CZECH MODERNISM
1930-1949
Czech Modernism flourished in the time between
the world wars, spurred on by a growing exposure to
world cinema, by the freedom of the Jazz Age, and by
a homegrown avant-garde (the Devetsil movement) that
reveled in the promise of the moving image. The cinema
that emerged is like no other, a dizzying cut-and-paste
compilation of outside influences and Czech artistry
with a delightful sense of experimentation. Geographically
situated between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Czechs
blended the dark moods of the German Expressionists
with the disorientingly quick editing styles of the
Soviet avant-garde, then added Hollywood glamour and
Surrealist dream imagery. (Often, all this could be
found in one film!) Their narratives ran from social
realism and agitprop to cautionary tales of excess and
strange Surrealist whatsits. -Jason Sanders
Tuesday, August
7 at 7:30PM
TONKA OF THE GALLOWS (Tonka sibenice)
Melodrama in its most extreme, operatic
form can be hopelessly entertaining and invigorating,
as any devotee of silent cinema can attest, and the
wondrously pulpy Tonka of the Gallows is no
exception. The dazzling lead actress of Machatý's
Erotikon stars as Tonka, a doe-eyed big-city prostitute
who exchanges her fancy clothes for simple peasant dress
when she returns home for a summer's idyll of windmills,
flute-playing shepherds, and kisses with her small-town
lover, Jan. Unfortunately she must return to the brothel,
and soon makes an even more unfortunate decision: to
accompany a condemned man on his last night. Now nicknamed
"Tonka of the gallows," she finds her career
destroyed and her life in ruins; can love save her from
the streets, or death? One of silent cinema's great
"undiscovered" melodramas, Tonka of the Gallows
depicts one human's descent into hell with an Expressionist
flair worthy of Murnau, pulling off enough nightmarish
double-exposure cinematic tricks to rival The Last
Laugh.
1930, 35mm, 84 mins, B&W, French
intertitles with English subtitles . Director: Karel Anton . Writers: Benno
Vigny, Willy Haas, from a novel by Egon Erwin
Kisch . Photography: Edvard Hoesch . Cast: Ita Rina, Vera Baranovskaia, Josef Rovenský
Monday, August 13 at 7:30PM
FROM SATURDAY TO SUNDAY (Ze soboty
na nedeli)
In the notorious Erotikon and
Ecstasy, Gustav Machatý infused
silent cinema with a pulsating
lyricism more suited to romantic poetry. Two bored office
girls hit the town with two wealthy older lechers, taking
in the nightlife while fending off their pince-nez'd,
top-hatted escorts' advances. When one man's move involves
a large sum of money and some extended innuendo, young
Mary (the more naďve of the girls) flees into the night,
where a chance encounter with a callused worker leads
to romance of the more down-to-earth variety. Machatý
put the new sound format to excellent use, juxtaposing
the clack-clack monotony of the girls' office drudgery
with the jaunty sounds of nocturnal Prague (the bouncy
nightclub rhythms are by Jaroslav Jezek,
the founder of Czech jazz). The film's images of sensual,
delicate romanticism, however, need no soundtrack at
all.
1931, 35mm, 72 mins, B&W, in
Czech with English subtitles . Director: Gustav
Machatý . Written by Vítezslav Nezval,
Gustav Machatý . Photography: Václav
Vích . Cast: L. H. Struna, Magda Maderová,
Jirina Sejbalová, Karel Jicínský
Tuesday,
August 21 at 7:30PM
FAITHLESS MARIJKA (Marijka nevernice)
Shot in the wild Carpathian Mountains,
Faithless Marijka is the woodsy antithesis
to Vladislav
Vancura's earlier hyper-urban On the Sunny
Side. Vancura, one of Czechoslovakia's best-known
novelists (his Markéta Lazarová was the source
of Frantisek Vlácil's film masterpiece), here adapts
a treatment by Ivan Olbracht. "The Carpathians are medieval!"
one character bellows, and this tale of the tree-chopper
Petro, his faithless wife Marijka, and various scheming
businessmen and foremen does little to disprove the
assertion. Interestingly filmed with a nonprofessional
cast recruited from the region, Faithless Marijka
may have a neorealist conceit, but its direction is
utterly futuristic, filled with the lightning-fast montage
techniques and low-angle camera of the Soviet avant-garde
(along with its invigorating agitprop). The film's manic
energy, juxtaposed with its breathless peasant-melodrama
flourishes, seems modern today, as if Guy Maddin had
gone back in time to remake himself.
1934,
35mm, 76 min., B&W, in Ruthinian, Slovak, Yiddish, and
Czech with English subtitles . Director:
Vladislav Vancura . Writer: Karel Nový, from a treatment by Ivan Olbracht .
Cast: Anna Skelebejová
Tuesday,
August 28 at 7:30PM
HEAVE HO! (Hej rup!)
The manic comedy duo of Jirí
Voskovec and Jan Werich, key
inspirations for the Czech
New Wave, originally gained fame through their Liberated
Theater, which, as the novelist Josef Skvorecky wrote,
"molded Dadaism, circus, jazz, Chaplin, Buster Keaton,
and American vaudeville into a new art form. They created
a kind of intellectual-political musical." Their films
were similarly anarchic, a never again- matched cross
of Laurel and Hardy with political agitprop and structuralist
chaos. Heave Ho! is recognized as possibly
their finest achievement, a tongue-in-cheek send-up
of both Hollywood happy endings and Soviet workers-utopia
montage. A good-hearted businessman (Werich) loses his
milk-selling empire to a scheming industrialist, and
joins forces with an unemployed labor leader (Voskovec)
to fight the power. With musical numbers, a burgeoning
romance, slapstick, and cinematic in-jokes,
Heave Ho! hits high and low,
and everywhere in between.-Jason Sanders
1934,
35mm, 87 mins, B&W, In Czech with English subtitles . Director: Martin Fric . Writers:
Formen (Jirí Voskovec, Jan Werich, Martin Fric,
Václav Wasserman) . Photography: Otto
Heller . Cast: Voskovec, Werich, Helena Busová, Josef
Skrivan
Tuesday,
September 4 at 7:30PM
VIRGINITY (Panenstvi)
The doomed love of a city girl caught
in the vise of poverty is detailed in
Otakar Vavra's fluid, romantic work. The lovely
Hana finds herself on the street after her lecherous
stepfather turns a little too attentive, but her new
job in a cafeteria offers no respite. When it's not
the customers, it's the boss: lechers all around, except
the young composer Pavel, whose heart is as large as
his lungs are weak. Soon Hana must make a fateful decision,
one that may save his life, but end their love. The
film lingers over its characters' habitats and haunts,
finding psychological truths in what each owns or desires,
and countering every Hollywood-ready scene of gleaming
restaurants and dazzling penthouses with realist moments
of employment lines and crammed flats. Vavra's classical
camerawork and aura of romantic defeatism give Virginity
a force comparable to the master of this genre, Hollywood's
Frank Borzage.
1937, 35mm, 84 mins, B&W, in
Czech with English subtitles . Director:
Otakar Vávra . Writers: Frantisek Cáp,
A. J. Urban, Vávra, Marie Majerová, from a
novel by Majerová . Photography: Jan Roth . Cast: Lída Baarová, Ladislav Bohác, Zdenek
Stepánek, Adina Mandlová
Tuesday,
September 11 at 7:30PM
THE STRIKE (Siréna)
The first Czechoslovak film to receive
the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival,
The Strike is a cornerstone example of political agitprop.
Set amidst a worker's strike in late-nineteenth-century
Kladno (the main coal-mining region of the country),
the film lays down the battle lines early with its portrait
of hardscrabble miners, determined wives, jackbooted
military oppressors, and the dandified Germanic elite
who control them all. (Made immediately after the war,
the film also highlights Czech nationalism in the face
of German rule.) Fortunately the film is no mirthless
diatribe, but full of verve and a remarkable black-coal
realism; Karel Steklý's direction benefits
from the noirish black and white photography of Jaroslav
Tuzar, which captures the miners' underworld realm and
their nighttime union gatherings along with the remarkable
landscape of the region. The Strike became the model
for countless generic retreads in the ensuing restrictive
years.
1947, 35mm, 83 mins, B&W, in Czech with
English subtitles . Director: Karel
Steklý . Writers: Karel Steklý, Marie
Majerová . Photography: Jaroslav Tuzar . Cast: Josef Bek, Ladislav Bohác, Vera Kalendová,
Marie Vásová
Tuesday,
Sept. 18 at 7:30PM
DISTANT JOURNEY (Daleká cesta, a.k.a. Terezín Ghetto)
Alfred Radok is a seminal
figure in the Czech theater, having directed the National
Theater and founded the landmark Laterna Magika, which
revolutionarily combined live performances with rear-projected
films and other cinematic tropes. In 1949 he ventured
into film with Distant Journey, merging experimental
theater into a cinematic narrative that addressed the
Holocaust. Set in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration
camp (where Radok's father had perished), the film depicts
the horrors experienced there by a young nurse during
the last days of the war. One of the first Holocaust-related
films, it's still one of most stylistically daring,
combining appropriated news footage, altered screen
shapes, and polyscreen graftings for what critic J.
Hoberman called "a stylized danse macabre. . . . Audacious
and grotesque, the movie looks back to Caligari and
forward to the unsettling puppet animation of Jan Svankmajer."
1949, 35mm, 103 mins, B&W, in Czech with English
subtitles . Director: Alfred Radok
. Writers: Mojmír Drvota, Erik Kolár,
Radok, from a story by Kolár . Photography: Josef Strechar . Cast: Blanka
Waleská, Otomar Krejca, Viktor Ocásek,
Zdenka Baldová
