the Bride) Karel Kachyňa
PÉT HOLEK NA KRKU (Five Girls to Deal With) Evald ScUorm
SOUKROMÁ VICHŘICE (Private Windstorm) Flynek Bočan
ZNAMENÍ RAKA (The Sign of the Crab) Juraj FJerz

1968 / 36 features

ČEST A SLÁVA (Honor and Glory) Hynek Bočan

KRÁLOVSKY OMYL (The Royal Mistake) Oldřich Daněk
KULHAVÝ ĎÁBEL (The Lame Devil) Juraj Herz
PENZIÓN PRO SVOBODNÉ PÁNY (Boarding House for Gentlemen) Jiří Krejčik
ROZMARNÉ LÉTO (Capricious Summer) Jiří Menze!
STUD (Shame) Ladislav Helge
ÚDOLÍ VČEL (Valley of Bees) František Vláčil
ZLOČIN V ŠANTÁNU (Crime in the Night Club) Jiří Menzel

1969-1970 /

(There were about 25 Czech features made in 1969). Some were not shown until 1970.
In the spring of 1970 some eight finished films were banned and about twelve un¬
finished films were stopped. I have marked those films, as far as I was able to establish
wath happened to which of them. See also note on page 197.
ADELHEID / František Vláčil
AESOP / Rangel Vulchanov (BANNED)
DEN SEDMY, OSMÁ NOC (Seventh Day, Eigth Night) Evald ScUorm (BANNED)
ECCE HOMO HOMOLKA / Jaroslav Papoušek
FARÁRQV KONEC (End of a Priest) Evald ScUorm
HLÍDAČ (The Watchman) I van Renč
HRST VODY (Adrift) Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos
HVĚZDA (The Star) Jiří Hanibal
JAK SE PEČE CHLEBA (How Bread is Made) Ladislav Helge (STOPPED)
JÁ TRUCHLIVÝ BÚH (I the Sad God) Antonín Kachlík
KLADIVO NA ČARODĚJNICE (Hammer Against Witches) Otakar Vávra
KOLONIE LANFIERI (The Lanfieri Colony) Jan Schmidt
LUK KRÁLOVNY DOROTKY (The Bow of Queen Dorothy) Jan Schmidt
NAHOTA ^Nakedness) Václav Matějka (BANNED)
NÁVŠTĚVY (The Visits) Vladimír Drha. Otakar Fttka, Milan Jonáš (STOPPED)
NEJKRÁSNĚJŠÍ VĚK (The Most Beautiful Age) Jaroslav Papoušek
NEVĚSTA (The Bride) Jiří Suchý
OHLÉDNUTI (Looking Back) Antonín Máša
OVOCE STROMŮ RAJSKÝCH JÍME (We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise)
Věra Chytilová

264
PASTÁK (The Decoy) Hynek Bočan (STOPPED)
PAVILION No. 6 (Pavilón č. 6) I van Balada (STOPPED)
PŘÍPAD PRO ZAČÍNAJÍCÍHO KATA (The Case for the New Hangman) Pavel Juráček
(BANNED)
SKŘIVÁNCI NA NITI (Skylarks on a String) Jiří Menzel (BANNED)
SMĚŠNÝ PÁN (The Funny Man) Karel Kackyňa
SMUTEČNÍ SLAVNOST (Funeral Rites) Zdeněk Sirovy (BANNED)
SPALOVAČ MRTVOL (The Cremator of Corpses) Juraj Herz
SVATEJ Z KREJCÁRKU (The Saint from the Outskirts of the Town) Petr Tuček
SVETÁCI (Men About Town) Zdeněk Podskalský
TVÁŘ POD MASKOU (Face under the Mask) Rangel Vulchanov (also announced as
Cvoci — The Eccentrics)
UCHO (The Ear) Karel KacUyňa (BANNED)
VALERIE A TÝDEN DIVU (Valerie and the Week of Wonders) Jaromil JireS
VŠICHNI DOBŘÍ RODÁCI (All Those Good Countrymen) Vojtěch Jasný
ZABITÁ NEDÉLE (Killed Sunday) Drahomíra Vihanová (BANNED)
ŽERT (The Joke) Jaromil Jireš

265
INDEX

About Something Else (O neceni Baarova, Lida 8

jinem) 102, 103, 182 Babel, Isaac 159
Accused, The (Obžalovaný) 172, 226 Bach, J. S. 169
Adelheid 212, 213 Bag of Fleas (Pytel blech) 101, 102,
Adrift (Touha zvana Anada) 223, 103
230 Baker’s Emperor, The (Pekarův
Aesop (Ezop) 197 cisar) 38
Against All (Proti vsem) 36 Balada, Ivan 197
Albee, Edward 27 Ballerina (Balerína) 1 2
Alexander II. (Yugoslav king) 7 Baltisberger, Hans 169
Allen, Ted 231 Band Won, The (Kapela vyhrala) 72,
All Over 27 73
All Those Good Countrymen Banik, K. 243, 249
(Všichni dobři rodáci) 48, 1 19, Banjo Show, The (Revue pro banjo)
214, 237 118, 120
Almanac of Jazz and Dance Music Barabas, Stanislav 241
(Ročenka taneční hudby a jazzu) Baranovskaya, Vera 6
69 Bardeche, Maurice 5
Alois Won the Sweepstakes (Alois Baron Munchhausen (Baron Prasil)
vyhrál na los) 9 193
America (Amerika) 220 Barrande, Joachim 181
Andalusian Dog (Un chien andalou) Bartered Bride, The (Prodana
116 nevesta) 56
Anderson, Lindsay 1 18 Basie, Count 35, 136, 225
Andrzeiewski Jerzy 141 Battalion (Batalión) 5
And the Son (Et du fils) 228, 233 Bathouse, The (Banya) 52
Angel Levine, The 230 Batista, Fulgencio 233
Angels Who Burn Their Wings 220 Beatles, The 53
Annie Is Jealous (Andula zarli) 2 Bedbug, The (Klop) 52
Antonioni Michelangelo 114, 203 Beethoven, Ludwig van 55
Ark of Mr. Servadac (Archa pana Behounek, Kamil 225
Servadaca) 193 Before the Matriculation (Pred
Arrival from Darkness (Prichozi z maturitou) 13, 14
temnot) 3, 4 Before this Night Is Over (Kym sa
Ashes and Diamonds (Popiol i skonči tato noc) 241
diament) 141 Bells for the Poor (Zvony pre
At the Terminal Station (Tam na bosých) 241
konecne) 225, 226 Belohradska, Hana 219, 220
Attached Balloon, The (Privarzaniat Bergman, Ingmar 210
balon) 251 Beria, Lavrentii Pavlovich 185
Audition, The (Konkurs) 75, 79, 84, Best Broad of My Life, The (Nejlepsi
87, 209 ženská mého života) 17
Auerbach (Czech banker) 5 Bierce, Ambrose 28, 201
Ave Maria (Aria) 48 Big Rock Candy Mountains 51
Awakening (Probuzeni) 31, 33 Binovec, Vaclav 5
Azure Rapids (Azurové vodopády) Birdies, Orphans and Fools
186, 187 (Vtackovia, siroty a blaznovia)
197, 241, 242
266
Bitter Love (Horka laska) 232 Brodsky, Vlastimil 51, 150, 153, 154,
Black, Karen 94-95 157, 178-179
Black & White Sylva (Černobílá Brook, Peter 27
Sylva) 64, 192, 198 Brooks, Louise 15
Black Dynasty, The (Cerna dynastie) Brousil, A. M. 254
233 Brown, Clarence 1 2
Blažek, Vratislav 44, 49-54, 63, 64, Brynych, Zbyněk 41, 44, 60, 96, 213,
224, 225, 237 216-223, 251
Block 15 140 Bubbling Stream, The (Sumi proud)
Blue Light, The (Das blaue Licht) 103, 105
246 Builder of the Cathedral, The
Blue Music 69 (Stavitel chrámu) 5
B-minor Fugue 169 Bunuel, Luis 1 16, 120, 129, 143
Bočan, Hynek 197, 205-208 Burian, E. F. 55
Boček, Jaroslav 62, 145 Burian, Vlasta 18, 22, 23, 30
Bogart, Humphrey 18 Burton, Richard 27
Bohdalova, Jiřina 133 Butterfield S 27
Bolshakov (Soviet critic) 87
Bond, James 216, 217 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The
Bonniere, Rene 228 (Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) 214
Bonosky, Philip 87, 88 Cách, Vojtech 241, 253
Bor, Vladimir 76 Camel through the Needle’s Eye
Born to Win 94, 95 (Velbloud uchem jehly) 20
Borovsky, K. H. 182 Camus, Albert 182, 247
Bosek, Pavel 124-125 Cancan 173
Boston Strangler, The 27 Capek, Karel 19, 20, 22, 36, 232
Boswell, James 232 Capricious Summer, The (Rozmarné
Bow of Queen Dorothy, The (Luk leto) 13, 161, 168, 171, 172, 201
královy Dorotky) 201 Career in Rome, The 13
Boy and the Doe, The (Chlapec a Case for the New Hangman, The
srna) 213 (Pripad pro zacinajiciho kata) 195,
Boys on the River (Kluci na řece) 39 196, 197
Boyer, Charles 12 Castle, The (Das Schloss) 194
Boxer and Death, The (Boxer a Catacomb (Katakomby) 18
smrt) 241 Cathedrale, La (Stavitel chrámu) 5
Bradbury, Ray 58 Cathy (Katka) 224
Brasillach, Robert 5 Cech, Vladimir 233
Bravados, The 27 Ceiling (Strop) 99, 100, 101, 109,
Brdecka, Jiri 38, 240 172,192
Brecht, Bertolt 19, 20, 27 Čepička, Alexej 44, 138, 193
Brejchova, Hana 85, 93 Cerny, Rudolf 246, 247
Brejchova, Jana 33, 69, 70, 71, 75, Cerny, Vaclav 238
85, 99, 146, 150, 157, 159, 160, Cervantes, Miguel 251
201, 205, 237. Červenkova, Thea I 1 2
Bresson, Robert 120, 129 Chaplin, Charles 21, 24, 37, 83, 120,
Brezhnev, Leonid 134, 135 121, 129, 153, 172, 177
Brod, Dr. Jan 244 Chaucer, Geoffrey 61
Brodsky, Jaroslav 244 Cheick, Gueye 157

267
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich 21, 27, Crime in the Library of Manuscripts

156 (Zločin v knihovně rukopisu) 170,

Chiarini, Luigi 12 171

Christ’s Years (Kristové leta) 241 Crime in the Night Club (Zločin v
Christmas with Elisabeth (Vánoce s santanu) 44, 168, 171, 172-180,
Alžbětou) 237 228
Chukhrai, Grigori 251 Cry, The (Krik) 182, 183, 184, 189
Chytilova, Vera 41, 63, 66, 99-113, Cucumber Hero (Okurkový hrdina)
1 19, 131, 133, 137, 138, 145, 162, 212
168, 169, 181, 182, 192, 209 Czech Heaven (Ceske nebe) 2, 3, 37
Cikan, Miroslav 1 9 Czech Year, The (Spalicek) 31
Cincera, Raduz 43 Czechoslovak Film 1945-1970 61,
Cisar, Cestmir 128 237
Cisarova, Miss 128 Czechoslovak Washboard Beaters,
Citizen Brych (Obcan Brych) 36 The 55
Cleaver, Eldridge 244
Cleopatra 242 Daisies (Sedmikrásky) 103, 107, 108,
Closely Watched Trains (Ostre 109, 110, 235
sledované vlaky) 57, 161, 167, Darkness Casts no Shadow (Tma
168. 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, nevrha stin) 115
228-229 Darnell, Linda 21
Closing Hour, The (Policejní David, Jasa 128
hodina) 36 Days of Glory 20
Coach to Vienna, The (Kocar do Dead Among the Living (Mrtvy mezi
Vidne) 119, 232, 235, 239, 252 živými) 31
Cock and Bull Story (Ptakovina) 248 Dealers, The (Handlili) 213
Cocks, Jay 87 Death Calls Itself Engelchen (Smrt si
Cole, Nat 21 rika Engelchen) 226
Conscience (Svedomi) 31, 228 Death of Mr. Baltisberger, The (Smrt
Conquest, The 12 pana Baltisbergra) 168
Constellation of the Virgo Decoy, The (Pastak) 197
(Souhvězdí Panny) 217 Deputy, The (Der Stellvertreter) 226
Cop, Karel 197, 241 Deserters and Pilgrims (Zbehovia a
Courage for Every Day (Kazdy den putnici) 241
Odvahu) 61, 143, 144, 145, 146, Desire (Touha) 48, 59
172, 184, 203 Devil from Vinohrady, The (Dabel z
Cowards, The (Zbabělci) 57, 58, 70, Vinohrad) 167
77, 90, 126, 169 Devil’s Dictionary, The 28
Cranes Are Flying, The (Letyat Devil's Trap, The (Dablova past)
zhtiravli) 251 209, 210, 212
Crazy Ones, The 22 Diamonds of the Night (Démanty
Cremator of Corpses, The (Spalovac noci) 115, 116, 119, 129, 185, 205
mrtvol) 214, 215 Diary of a Counter-revolutionary
Crevel, Rene 91 (Denik kontrarevolucionare) 188
Crime Does Not Pay 12 Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer
Crime in the Girls' School, The Verlorenen) 15
(Zločin v divci skole) 112, 162- Dickens, Charles 11 2
168, 170, 173, 203 Difficult Love, A 169

268
Discussions with Masaryk (Hovory s End of a Priest (Fararuv konec) 139,
T.G.M.) 232 150-157, 214, 228
Ditetova, Jana 188, 191 Engle, Paul 222
Djilas, Milován 52 English Letters (Anglické listy) 232
Dog’s Life, A (Život je pes) 20 Enraged Groom, The (Vzteklý
Don’t Hide When It Rains ženich) 9
(Neschovávejte se když prs i) 216 Erenburg Ilia Grigorievich 48
Dostoyevski, Feodor Michailovitch Eroticon (Erotikon) 10, 11
119 Esenin, Sergei 129
Dove, The (Holubice) 101, 208, 209
Eva Is Fooling (Eva tropi hlouposti)
Drahokoupilova. Marie (Madla) 60 18
Drha, Vladimir 197
Every Crown Counts (Kazda koruna
DS-70 Is Not Starting (DS-70
dobra) 216
nevyjíždí) 29
Everything Ends Tonight (Dnes
Drive, The (Nastup) 36
večer všechno skonči) 231
Drummond, Bulldog 3
Every Young Man (Kazdy mladý
Dubcek, Alexander 53, 54, 64, 85, 90, muz) 195
131, 133, 136, 137, 189. 193, 226, Exhibition Sausage Vendor, The
237, 238, 244, 247 (Výstavní parkar) 1
Duchcov Underpass, The (Duchcov¬
Extasy (Extase) 9, 11, 12, 13, 16,
sky viadukt) 253 114,230
Dull Afternoon (Fadni odpoledne) Extasy and Hedy Kiesler (Extase a
92, 168 Hedy Kieslerova) 11
Duna Latrína Zaryetchnaya 51 Extasy and I 11
Durrenmatt, Friedrich 27
Dvorak, Antonin 2, 56, 57
Fabera, Miloslav 244
Ear, The (Ucho) 197, 239, 252 Face under the Mask (Tvar pod
Ecce Homo Homolka 92, 97, 98, 99, maskou) 251
165 Factory of Illusions (Tovarna na
Eckermann, Johann Peter 232 iluze) 246
Edge of Hell 21 Fahrenheit 451 58
Edison, Thomas Alva 1 Fairbanks, Douglas 14
Effenberger, Vratislav 57, 91, 112 Famira, Emanuel 157
Eine kleine Jazzmusik 69, 71, 76, 90, Father (Apa) 251
92, 93, 94 Faulkner, William 81, 83, 139
Einstein, Albert 27 Faust 4
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich 7 Feathered Shadows, The (Operene
Ellington, Duke 35 stíny) 3
Emperor's Baker, The (Cisaruv Fellini, Federico 191, 210, 249
pekar) 38, 112 Fiala, Eman 3
End of August at the Hotel Ozone Fialka, Ladislav 57
(Konec srpna v hotelu Ozon) 194, Fields, W. C. 172
198, 199 Fiery Summer (Ohnivé léto) 39
End of a Clairvoyant (Konec Fifth Horseman Is Fear, The (. . . a
jasnovidce) 64, 65, 66, 74 paty jezdec je strach) 41, 217, 219-
End of the Nylon Age, The (Konec 221
nylonového veku) 135, 204 Film & Doba (magazine) 197

269
Final Stretch, The (Poslední etapa) Galileo Galilei I 9, 20, 27
213 Garaudy, Roger 247
Finnish Knife, The (Finsky nuz) 213 Garbo, Greta 12
Firemen's Ball (Hori, ma panenko!) Garceau, Raymond 228
68, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, Garland, Judy 69
99, 221 Genesis 1 1 1
First Circle, The (V kruge pervom) Ghetto Swingers, The 222
185 Gielgud, Sir John 27
First Day of My Son, The (Prvni den Gilli’s First Visit to Prague (Gilly
mého syna) 47 poprvé v Praze) 9
First Squad, The (Prvni parta) 36 Ginsberg, Allen 134, 159
Five Girls to Deal With (Pet holek Glazarova, Jarmila 59
na krku) 1 12, 148, 149, 158 Godard, Jean-Luc 87, 205
Fjord, Olaf 10 Goebbels, Josef 8, 187
Flirting With Miss Silberstein (Flirt Gogol, N. V. 88
se slečnou Stribrnou) 60 Goldberger, Kurt 240
Forman, Matej 77, 97, 165, 166, 181 Golden Kids, The 134
Forman, Milos 24, 41,42, 43, 61, Golem 39
63, 67-99, 102, 113, 120, 143, 150, Good Earth, The 12
157, 159, 165, 168, 180, 181, 182, Good Soldier Schweik, The (Dobry
202, 216, 217, 221, 233, 243, 248, voják Švejk) 252
254, 255 Good Soldier Schweik in Civilian
Forman, Petr 76, 97, 165, 166 Life, The (Švejk v civilu) 10
Formanova, Vera - see Kresadlova, Gott, Karel 103, 105
Vera Gottwald, Klement 37, 128
Forty-First, The (Sorok pervyi) 251 Gounod, Charles 4, 48
For Whom Havana Dances (Komu Government inspector (Revizor) 88
tanci Havana) 233 Grandpa Motorcar (Dedecek
Frankenstein 2, 3, 37 Automobil) 41, 70
Frankfurter Allgemeine 244 Grand Prix, The (Velká cena) 168
Franklin, Sidney J. 12 Grass, Gunther 188, 226
Freischutz, Der 149 Great Opportunity, The (Velka
Freud, Sigmund 167 příležitost) 29
Fric, Martin (Mac) 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, Great Seclusion, The (Velka samota)
22, 24, 31, 33, 38, 39, 115 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58, 96
Fried, Jiri 100 Green Horizons (Zelene obzory)
Fristensky, Gustav 4 232, 233, 236
From Saturday to Sunday (Ze soboty Green Notebook, The (Zelena
na nedeli) 10, 11 knizka) 40
Frost, Robert 104 Grey-Eyed Demon (Sivooky demon)
Fuka, Otakar 197 5
Fuks, Ladislav 63, 214 Griffith, D. W. 9, 210
Funeral Rites (Smuteční slavnost) Grin, Alexander 198, 200
197, 213 Grosman, Ladislav 228
Funny Man (Smesny pan) 236, 237 Ground to Ground (Zeme zemi) 140
Guild of the Maidens of Kutna Hora
Gajer, Vaclav 33, 60 (Cech pannen kutnohorských) 17

270
Guilt of Vladimir Olmer, The (Vina Honor and Glory (Cest a slava) 1 86,
Vladimíra Olmera) 60 206, 207, 208
Gulliver’s Travels 195 Honzíkova, Milena 204
Honzl, Jindřich 24
Haas, Hugo 16, 19-22, 222
Hope (Nadeje) 234
Haas, Paul 19
Hop-Pickers, The (Starci na chmelu)
Hajek, Jiri 247
51, 53, 239
Hall of the Lost Footsteps, The (Sal
Horniček, Miroslav, 51, 52, 65, 208
ztracených kroku) 108, 182, 183,
Hotel for Foreigners (Hotel pro
209
cizince) 172, 203
Hammer Against Witches, The
House of Happiness, The (Dum
(Kladivo na čarodějnice) 16, 17,
radosti) 168
36, 216
How Bread Is Made (Jak se pece
Hamlet 27
chleba) 48, 197
Hanuš, Miroslav 217
Hrabal Bohumil 57, 63, 161, 168,
Hardy, Oliver 23
169, 181
Harlan, Veit 187, 231
Hrbas, Jiri 1 97
Harlow, Jean 172, 174, 177
Hrubin, František 36
Hašek, Jaroslav 10
Hrubý, Jiri 83
Havel, Vaclav 57, 63, 239
Hughes, Langston 7, 55
Havlíček, Jaroslav 214
Hulán, Luděk 104
Heacock, Linnea 86-87
Husák, Gustav 85
Hearth Without Fire, The (Krh hez
Hussite Trilogy, The (Husitská
ohne) 2
trilogie) 28
Heave-Ho! (Hej rup!) 18, 24
Helge, Ladislav 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49,
58, 62, 96, 183, 197 1 Am Curious (Yellow) 11
Heilman, Lillian 54 Ibragimbekov, Rustam 251
Hemingway, Ernest 61, 80, 139, 162 I Can Jump Puddles (Uz zase skacu
Hen and the Sexton, The (Slepice a pres kaluže 252
kostelník) 23, 30 If a Thousand Clarinets (Kdyby tisíc
Hendrych, Jiri 59, 62 klarinetu) 64, 65, 172
Hercikova, Iva 11 2 If It Weren’t for those Bands (Kdyby
Herz, Juraj 168, 213, 214, 215, 219 ty muziky nebyly) 79
Hesiodos 103 Ikaria XB-I (Ikarie XB-I) 193
Hevdrich, Reinhard 13, 14 II posto 80
Hie Sunt Leones (Zde jsou lvi) 44, / Love Lucy 248
45, 59, 62, 64, 183 Imposters (Podvodnici) 116, 168
High Wall, The (Vysoka zed) 234 Incomprehensible to Masses 191
Hijacking, The (Unos) 223, 224, 225 Incorrigible Tommy
Hitler, Adolf 20, 204, 218 (Nenapravitelný Tommy) 14
Hlásko, Marek 114 Inkognito Quartette, The 120
Hlavsa, Stanislav 4 Innemann, Svatopluk 14
Hobl, Pavel 240 Innocent Sorcerers, The (Niewinni
Hochhut, Rolf 226 czardzieje) 251
Hoger, Karel 59 Internationale, The 48
Holan, Vladimir 63, 70, 143 International Film Guide 1971 197
Holub, Miroslav 63 In the Train (Ve vlaku) 65

271
Intimate Lighting (Intimní osvětleni) Juracek, Pavel 64, 99, 192-197, 202,
92, 93, 94 205
Invention for Destruction (Vynalez Jutzi, Piel 7
zkázy) 59, 193
I Survived my Death (Prezil jsem Kacer, Jan 146
svou smrt) 48 Kachyna, Karel 119, 197, 230, 231 -
It Happened in May (Bylo to v maji) 239, 252
33 Kadar, Jan 31, 44, 53, 59, 62, 63,
It Happened on June 20th (Es 223-231
geschah am 20. Juni) 13 Kafka, Franz 22, 119, 194, 195, 220,
/, The Justice (Ja spravedlnost) 21 7, 247, 254
218 Kahuda, František 59, 60, 61, 105
It’s Still Before the Wedding (Jeste Kalatozov, Mikhail 251
svatba nebyla) 35 Kalis, Jan 219
Kaminska, Ida 226-227
Jack-in-the Box (deputy)-see Pruzinec Kant, Immanuel 1 11
Jakubisko, Juraj 197, 241, 242 Karlstein for Sale (Proda se
Janacek, Leos 161 Karlštejn) 53
Jancso, Miklos 252 Kawalerowicz, Jerzy 251
Jan Hus 36 Keaton, Buster 24
Janik, Karel 243, 249 Kenton, Stan 55
Janosik 4, 169 Kerosene Lamps, The (Petrolejové
Jansky, Jan 39 lampy) 214
Janu, Zorka 8 Kheil, Ivan 83
Jan Zizka 36 Khrushchov, Nikita 57, 59, 62, 193
Jasny, Vojtech 44, 46, 48, 49, 58, 59, Kidnapping of Banker Fux (Unos
62, 96, 119, 160, 183, 188, 214, bankere Fuxe) 3
228. 231, 237 Kiesler, Hedwige 11
Jealousy 12 Killed Sunday (Zabita nedele) 197
Jelinek, Oskar 21 King Dislikes Beef, The (Krai nerad
Jester's Tale (Dva mušketýři) 193 hovezi) 51
Jew Suss (Jud Suss) 231 King, Flenry 27
Ježek, Jaroslav, 23, 56 King in New York, A 37
Jires, Jaromil 108, 168, 182-192, 209, King Kong 56
214, 240, 243, 250 King of the Bohemian Forest (Krai
Jodas, Josef 85, 157, 197, 246, 247 Šumavy) 231
John Birch Society 244 Kinoautomat 43
Joke, The (Zert) 182, 183, 186, 187, Kirov, J. M. 185
188, 189, 190, 191, 205 Kliment, Jan 59, 61, 189, 190, 191,
Jonas, Milan 197 192, 220, 241, 243, 244, 248, 250,
Jones, LeRoi 55 251, 252
Josef Killian (Postava k podpíráni) Klos, Elmar 7, 31, 44, 53, 59, 63,
193, 194, 195, 198 223-231
Journey to the Primeval Time Klusak, Jan 106, 107, 109, 111, 122-
(Zmizely svet) 193 123
Joyce, James 254 Kmoch, František 79
Junghans, Carl 5-8 Know of a Flat? (Nevíte o byte?) 31

272
Kohout, Pavel 44, 188, 226, 239 Leaden Bread (Oloveny chleb) 205
Kopecký, Vaclav 42 Lederer, Jiri 58
Kopta, Josef 21 Legend of Love (Legenda o lasce) 40
Kotva, Vaclac 151 Lelicek in the Service of Sherlock

Kozintsev, Grigori 139, 251 Holmes (Lelicek ve službách

Sherlocka Holmesa) 3
Krejcik, Jiri 22, 31, 33, 43, 76, 216,
228 Lemonade Joe (Limonádový Joe) 38
Lenin, V. 1. 37, 61, 126, 137, 235
Kresadlova, Věra 76, 77, 87, 93,
Letters Across the Frontiers (Briefe
99, 163, 165, 166, 171, 173, 181,
uber die Grenze) 188
187, 209
Levy, Alan 162, 180
Kreuzer Sonata (Kreuzerova Sonata) Libicek, Jan 154, 157
10 Liehm, A. J. 88, 244
Kriegel, František 239 Lies My Father Told Me 231
Kristian 17 Life Goes On (A život jde dal) 7
Kriz, Ivan 48 Light of his Eyes (Světlo jeho oci) 2
Krizenecky, Jan 1, 2, 3 Limanova, Eva 184
Krška, Vaclav 16, 31, 38, 39, 40, 44, Lincoln, Abraham 248
59, 114, 115 Linhartova, Vera 57, 63
Krumbachova, Ester 63, 108, 1 10, Lion Cub, The (Lvice) 60
111, 113, 116-134, 181, 189, 208, Lipsky, Oldřich 51
219 Liská, Zdenek 111
Kubasek, Vaclav 14 Little Fly, The 214
Kubišova, Marta 128, 133, 134, 135, Little Women, The 220
175, 238, 239 Lizzie 21
Kučera, Jan 111 Local Romance, The (Žižkovská
Kučera, Jaroslav 108, 111 romance) 44, 60, 217
Kundera, Milan 187, 189, 205, 248 Long Journey, The (Daleka cesta)
40, 41, 43, 209, 221
Lady on the Tracks (Dama na Long Live the Republic! (At zije
kolejích) 239 rebublika!) 232, 234, 235
Lamarr, Hedy 11 Long White Road, The (Dlouhá bila
Lame Devil, The (Kulhavý dabel) cesta) 65
213, 214-215 Look Back in Anger 143, 145
Lane in Paradise, A (Ulička v ráji) Looking Back (Ohlednuti) 203, 204,
20, 21 205
Lanfieri Colony, The (Kolonie Losey, Joseph 64
Lanfieri) 198, 200, 201 Louis, Joe 16
La Peste 182 Love and People (Laska a lide) 14
Last Man, The (Poslední muz) 20 Loves of a Blond (Lasky jedne
Laterna Magica 42, 70, 74, 96 plavovlásky) 82, 83, 84, 85, 91,
La Traviata 139 101, 133, 157, 168
Laughing and Crying (Smich a plac) Low ben Bezalel, Rabbi 39
1 Lumiere, Brothers 1
Laughton, Charles 19, 20 L’ Unita 144
Laurel, Stan 23, 175 Lustig, Arnošt 113, 115, 185, 222
Leacock, Stephen 50 Luther, Martin 2

273
Mach, Josef 233 Men Off-Side (Muži v offside) 19,
Machane, Jiri 200 222
Machaty, Gustav 8-13, 16, 17, 20, Mensik, Vladimir 82, 83, 133
230 Menzel, Jiri 13, 57, 63, 110, 112, 138,
Macourek, Harry 38 161-181, 186, 197, 201, 202,
Madame X 12 213, 228-229, 243
Magical Hat, The (Divotvorny Messenger of Dawn (Posel usvitu) 39
klobouk) 41 Metamorphosis (Verwandlung) 119
Maharal 39 Meyer, Louis B. 14
Mahler, Zdenek 43, 159 Michal, Karel 186, 206
Main Prize, The (Hlavni výhra) 71 Michalski, Czeslav 235
Makarenko, Anton Semionovich 14 Mill, The (Mlyn) 159
Makavejev, Dušan 64 Mille, Cecil B. de 36
Malamud, Bernard 230 Miller, Glen 136
Maile, Louis 64 Miller, Henry 11
Manipulators 228 Minor Bird, A 104
Marathon (Maratón) 234, 237 Missing Child 312 (Suchkind 312) 13
Marek, Jiri 64 Mlikovsky Cestmir 47, 21 2
Mares, Karel 123, 124, 126-127 Mnacko, Ladislav 226
Markéta Lazarova 13, 15, 172, 201, Modern Times 17, 21
209, 210, 212, 228 Molas, Zet 1 1 2
Marshall, Alan 252 Money or Your Life (Peníze nebo
Marshal Budenny 201 život) 24
Martinu, Bohuslav 42 Moon Above the River (Mesic nad
Martyrs of Love, The (Mučednici rekou) 39, 114
lásky) 107, 121, 126, 128, 129, Morality Above All (Mravnost nade
130, 133 vse) 20
Maryša 15, 16, 23 Moravian Hellas (Moravska Hellas)
Marx, Groucho 22, 214 213
Masa, Antonin 61, 202-205 Morsel, The (Sousto) 115
Masaryk, Jan 21, 23 Most Beautiful Age, The
Masaryk, Tomas Garrigue 36, 232, (Nejkrasnejsi vek) 92, 93, 97, 98
237 Mostel, Zero 231
Massacre of Farmer Cook’s Family, Most Sacred Words of Our Life, The
The 9 114
Materialism and Empirio criticism Most Strike, The (Mostecka stavka)
61 253
Matuška, Waldemar 103, 104 Mother and Son 130
Maupassant, Guy de 214 Mother Joan of the Angels (Matka
May, Karl 8 Joanna od aniolow) 251
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 52, 128, Mother Krausen's Journey to Happi¬
129, 191
ness (Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins
Max and the White Phagocytes 1 1 Gluck) 1
Melies, Georges 4, 59 Mournful Demeanor of Lieutenant
Memory of Our Day (Pamet našeho
Borůvka (Smutek poručíka
dne) I 15
Borůvky) 163
Men About Town (Svetaci) 237, 239 Mr. Buddwing 27

274
Murder for Good Luck (Vražda pro 174, 175, 184, 188, 189, 193, 226,
stesti) 159 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 244,
Murder of Engineer Devil, The 247, 249
(Vražda inženýra Čerta) 133 Novotny, Milon 123
Music from Mars (Hudba z Marsu) Nyman, Lena 1 1
53, 225 Nuremberg Express (Expres z
Mussolini Benito 12 Norimberka) 35

Naceradec, the King of the Kibitzers Oasis (Oaza) 220

(Naceradec, krai kibiců) 11, 20 Oblomov 94
Náchod 69 Obrova, Božena 224
Neckar, Vaclav 134, 136, 239 Of My Life (Z mého života) 40
Necklace of Melancholy, A (Náhr¬ Oh, Happy Day! 220
delník melancholie) 133, 135 Olmerova, Eva 104, 106
Nejedly, Zdenek 56, 57 Olmi, Ermanno 80
Nemcova, Božena 112 Ondra Anny 3, 4, 5, 16, 18
Nemec, Jan 41, 63, 107, 113-137, Ondráček, Miroslav 212, 213
149, 157, 168, 181. 205 One Girl’s Confession 21
Nemec, Jiri 123, 124 On the Beach 198
Neruda, Jan 31 On the Little Island (Na malkia
New Class, The 52 ostrov) 251
Newsweek (magazine) 87 On the Sunny Side (Na sluneční
New World Symphony (Symfonie z straně) 14
Nového světa) 56 On the Tight Rope (Na lane) 233
New Year’s Eve 1957 (Sylvester Opening of Springs, The (Otvirani
1957) 13 studánek) 42_
Nezval, Vítězslav 10, 189, 190 Oratorio for Prague (Oratorium pro
Night in Lisbon, A (Eine Nacht in Prahu) 1 37
Lisbon) 220 Ordinary Fascism (Obyknovenyi
Night of the Bride (Noc nevesty) fashism) 187, 251
233, 236, 239, 252 Organ 241
Night of the Quarter Moon 21 Orwell, George 253
Ninety in the Shade (Třicet jedna ve Osborne, John 143, 145, 146
stínu) 31 Oshima, Nagisa 64
Nobody Shall Be Laughing (Nikdo Our Combat (Notre combat) 20
se nebude smát) 172, 205 Out of Love for You (Dir Zuliebe)
Nobody's Business 228, 230 33
Nocturne (Nokturno) 12
Northern Port, The (Severní přistav) Pabitele 181
35 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm 13, 15
Not Without Laughter 7 Palach, Jan I 32
Novak, Antonin Dr. 197 Palacky, F. 2
Novak, Ivo 70, 71, 233, 237 Papoušek, František 240
Novotny, Antonin (actor) 13, 14 Papoušek, Jaroslav 77, 83, 92, 93, 96,
Novotny, Antonin (president) 13, 14, 97, 98, 99, 165, 181, 208
28, 49, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 74, Papoušek, Jiri 240
87, 89, 90, 103, 110, 113, 126, 128, Paral, Vladimir 63, 206
130, 131, 132, 134, 144, 157, 173, Paravan Theatre 110
275
Passer, Ivan 43, 63, 83, 92, 93, 94-97, Poledňák, Alois 54, 64
113, 168, 170, 181, 254-255 Polo, Eddy 9
Pat and Patachon 23 Ponti, Carlo 87, 169, 220
Pavilion No. 6 (Pavilon c. 6) 197 Powder and Petrol (Pudr a benzin)
Pearls in the Abyss (Perličky na dne) 24
110, 116, 168, 182, 214 Prachařova, Jana 123
Pechlatova, Josefa 153 Prague Adamites, The (Prazsti
Peck, Gregory 20 adamite) 2
Pecka, Karel 48 Prague Executioner, The (Pražsky
Pejskova, Helena 122-123, 150 kat) 4
Pejskova, Irena 123 Prazak, Antonin 212
Pentagon Papers 64 Pražsky, Přemysl 5
People Just Like You (Lide jako ty) Prenosilova, Yvonne 244
232 Private Windstorm 206
Peter and Paula (Cerny Petr) 77, 78, Procházka, Jan 231-239, 244, 247,
79, 80, 81, 84, 92, 97, 99, 182, 242, 252
254 Promised Land 228
Physicists, The (Die Fysiker) 27 Pruzinec, the Deputy 109, 110, 126,
Picasso, Pablo 209 197, 235, 250
Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius 249 Ptacnik, Karel 57, 58
Pick, Jiri Richard I 10 Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich 6, 7,
Pickup 16, 21 225
Pig-Feeder, The (Krmička vepru) 51 Puppies (Stenata) 70, 71, 233
Pike in the Pond, The (Stika,v ryb¬ Purkyne, Jan Evangelista 1, 4
niče) 35 Purs, Jiri 197
Pilařova, Eva 103, 104, 106, 159,
172. 173, 174, 175, 176-177 Radio Free Europe 58
Pilgrimage to the Virgin (Procesí k Radio Yerevan 64, 252
panence) 48, 96 Radok, Alfred 40, 41, 42, 43, 45,
Pink Slip, The (Ruzove kombiné) 2 48, 64, 70, 96, 159, 209, 221, 233
Pipes (Dymky) 48 Racial Question, The (Rasova otazka)
Pistek, Theodor 5 99
Pittermann, Otto - see Slavinsky, Rakosi, Matyas 252
Vladimir Ralston, Vera Hruba 12
Pius II (Pope) 249 Ray, Maria 12
Place in the Crowd (Misto v houfu) Razumowski. Graf von 244
217 Reader’s Digest (magazine) 193
Plamen (magazine) 133, 247 Rebel, The (Der Rebell) 246
Plato 248 Red and the White, The (Csillagosok,
Playboy (magazine) 166 katonak) 252
Poacher’s Ward, The (Pytlákova Red Army Ensemble 1 34
schovanka) 18 Red Music 69
Podskalsky, Zdenek 237, 239 Reflections (Zrcadleni) 141, 143, 160
Poe, Edgar Allan 3, 83, 163 Reflections on "Extasy” 11
Poisoned Light (Otravene světlo) 3 Reid, Bill 228
Pojar, Břetislav 240 Related by Choice (Spřízněni volbou)
Polaček, Karel 11,19 213

276
Remarque, Erich Maria 220 School of Fathers (Skola otcu) 43, 45,
Rendez-vous at the Grinding Room 58, 64, 183
(Dostaveníčko u mlynice) 1 Schorm, Evald 61, 63, 1 12, 122, 123,
Report on the Party and the Guests 137-161, 168, 181, 184, 197, 202,
(Zprava o slavnosti a hostech) 107, 203, 214, 237, 240
116, 119, 121-127, 130, 132, 138, Schulz, Milan 106
149, 150, 235 Seagull Is Late (Racek ma zpozdeni)
Resnais, Alain 254-255 30, 100
Return of the Prodigal Son, The Sea in Flames, The (La mer en flam-
(Navrat ztraceného syna) 145, 146, mes) 20
147, 148, 172 Searle, Ronald 163
Rezac, Vaclav 40 Second Shot, The (Der Zweite
Richard the Lionhearted 156 Schttss) 32
Riefenstahl, Leni 187, 246 Secret of Blood, The (Tajemství krve)
Rina, Ita 10, 11 39
River, The (Reka) 16 Sedlaček, Pavel 173, 175
Road to Happiness (Cesta ke stesti) 35 Sefranka, Bruno 240
Robin Hood 4 Sejna (general) 192, 193
Rohac, Jano 43, 64, 65, 74 Semafor Theatre 24, 75, 77, 162, 167,
Romance 168 175, 214
Romance for the Fluegelhorn Sennett, Mack 154
(Romance pro kridlovku) 17,216 September Nights (Zářijové noci) 44,
Romeo, Juliet and the Darkness 45, 48, 64, 183, 188
(Romeo, Julie a tma) 31 Serventi, Luigi 10
Romm, Mikhail 187, 251 Seventh Day. Eighth Night (Den
Rosenberg, Alfred 138 sedmy, osma noc) 159, 160, 181,
Rovensky, Josef 15, 16, 21, 23 197
Rude Pravo 62, 132, 244 Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) 210
Rychman, Ladislav 51, 53, 64, 171, Sevigne, Madame de 49
239 Shakespeare, William 251
R.U.R. 19,232 Shame (Stud) 46, 47
Sholokhov, Mikhail 236
Sadoul, Georges 12 Shop on Main Street, The (Obchod na
Sagan, Francoise 197 korse) 7, 223, 225, 226-227, 228,
Saint-Exupery, Antoine 129 230
Saint Wenceslas (Svaty Vaclav) 3 Siakel Brothers 4
Salvage of Cruelties (Sběrně surovosti) Sign of the Crab, The (Znamení raka)
168 214, 219
Sartre, Jean-Paul 247 Silent Don, The (Tikkii Don) 236
Satire, Theatre of the 51, 52 Silver Clouds, The (Stribrna oblaka) 2
Satoransky, Jaroslav 153 Silver Wind, The (Stribrny vitr) 39
Satyricon 210 Sirovy, Zdenek 197, 213
Saxophone Suzi (Saxofonová Suzi) 2 Six Black Girls (Sest cernych divek)
Scheinpflugova, O. 19 64, 163, 165, 171
Schleichert, Karel 10 Skalsky, Stepan 233
Schmelling, Max 16 Skid (Smyk) 96, 217
Schmidt, Jan 64, 192, 193, 194, 197-202 Skvorecka, Zdena 123, 127, 153, 155

277
Skylarks on a String (Skřivánci na niti) Strike, The (Siréna) 31
181, 197 Stroheim, Erich vori 9
Slánský, Rudolf 21, 89, 138 Strudl, Jaroslav 38
Slavinsky, Vladimir 29, 33 Suchy, Jiri 24, 57, 63, 75, 77, 159,
Slippers, The (Střevíčky) 213 174, 175, 177, 178-179
Slitr, Jiri 24, 57, 63, 75, 77, 159, 162, Sudek, Josef 140, 141
167, 174, 175, 177, 178-179, 209 Suk, Josef 56
Smetana, Bedřich 40, 56 Summerstorm 21
Smida, Bohumil 241 Sun and Shadow (Slantseto i syankata)
Smiling Land, The (Usmevava zeme) 251
33 Sun in the Net, The (Slnko v sieti) 241
Smocek, Ladislav 63 Sunday in August, A (Srpnová nedele)
Smolová, Zdena - see Molas Zet 36
Smrkovsky, Josef 136, 137, 239 Svab, the grocer 67, 69
Snack-Bar World (Automat Svět) 1 10, Svab-Malostransky, Josef 1
168 Svitacek, Vladimir 43, 64, 65, 66
Sofr, Jaromir 156 Swaggerers, The (Nasi furianti) 15
Solan, Petr 241 Sweet Games of Last Summer, The
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 46, 48, 185, (Sladké hry minulého léta) 214
248 Sweethearts of an Old Jailbird, The
Song of Forgotten Years (Pisen (Milenky starého kriminálníka) 18
zapomenutých let) 201 Swift, Jonathan 1 95
Song of Gold, The 5 Szabo, Istvan 251
Sousa, Philip 79 Táborsky, Vaclav 240
Spartacus 242 Taking Off 61, 81, 87, 88, 92
Spider’s Web, The (Pavučina) 217 Tank Brigade, The (Tankova brigada)
Spiegel, Der 87 37, 208
Spy Who Came In from the Cold, The Tank Corps, The (Tankový prapor)
27 208
Sramek, Frana 39 Taste of Power, The (Ako chuti moc)
Stalin, J. V. 37, 56, 137, 185, 204, 226
246, 250, 252 Taylor, Robert 14
Stallich, Jan 11 Teddy’d Like a Smoke (Teddy by
Stankova, Maruška 228, 233 kouřil) 9
Star Goes South, The (Hvězda jede na Temptations of an Operator (Pokušeni
jih) 64 manipulanta) 129
Stekly, Karel 31 Terence 203
Step-Daughter, The (Jeji pastorkyňa) That Cat (Az přijde kocour) 48, 49,
161 96
Stepnickova, Jiřina 15, 16, 23 That's Life (Takový je život) 5-7
Stern, Jiri 247 There Beyond the Forest (Tam za
Stolen Frontier, The (Uloupena lesem) 74
hranice) 3 1 There Must Be Something Wrong
Strauss, Richard 7 (Podezřely jev) 104
Střecha, Jan 41 They Did Not Pass (Neprošli) 243,
Street of Lost Brothers, The (Ulice 249
ztracených bratri) 1 1 3 Thirst (Zizen) 30

278
Third Wish, The (Treti prani) 44, 45, Unfaithful Marijka, The (Marijka
53, 59, 61, 63, 183, 226 neve mice) 14
Those Daring Young Men in Their Unwanted Guest, The (Nezvanv
Flying Machines 42 host) 216
Through the Desert (Durch die
Vachek, Karel 213
Wuste) 8
Vaculík, Ludvik 244
Thy Neighbour's Wife 21
Valenta, Vladimir 174, 228-230, 233
Time (magazine) 87
Valerie and the Week of Wonders
Time Squeeze (Casova tisen) 100
(Valerie a tyden divu) 182, 188,
Tito, Jozip Broz 58, 59
189, 190, 191, 243
To Live One’s Life (Zit svůj zivot)
Valley of Bees, The (Udoli vcel) 212
140, 141
Vančura, Vladislav 13-15, 39,
Tolstoy - American, Count Fiodor 88
171, 172, 201, 209, 210, 212, 223
Tolstoy, Leo 10
Vanished Writing, The (Zmizele
Toman, Ivo 37
pismo) 15
Toman, Ludvik 220, 246
V-avra, Otakar 16, 17, 20, 28, 31, 36,
Topol, Josef 63
37, 216
Tower, The (Vez) 47
Vertigo (Zavrat) 233
Town on the Border (Mesto na
Vest Pocket Revue 75
hranici) 57, 58
Vigel’, F. F. 88
Tragedy of the Bark Scarab (Tragedie
Vihanova, Drahomíra 197
kůrovcova) 51
Virginity (Panenství) 16
Transit Karlsbad 217
Visconti, Luchino 64
Transport from Paradise (Transport z
Visits, The (Navstevy) 197
raje) 185, 217, 220, 221-223
Vlach, Karel 55, 56
Trapl, Vojtech 79, 241, 246, 254
Vláčil, František 13, 101, 201, 208-
Trees and People (Stromy a lide)
213, 228
140
Vogel, Erich 222
Trenker, Luis 246
Vondráčková, Helena 134, 136
Trial, The (Der Prozess) 194
Voskovec, Jiri (George) 18, 23, 24,
Triumph of the Will (Triumph des
25, 27, 31, 49, 75, 159
Willens) 246
Vostrcil, Jan 78, 79
Trnka, Jiri 31, 240
Vrba, František 61, 62
Trotsky, Lev 187
Vulchanov, Rangel 197, 251
Truckdriver 228
Vyschinski, Andrei 104
Trumbo, Dalton 12, 64
Vyskočil, Ivan 57, 63, 107, 118,
Tuzex 104
122-123, 126, 235
Twelve Angry Men 27
Two Thousand Words Manifesto Wajda, Andrzej 251
244, 252 Wallo, K. M. 29
Tyrlova, Hermina 240 Waltz for a Million (Valcik pro
milion) 233
Ugge, Emanuel 55 Wandering (Bloudění) 203
Uher, František, Dr. 5 Wandering Cannon, The (Zatoulané
Uher, Stefan 241 delo) 232
Ulbricht, Walther 205 War on the Second Floor (Krieg im
Uncle Vanya (Diadia Vanya) 27 dritten Stock) 188

279
War with the Newts, The (Valka s Wichterle, Otakar Prof. 244
mloky) 232 Within the Law 12
Watchman Number 47 (Hlidac 47) Without Beauty, Without a Collar
16 (Bez krasy, bez Hrnce) 219
Waugh, Evelyn 140, 254 Wolf Trap (Vlci jama) 59
We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Women - Our Fate (Zeny nas osud)
Paradise (Ovoce stromu rajských 203, 204
jime) 108, 110, 111 Wood, Sam 12
14V Live in Prague (Žijeme v Praze) Word / shall Not Withdraw, A

17 (Slovo nevezmu zpět) 69, 70

We Love (Milujeme) 35 Word Makes a Woman (Slovo dela
Webb, Chick 136 zenu) 35
Weber, Karl Maria von 149 World Belongs to Us, The (Svět patri
Week in the Quiet House (Týden v nam) 18, 24
tichem dome) 31 World Literature (Svetova
Weiss, Jiri 31, 40, 59, 216 literatura) 197
Well Paid Stroll, The (Dobre World of Beggars (Svet, kde se
placena procházka) 77 zebra) 19
Welles, Orson 187, 195 Worries (Trápeni) 232, 234, 239
Werich, Jan 18, 23, 24, 25, 27, 31,38, Writing Today in Czechoslovakia
48, 49, 70, 75, 159 201
Wet Snow 119 Wrong Way Out, The 12
Where is Kutak? (Kde je Kutak?) 52
Where the Devil Cannot Go (Kam
Yates, Herbert J. 12
cert nemuze) 239
Years of Decision, The (Die Jahre
Where Will you Be when that Trum¬
der Entscheidung) 8
pet Sounds? (Kde budeš ty az zazni
ta trouba?) 40
White Birches in the Fall (Bile brizy Zabrana, Jan 63, 159
na podzim) 185, 187 Zachoval, Miloslav 68, 69
Zalman, Jan - see Novak Antonin, Dr.
White Book on Counterrevolution
in Czechoslovakia, The 61, 137 Zarkhi, Alexander 200
White Lady, The (Bila pani) 186, Zelenka, Jan 1 34
239 Zelenohorská, Jitka 173
White Sickness, The (Bila nemoc) Zeman, Karel 59, 193
19, 20 Zemánkova, Inka 55
Who Takes Baths in Champagne'.’ Zhdanov, Andrei Alexandrovich 12,
(Kdose koupa v sum panském'’)
55, 246

103 Zheljazkova, Binka 251

147*0 Will Collect the Loot 253 Ziegler, Adolf 160
Why (Proc) 141, 143 Zilaly, Lajos 230
Why Aren't You Laughing? (Proc se Zizka, Jan 2
nesmejes?) 17 Zvoniček, Stanislav 61, 62

280
date due
All the Bright Young Men and Women

“a touching and very comical book about the apparently extinct

dynasty of the Czech film makers.”
The New York Review

“a valuable, comprehensive, and delightful book on the Czech

cinema.”
■ Esquire

“An outstandingly well written and almost unbearably moving

account of Czech cinema.”
International Film Guide 1974

“A Czech film-maker . . . offers a remarkable, personal and often

caustic history of the vicissitudes of his native cinema.”
Films and Filming

“a poignant, nostalgic portrait of the cultural ferment in Prague

during the late 50’s and 60’s.”
Montreal Star

“Skvorecky’s humour, his wry self-criticism, his scattershot satir.e

of artistic and political venality, his flashes of warmth . . . bring
you into that heady Prague-spring atmosphere.”
Film Quarterly

$5.95 Cover design: Diana Me Elroy