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THE MIRACLE AND THE YOUNG WAVE : Czechoslovakia after 1963

Mira Liehm and Antonin J. Liehm


SUNSHINE IN A NET

“As long as I’m here, this anti-socialist art will not be distributed!” This statement was made in
the spring of 1963 by Karol Bacílek, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia, and
erstwhile Minister of State Security in the early fifties. In response to this statement, the Film
Journalists’ Club organized in Prague a special premiere showing of Štefan Uher’s film, Sunshine in
a Net (Slnko v sieti – 1962). At just about the same time, a commission composed of political
leaders, historians, and political scientists was meeting in Prague. The resolutions passed by this
commission resulted in the rehabilitation of the so-called “Slovak nationalists,” some of whom had
been condemned to life imprisonment in the witch-hunt trials of the fifties. (One of these
“nationalists,” Gustav Husák, succeeded Dubček as First Secretary of the Communist Party after
Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968.) Karol Bacílek soon vanished into political limbo,
to be replaced by the unknown Alexander Dubček as the head of the Slovak Communist Party. That year
only Czechoslovakia, among all the industrial countries in the world, showed a drop in national
income. The total drop was 2.2 percent, industrial production dropping 0.7 percent (agricultural
production fell 0.4 percent between 1961 and 1965), and productivity 1.4 percent. What had been the
foundation of Czechoslovakia’s political stability since 1956 was in an unprecedented shambles.

The history of Sunshine in a Net aptly illustrates the direct link between culture and politics in
another land where the Spectator was simultaneously the wielder of absolute power and the
embodiment of absolute authority. A shock to political power brought about a crisis of authority,
and art – above all film – emerged from this crisis into open conflict with the established
cultural policy.

Sunshine in a Net was entirely different from practically everything that preceded it. The script
rejected the axioms about dramatic structure, turning instead to the inner life of its characters,
the complex problems of their intercommunication – the hero’s mother, for example, is blind, which
forces her to perceive reality through the eyes of others. Uher acted with utter freedom, within
the limits of the real world; he cast off all political opportunism and showed on the screen some
of the aspects of the true face of economic reality. Stanislav Szomolanyi’s camerawork went on to
contribute an entirely new dimension of almost surreal lyricism.

Thus Sunshine in a Net became the symbol of the upsurge that at that time was ripening on all
fronts. Almost simultaneously with the opening of Sunshine in a Net, a program of films directed by
Věra Chytilová finally was distributed, after endless delays. The two medium-length films were
shown under the title There’s a Bag of Fleas at the Ceiling (U stropu je pytel blech – 1962). In
the style of cinéma verité, and influenced by American underground films, the films were on one
hand a personal contemplation of the lot of women – The Ceiling – a complete departure from past
themes, and on the other hand, a sharply-honed, moralizing, sarcastic tract against the hypocrisy
of educators in a girl’s apprentice dormitory – A Bag of Fleas (Pytel blech). Shortly thereafter,
Chytilová concluded work on her first feature film, Something Different (O něčem jiném – 1963), one
of the best films made in Czechoslovakia in the sixties. In it, she remained true to the cinéma
verité method, but she introduced a new philosophical note into Czech film by showing the
parallelism of success and failure, the relativity of two totally dissimilar “women’s destinies.”


PRECEDING GENERATIONS

One thing that was characteristic of the exceptional upsurge in Czechoslovak film between 1963 and
1969 was the fact that although the youngest generation dominated the scene, the “Czechoslovak Film
Miracle” was not only their affair. It was as if what three generations had striven to achieve –
the prewar generation, the postwar generation, and the “second” generation of 1956 – was suddenly
coming to pass in this period. Film-makers of all generations were finally, for the first time,
finding it possible to make films the way they wanted, the way they felt they should be made, and
to arrive at some measure of self-realization.

Jan Kadár and Elmar Klos pushed directly into contemporary problems with The Defendant (Obžalovaný
– 1964). A classical “trial film,” and social-conscience picture, but on a timely theme: three men
stand before a court of law, accused of economic crimes. It gradually becomes apparent, however,
that it is the nonsensical state economic system that stands accused, accused of punishing people
who display personal initiative, take risks, and achieve success in spite of the system. In the
film’s conclusion, the hero refuses the compromise offered by the court, preferring to return to
prison, because that is the only way that he can even hope to see the true culprits finally brought
to trial. It was the film audience that became the true judge, and in its open end, the film turns
to the viewers as to a court of last resort. Following this film, their most political, Kadár and
Klos finally won international acclaim. On the surface, their The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na
korze – 1965) appeared to be a story of the persecution of Jews in the fascist Slovak state during
World War Two. But in fact Kadár and Klos used this plot as a vehicle to express a more universal
moral credo – their hatred of indifference and opportunism and of all oppression. Once again they
reminded their audiences: “You all share the responsibility, no one can escape from himself.”

It was a leading representative of the generation of 1956, Vojtěch Jasný, who declared in 1963 that
Czechoslovak film-makers are aware of this responsibility, that they don’t intend to keep silent
any longer, and that from then on, they would call things by their right names. Cassandra Cat (Až
přijde kocour – 1963) was a modern fairy tale, one of the political morality films that became so
typical in those years. Stylized to the extreme, almost a kind of film ballet, it was the story of
a magic cat whose gaze made everyone show his true colors: it not only opened a Pandora’s box of
taboo subject matter, it also broke the lock on the chest that for so many years had confined
visual fantasy. Following Desire, it was another pioneering feat, and it was no accident that Jasný
was to conclude this era of film-making – after the unsuccessful international coproduction of
Pipes (Dýmky – 1966) – with one of the most significant films of 1968, All My Countrymen (Všichni
dobří rodáci).

The dominant “young wave” succeeded, by means of its elan and its example, in inspiring many of the
older film-makers who seemed already to have thrown in the towel. Such, for example, was the case
of Otakar Vávra, teacher of many of the young people at the film academy, who in the mid-sixties
emerged with two of his very best films, Golden Rennet (Zlatá reneta – 1965), a portrait of
intellectual cowardice in the early fifties, and Romance for Trumpet (Romance pro křídlovku –
1966), about the drama of growing up in the Southern Bohemian countryside that Vávra had used as a
setting in several earlier films. It was no coincidence that the author of the story on which each
of these films was based was František Hrubín, the same poet who years earlier had reminded Czech
writers of the metaphor of the swan frozen in the ice.

Jiří Weiss and Jiří Krejčík were other members of the previous generations to catch their second
breath in this period. In his fairy-tale spectacular, The Golden Fern (Zlaté kapradí – 1963), Weiss
confirmed his somewhat cool mastery of film material. Ninety in the Shade (Třicet jedna ve stínu –
1966), a psychological mystery aimed at the hypocrisy and immorality of society, made in
coproduction with Great Britain, suffered as a result of the misalliance of Czech material and the
ambitions of an international coproduction. Murder Czech Style (Vražda po našem – 1967) took its
place in the bitter moralizing context of the sixties. Through the story of a wool-gathering office
worker, Weiss attempted to show Czech indecisiveness, pettiness, and opportunism in a mixture of
the imaginary and the real. Krejčík was also successful in this area in Wedding under Supervision
(Svatba jako řemen – 1967), which tied in with the tradition of black and grotesque humor that
strongly colored his prewar student days. One of his very best films, it was something of a
screwball comedy, exposing the dullness of both the old and the new petty bourgeoisie and the
representatives of law and order. Later the same year, he made a comedy based on a farce by Sean
O’Casey Boarding House for Bachelors (Penzion pro svobodné pány – 1967), noteworthy above all for
the acting.


THE YOUNG WAVE – JIREŠ

In 1963, Jaromil Jireš completed his first feature film, The First Cry (Křik), which, along with
the films of Chytilová and Uher, definitively confirmed that something new was happening in Czech
film-making. The young parents-to-be in the film walked onto the screen directly from the street,
from the midst of an anonymous crowd that came to life before Kučera’s camera, while the anti-hero
of the film, dressed in the overalls of a TV repairman, entered the apartments of members of the
socialist-realist establishment; his honesty and simplicity functioned as a kind of “truth mirror”
making apparent their “new” values and attitudes. Although Jireš made a successful debut in the
early sixties, the demands that he made of himself and his uncompromising examination of the
present and of future possibilities created difficulties that kept him from realizing any more of
his scripts until 1968. During the five-year interim, he made only a few exceptional short films,
but his personality remained an integral part of everything that happened in those years in
Czechoslovak film.


FORMAN, PASSER, PAPOUŠEK

Almost simultaneously, three names appeared in the mid-sixties that became inseparable in the
audience’s consciousness: Miloš Forman (b. 1932), Ivan Passer (b. 1933) and Jaroslav Papoušek (b.
1929). Forman made his independent debut with two medium-length films, Competition (Konkurs) and If
There Were No Music (Kdyby ty muziky nebyly), shown jointly in 1964 under the title Competition.
His style, which was evident from the beginning, was simple: focus the eye of the camera as closely
as possible on human detail, and then put on the screen, in uncensored form, everything that turns
up as a result of such a microscopic view. The result of this method, as it became obvious in
Forman’s later films, was unexpected: in addition to painstaking observations of individual people
and their daily lives, another portrait appeared on the screen, a merciless portrait of the whole
fabric of society, the like of which Czechoslovak film had never produced before. The whole offered
to view an embarrassed, convulsive grimace, a countenance verging on the grotesque; but Forman
laughed with gusto and with no condescension at what he saw, and the audience laughed with him,
accepting him as one of themselves.

His first feature film, Black Peter (Černý Petr – 1963), proved Forman’s exceptional ability to see
in detail, to capture the unrepeatable, small incidents of life, incidents chosen with uncanny
insight as being socially representative. Both Passer and Papoušek collaborated on the film. In
Black Peter, a young boy who is just starting out in life receives his first mission on his new
job: to be an informer, to spy on his fellow-citizens, to watch and to mistrust people. As a
consequence, a gulf opens between the puzzled boy and his painfully smug father that at the film’s
end has become unbridgeable. We encounter the same abyss, the same lack of humanity, in the final
sequence of the film that made Forman known throughout the world, Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné
plavovlásky – 1965). Here also, everything was predetermined from the outset. A small town has a
shoe factory that employs hundreds of young women. The army is asked to provide the missing “male
element,” but instead of the promised garrison of young soldiers, the army stations a unit of
middle-aged reservists there. The mixed-up situation made audiences laugh, but at the same time, it
revealed the inhumanity of this “problem-solving” approach to emotional human needs. The rest of
the film, including the relationship of a young blonde and a touring piano player, was kept within
the framework of the basic “problem,” bringing Loves of a Blonde onto a plane that the film’s
creators had not imagined at the start. Miroslav Ondříček was Forman’s cameraman.



Černý Petr, Miloš Forman, 1963


Although Passer was considered by some to be Forman’s double, his debut, the short A Boring
Afternoon (Fádní odpoledne – 1965) – based on a story by one of the key writers of the period,
Bohumil Hrabal – introduced an entirely unique personality. Whereas Forman had a firm and
irrepressible confidence in the belief that revelations alone are sufficient for the ends of satire
and ridicule, Passer was a melancholy observer, whose laughter contained the mournful element of
understanding. His masterful first feature film, Intimate Lighting (Intimní osvětlení – 1965), was
an almost plotless portrait of the tragicomic futility of the life of a provincial intellectual,
who is confronted with the almost identical futility of his urban counterpart. This film
immediately placed Passer in the ranks of Europe’s foremost directors. It turned out, however, that
he was not to make another film until six years later, when, as an émigré in the United States, he
directed Born to Win (1971).

The third member of the trio, Papoušek, whose name always appeared among the credits of Passer’s
and Forman’s films, did not make his independent debut until 1968, with The Most Beautiful Age
(Nejkrásnější věk). Later, in 1969-1971 he made a series of films about the life of a lower
middle-class Czech family, Ecce Homo Homolka, Big Shot Homolka (Hogo fogo Homolka), and Homolka and
the Purse (Homolka a tobolka). His exceptional talent for observation turned out to be more
literary than cinematic and under circumstances that had already changed, he did not have the
success enjoyed by his two colleagues.

Forman, Passer, and Papoušek destroyed the old conventions of the scenario, striving for a
reconstruction of reality not so much by a realistic plot as by means of the acute perception of
details of situations and characters. They found in nonprofessional actors the ideal interpreters
of the unique moments they brought to life on the screen. This “uniqueness” became the foundation
of their esthetic credo.


NĚMEC, JURÁČEK, KRUMBACHOVÁ

Jan Němec and Pavel Juráček (b. 1935) also believed in this uniqueness, and in nonprofessional
actors as its main interpreters. But for all that, their approach was almost diametrically opposed
to that of the aforementioned trio. They did not use slice-of-life portrayals as their point of
departure, but rather the whole, the philosophical fable, a metaphor for which they sought and
found concrete forms of expression that frequently were not fleshed out with details until the
shooting itself. This was true particularly of Němec and his scenarist and art director, Ester
Krumbachova (b. 1923). Němec’s feature debut, Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci – 1964), still
had a realistic foundation – it was based on Arnošt Lustig’s story of two Jewish boys who escaped
from the Nazis as they were being taken to a concentration camp. But director Němec and cameraman
Kučera transformed the story into an almost abstract vision of young people persecuted by a hostile
world with which they strive in vain to establish contact – a world that is most tellingly
represented by a group of impotent old men in a position of power, who in the end organize a hunt
for the two helpless boys. Jan Němec went on to shoot one segment of the episodic film, Pearls at
the Bottom (Perličky na dně – 1965). Hrabal’s short stories formed the basis for all the episodes
of the film, which brought most of the leading members of the ‘young wave’ together. But it was
Report on the Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech – 1966), that revealed Němec’s full range
of talents. Němec transformed a philosophical morality play about man’s indifference to the fate of
others, about his willingness to accept force and violence, and even to voluntarily become its
tool, into a film metaphor, a series of human situations that are experienced before our eyes by
“ordinary” people that most of us, the viewers, can identify with. This autoreflection – which was
a common trait of the films of the “young wave,” along with the effort to capture and demystify
social realities – was drawn to its inevitable conclusion when all the “voluntary” participants in
that odd, morbid party set out willingly, accompanied by a pack of dogs, to track down the only one
of the “guests” who simply couldn’t take it and fled the party. The fight to overcome the banning
of the film became one of the lessons in the school of practical politics that was attended in
those years by all Czechoslovak artists. The struggle ended in 1968, when, at least for the time
being, the film was released for public screening. In the meantime, Němec made Martyrs of Love
(Mučedníci lásky – 1967), three surreal and comic dream stories about the unfulfilled amorous hopes
of heroes who had been variously trodden on by destiny. No matter how obvious it was that this film
represented a temporary digression from his fundamental concerns – no one imagined that it would be
his last film until the mid-seventies – something to fill the gap until he could work with more
significant material, Martyrs of Love was clear evidence of Němec’s maturity, of his ability to
give an intriguing shape and style to any film material.



Diamonds of the Night, Jan Němec, 1964


THROUGH WOMEN’S EYES

Another cinematic milestone of Czech film in the sixties was shot from a script by Krumbachová, who
also worked on the film as art director. It was Daisies (Sedmikrásky – 1966), directed by Vera
Chytilová, who – as did Forman after Competition – abandoned the method of cinéma vérité after
Something Different. Chytilová, with Jaroslav Kučera at the camera, combined fragments of everyday
reality with artistic and motion-picture recollections to create an artificial, stylized reality as
a setting for her modern fable. The story deals with the inner void, with boredom, with the
destructive impulse that these bring into being; it deals with the indifference of the world, and
also with people whose indignation in a world of mass murder and silent inhumanity “is reserved for
an overturned bowl of salad.” When their real-life Czech counterparts were confronted with the
finished work, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would turn that indignation on
Daisies. Mainly because the film spoke in a language that was almost totally incomprehensible to
them – for, as they used to say in Prague, “socialist realism” just a euphemism for “celebrating
the Party and the Government in a language that even they can understand”?

In 1970, Chytilová, Krumbachová, and Kučera – in a coproduction with Belgium – completed another of
their philosophical visions of the contemporary world, an ambitious artistic parable about women in
a man’s world, The Fruit of Paradise (Ovoce stromů rajských jíme). A symphony of surrealist
estheticism, not always molded into comprehensible form; a film for the next decade, as one
American reviewer wrote.

Ester Krumbachová made her first – and for a long time, her only – independent film, The Murder of
Dr. Lucifer (Vražda ing. Čerta – 1970), at the moment when it was all coming to an end. A sarcastic
tract on the myth of maleness, it is practically the only really Brechtian film made in
Czechoslovakia during the period. It achieves the necessary “distances,” not through cinematic
techniques but through acting and staging,


JURÁČEK

Josef Kilian (Postava k podpírání – 1963), directed by Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt (b. 1934), was
not banned like Report on the Party and the Guests, but its distribution within the country was
limited. A Kafkaesque story that takes place in contemporary Czechoslovakia, it seems almost to
foretell the position Franz Kafka was to have in his native land in the sixties. In the spring of
1963, at an international scholarly conference at Liblice, Kafka, long damned by the establishment,
was officially rehabilitated. In the eyes of the world, Pavel Juráček, one of the most striking
personalities of the period, remained the author of just this one film. His feature debut – a
single film consisting of two thematically connected stories – Every Young Man (Každý mladý muž –
1965), revealed with melancholy humor the alienation of young men in military uniform, and
confirmed the existence of an extraordinary talent. But Juráček’s major work was to be Case for a
Rookie Hangman (Případ pro začínajícího kata – 1969), inspired by Part III of Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels. Although the script was finished in the early sixties, the shooting was postponed under
various pretexts for years, Juráček, in the meanwhile, helping other “young wave” directors with
their scripts. He finally got to shoot his long-awaited film in 1968-1969, but it was completed
only for the storage vaults of the post-Soviet occupation censors.

The codirector of Josef Kilian, Jan Schmidt, also had to wait more than a year for the opening of
his film The End of August in the Hotel Ozone (Konec srpna v hotelu Ozón – 1966), which was written
by Juráček. His picture of a world destroyed by atomic war, a world inhabited only by a surviving
group of young women, was too depressing and too desolate for representatives of official optimism
and leaders of the military. Whereupon the athletic, anti-intellectual Schmidt – director of a
number of interesting short films on sports themes – tried, within the Czechoslovak context, to
create something that was practically unknown there – a romantic action film. His two efforts in
this area were Lanfieri Colony (Kolonie Lanfieri – 1968), and the multi-episode film based on the
short stories of V. Vančura, Queen Dorothy’s Bow (Luk královny Dorotky – 1970).


SCHORM

The greater the determination of Czech film-makers to do away with the old taboos, taking advantage
of every opportunity that the crisis of the system and the ideology’s gradual disintegration
suddenly afforded them, the more they found bans, censorship, and the fight against them to be a
part of their day-to-day existence. This was the atmosphere at the time of the feature-length debut
of Evald Schorm (b. 1931) – who had emerged as the director of a number of fascinating
philosophizing shorts. Schorm’s Courage for Everyday (Odvahu pro všední den – 1964) marked the
birth of another directorial personality. It brought together the most varied sources of modern
inspiration with traditional elements to create a truthful picture of the disillusionment of the
postwar political generation. The script was by Antonín Máša (b. 1935).

In his later films, Schorm remained one of the most controversial directors, an uncompromising
moralist in the best sense of the word. In his The Return of the Prodigal Son (Návrat ztraceného
syna – 1966), he posed the question that was later to become a supremely important one,
particularly in the Soviet Union – is it a sign of social or individual abnormality when the
individual’s inability to make a moral compromise is classified as madness? In Saddled with Five
Girls (Pět holek na krku – 1967), he re-created a novel for adolescent girls, transforming it into
a study of human malice and at the same time pointing up the hypocrisy appearing among the “new
class.”


MÁŠA

Máša made his debut as the director of Wandering (Bloudění – 1965), a sharply defined story of the
conflict between generations projected against the backdrop of the post-Stalinist period. Shortly
thereafter, in Hotel for Strangers (Hotel pro cizince – 1966), he created, in an art nouveau style,
a picture of an ivory-tower world that kills a poet who has come seeking sensitivity and truth.
This metaphor was replaced by direct political reflection in his next film, Looking Back (Ohlédnutí
– 1968), an attempt at finally integrating the experiences of the last 25 years.

Máša’s metaphor about the death of the poet seemed to take up the theme that was expressed earlier
on the stage in Ivan Klíma’s play, The Castle. The sixties in Czechoslovakia had become a period of
renaissance for the legitimate theater, which found – for the first time since the Čapek brothers –
true dramatists in Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Josef Topol, Ivan Klíma, and others. The stage
became an important platform for the intellectual destruction of myths and taboos, and at the same
time a focus and a departure point for cultural ferment, dominated by the Prague Theater Behind the
Arch (Otomar Krejča), Theater on the Ballustrade (Jan Grossman), Semafor Theater (Jiří Šlitr, Jiří
Suchý), Drama Club, and others.

Aside from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia was the only country in which the belated
de-Stalinization brought with it an exceptional flowering of national literature, bringing to light
such extraordinary talents as Fuks, Hrabal, Kundera, Linhartová, Páral, Škvorecký, Vaculík, and,
later, Šotola and others. The symbiosis of theater, literature, art, and music with film, in a
tense period of anxiety and searching, and in the inspiring uniqueness of the setting that was
Prague, indisputably represented an important stimulus to the development of film culture. In many
ways it was a repeat of what had happened in the thirties.


MENZEL

This atmosphere also nourished the distinctive and versatile talent of Jiří Menzel (b. 1938) –
actor, stage director, and film-maker. His film career was closely linked with the name of Bohumil
Hrabal, from the story The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (Smrt pana Baltazara – 1965), another of the
episodes in Pearls at the Bottom, through his to-date most successful film, Closely Watched Trains
(Ostře sledované vlaky –1966), to the banned Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti – 1969). Hrabal’s
tragicomic everyday absurdity found a congenial poet in Menzel, who viewed life with an attitude of
artful irony, an at the same time with an almost philosophical understanding for the tragicomic
non-heroes of his films. Menzel proved equally at home making the film version of twentieth-century
Czech classic by Vladislav Vančura, the sagely ironic parable of illusion and reality, Capricious
Summer (Rozmarné léto – 1967). On the other hand, the mystery comedies of Josef Škvorecký, Crime at
the Girls’ School (Zločin v dívčí škole – 1965), and Crime at the Nightclub (Zločin v šantánu –
1968), were too different in style and too abstractly literary to provide Menzel enough specific
human for his compassionate irony.


KACHYŇA AND PROCHÁZKA

An entirely different link with literature brought about the successes and the failures of Vojtěch
Jasný’s former codirector, Karel Kachyňa. By a series coincidences, Jan Procházka, a hearty,
talented and exceptionally prolific writer, became a favorite of the political leadership for a
number of years, and thus gained almost unlimited influence in Czechoslovak film. As time went on,
Kachyňa became the sole director of Procházka’s scripts, touching with increasing daring on painful
and taboo subjects from the past 25 years. Between 1961 and 1970, the Kachyňa-Procházka team made
11 fiction films. The best of them, Long Live the Republic (Ať žije republika – 1965), looks
through the merciless, politically unbiased eyes of a child at a legend of national heroism at the
time the country was being liberated from the fascist occupation. Procházka’s position inspired and
made possible other controversial Kachyňa films, including another provocative of the war, Carriage
to Vienna (Kočár do Vídně – 1966). This held true until the film Night of the Bride (Noc nevěsty –
1967), which, in showing the period of the collectivization of agriculture in a most unflattering
light, initiated the open conflict between Procházka and the political establishment. The last two
films to emerge from this collaboration, Funny Old Man (Směšný pán – 1969) about a victim of the
persecution of the fifties, and The Ear (Ucho – 1970), about powerful men’s horror of the system
that they themselves established, were eventually banned. Procházka became one of the targets of
the persecution of intellectuals after 1968, and died of cancer in 1971.

Literary works also inspired another member of the young generation, Hynek Bočan (b. 1935), who
displayed an exceptional sense of social irony and sarcasm in the films No Laughing Matter (Nikdo
se smát nebude – 1965), based on a story by Milan Kundera; Private Hurricane (Soukromá vichřice –
1967), based on a novel by Páral; and Honour and Glory (Čest a sláva – 1969), based on a novel by
Michal. Self-irony, a sense of atmosphere, and an intellectual approach to the subject matter were
characteristic of Bočan’s talent. Contrary to his contemporaries – Bočan inclined more toward
traditional cinematic techniques and the use of professional actors.


Carriage to Vienna, Karel Kachyňa, 1966



PRODUCTION GROUPS AND FIFTIES

The reorganization of film production went the furthest in Czechoslovakia between 1963 and 1968,
finally permitting film to exist as an art, and allowing the independent development of a plurality
of heterogeneous talents and styles. In fact, this production concept became a prevalent notion
throughout Eastern Europe, but its realization never quite came to be. What follows applies in
varying degrees to all the Eastern European film industries. The basic idea was that of small
workshops with a stable state subsidy, the workshops increasingly acting as customers vis-à-vis the
studios and the laboratories. The workshops, or production groups, each of which in Czechoslovakia
produced on the average of five or six films annually, were headed by a producer-scenarist team,
and they each had their own art council, while directors were free to work with various groups,
depending on the circumstances surrounding the origin of the specific film. The centralized
evaluation and approval of films was gradually limited as the production groups’ autonomy increased
until finally, in 1968, they were entirely independent. The idea was gradually accepted that the
entire system of film distribution, including the import and export of motion pictures, should be
governed by the cultural and artistic role of film, while television would gradually take over the
role of the main source of popular entertainment. By 1968, the overall reorganization of film
production and distribution was practically ready, having returned to the original concept of a
nationalized cinematography that had been altered and realtered over the years.

The gradual success of this reorganization, as well as that of numerous specific films, generated
constant friction and tests of strength between film-makers, on the one hand, supported by the
majority of film critics, and on the other the still dominant, but shaken, state power, which
simultaneously acted as the sole financier. The Union of Film and Television Artists (FITEs)
carried the banner of the film-makers in this conflict, becoming, as time went on, the first
specialized labor organization in Czechoslovakia with the admitted aim of being a partner, and,
when necessary, an opponent, to the state in establishing conditions for artistic film work. The
key positions in the union in these years were occupied by film journalist Ludvík Pacovský and
director Ladislav Helge. The latter, a leading representative of the generation of 1956, and one of
the main targets of the 1958 neo-Stalinist counteroffensive, for several years sacrificed his own
promising film career to the struggle to create the prerequisites for the film work of others. He
did not make a single film between 1963 and 1968, but nonetheless he was the central figure of the
Czech film industry. It was not until 1968 that he completed Shame (Stud), the portrait of a
political functionary who is corrupted by power and ends his life as a total failure, the hero of
Great Solitude 20 years later. From the political point of view Shame was one of the most outspoken
works of the entire period. This film was unfortunately weakened by Helge’s long absence from the
director’s chair.



BRYNYCH, DANĚK, VLÁČIL

In addition to Vojtěch Jasný, the contemporary of Helge’s to achieve the artistic success was
Zbyněk Brynych. In ... And the Fifth Rider Is Fear (... a pátý jezdec je strach – 1964), he used
the stories of the inhabitants of an apartment house in Prague during the Nazi occupation as a
framework for an expressionistic and entirely contemporary commentary on how man acts in a
situation where police terrorism makes ordinary honesty and decency a matter of life and death.
Brynych also considered the fundamental questions of political morality in his later film I,
Justice (Já, spravedlnost – 1968), a fantastic story of a group of people who want to make the
punishment of Adolf Hitler a matter of their own vengeful concept of justice. Oldřich Daněk, the
scriptwriter for Hic Sunt Leones, who made his debut as a director in 1960 with the officially
irreproachable Three Tons of Dust (Tři tuny prachu), also turned to history – The Nuremberg
Campaign (Spanilá jízda – 1963) – to seek metaphors for the present. In 1967, Daněk made his best
film, The Royal Blunder (Královský omyl), a fourteenth-century tale about the relativity of
despotic power.

Historical material was by far the best medium for František Vláčil, who in 1967 completed his
unique reconstruction of thirteenth-century Bohemia, Markéta Lazarová, based on the novel by V.
Vančura. Supported by the photography of B. Baťka, he achieved an almost flawless recreation of a
period that hovered between paganism and Christianity and filled it with authentic portraits of
people from another civilization. But in the last stages, Vláčil unfortunately lost artistic
control of the large amount of material, which ultimately lacked the disciplined structure and the
orderliness of the poetic original. In this sphere, he was more successful in another historically
based film, The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel – 1968). The conflict between paganism and
Christianity, between two moralities, two civilizations, is once again the central theme. But the
things that had made of Markéta Lazarová a flawed great work of art, the immediate rawness and the
poetic vision, were lacking in The Valley of the Bees.


GOOD ENTERTAINMENT

Searching for a new language, doing away with the traditional script and with studio sets – unless
a high degree of stylization is needed – viewing film art as a persistent destroyer of myths and a
seeker of the truth about man and society – those were the dominant characteristics of Czech film
during the period known as “The Czechoslovak Film Miracle,” dominated by the directors of the
“young wave.” The tradition of highly professional, good comedy, musical, mystery, thriller, and
adventure story, that had developed over the years, specially in the United States, France, and
Great Britain, was entirely lacking in Czechoslovakia and in Eastern Europe in general. From the
very beginning, commercial production here was provincial by nature and was aimed exclusively at
the least demanding audiences on the domestic market or in the neighboring countries. But under the
pressure of an unusually high percentage of artistically ambitious films made by the Czechoslovak
film industry, which by the mid-sixties was producing about 40 films a year, as much as 25 to 35
percent of which were beyond the framework of common commercial production, the quality of the
so-called entertainment genres also went up.

In 1964, the first successful Czechoslovak musical was shown. Called The Hop Pickers (Starci na
chmelu), and directed by Ladislav Rychman (b. 1922), its central motif was the confrontation of
middle-aged hypocrisy with the honesty of youth. Director Zdeněk Podskalský came up with a “ghost
story,” the politically daring satirical comedy White Lady (Bílá paní – 1965), based on a story by
Karel Michal. Another specialist in the comedy genre, Oldřich Lipský (b. 1924), achieved great
success with his intelligent but uneven parody of westerns, Lemonade Joe (Limonadový Joe – 1964).
Václav Vorlíček (b. 1930) achieved a good response internationally with his spoof of the comic
strips, Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (Kdo chce zabít Jessii? – 1966).

A turn for the better as far as quality is concerned was also taken by the mystery and adventure
film genres. There were detective stories by Petr Schulhoff (b. 1922) – for example, The Murderer
Hides His Face (Vrah skrývá tvář – 1966) – and a mystery with political motivations filmed by
Štěpán Skalský (1925) – The Pathway Through the Deep Forest (Cesta hlubokým lesem – 1964), which
revealed the background of one of the most infamous secret police “frame-ups” of the early fifties
– as well as the exceptional Sign of Cancer (Ve znamení raka – 1966), directed by Slovak director
Juraj Herz, who was working in Prague. In 1968, Herz made an interesting political horror film, The
Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol), the story of a “small” man who is transformed by ideology into a mass
murderer.

The traditionally important area of films for children and young people was graced with a number of
film-makers that raised the overall standards of that genre, including Josef Pinkava, Milan Vošmik,
Ludmila Plívová, Jiří Hanibal, and above all, Milan Hobl (b. 1935), who directed Do You Keep a Lion
at Home? (Máte doma lva? – 1963).

In the area of animated films Jiří Trnka added his voice to those of the fiction-film directors
with a powerful metaphor about the fate of the artist in a totalitarian society, The Hand (Ruka –
1966). Karel Zeman continued in his efforts to combine animation with live actors, particularly in
War of the Fools (Bláznova kronika – 1964), but he never could rise to the poetical immediacy of
his first great successes.


SLOVAKIA IN THE SIXTIES

After the success of Sunshine in a Net, Slovak film did not keep up with Prague. Only Uher
fulfilled the hopes he had raised, creating in The Organ (Organ – 1965), a baroque metaphor about
life and art against the backdrop of Slovak fascism during World War Two. Uher’s less successful
attempt to make a screen version of one of the authentic works of Slovak surrealism, Dominik
Tatarka’s novel, The Miraculous Virgin (Panna zázračnica – 1966) is typical of the efforts to find
a source for a genuine modern Slovak style.

With his by then usual scriptwriter, Alfonz Bednár, Uher had unearthed it in Three Daughters (Tři
dcery – 1968), a Learian ballad about an old who had put his daughters in a convent in order to
avoid having to provide dowries for them, and then, dispossessed as a result of collectivization,
sought help from them after the convents had been disbanded. The poetically realistic metaphor once
again gave way to the surreal metaphor Genius (Genius – 1969), which shows the Devil weeping over
the fate of Man-Devil and Man have traded places. To maintain their ancient role, the devils set
out to convert man. to love and goodness so that he might once again be accessible to corruption.

Uher’s peers, Peter Solan, Eduard Grečner, Martin Hollý (b. 1931), and the somewhat older Stanislav
Barabáš, formed the vanguard of Slovak film of this period. The older generation of directors
(Bielik, Bahna, Andrej Lettrich, Jozef Medveď, Jan Lacko, and others) was capable of ensuring the
industrial running of the Koliba studios in Bratislava, but was unsuccessful in wrenching
themselves away from provincial standards. But even among the younger generation, many failed to
find the means to achieve a radical modernization of language and style: Eduard Grečner did not
succeed in Nylon Moon (Nylonový mesiac – 1965); Solan vainly sought his own approach to portraying
the psychological makeup of his contemporaries in Before Tonight Is Over (Kým sa skončí tato noc –
1966), as did Barabáš, who strove for a new existential dimension in his Knell for the Barefooted
(Zvony pre bosých – 1965). Solan, in The Case of Barnabáš Kos (Případ Barnabáš Kos – 1964), and
Barabáš, in Tango for a Bear (Tango pre medveda – 1966) certainly did not find a compatible genre
in political satire. Then, in 1967 they began to make original films for television. A Gentle
Creature (Něžná – 1967) meant the beginning of Barabáš’s international career as an interpreter of
the work of Dostoyevsky. As for Solan, he directed a penetrating view of the fifties, the
medium-length And Behave Yourself (A sekat dobrotu – 1968). Martin Hollý too achieved his greatest
success in Leonid Andreyev’s ballad Seven Hanged Men (Sedm oběšených – 1968), also originally
intended for TV.


JAKUBISKO, HANÁK, HAVETTA

But an entirely new note sounded when Juraj Jakubisko (b. 1938), a graduate of the Film Academy in
Prague, who as a cameraman shot a promising graduation project in Waiting for Godot (Čekáni na
Godota – 1965), finished his first feature film, Crucial Years (Kristove roky – 1967). This film
signaled not only the birth of an exceptional talent, but also the birth of a Slovak style, with
roots in different, more natural, and wilder soil than the style of the Czech young wave. Crucial
Years is still for the most part an urban film, the story of a painter who, at the age of 33,
enters his “age of reason,” and finally comprehends that life is compounded of “love, foolishness,
and death.” What he had only implied in his debut, Jakubisko stated openly in his next film.
Deserters and Nomads (Zbehovia a pútníci – 1968), a wild ballad about war and killing, that deals
with “death and obscenity.” It is a passionate protest, an eruption of metaphors flowing directly
from the imaginative world of surrealism and from authentic Eastern European folklore, still pure
and uncommercialized, literally swimming in blood and violence. In this film, Jakubisko discovered
a compatible cameraman in Igor Luther and indicated that the focus of seeking and finding a new
cinematic language for the forthcoming era of Czechoslovak film might be shifting to Bratislava.
Shortly thereafter, two others made debuts as fiction-film directors, the documentarist Dušan
Hanák,, and the former graphic artist Elo Havetta (d. 1975). Their appearance confirmed the
originality of the contribution of the new generation from Slovakia. In his film 322 (1968), Hanák
presented a parallel between the cancer that eats away at the guts of the film’s hero and the
cancer that destroys human relations and the social tissue. Havetta, on the other hand, in his
Party in the Botanical Garden (Slávnosť v botanickej zahrade – 1969) proclaimed an anarchist joy in
an unwarped, undistorted life, a protest against pettiness. It was a film full of surreal images
that drew their inspiration from the rural life of the Slovakian hill country.


IMAGES OF “CONCRETE TOTALITY”

It took only five years (1963-1968) for Czech and Slovak film artists to lead the Czechoslovak film
industry to one of the leading positions in Europe. The young generation, just entering upon the
scene in those years, was dominant, but – as mentioned before – in essence the achievement resulted
from the efforts of all generations, which up until then had been repeatedly frustrated and
constrained by political and administrative forces. Thus, in the second half of the sixties,
Czechoslovakia had a number of film directors of European renown, united in their opposition to
those who would either restrict their originality or fetter them with endless delays in production
or distribution. Together with all of Czechoslovak culture, with scholars of the humanities, with
the economists, the best of the journalists, and, in the final stages, with the contribution of
some members of the political establishment, Czechoslovak film played a significant role in laying
the cultural and social groundwork for what was to become known as “the Prague Spring of 1968.” But
it was not until 1968, when all censorship had been withdrawn and production groups had attained
full autonomy that the Czechoslovak films would cease to be just partial analyses and trial ballons
and would create a portrait of what philosopher Karl Kosík referred to as the “concrete totality”
of the Stalinist world. These films included Forman’s Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko!), which was
completed in 1967 and was an extended Gogolian metaphor about stupidity, dullness, and incapacity.
In it, its authors brought to the extreme their method of using the concrete reality of detail – in
this case the world of the provincial functionaries of a fire brigade – to reveal the truth behind
it, the truth about social system as a whole. The film opened in movie theaters on December 15,
1967, at the moment when a political crisis was coming to head – the crisis that was to bring
Alexander Dubček and his reform to power in the first week of January, 1968.

Other films in this unique series of “total” views of the previous period did not enter production
until later in 1968 – even though the scripts had long since been ready for shooting – and they
were not completed until the armed intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 brought an
end to the period that had permitted them to come into being. Thus, paradoxically, 1969 became the
year in which the efforts of the years past came to fruition, and simultaneously the year in which
they were frustrated. Jaromil Jireš completed the brutally realistic Joke (Žert), based on the
novel by Milan Kundera, in which a man who had been among the revolutionary youth of the postwar
period comes to bitter terms with events of those days and of his young adulthood. In The End of a
Priest (Konec faráře), Evald Schorm used the script by J. Škvorecký to view under a magnifying
glass a grotesque world distorted by ideologies that also hide the real human beings behind them.
In his lyrically melancholy All My Countrymen, Vojtěch Jasný erected a mournful and nostalgic
monument to the wasted lives of his friends from a Moravian village, who after the war worked with
him for a “better life.” And finally, in Slovakia, Juraj Jakubisko made his third film, Birds,
Orphans, and Fools (Vtáčkovia, siroty a blázni), a desperate scream of protest against the brutal
absurdity of the world, declaring: “When soldiers invade your country and steal your house and your
language, if you build yourself a house in your soul, you will be happy.” The hero of the film –
just to be on the safe side – commits threefold suicide.


“NORMALIZATION”

The so-called normalization of Czechoslovakia following 1969 also meant an end to the Czechoslovak
film miracle. The General Manager of Czechoslovak Film was arrested; Radok, Kadár, Weiss, Jasný,
Barabáš, Forman, Passer, Luter and others went abroad, later joined by Němec, while other leading
directors of the sixties were fired by Czechoslovak Film. Only Jaromil Jireš was to shoot two of
his long-prepared scripts. One of them was Valerie and the Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divů –
1969), an excellent poetic vampire film based on a story full of childhood fantasies the Czech
surrealist poet of the twenties, Vítězslav Nezval. The other was And Give My Love to the Swallows
(A pozdravujte vlaštovky – 1971), a lyrical, stylized story based on the diaries of a 17-year-old
girl who was executed during the Nazi occupation.

It was with far less success that Juraj Herz escaped into the unreal world of art nouveau and made
Kerosene Lamps (Petrolejové lampy – 1971) and Morgiana (1972), while Karel Kachyňa returned to
films for youth with Jumping the Puddles Again (Už zase skáču přes kaluže – 1971), and Destination
Heaven (Vlak do stanice nebe – 1973). And the censors’ vaults swallowed not only such finished
films as Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String, Pavel Juráček’s Case for a Rookie Hangman, Evald Schorm’s
The Seventh Day, Eighth Night (Sedmý den, osmá noc) and Dogs and People (Psi a lidé), which he
codirected with Vojtěch Jasný, Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear, Hynek Bočan’s Reformatory (Pasťák), and
others – all works by experienced directors – but also films that marked the debuts of other
directors, including the fourth and youngest generation of film-makers to work under nationalized
film industry. Of particular note among these films was Dull Sunday (Nudná neděle) by Drahomíra
Vihanová (b. 1930), Ivan Renč’s (b. 1937) Prison Guard (Hlídač), and Václav Matějka’s (b. 1937)
Nakedness (Nahota). Karel Vachek (b. 1931), one of the most incisive new talents of the late
sixties, director of a shattering documentary about the degeneration of folklore entitled Moravian
Hellas (Moravská Hellas) and the feature-length documentary about the “Czechoslovak Spring,”
Elective Affinities (Spříznění volbou – 1968), was unable to complete his first fiction film.

At the beginning of the seventies, Czechoslovak fiction-film production dropped to half that of the
immediately preceding period. Except for the aforementioned films, these were for the most part
mediocre and submediocre films, made by second- and third-rate directors. Otakar Vávra, however,
reappeared at this time, attempting, at the end of his long career to revive the “publicistic” and
“artistic documentary” genres of the Stalin years in The Days of Treason (Dny zrady – 1972), about
the Munich crisis in 1938, and Sokolovo (1975), devoted to the deeds of the Czechoslovak army unit
on the Soviet front in World War Two. And Zbyněk Brynych soon became the showcase director of this
period, bringing into the screen conformist scripts in every conceivable genres, e.g. the love
story What Is the Color of Love? (Jakou barvu má láska  – 1973) or the film on prison life The
Night of Orange Bonfires (Noc oranžových nožů – 1975).

In Slovakia in 1973, Juraj Jakubisko was permitted to shoot Construction Century (Stavba storočia),
a documentary about the building of a gas pipeline across Czechoslovakia for delivering natural gas
from the Soviet Union to West Germany. Štefan Uher filmed an amusing view of the war as seen
through the eyes of children in If I Had a Gun (Keby som mal pušku – 1971), and shortly thereafter
made a film version of the balladic folk The Maple and Juliana (Javor a Juliana – 1973). Elo
Havetta, in his second and last film, Lilies of the Field (Lalie polné – 1973), confirmed the
promise of his debut. Nonetheless, the overall tendency in Slovakia was also to revert to the
conservative approach of the period prior to 1962.

And so, a prophecy was fulfilled, the one made by Soviet critic V. Bolshakov in the spring of 1968
in Komsomolskaya Pravda: “I believe,” he wrote, “that the period of the development of Czechoslovak
film, as represented by the Formans, the Menzels, the Němecs, and their kind, will, all things
notwithstanding, not last long.”

In 1973, a list of banned films was issued in Prague that contained practically all the best films
of the sixties. The list concluded with an enumeration of films BANNED FOREVER: Firemen’s Ball, End
of a Priest, A Report on the Party and the Guests, All My Countrymen.



In: Liehm, Mira and Liehm, Antonin J. 1977. The Most Important Art. Soviet and Eastern European
Film After 1945. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 275-305.