In the 1960s, cinematic "new waves" blossomed across the globe as rapidly
as celluloid frames charging through a film projector. Following the
epochal nouvelle vague breakthrough in France -- led by such young and
ambitious directors as Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol -- adventurous,
independent-minded filmmakers began to appear elsewhere in Europe, as
well as in Asia, Africa, and the United States, itching to produce personal
work that would reflect the immediate social and political upheavals of the
era while simultaneously attempting to dismantle the artifice of mainstream
cinema. It was a heady time, and the smart, fresh-faced directors of
Czechoslovakia were just as high on the fumes of escalating change as
anyone else.
The smattering of Czech films from that intensely creative period that are
familiar to most American cinephiles include the now-established classics of
pre-Hollywood Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde, Fireman's Ball),
Jiri Menzel (the Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains), and V?ra
Chytilov (Daisies). Criterion's four-disc set, Pearls of the
Czech New Wave, attempts to fill in a gap by presenting four little-seen
features, an omnibus collection, and a good-looking transfer of
Daisies, providing a closer look at a cinematic culture that was being
directly affected by a stimulating but uncertain national political climate.
To the Czech people, the brief idyll of 1963 to 1968 must have felt like a
delicious variation on the fable of the sword of Damocles. For a moment,
oppressive Soviet interference in Czechoslovakia lightened, and, as with
many things, from international exchange to sexual expressiveness, the arts
flourished. A new openness about society entered filmmaking; directors took
to both celebrating personal freedom and bravely mocking the bureaucratic
madness of the Communist regime. Yet, when we observe the melancholy
and frustration, along with the disconcerting buzz of the irrational, that
pervade so many of these films -- intermingling with the temperate humanism
that endeared Czech cinema to the international community -- it becomes
obvious that few felt the Party would allow the party to last forever.
Director Evold Schorm's Return of the Prodigal Son and Jeromil
Jires's The Joke, an adaptation of the Milan Kundera novel, examine
the difficulties of seemingly normalized citizens adjusting to a society that,
on the surface, offers each a place in the sun -- fat chance. Gentle satire has
no part here, Schorm and Jires aim to cut to the bone, and the results in both
cases are effectively chilling. (An overly mild entertainment, and the only
disappointment of the set, Menzel's Capricious Summer cloaks
whatever deeper points it's trying to make in unfortunate bluster.)
A Report on the Party and Guests, by Jan Nemec, and Chytilov 's
Daisies take different routes from the dour realism of the Schorm and
Jires films. Nemec's disturbing allegory on the symbiotic connection between
the powerful and the powerless is reminiscent of a Bu¤uelian nightmare: an
al fresco banquet turns nastier and nastier; absurdity and menace are the main
courses. Daisies, a nutsy-kooky archetype of '60s cinema, explodes with
intermittent color (in marked contrast to the gorgeous but expressively bleak
black-and-white cinematography of the other titles), hyperactive
editing, slam-bang juxtapositions of image and music, and
general surrealist/anarchic mayhem of the type that arises when we conjure
up European art films in the wake of Godard. Released in December 1966,
Daisies gloried in the dreamlike freedom the Czechs could almost
convince themselves was now theirs. A little over a year later, Soviet tanks
rolled into Prague: the dream was officially over.
--Steve
Futterman
