A Case for the Young Hangman

Political reality was unkind—to put it mildly—to the work and life of writer-director Pavel Jurácek (1935–1989), one of the Czech New Wave’s most neglected personalities. Inspired by two icons of Czech literature—the antimilitarist, antiauthoritarian anecdotal style of Jaroslav Hasek and the grotesque nightmares of Franz Kafka—Jurácek’s writing also drew on a concise intellectual rigor that was most apparent in his scripts for others (science fiction and fantasy were his forte). The son of a waitress and a shop-window designer, he was booted out of Prague’s Charles University after gaining a reputation as a “frivolous debauchee” and worked as a newspaper editor until being accepted at the major Czech film school FAMU in 1957. Honing his scriptwriting talents with such future luminaries as Vera Chytilová, he left FAMU to concentrate on writing and directing. His two surrealist masterpieces, Josef Kilián and A Case for the Young Hangman, were “banned forever” after the Soviet invasion of 1969, and he was later fired from Barrandov Studios because “his activities disrupted the socialist social order.” Jurácek never realized another film; he died prematurely on the eve of the fall of the government that banned his work. —BAM/PFA