Evald Schorm was born on December 15, 1931 in Prague, and died on December 14, 1988 also in Prague. He spent his childhood and youth on a family homestead in Elbančice near Mladá Vožice where he also attended elementary school. He yearned to become an opera singer but instead, obeying his father’s wishes, he took up studies at a trade school in Tábor in 1946. They expelled him in 1950 for being “a son of a kulak”, and his family was displaced to the town of Zličín. He worked as a tractor driver. In 1951 he was allowed to take his graduation exam and afterwards he earned his living as a builder. He went through military service from 1952 – 1954 and then took up a singing job in the Army Art Company of Vít Nejedlý. He repeatedly attempted to pass entrance exams for acting school but eventually he graduated in film directing at FAMU, under professor Otakar Vávra. Among his schoolmates were Věra Chytilová, JiřI Menzel and Jan Schmidt. His graduate project was the introspective The Tourist (1961). The co-screenwriter was schoolmate Antonín Máša.
That year, he also worked as assistant director to Zdeněk Podskalský on the bucolic comedy The Girl from the Moon (1961). For the Studio of Documentary Film he directed newsreels and documentary essays like Helsinki (1962), Country to Country (1962), Trees and People (1962), Railwaymen (1963), To Live One’s Life (1963), Why? (1964), Reflections (1965), The Psalm (1966) and also a short feature film Carmen Not Only According to Bizet (1968). From 1963 he also worked at Czech television – his productions there include the poetic collage Gramo von Balet (1966), The King and the Woman (1967), Regret (1970), Intrigue and Love (1971).
His debut feature film was Courage for Every Day (1964), once again developed in cooperation with Máša. So, too, with the feature that finally followed, Return of the Prodigal Son (1966), on which Sergej Machonin also co-wrote. Both features pursue the socio-ethical line of Schorm’s short films. Courage for Every Day was not released because of communist censorship. Undaunted, Schorm directed House of Joy, a short film which would become a segment in the anthology feature Pearls of the Deep (1965), based on prose works of author Bohumil Hrabal’s.
As he was allowed to make films, Schorm continued cooperating with notable writers of the sixties. Iva Hercíková worked with him on Five Girls Around the Neck (1967), a movie about life of teenagers; Josef Škvorecký on the withering tragicomedy End of a Priest (1968); Jiří Brdečka on the Faustean short Bread Shoes from the romantic anthology The Nights of Prague (1968); and with Zdeněk Mahler on Seventh Day, Eighth Night (1969), an apocalyptic vision inspired by the Soviet invasion. This last title was immediately banned and not publicly shown until 1990. The same fate befell his documentary Chaos (1969) about the events of August 1968.
The coup-de-grace of Schorm’s movie production in the sixties (including the films by other directors such as Jan Němec, Antonín Máša and Jaromil Jireš, in which he was only acting), was the capricious, magical Dogs and Men (1971), which he took over from another director, Vojtěch Jasný. After 1971 he was forbidden to work in the film industry for political reasons. He was also barred from television and working at FAMU where, since 1964, he had served as assistant director to Václav Wassermann and Otakar Vávra. In 1988 he was finally given the opportunity to direct again with Killing with Kindness, a film about family relationships based on a script by Jaroslava Moserová-Davidová. Sadly, he did not live to see the opening of this film.
Since 1966 he had also involved himself in the theater, directing plays (the theaters include: Drama Club, Studio Ypsilon, The State Theater in Brno, Drama Studio, the Theater On the Balustrade, Semafor, The National Theater). With A Revue from a Box he began cooperating with the multi-media theater Laterna Magika. Additional productions include: Magic Circus, 1977, The Snow Queen, 1979, Night Rehearsal, 1981, The Black Monk, 1983, Ulysses, 1987, and more. This world became his refuge in the normalization era. Despite the disfavour generally shown to him, there he received high acclaim as an author of drama, opera and multimedia. His versions of Dostoyevski’s works, which were very much in harmony with Schorm’s own tendency to point at existential principles of human life, were of very special significance. His first dramatic effort was Crime and Punishment (Drama Club, 1966), followed by An Eternal Husband (Studio Ypsilon, 1973). He reached the artistic peak of this exploration directing his own adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov (Theatre On the Balustrade, 1979; Malo Kazaliste, Zagreb, 1983). —www.karamazovi.cz
