Czech and Slovak Cinema
Continued from Part One.
After the Prague Spring
The Russian tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968, and the country was cowed into toeing Moscow's political line. Funnily enough, the definitive end to the Prague Spring didn't happen until almost a year later with an ice hockey match some 650 miles away in Stockholm. It was the first major international sporting event between Czechoslovakia and the USSR since the invasion, and the Czechs splurged their hoarded foreign currency allowances to be able to attend and hold up signs such as "Your tanks won't help you now." The Czechoslovak players, meanwhile, covered up the red stars on their jerseys. If such provocations weren't enough, Czechoslovakia won the game 2-0, and a massive celebratory riot broke out in Prague during which the offices of Aeroflot, the Russian state airline, were trashed.
Russia put its foot down. Order was not being maintained in Czechoslovakia, and a new leader more favorable to the Russians had to be imposed. So, in April 1969, out went Aleksander Dubcek, the affable Slovak whose "socialism with a human face" had inaugurated the Prague Spring, and in came a hardline neo-Stalinist, Gustav Husák. (And the Czechoslovak team didn't even win in the overall hockey tournament: the honor went to the USSR.)
In film, the ramifications were dramatic and, between 1969 and 1970, the film industry was reorganised and the liberal films that were planned and made during the Prague Spring were banned "forever." As might be expected, these include some of the most caustic commentaries on the nature of communism.
Jaromil Jireš's The Joke (Zert), for example, charts the bitterness of a student member of the Communist Party who is expelled from university and sentenced to hard labor after a harmless prank directed at a girl he loves. Years later he finds the opportunity to get his revenge on a former friend responsible for his downfall, only to find that life has played a cruel joke on him yet again. The film was so such a stern condemnation of Stalinist methods that it was not only banned but also removed from Jireš's official filmography.
Otakar Vávra's Witches' Hammer (Kladivo na carodejnice, 1969) is more allegorical, but it doesn't take too much to see through his portrayal of the 17th century. Based on historical documents describing witch trials, the film charts how poor superstitious local women are condemned to death as witches by an overly zealous judge. Eventually, the judge's style raises opposition and the witch-hater accuses his political opponents to protect his position. The film bears some similarities to the more well-known Carl Theodor Dreyer masterpiece Day of Wrath (Vredens dag, 1943), which did as much to annoy the Nazis as Vávra's film must have the communists.
After the lively and inventive period of the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s were largely marked by a desire not to cause offense. While some interesting films were certainly made during this period, there was no hotbed of creativity as seen in the 1960s, and worthwhile films are exceptions rather than the rule.
Making an artistically independent film in 1970s Czechoslovakia was largely a game of smoke and mirrors, of convincing the authorities that the film underway was harmless and didn't merit supervision. The most effective way of doing this was to work in genre film, and most of the good cinematic works from this period come from styles that the authorities considered generally harmless.
Jaromír Jireš's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valerie a tyden divu, 1970), for example, presumably must have been presented to the authorities as a fairy tale and a literary adaptation (of a 1930s novel by Vitezslav Nezval). That Nezval had been a committed communist during the inter-war period undoubtedly helped. The result, though, goes far further than a film-of-the-book fairy tale. Part gothic horror film, part children's story, part soft porn, part political allegory, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is one of the most famous horror films that Czechoslovakia has produced.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
The plot is so labyrinthine that it would be impossible to describe it in any detail (and besides, the story is propelled by poetic mood rather than linear narrative). Suffice to say that it concerns the awakening sexuality of 13-year-old Valerie in a dream world filled with predatory vampires and wicked grandmothers. It may be uncomfortably close to child pornography for some viewers, but the perpetual references to the rape, the images of blood staining white clothes and the theme of the abuse of those who cannot defend themselves by those who should be their protectors could not have been mistaken by Czech audiences at the time.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders works because of the strength of the fairy tale tradition in Czechoslovakia. In literature, the genre is well-established, while in cinema, its big breakthrough was the 1950s, when actors, writers and poets who before the Second World War (and, therefore, before communism) had been major experimentalists were forced to find ways to express themselves that would not inflame the culturally repressive Stalinist authorities, who viewed such artists with great suspicion and a watchful eye. The result was a series of big budget fairy tales shot in color that shattered the dull years of post-war totalitarianism in the same way that Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939) livened up the gray years of the Depression in the US.
The 1970s was also a pinnacle in fairy tale production, as talented and free-spirited film professionals sought refuge in a genre that was popular, respected and had a fine pedigree for harboring artistic talent fleeing persecution. Probably the favorite Czech fairy tale of all time is Václav Vorlícek's Three Wishes for Cinderella (Tri oríšky pro Popelku, 1973), and again, its graced with star performances, including a song from the crooning heart-throb of all Czech housewives, Karel Gott. The film is regularly regurgitated on Czech television each Christmas in a prime-time slot and hardly anyone in the country has not seen it at some point.
The tradition lives on today and, although the quality and levels of interest have been more varied than previously, as recently as 2000, the highest number of box office admissions for the Czech Republic for the year went to a domestically produced fairy tale, and a sequel at that, beating out Hollywood hits such as Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000).
Jan Švankmajer: The Dark Side of the Fairy Tale
Whereas fairy tales such as Three Wishes for Cinderella bear bright positive messages, Czech cinema has long had an obsession with the Dark Side. The most brilliant and well-known exponent of this trend is Jan Švankmajer, whose grotesque and technically astounding animations have become internationally famous and inspired such homage as a short film by fellow animators the Brothers Quay, "The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer."
"Dimensions of Dialogue"
Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Goethe and others, Švankmajer's films are voyages into interior worlds in which the abstract demons that haunt us are rendered with a disgusting physicality (the oversized animated tongues that flop around always get me). The word "surreal" is often bandied around so much that it almost means nothing now, but Švankmajer is a Surrealist in the proper sense of the term, being a key member of the Czech Surrealist Group and a dedicated prober of what lurks in humanity's lower layers of consciousness. He's often been evocatively described as an alchemist, a description that matches both his role as creator and some of the visual props of films such as Faust (Lekce Faust, 1994).
For the first twenty years of his career, from the 1960s to the 80s, Švankmajer made shorts, principally with stop motion animation but also using live action, live puppetry and other techniques. Needless to say, his philosophical approach to film infuriated the authorities, and he spent large portions of this time unable to work. A good selection of these disturbing and original works are available on the DVD series, The Collected Shorts of Jan Švankmajer, Volumes 1 and 2.
Since the late 1980s, he has increasingly concentrated on feature films that make use of live action with real actors. The first of these features was Alice (Neco z Alenky, 1988), a reworking of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In the late 1970s, the authorities started forcing the director to work from literary classics, as they thought he couldn't cause as much trouble with adaptations. But while Alice generally follows the book's plot, Švankmajer adds a whole new level of meaning to it and the film certainly transcends adaptation in the usual sense of the term. The most morbid and textured of Švankmajer's features, it is also the most challenging.
Following the fall of communism in 1989, the only restrictions to Švankmajer's work were financial, and he made three feature-length films in this period. Faust is an adaptation of Goethe's famous tale of diabolical dealing, reworked to take place in contemporary Prague, with the reading of the original text and the actual events described in the story colliding.
Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci slasti, 1996), practically a silent film, explores the world of secret and bizarre erotic obsessions (but, no, the film isn't in any way explicit or, paradoxically, even sexy). Czech viewers are rewarded with extra laughs since they'll recognize real-life news anchor Anna Wetlinská playing herself (with a strange fish fixation).
Little Otík (Otesánek, 2000), the most recent of Švankmajer's films, returns to adaptation of a children's book, this time a Czech fairy tale about a childless couple that adopt a tree-stump as a boy and find it turns into a crazed man-eating monster. Again, the tale is updated to modern times, and, as in Faust, the original story is read by one of the main characters as parallel events echoing those in the book unfold around.
Also worth noting is that Švankmajer is far from being the only Czech puppet animator of note. Jirí Trnka made a name for himself illustrating children's books before moving on to animation. Although many of his early works are whimsical in nature, his technical skill shines through: "A Drop too Much," for example, conveys speed and danger (qualities not naturally associated with puppet-work). Moreover, the sentimental gloss can sometimes be deceptive: "The Emporer's Nightingale" ("Císaruv slavik," 1951), for example, clearly advocates rebelling against strict rules. Such an oppositional undertone becomes clear in his last film, "The Hand" (Ruka, 1965), an thinly-veiled allegory of an artist's plight in a totalitarian state.
Jirí Barta, like Švankmajer, has also worked with the grotesque. His masterwork is the feature-length The Pied Piper (Krysar, 1985), which mixes a variety of animation techniques and incorporates real, live action rats. His current project is an ambitious adaptation of the legend of the Golem of Prague (already successfully translated into film by Paul Wegener and Julien Duvivier, among others), but it looks like it will never be completed; animation, once state-subsidized, has suffered most of all film forms in the free-market Czech Republic.
1989 Onwards: Nostalgia and Bitterness
The fall of communism in 1989 offered the chance for directors to look at the present and the past with a new honesty - the very formula that had made the 1960s so cinematically successful. Not surprisingly, then, Czech cinema in the 1990s and 2000s has had a large degree of continuity stylistically and thematically with the Czech New Wave. Although critical comparisons between the two eras have generally found the more recent films to be weaker and more derivative, international success has returned to Czech cinema, including an Oscar win and several nominations.
Ironically, as the hardships of adapting to capitalism have hit the country's economy, Czech film has looked back to the past more with a sentimental warmth than with biting analysis. Jan Svrrák's Kolya (Kolja, 1995) has been the most successful of these, taking a gently humorous look at Communist oppression and superimposing it over a story of a womaniser who grows up through having to care for a five-year-old boy. Sverák's next feature, Dark Blue World (Tmavomodry svet, 2001) rehabilitates Czech pilots who fought on the side of the Western Allies in the Second World War and who subsequently suffered under communism.
Of the films that have looked at the present, Wiktor Grodecki's Mandragora (1997) is one of the most scathing, focusing on gay teenaged prostitutes in Prague. The dark, seedy picture it paints of post-communist life was not well-received in the Czech Republic, but you can't fault Grodecki on accuracy: the film was based on extensive research, as can be seen in his two preceding documentaries on the subject, Not Angels but Angels (1994) and Body without Soul (1996), based largely on interviews with adolescent sex trade workers.
In the early 2000s, there was a small wave of interest in rediscovering the country's Jewish past, of which Jan Hrebejk's Divided We Fall (Musíme si poméhat, 2000) is a good example (see the section on Holocaust cinema in Part One.)
Slovakia: The Forgotten Country
While most of the films of the 1960s were made at the Barrandov Film Studios in Prague by Czechs, it shouldn't be forgotten that the country was then Czechoslovakia and Slovakia had a film culture of its own based around the Koliba studios in Bratislava. Indeed, some Slovaks have preferred to work in Prague, including Jaromil Jireš, Juraj Herz and, since the breaking up of Czechoslovakia in 1992, the "Slovak Fellini" Juraj Jakubisko. Slovak Martin Štrba is now probably the most important and original director of photography in the Czech Republic (as at home, where he still works).
The Shop on Main Street
Ironically, the most successful film shot in the Slovak language, Elmar Klos and Ján Kádar's Oscar-winning The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965) was made by Barrandov. Despite the fact that the dialogue is in Slovak, most of the actors are Slovak and the action takes place in Slovakia, many Czechs still consider the film theirs. The issue isn't simplified by the fact that the film had two directors, one Czech (Klos) and one Slovak (Kádar) and the screenplay is based on a novel by a Czech author with Jewish roots who grew up in Slovakia (Ladislav Grosman).
Klos and Kádar belong to the older generation, who like Vlácíl and others, prefigured the Czech New Wave. But there was also a Slovak New Wave which produced some equally remarkable films by directors such as Stefan Uher and Peter Solan in the early 1960s, with Jakubisko, Dušan Hanák and Elo Havetta emerging later. Furthermore, Slovak directors working in the 1970s and 1980s frequently made far more hard-hitting films than their Czech counterparts (in Prague, only Chytilová could compete with the Slovaks for independence), largely as Bratislava was further away from the centers of control. Some Czech directors, such as animator Ján Švankmajer, were able to side-step a ban on directing imposed by Prague by filming in the Slovak half of the federation.
Slovakia faired badly in the 1990s, with nationalist autocrat Vladmir Meciar at the country's helm. Despite promises to boost film production, output fell to a bare trickle. But this didn't stop the emergence of a major talent, Martin Šulík, whose lyrical films often explore tense father-son relationships.
Despite these important works, Slovakia is shamefully under-represented in mainstream views of world cinema history. More DVD releases, Criterion, please!
Andrew James Horton is the Editor-in-Chief of Kinoeye, an invaluable film journal that originated as a column for the Central Europe Review.
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