Pearls of the Deep

Vera Chytilová was born on February 2, 1929, in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic). She studied philosophy and architecture in Brno for two years, then worked as a technical draftsman, a designer, a fashion model, a photo re-toucher, then worked as a clapper girl for Barrandov Film Studios in Prague. There she continued as a writer, actress, and assistant director.

She was denied a scholarship, or even a recommendation from Barrandov, but she took the admissions tests at FAMU and was accepted. From 1957-1962 she studied film directing under Otakar Vávra, who also taught Jirí Menzel, Milos Forman, Jan Nemec, and Ivan Passer. In 1962 she graduated as director from Film Academy (FAMU) in Prague. Her graduation film Strop (Ceiling 1962) and the following film Pytel blech (A Bagful of Fleas 1963) were “staged” improvisations with non-actors. In 1966 Chytilova and her husband, Jaroslav Kucera, made a witty surrealist comedy Sedmikrásky (1966), which was immediately banned, but then was released in 1967, and won the Grand Prix at the Bergamo Film Festival. She remained in Czechoslovakia after the events of 1968, when her colleagues Milos Forman, Jan Nemec, and Ivan Passer emigrated. Her films were often “shelved” for reasons of political censorship. For six years Chytilova was banned from making films. In 1976 she wrote a letter of complaint to President Gustav Husak, describing her artistic position. After some behind-the-scenes influence by her supporters, Chytilova was allowed to make a low-budget Hra o jablko (1977), which won a Silver Hugo at Chicago Film Festival.

Chytilova belongs among the foremost directors of the 1960’s Czech New Wave, which was influenced by both the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism. Her films were acclaimed for visual experimentation and for bold unmasking of the moral problems of contemporary society. Her art belongs to what Sergei M. Eisenstein described as “intellectual cinema”, that embraces the mix of “avant-garde”, “cinema verite”, “formalism”, “feminism”, or “happening” and, with a good deal of humor, it spreads beyond definitions. Chytilova’s films often present a multi-layered plethora of visual associations that encourages the viewer to make active interpretations. She survived through the political turbulences in Czechoslovakia and has been a highly original and uncompromising filmmaker. —IMDb

Having finished his studies at the Prague Film School, Jaromil Jireš entered filmmaking at the end of the 1950s with several short films, the most engaging of which was Sál ztracených kroku (The Hall of Lost Steps). In 1963 he made his debut in feature-length films with the picture Křik (The Cry), which earned him a place among the ranks of young directors striving for new content and a new film language. In his debut Jireš reacts to modern film currents, above all to the stylistics of the cinéma vérité, whose elements he utilizes, conscious, of course, of the danger that this can hold for the representation of reality and the expression of truth. The story of The Cry suppresses traditional dramatic structure. It consists of the fragmentary memories of the two main protagonists, a husband and wife, on the day their child is to be born. Arranging individual recollections, combining fictional segments with documentary shots, and using a hidden camera, Jireš seeks to convince the viewer of man’s connection with the present, the past, and the future, and his close and immediate link with the whole world. (Jireš: “We live in a time when a person’s most intimate experiences are connected with the major currents of world events.”) The Cry was very well received and won several awards; it is the first pinnacle of Jireš’ creative work.

The second pinnacle was achieved in two totally disparate pictures from the early 1970s. One film was Valerie a týden divu (Valerie and a Week of Wonders), based on a novel by the eminent modern Czech poet Viítězslav Nezval. What interested Jireš about the novel was “the juncture of reality and dream and the playful struggle between horror and humor.” The other film … a pozdravuji vlaštovky (My Love to the Swallows), is purely Jireš’ own. The director was inspired by the life and death of the real-life character of Maruška Kudeříková, a young woman who fought against German fascism during the Second World War. Here, in a different connection, Jireš used the same method of alternating real-life elements and reminiscences, as in The Cry, but for a different purpose, namely, to demonstrate a person’s inner strength, the source of her faith and hope.

The following years, in which Jireš made three pictures, were a period of stagnation. The fairy-tale film Lidé z metra (The People from the Metro) and Ostrov stříbrných volavek (The Island of Silver Herons), in which he returns to the days of the First World War, are equally undistinguished. Even less noteworthy is the fantastic tale Talíře nad Velkým Malíkovem (Flying Saucers over Velký Malík). Jireš’ creative path took a new turn in 1978 with Mladý muž a bílá velryba (The Young Man and the White Whale). The film is an adaptation of Vladimír Páral’s novel of the same name and deals with modern man’s uneasy oscillation between a mask of cynicism and pure human feeling. Next came Causa králík (The Rabbit Case), an apparently humorous morality piece with a bitter finale on the struggle for justice against cunning and evil. The heroine of Jireš’ next work, Utěky domu (Escapes Home), is a young woman who must face a conflict between her desire for self-fulfillment in a challenging profession and her duties as a wife and the mother of a family. In Neúplné zatmění (Partial Eclipse), about a little blind girl, he speculates on an emotional level about the meaning of life and the quest for human personality. All these films address problems of modern life in the area of the ethics of human relations.

Documentary films form an integral part of Jireš’ creative work. Unlike his friends of the same generation, Jireš has remained faithful to the documentary genre throughout his artistic career. This segment of his work shows great thematic breadth. We can nonetheless delineate two fundamental areas of interest for Jireš. In the 1960s his attention was drawn to the folklore of southern Moravia, where several of his short films have their setting. Jireš returned to this region and to this subject matter in a modified form in 1981 with the ballad story Opera ve vinici (Opera in the Vineyard). From the 1970s on, his documentary films turn more and more to the world of art, to music, painting, and architecture. —Vladimir Opela

With his debut feature film Closely Watched Trains (1966), Czechoslovakian filmmaker Jirí Menzel became an important member in Czech New Wave cinema and won an Academy Award. Menzel started out as an assistant director and occasional actor for Vera Chytilova following his graduation from the Prague film school F.A.M.U. In 1965, Menzel directed an episode (“The Death of Mr. Baltazar”) for the feature anthology Pearls of the Deep, a tribute to distinguished Czech author Bohumil Hrabal. Later that year, he contributed an episode in a similar tribute to the writings of Josef Skvorecky, Crime at the Girls School. Following the success of Closely Watched Trains, Menzel directed Capricious Summer (1968) and turned in a great performance as a tightrope walker (Menzel is actually an accomplished balancer and performs regularly on-stage). In 1969, he made Larks on a String, considered by many to be his best work. Unfortunately, its critical stance on Communism led to its being banned from release until 1990 when it played internationally. Because the film was banned, Menzel was barred from filmmaking until 1974 when he publicly announced that he supported Communism. He then made Who Looks for Gold?, but has since disowned the film because of the personal price he had to pay to make it. From the late ‘70s through the mid-’80s, Menzel made non-political, nostalgic comedies that were almost slapstick at times. He had international success in 1986 with the delightful My Sweet Little Village. In the late ‘80s, Menzel again returned to political activism and continued to make films though the mid-’90s.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:102538)

Jan Němec (July 12, 1936, Prague) is a Czech filmmaker whose most important work dates from the 1960s. Film historian Peter Hames has described him as the “enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave.”

Němec’s career as a filmmaker in the late 1950s when he attended FAMU, the most prestigious institution for film training in Czechoslovakia. At this time, Czechoslovakia was ruled by a puppet government subservient to the USSR and artistic and public expression was subject to censorship and government review. However, thanks largely to the failure of purely propagandist cinema in the early 1950s and the presence of important and powerful people within the Czechoslovak film industry, such as Jan Prochazka, the 1960s led to an internationally acknowledged creative surge in Czechoslovak film that became known as the Czech New Wave, in which Němec played an instrumental part.

As a graduation film, Němec adapted a short story by Arnošt Lustig based on the author’s experience of the Holocaust: A Loaf of Bread (Sousta). Němec would return to Lustig’s writing when he directed the influential film, Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) in 1964, which was also based on the Holocaust. The film follows the fate of two boys who escape from a transit train to a concentration camp. It is noted for its dramatic subjectivization of the experience of the Holocaust using experimental techniques, including flashbacks, simulated hallucinations and an unusual double ending that leaves the viewer in doubt as to the fate of its protagonists. It was his first major success, and while it passed the censors’ reviews, it helped lay the foundation for the political movement that was coming. More importantly, it remains an aesthetic and technical milestone in the exploration of human experience under extreme conditions.

His best known work is A Report on the Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech) in 1966. Its plot revolves around a group of friends on a picnic who are invited to a bizarre banquet by a charismatic sadist, played by Ivan Vyskočil, who eventually bullies most of them into blind conformity and brutality while those who resist are hunted down. The film particularly received a bad reception from the authorities as Vyskočil in the film had a remarkable likeness to Lenin, though according to Peter Hames this was accidental. Moreover, the cast consisted of very many dissident Czechoslovak intellectuals of the day. The film was viewed as being so subversive to the Communist state that Antonín Novotný, the President, was said to “climb the walls” on viewing it and Němec’s arrest for subversion was considered.

However, before the political fallout from A Report on the Party and the Guests was able to take effect, he was able to have approved one more feature: Martyrs of Love (Mučedníci lásky) in 1966. The film, perhaps in mind of the previous troubles he had suffered, was completely apolitical, but it’s surrealist lyrical style did not endear it to the authorities and Němec was forced to work outside the government-approved system, producing the film Mother and Son (Mutter und Sohn) in 1967, which won an award at the Oberhausen Film Festival.

His next important feature was a documentary, Oratorio for Prague, of the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in 1968, which ended the liberal Prague Spring. It was banned, but Němec’s footage would eventually be used by countless international news organizations as stock footage of the invasion. Němec was also an advisor on Philip Kaufman’s film adaption of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) with Němec’s original film of the invasion being integrated.

After 1968, he left Czechoslovakia for Germany before eventually moving to the United States. Unable to work in traditional cinema, he was a pioneer in using video cameras to record weddings, including documenting the nuptials of the Swedish royal family.

After the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, he returned to his native country, where he has made several films, including Late Night Talks with Mother (Nočni hovory s matkou) in 2000, which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. —Wikipedia