Ján Kadár b.18 & Elmar Klos b.10 Jiří Weiss b.13 Frantisek Vlácil0 b.24 Votech Jasny b.25 Zbynek Brynych b.27 New Wave Vera Chytilova* b.29 Štefan Uher b.30 (Slovakia) Jan Nëmec (68) b.36 Milos Forman (69) b.32 Evald Schorm (71) b.31 Jaromil Jires b.35 Ivan Passer b.34 Juraj Herz b.34 (Slovakia) Pavel Juracek b.35 Juraj Jakubisko (Slovakia) b.38 Jiri Menzel b.38
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| Czech New Wave directors including Vera Chytilova (center), Milos Forman (second from right), Evald Schorm (to his left), and Jiri Menzel (far right). |
The New Wave : “All the bright young men and women.”
The post-Stalinist political thaw ended in Hungary in 1956 and in Poland in 1962 while in Czechoslovakia a move to test the boundaries was begun in the late 50s encouraged by changes in the Party leadership. This has ironically been referred to as the ‘ur-wave' preceding the real New Wave of the mid-sixties. These were older generation filmmakers like Ján Kadár (1918-79) and Vojtech Jasny (1925-2019) as well as younger ones like Jaromil Jireš (1935-2001), who were all members of the Communist party looking to loosen the shackles of socialist realism, if not too radically. Waiting in the wings were the younger generation who, in the main, were not party members and felt no such responsibility. They were soon to become internationally famous as the core of the New Wave in the mid-sixties: Milos Forman, Evald Schorm, Vera Chytilova, Ivan Passer, Jiri Menzel, Jan Nemec et al. As Nowell-Smith puts it, “they had no particular interest in building socialist culture” pointedly described by the documenter of the New Wave from the inside, Josef Škvorecký, as “socialists without complexes.”
The Czech New Wave, as Škvorecky points out, was the product of “a synthesis evolved from a dialectical situation formed by four factors of the post war development.” The first was the stultifying bureaucratic processes that came with nationalisation. The second was the establishment of the Prague Film Academy in 1947 which gave aspiring filmmakers ready access to screenings of foreign films. This gave them an immunity to the nationalisation of aesthetics in a nation with a long and sophisticated tradition in the arts as “they were forced to conform to a mandatory system of socialist realism in its most primitive form.” However, as Škvorecky further points out, “this reign of twentieth century cultural curiosity was short”- a matter of only five or six years. “Heavy handed didactic fairy tales were served to an audience, who from their own experience knew the real problems of a transitory period, aggravated by the bloody eccentricities of the declining Stalinism.” This established a fourth point in the game: “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.” (Skorvecky 28-30)
The old guard did produce some alternatives. Jiří Weiss (above,1913-2004) in a long career, summoned 'perfect professionalism' to make the internationally successful Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (1960). Vojtech Jasny made a political fairy tale, in concept not untypical of these years, Cassandra Cat/That Cat (1963), but in extremely stylised colour, “almost a kind of film ballet,” in which a circus cat sees people in their true colours when he wears his spectacles, so exposing deceit and hypocrisy. Kàrda and Klos finally won international acclaim with The Shop on Main Street (1965) a story of anti-semitism in the fascist Slovak state which they used “as a vehicle to express a more universal moral credo – their hatred of indifference and opportunism and of all oppression.” (Liehm 277). The New Wave did inspire some of the older generation, such as teacher of young people at the Film Academy, Otákar Vavra (Jiri Menzel worked under his tutelage for some time), to produce his best work, Romance for Trumpet (1966). The noteworthy class at the Prague FAMU under the leadership of Vavra included Vera Chytilova, Jiri Menzel, Jan Schmidt and Evald Schorm, all of whom had a personal but emphatic influence on the development of Czech cinema (Vladimír Opela)
It is significant that all three of the above revivified films from the 'old guard' were released theatricality in Sydney and Melbourne art houses foreshadowing the coming of the New Wave films that became available in the mid-sixties on 16mm from the Czech Embassy for non-commercial screening before being summarily withdrawn in 1968. None of the New Wave features, to my recollection, were released commercially. Only Saddled with Five Girls of the three films of Evald Schorm’s evolving oeuvre in the 60s (see below) was ever made available on 16mm.
In the late 50s a number of important films of old guard directors such as those referred to above and films directed by Vojtech Jasny, Vladislav Helge, and Zbynek Brynych, that challenged the conventions of the 50s. The challenge took two forms: an attempt to look honestly at contemporary society; and a revival of the Czech lyricism applied to a basically humanist subject matter. A number of the films were examined at a special conference in 1959, five were banned and the head of the Barrandov studios sacked (Hames 82).
Slovak director Štefan Uher's Sunshine in the Net (1962) in concept and style “entirely different from practically everything that preceded it” was defiantly given a special premiere screening in Spring 1963 at the Prague Journalist's Club in response to the Slovak CP First Secretary's edict that “this anti-socialist art will not be distributed!” Sunshine“ became a symbol of the upsurge ripening on all fronts” (Liehm 275). Almost simultaneously a program of films directed by Věra Chytilova was distributed, after many delays, under the title of There's a Bag of Fleas at the Ceiling (1962). She completed her first feature Something Different (1963) in cinéma vérité mode soon after, described by the Liehms as “one of the best films made in Czechoslovakia in the sixties.”
Jaromil Jires' (above) first film The Cry (1962), a fragmented experimental narrative about a couple having their first child, was further confirmation that something was happening. The exceptional upsurge in Czech film between 1963 and 1969, although dominated by the younger generation, “was 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. Filmmakers of all generations were finally for the first time, finding it possible to make films the way they wanted” (Liehm 277)
In November 1964 Jires wrote of a film, Little Pearls from the Bottom/ Pearls in the Abyss : “We are six directors. We are all very different. We have in common certain conceptions of life and of our work, hence our unanimity on Bohumil Hrabul [the writer on whose short stories the film was based]. But I’m convinced that each of us interprets him in a slightly different way. To preserve our freedom while shooting, none of us saw the other sketches: we wanted the film in its final state, to be a surprise to us too. We take the risk of disparity rather than impose a predetermined unity which would lead to compromise.” The author of the article Sons of Kafka, journalist and filmmaker Claire Clouzot reassures Jires that he “need not worry, for the unity summed up in Little Pearls has probably no equivalent elsewhere." Clouzot further claims that “this sample-film is something quite unusual in the history of a country’s film production. It offers a concentrated introduction to Czech cinema - the new one […] we are dealing with a rebirth rather than a birth.”
Represented in Little Pearls was the constellation of new talents figuring on the credits, all graduates of the Prague School of Cinematography, all in their early to mid thirties and listed above as core new wave filmmakers : Menzel, Nemec, Schorm, Chytilova, Passer and Jaromil Jires plus the names of famous cameraman Jaroslav Ku0cera who shot all six sketches, and two composers, Jan Klusak and Jiri Sust.
Following the example of writers like Milan Kundera, Hrabal and Kafka who use the short story, the literary version of the sketch, movie-makers find in that underrated genre a means of saying something quickly, forcefully, and also elliptically. For the critic the trends [in Little Pearls] persist from sketch to sketch and through it directors’ other work. First and foremost, there is that mixture of realism and fantasy which may almost be considered a Czech trademark. A realism different from the Italian neo-realism, depicted through impressionistic touches rather than heavy brush-strokes, close to banality, but a poetic banality if you will. And reality rather than realism : plain daily reality […] chosen perhaps because it is significant […] seen often through the eyes of adolescents, apprentices, beginners, young girls searching for their identity. […] Czech directors rather turn their backs on the past ; they are not like Poles in cultivating war nostalgia. The Czech cinema is written in the present tense” (ibid).
Intertwined with this realism is another dimension : the element of the fantastic à la Kafka, “the result of a dream transformation and of a genuine despair.” But as Clouzot insists “Czech film-makers are far from being victims, and their intellectual and formal rebellion, quite remarkable in a Socialist Republic, is a very lucid one and results in films which are, first and foremost, a comment on society […] tempered by something called Czech humour which causes the colour (except in Nemec’s work) to remain grey.” The mood is bitter-sweet as Clouzot identifies the underlying feeling in Forman’s Peter and Pavla and Passer’s Intimate Lighting, or the cause of more continuously open laughter masking deeply felt disenchantment as in Chytilova’s Daisies.”
The upsurge in Slovak cinema came only after the war and mainly in the 60s. Beginning with Sunshine in the Net (see above) Slovak directors such as Juraj Jabubisko (above,01938-2023) made films fully comparable with the best of the Czech New Wave (Skvorecky 241). His first feature film Kristovy roky/ Christ’s Years/The Prime of Life (1967), the semi-autobiographical story of a painter, identified by the Liehms as marking “the birth of a Slovak style, with roots in different more natural, wilder soil than the style of the Czech young wave” (298). Jabubisko’s follow-up film Deserters and Nomads (1968) is “a wild ballad about war and killing, that deals with “death and obscenity,” surreal imagery combined with Eastern European folklore. It remained unreleased with two of his other 60s films until 1989.
The Liehms underline the determination of the new wave of Czech film-makers to take advantage of every opportunity afforded by the crisis in the system with the gradual disintegration of ideology, fighting bans and censorship became a part of everyday existence. However when the new generation first began to make films it did so in a small way, one which was not likely to draw the attention of the authorities (Nowell-Smith 169) - see Konkurs below. The initial model involved a subtle mixture of fiction and documentary. Few were overtly anti-regime but many were quietly critical of the state of Czech society, the seeming innocence of the socio-political analysis becoming a cause of increasing concern to the Communist authorities. The Czech model of analysing a selected segment of society as a sample of the larger system soon caught on in Yugoslavia (Hendrykowski 633)
Škvorecky notes that Milos Forman (above,1932-2018) was the only Czech director to create something resembling a school (92). All his films in the New Wave were the product of excellent team-work with his collaborators Ivan Passer and Jaroslav Papousek, and Forman's cameraman Miroslav Ondricek, who also created their own films. When they did so they highlighted the specific contributions each made to the group. Ivan Passer (1933-2020) was “the philosopher of the trio” with his melancholic observational style in his almost plotless Intimate Lighting (1965) while Papousek's exceptional talent for observation in a series of films about a middle class family “turned out to be more literary than cinematic” (Liehm 283).
In Forman's first feature film Black Peter/Peter and Pavla (1963) there is nothing unusual in the relationships between young working class youth (Peter with Pavla) and Peter's fraught relationship with his father. Influenced by Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto, Forman sought truth in cinema vérité through casting of non-professionals (often alongside professional actors) on location in improvisational mode, yet he “was probably one of the slowest, most careful screenwriters.” (Škorvecky 81). Nowell-Smith states that “there was nothing in the film to be censored, but official critics found it [in its view of the working class] deeply offensive” ( ‘Making Waves’ 70). The carefully mapped natural situations in Loves of a Blonde (1965) brought it onto “a plane that the film's creators had not imagined at the start” (Liehm 283). The trio of Forman, Passer, and Papousek finding nonprofessional actors for a small-scale featurette Konkurs /The Audition, as “unique interpreters of unique moments […] destroyed the old conventions of the scenario, striving for a reconstruction of reality not so much by a realistic plot as by means of acute perception of details of situations and characters” (ibid). Konkurs is sometimes held as the beginning of the New Wave proper.
In contrast to the approach of the Forman school, Jiri Menzel (1938-2020) revealed himself to be a master of literary adaptation with the tragicomedy Closely Watched Trains (1966), the culmination of an anti-heroic trend which included underground writer Bohumil Hrabel’s novel Ostre sledované / Closely Watched Trains (1966), attacked by the Stalinists, initially directed at the novel ‘The Cowards’ (1958) by Josef Skvorecky and a parcel of films. (Skovrecky is also the author of ‘All the Bright Young Men and Women’ q.v.). For the film adaptation of Closely Watched Trains Menzel successfully realised Hrabel's rearrangement of the novel's complicated time structure while assembling a matchless cast on the path to the second Czech 'foreign film' Oscar (Liehm ). Menzel “proved equally at home in making the film version of the twentieth-century Czech classic, the sagely ironic parable of illusion and reality,” Rozmarné léto / Capricious Summer (1967) (ibid 290). Menzel was banned from the industry after the Soviet invasion in 1968. He eventually saved his career by recanting and disassociating himself from his pre-invasion films including Closely Watched Trains but refused to return his Oscar as was demanded.
The first feature of writer-director Evald Schorm (1931-88) Odvahu pro viand den / Courage for Everyday (1964) confirmed the emergence of another whose distinctive directorial personality had already been on notice in “a number of philosophising shorts.” The subject of Schorm’s documentary inquiry titled Zrcadleni / Reflection (1965) made immediately after his first ventures into fiction film, is stated as “his view on questions of the meaning of life and death, of life, values and the way one lives, and one’s attitude to death.” Schorm entered adult life when the family farm was confiscated by the Communist government in 1948. He was required to work in construction until his acceptance into the Prague film school, FAMU, graduating in1963, directing documentaries for tv.
In his first feature Odvahu pro vsedni den / Courage for Everyday (1964), Schorm seeks to capture the inner crisis of a true socialist in his 30s, working only for the good of the people whose ideals are tested by the changing ideals of post-revolutionary times; workers don’t give a damn about the old slogans; they work in order to be paid, to feed their families. Skvorecky writes that “the subsequent difficulties of this ideologically pure work [are only understandable], if we realise 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 government rooted in antiquity. […] The work bore the trademarks of Schorm’s style with negligible traces of cinema vérité, and no signs of the formalist smile at reality” (145). Skvorecky describes Courage as “capturing the working- class reality fifteen years after the revolution.”
The President and his advisers labelled, what Skvorecky described as a “revolutionary work of art, “as a slander against the revolution.” To the Liehms Courage “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” (288). When critics awarded it a prize the President ordered that Schorm could not receive it although he was finally allowed to after ten months of wrangling; Courage remained banned from participation in any foreign festival. “Of all the Czech film-makers, only Schorm could have made such a film, because, despite his great admiration for Bunuel, he is an intrinsically Christian artist” (Skvolecky 143). “Schorm passionately and without prejudice attacks the problem of the human consequences of what is usually summarised under the term ‘stalinism’,” wrote the critic in the Italian Communist paper ‘L’Unita”.
In his later films Schorm remained controversial. His next feature Návrat ztraceného syna / The Return of the Prodigal Son (1966) is the story of a disturbed man trying to find himself, as befits the ‘philosopher of the New Wave’, “bears the markings of his style, polished to excellence by greater directorial experience.” From statement of betrayal of the revolution, Schorm advances to the psychological and philosophical analysis of the causes here of the betrayal of a successful young architect raising questions also central to society as a whole. The Osbornian hysteria of the working class hero [comparable to Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger] from Courage for Everyday is replaced by subdued questions with which a suicidal intellectual confronts himself and others […] “That is why everything is in half-tones from camera to dialogue. There is a kind of bewitching magic of absolutely serious art about it, the cathartic effect of classical tragedy” (ibid). “Schorm poses the question that was later to become a supremely important one 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?” (Liehms 289).
Škvorecky identifies Jan Nêmec (above,1936-2016) as the enfant terrible of the Czech new wave. In collaboration with his wife Ester Krumbachova, he reached new heights in the wave's 'offending' of would-be cultural arbiters. Although unlike Forman and Passer he had not until recently experienced the terror, cruelty, cynical apathy and injustice of the world, he reacted against them in perhaps all of his films with the greatest intensity. (Liehm 113)
Nemec saw humanity's one central problem as “the fundamental unwillingness of people, or humanity as a whole, to deal with the problems that concern them.” In his first feature, Diamonds of the Night (1964), he did not film the story of two young boys trying to escape from the last days of the war, he filmed their mental states “their hallucinations, day dreams and nightmares, their notions and ideas.” Škvorecky finds it, reminiscent of Buñuel's Un chien Andalou.
Nêmec's intentions were informed by his belief that to create the most accurate external copy of life is but the initial developmental phase of film, that the trend to enrich film language should always be towards stylisation. It is necessary, he insisted, that the author film his own world independent of reality (he cited Buñuel, Chaplin and Bresson as examples). His aim was to divert the viewer's attention away from duplication or resemblance to “the crux of the matter with which I am dealing.” Thematically in his films Nêmec's intent was to deal with psychological obstacles to human freedom: resort to war in Diamonds of the Night, excessive propensity to collectively conform (The Party and Guests, 1966), lack of opportunity “to act out one's own folly, one's own madness, or dreams of love and happiness” (Martyrs of Love,1967), “three surreal and comic dream stories about the unfulfilled amorous hopes of heroes who had been trodden on by destiny” (Liehm 284).
The latter film was ”clear evidence of Nemec’s maturity, of his ability to give an intriguing shape and style to any film material” (ibid 285). He achieved international fame with the screening of Party and Guests at the New York Film Festival in 1968 revealing the full range of his talents - the transformation of a philosophical morality play into a film metaphor demystifying everyday experience - following a two year struggle to have the film screened in Czechoslovakia. After completing Martyrs of Love Nemec was blacklisted by the studio for political reasons and was unable to work in his own country except for one short film in 1972, leaving Czechoslovakia in 1974. Apart from a couple of short films in Germany and a move to the US, he was unable to revive his career.
Nemec and Pavel Jurácek (above,1935-89) shared with Forman, Passer and Papousek in rejecting the old conventions of the scenario (see above) in finding unique moments on the screen with nonprofessional actors acting as interpreters, “not using them as slice-of-life departure but rather [as] the whole: the philosophical fables metaphor for which they sought and found a concrete form of expression” in the actual process of filming (ibid). Juracek’s Postava k podpíreání / Josef Killian (1963) “one of the best known of the New Wave’s early tide” is a Kafkaesque story which was not banned but its distribution was limited despite film festival successes. Written by Juracek the script was first rejected then later rehabilitated along with Kafka in the same year, it is a Kafkaesque story - the initials are the same as for the hero of The Trial, Joseph K. - a satire on bureaucracy. While walking through the streets of Prague JK notices a strange store bearing the sign “Cats for Rent.” He enters and rents a cat without thinking why. The next day he wants to return the cat but the store is no longer there. The rental fee doubles every day. JK seeks the dubious help of bureaucracy without success.
Despite the Russian invasion Juracek managed to complete Pripad pro zacínajicího / A Case for the New Hangman (1970) based on the third book of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Juracek claimed it was not a satire, but rather a film “about a certainty and security provided to the stupid by stupidity.” Skvorecky states ‘that the film is conceived as a dream and, although it is not supposed to be a satire, it contains a few of the most scathing scenes that can be seen (or rather cannot be seen) in Czech cinema” (196). Skvorecky quotes Juracek in protest of its banning : “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.”
Věra Chytilová (above,1929-2014) in her first films, including her first feature, Something Different (see above), resembled Forman's in seeking the immediacy of cinema vérité (which he also subsequently abandoned) in a film about the morale and needs of young working women in textile factories. In Daisies (1966) with her husband Jaroslav Kucera on the camera and Ester Krumbachova co-scripting and designing the sets, Chytilová created an artificial, stylised reality with montage, image deformation and colour as a setting for her modern fable. Skvorecky pointed out that Chytilova was the only Czech director to work the Eisensteinian tradition.The story, centring on two young women ('the two Marys'), is told anarchically, dealing with “the inner void, with boredom, with the destructive impulse that brought these into being; it deals with the indifference of the world of mass murder and silent inhumanity, and also with people whose indignation is reserved for the 'overturning of a bowl of salad'.” (Liehm 285).
Chitilová in her films a decade later - Fruit of Paradise (1977), Prefab Story/Panel Story (1979), The Apple Game (1981) - shifted towards greater realism without discarding her formalist commitments and the satirical presentation of social reality. Like Jan Nêmec she sought to develop a personal film language, as outlined above, to free narrative of literary and verbal conventions while engaging the viewer emotionally through feelings in response to beauty and form while maintaining a certain distance intellectually receptive to her active 'individualist' satire of targeted social norms - she chose not to refer to herself as a feminist filmmaker. Chytilová was one of a half dozen survivors of the New Wave who were allowed to return to making films in Czechoslovakia from the mid-seventies, presumably within 'normalisation' guidelines, without compromising her aesthetic creed and her vision of society, openly resisting, through forthright advocacy and charm, attempts to ban her work.
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Josef Škvorecky All the Bright Young Men and Women a personal history of Czech Cinema 1971
Dina Iordanova Cinema of the Other Europe 2003
Mira & Antonin Liehm The Most Important Art : East European Film After 1945 1977
Peter Hames “Towards the Prague Spring” Movies 0f the Sixties Ed. Ann Lloyd 1983
Claire Clouzot “Sons of Kafka” Sight and Sound Winter 1966/7
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith Making Waves : New Cinemas of the 1960s 2008
Christopher Lyon ed. International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers Vol 2 Directors 1984 Entries on Chytilova, Forman, Jires, Kachnya, Menzel, Nemec, Shorm.
Brendan Black, Great Directors: Jiri Menzel Senses of Cinema October 2020
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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links
Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more
Part Two - Defining Art Cinema
Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism
Part Four - Authorship and Narrative
Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles
Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror
Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke
Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms
Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE
Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry
6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group
6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent
6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard
6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel
6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice
6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson
6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati
6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer
6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti
6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One
6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism
6(20) - Rossellini in Australia
6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni
6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi
6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi
6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren
6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One
6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two
6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta
6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder
6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet
6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg
6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell
6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer
6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland
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