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The Czechoslovak New Wave Second Edition Hames
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Hames, Peter
ISBN(s): 9781904764434, 1904764436
Edition: second edition
File Details: PDF, 22.64 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
 PETER HAMES

THE CZECH
OS
NEVV VVAVESECOND EDITION
THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE
SECOND EDITION
 "=

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THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE
SECOND EDIMNON

Peter Hames

Gan
Sant)
com> «6©6WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK
CRS)
First edition published in 1985 by
University of California Press (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London)

Second edition published in Great Britain in 2005 by

Wallflower Press
4th Floor, 26 Shacklewell Lane, London E8 2EZ
www.wallflowerpress.co.uk

Copyright © Peter Hames 2005

The moral right of Peter Hames to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transported in any form or by any means, electronic, mech-anical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owners and the
above publisher of this book

A catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-904764-42-8 (pbk)

ISBN 1-904764-43-6 (hbk)

Printed by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wiltshire

 CONTENTS

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

INTRODUCTION
The New Wave and the Reform Movement
Film Movements and the Czechoslovak New Wave

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

The Czechoslovak Cinematic Tradition
The Political and Cultural Background
Industry and Education

THE FIRST WAVE

The Postwar Years
Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos
Ladislav Helge
Vojtéch Jasny
Stefan Uher
Frantisek V1acil
Karel Kachyna

THE REALIST INFLUENCE

Jaromil Jires
Evald Schorm
Hynek Bogan

THE FORMAN SCHOOL

Milos Forman
Jaroslav Papousek
Ivan Passer

LITERATURE, FANTASY AND EXPERIMENT

Pavel Jura¢ek
Jiti Menzel
166 Jan Némec
183 Véra Chytilova
 201 Valerie and Her Week of Wonders — Jaromil Jires
208 The Case of Jan Svankmajer
212 The Slovak Wave: Juraj Jakubisko, Elo Havetta and DuSan Hanak
223 Juraj) Herz
Zeill Brynych, Maga, Vihanova, Sirovy and Vachek

239 THE CINEMA SINCE 1968

229) The Restoration of Order
Heyy) The Velvet Revolution and After

270 CONCLUSION

275 Notes
290 Bibliography
308 Index

vi
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

WHEN JIR{ MUCHA SAID that Czechoslovak cinema had done more to attract international
attention to his country than any previous industrial or cultural endeavour, he was merely
stating the truth. The Czechoslovak New Wave was a revelation for me and many others.
Although I had read a few novels and had an interest in Eastern and Central Europe, the
prevailing image of Czechoslovakia after the purges of the 1950s was one of dull Stalinist
conformity — the nearest equivalent to the vision of George Orwell. Even allowing for the
distortions of the Western media, the astonishing diversity and creative range of the films of
the 1960s were totally unexpected. How had it all started, and what were the traditions from
which the films had been born?
My active interest in Czechoslovak films dates from 1970, but as fast as I began to answer
questions and track down movies, I discovered that others were removing the evidence. As
products of the reform period leading to the Prague Spring of 1968, many ofthe films were
now deemed ‘anti-Socialist, and it seemed that a movement that had made Czechoslovak
cinema world-famous was to be carefully eliminated from history. Many films made in 1969
were never released, and others from earlier years have apparently been consigned to cold
storage forever.
I became fully aware of this situation during a study visit to Czechoslovakia in 1973
when I discovered the blacklist extended to films that, to me, seemed politically innocuous.
Added to my original interests was the need to record and describe films before they were
withdrawn from distribution. For this reason, there was no opportunity to learn the Czech
language before starting my research. I do not believe that this has proved a significant
drawback in my interpretation of the films, although it has meant that I have not studied
back issues of Film a doba. However, the availability of the work of Antonin Liehm, Josef
Skvorecky, Jan Zalman, Jaroslav Boéek and others in translation does guard against any
excessively subjective reaction. My initial research was carried out before the publication
of Skvorecky’s All the Bright Young Men and Women (1971), Langdon Dewey's Outline of
Czechoslovakian Cinema (1971) and Liehm’s Closely Watched Films (1974) and The Milos
Forman Stories (1975). Thus, although I have referred substantially to these sources, they
have served to confirm and supplement what I was also discovering for myself.
I am indebted to the British Council for supporting a cultural exchange visit to Czecho-
slovakia in 1973, when I was able to see a significant number of films courtesy of Cesko-
slovensky Filmexport, the Ceskoslovensky filmovy ustav, Prague (Czech Film Archive) and
the Ceskoslovensky filmovy ustav, Bratislava (Slovak Film Archive). The films that I saw then
were largely from the interwar period and the 1970s. I would like to record my thanks to
these organisations who were always helpful within the bounds of what was then permitted.
They are not responsible for my judgements and assessments, which are entirely my own.
I am also grateful to the director and governors of the North Staffordshire Polytechnic for
allowing me study leave at that time.
 The present text is based on a PhD dissertation written at University College, London,
in 1980. I owe particular thanks to my tutor Liz-Anne Bawden, herself an enthusiast of
Czechoslovak cinema, who encouraged me throughout a long period of part-time study.
Thanks are also due to the following: The British Federation of Film Societies, whose
viewing sessions first established my interest; Peter Cargin, editor of Film; Ronald Shields,
vice-president of the International Federation of Film Societies; Contemporary Films
(Charles Cooper, Lottie Steinhart); ETV Films (Stanley Forman, Betty Baker); lgor Hajek
(University of Lancaster); the National Film Archive (Jeremy Boulton); the British Film
Institute Library; the National Film Theatre (Waltraud Loges, Helen Loveridge); David
Phillips, who first encouraged me to start the project; and Pauline Kelly, who typed the first
draft. The extracts from Closely Watched Films and The Milos Forman Stories are quoted with
the permission of M. E. Sharpe, Inc. The material on Véra Chytilova originally appeared in
a slightly different form as “The Return of Véra Chytilova’ in the summer 1979 issue of Sight
and Sound. It is reprinted here with the permission of the British Film Institute and the
editor of Sight and Sound, Penelope Houston.
I also owe a special debt to Ernest Callenbach at the University of California Press for his
advice, and to Marilyn M. Schwartz and Estelle Jelinek for their patient work on a complex
manuscript.
Finally, the book could never have been finished but for the support and understanding
of my wife Jane, who died before its completion and to whom it is dedicated. She not only
was my most perceptive critic, but also shared the experience. Her example enabled me to
continue when I might have given up. Thanks also to my son Nicholas, whose favourite
Czech movie is Josef Kilian, and to my daughter Jenny, who hoped that the girls in Daisies
‘didn't get caught’

Peter Hames
Stone, Staffordshire
October 1983

viii
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

WHEN I FIRST BECAME interested in Czech and Slovak cinema in the late 1960s, I had little
idea that this would lead to a book, still less to a second edition. What to some may now
seem a somewhat specialised interest was then no more than a recognition of some of the
most popular international films and filmmakers of the time. Forman, Menzel and others
were for a short while names to put beside Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini, Bufiuel and
Bergman.
The case for producing a second edition comes initially from the fact that the first is now
out of print. A reprint of the original, complete with its reference to ‘post-Brezhnev bureau-
crats’ and the future development of the Cold War, is clearly inappropriate. Furthermore,
the films that I was then unable to discuss because they were banned or unreleased have
subsequently become available. The advent of ‘post-Communism also gives ground for new
perspectives.
In preparing a second edition I have faced the usual dilemmas and temptations.
Although published in the mid-1980s, the original book was very much a product of my
research in the mid-1970s. If 1 were to write it completely anew from the perspective of the
1990s, I have little doubt that I would adopt a different structure and approach. And yet, it
seems to me that there is a case to be made for the original form. My initial intentions were
fairly straightforward — to draw attention to a important national cinema movement. It was
a movement that, in terms of its political significance and aesthetic achievement, seemed to
me to be more sustained than its counterparts in France, West Germany or Great Britain. At
the very least, the Czechoslovak New Wave deserved a place in the history of cinema.
It was never my intention to write a book that would neatly tie up a particular period of
cultural history — rather than present the last word on the subject, it was more my concern to
indicate an area worth further investigation. This did not happen, and twenty years of ‘nor-
malisation’ seem to have taken their toll. Not only did the Czechoslovak authorities ban most
of the films, but they also banned or curtailed the activities of those who had made them. It
seemed as if they were concerned to liquidate a national culture (indeed, in many ways, this
was the objective). The West was only too ready to resurrect its “Wall in the head’ and consign
both Czechoslovakia and its culture to virtual oblivion.
One of my major concerns was to address a wide audience - to try to write simply. I
have had sufficient feedback from non-academic readers to suggest that this has worked, and
it has confirmed my view that an interest in Czech and Slovak film is more extensive than
many might think, and a potential interest in the culture still wider. Quite apart from the fact
that Metzian semiotics and psychoanalytic theory did not seem particularly appropriate for
the work that I was then doing, I wanted to reach an audience for whom the jargon of Film
and Cultural Studies was (and is) a major obstacle.
There is always a major problem in discussing films that are banned or just not dis-
tributed. What do they look like? What do they feel like? It is for these reasons that I have
often described films, sometimes in considerable detail, and tried to evoke the experience of
watching them. In this sense I have become a cultural traveller, and the views are those of an
outsider attempting to steer a course between empathy and critical distance.
In theory, the fact that the banned films have been released ought to render descriptive
analysis redundant; moreover, the advent of video and now DVD has revolutionised Film
Studies, and we can all view the films in the comfort of our own homes. That may be the
case for English-language cinema, but the majority of cinema cultures are poorly served,
except in their domestic markets. The banned films are no more accessible to international
audiences than they ever were. Czech and Slovak films remain as remote — perhaps more so
- than when I first wrote the original book.
Worse than that, consciousness of international cinema and of film history as such has
decreased. There is probably as much of a case for re-establishing the significance of the
French New Wave as the Czech and Slovak. This has no doubt been partly assisted by the col-
lapse of the ‘art cinema market in the United States, and the increased dominion of interna-
tional cinema by American media and marketing. The Hollywood publicity machine never
sleeps. The concern of Film and Media Studies courses to emphasise popular culture has
similarly privileged English-language films at the expense of others. The days when students
might have been expected to be familiar with the work of Renoir, Mizoguchi or Rossellini
alongside that of Welles or Hitchcock seem to be long gone.
While film scholarship has clearly improved and many notable books have been pub-
lished on national cinemas, this seems to have been matched by a decline in film availability
and shrinking audiences. Increasingly, an interest in international film has become the prov-
ince of French, Italian, German, Russian or Slavic Studies. While there is some inevitability
in this, a great deal is, at the same time, being lost. It leads, of course, to a further margin-
alisation which means that, despite the capacity of film to transcend national boundaries,
everything is returned to its linguistic and local identity. Czech and Polish film is studied by
specialists, and the view of the history of cinema as the history of English-language cinema
is reinforced. All of which suggests that the case for accessible forays into the field of world
cinema still remains.
In adapting the first edition, I have avoided making too many changes, except where
new material has become available or where new assessments have clearly become unavoid-
able. I have cut some sections and made a number of minor amendments in the interests of
overall balance. For instance, I have reduced the detail on certain films by Kadar and Klos,
Helge and Kachyna. However, this has been balanced by an expanded coverage of their other
films.
Parts of the chapter “The Cinema Since 1968’ are taken from my ‘Czechoslovakia: After
the Spring, first published in Daniel J. Goulding (ed.) Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). They are repro-
duced here with the permission of Daniel J. Goulding and of Indiana University Press.
Stills are reproduced by courtesy of ETV Films, Peter Cargin, Narodni Filmovi Archiv
(National Film Archive, Prague) and the National Film Archive (London).
The main additional films to be discussed include Cassandra Cat/That Cat/When the
Cat Comes, All My Good Countrymen, The Ear, The Joke, Seventh Day, Eighth Night, Skylarks
on a String, Birds, Orphans and Fools, See You in Hell, Fellows!, 322 and Funeral Rites. | have
also added coverage of a number of directors, including Jan Svankmajer, Elo Havetta, Dugan
Hanak, Zbynék Brynych, Antonin Masa, Drahomira Vihanova, Zdenek Sirovy and Karel
Vachek. The chapter on the cinema since 1968 has been updated to include the post-1989
period. I have streamlined the original bibliography, which had extensive historical, political
and literary references. This had been partly to provide an indication of the sources of my
own views, but was also intended to suggest the range of English-language publication in an
increasingly submerged area. I have now, for instance, only included novels where they have
actually been filmed and political studies crucial to the period. While the original book was
based almost solely on my viewing of the films and two visits to Czechoslovakia, I have since
1985 been able to visit the country regularly. I have therefore met, interviewed or attended
seminars by the following filmmakers and critics, among others: Jan Bernard, Hynek Boéan,
Michal Bregant, Jiti Cieslar, Véra Chytilova, Dusan DuSek, Milos Forman, Bohumil Hrabal,
Juraj Jakubisko, Jaromil Jires, Karel Kachyna, Elmar Klos, Petr Koliha, Antonin J. Liehm,
Jiti Menzel, Jan Némec, Vladimir Opéla, Irena Pavlaskova, Milan Steindler, Ondrej Sulaj,
Jan Svankmajer, Zdenék Svérdk, Ivan Svitak, Zdena Skapova, Jiti Svoboda, Pavel Taussig,
Zdenék Tyc, Karel Vachek, Franti$ek Vlacil and Petr Zelenka.
I would especially like to thank Eva Kaéerova of the Czech Film Archive, who organised
many screenings for me in the period 1985-90, and was particularly helpful and resourceful
in the organisation of a four-part retrospective of Czech and Slovak cinema at the National
Film Theatre, London, in 1989-90. Véroslav Haba, also of the Czech Film Archive, has kept
me fully supplied with research materials over the years, while Dana Habova’ skills at voice-
over translations have provided the essential accompaniment to many films. I would also
like to thank Irena Zikova and Pavel Dominik, whose translations of films were to prove
particularly helpful in different contexts.
I should also add acknowledgments that would have appeared in the first edition had
times been different, in particular to the late Dr Myrtil Frida of the Czech Film Archive for
advice and screenings in September and October 1973, and to Ilona Hamplova, whose duties
as interpreter and translator included tracking down films in obscure venues and taking a
firm attitude towards negotiations with a variety of bureaucrats and officials.
I would like to thank Staffordshire University for granting me a half-sabbatical in 1995-
96, and for further study leave in 1996, part of which was devoted to the preparation of this
edition. In particular, I would like to thank my colleagues in Media Studies for enduring the
inequities resulting from my absence. Thanks are due to Christine Gledhill, Mel Hill, Ray
Johnson, Alan Lovell, Martin Shingler, Ulrike Sieglohr and - especially - Lez Cooke, who
bore the brunt, and to my then-Head of Division, Shaun Richards, for his unqualified sup-
port. Finally, I would like to thank Yoram Allon of Wallflower Press for his enthusiastic and
ongoing commitment to the area of Central and East European film.

This book is dedicated to Jane.

Peter Hames
Stone, Staffordshire
March 2005

xi
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 INTRODUCTION

THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEw Wave has been widely recognised as one of the most important
movements in world cinema since Italian neorealism. It marked a more general and sus-
tained break with Socialist Realism than Polish cinema of the late 1950s and Hungarian
cinema in the early 1970s. Its world importance was established by a succession of awards at
international festivals in the 1960s, and a critical and commercial breakthrough into Western
markets that culminated in the Academy Awards® given to Obchod na korze (A Shop on the
High Street/The Shop on Main Street) in 1965 and Ostfe sledované vlaky (Closely Observed
Trains) in 1967.
After the Second World War, Czechoslovakia gained early international success when
the Venice Grand Prix of 1947 was awarded to Siréna (The Strike/The Siren), directed by Karel
Stekly. During the 1950s, however, the international reputation of Czechoslovak cinema
depended almost exclusively on the animated and puppet films of Jiff Trnka and Karel
Zeman. Although that achievement should not be underestimated, it was clearly limited to a
specialised area of filmmaking. Films by Alfréd Radok and Jiti Weiss won awards in the late
1950s, but there was no preparation for the sudden spate of prizes awarded to Vojtéch Jasny,
Véra Chytilova, Zbynék Brynych, Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, and Milos Forman in the period
1963-64. The two Academy Awards® for Best Foreign Film followed, and Czechoslovak films
continued to receive acclaim at international festivals until the Best Direction Prize at Cannes
awarded to Jasny’s VSichni dobri rodaci (All My Good Countrymen) in 1969. Although some
of this recognition was limited to specialised audiences, festival juries and fellow filmmakers,
films such as A Shop on the High Street, Closely Observed Trains, Cerny Petr (Black Peter/Peter
and Pavla, 1963) and Lasky jedné plavovlasky (Loves ofa Blonde/A Blonde in Love, 1965)
made a direct appeal to a large international audience with their mixture of ‘realist’ observa-
tion, humanity and humour.
It is hazardous to speculate on what might have happened to Czechoslovak cinema had
the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 not occurred. The history of Europe would itself have been
very different. Even had Czechoslovakia not reverted to its previous isolation after 1968,
however, it is unlikely that international interest would have been sustained at the high level
of the early and mid-1960s. In 1968, the American distributor of Closely Observed Trains
went out of business with five Czech films that included Brynych’s ...a paty, jezdec je Strach
(The Fifth Horseman is Fear, 1964) and Jan Némec’s O slavnosti a hostech (The Party and the
Guests, 1966). Despite enthusiastic reviews, the public was no longer interested.' In fact,
few of the important Czechoslovak films to reach the West in 1968-69, including All My
Good Countrymen and films by Chytilova, Juraj Jakubisko and Jaromil JireS, received the
critical attention that might have been expected. This decline in interest can be seen as part
of changes in critical fashion, especially in Britain and the United States. Just as the novelty
value of Japanese and Polish cinema had produced an enthusiastic response in the late 1950s,
so the fashion for Czechoslovak film rose and then declined during the 1960s.

introduction |
 After the 1968 invasion, film production remained unaffected until the reorganisation
of the industry in 1969-70, which led to the banning or stopping of some ten new features,
a third of the annual output. The blacklist was subsequently extended backwards to include
many of the most important films of the 1960s, and, in many cases - such as Jaromil Jireé’s
1968 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel, Zert (The Joke) — the film was even eliminated from
the director’s official filmography.” Notable films that had scarcely been seen, let alone ana-
lysed, were no longer available for export, and a number of films were precipitately withdrawn
from Western distribution libraries. The final blacklist included well over a hundred films.

THE NEW WAVE AND THE REFORM MOVEMENT

This suppression of New Wave films can be understood only in a Czechoslovak context.
Their international success did not derive from any ‘subversive’ qualities that might supply
fodder for Western anti-Communist propaganda. On the contrary, the freedom of expres-
sion allowed to filmmakers began to break down the image of Czechoslovakia created during
the Cold War. It was not pure romanticism that prompted Lindsay Anderson to say that the
conditions under which films were made in Czechoslovakia ‘had every chance of becoming
the best in the world, or Ernst Fischer to observe euphorically that, during the Prague Spring
of 1968, Czechoslovakia was ‘the freest land ever known’
The development of creative ideas in the film industry should be seen as one aspect of a
wider phenomenon of the growth of ideas in economics, politics, literature and the arts that
made up the Czechoslovak Reform Movement. It was a movement that led directly to the fall
of the Novotny regime and the Action Programme of April 1968. The threat to introduce a
‘Socialist democracy’ into an Eastern European Socialist regime implied a radical attack on
the ‘leading role of the Communist Party, which, Karel Kosik argued, was a euphemism for
‘the ruling position of a power group.’ It was this threat to the Soviet model of government,
rather than the danger of counter-revolution, that led to the invasion of the Warsaw Pact
powers and the later suppression of New Wave films along with other forms of expression.
Czechoslovakia was one of the few countries in Eastern Europe with a substantial dem-
ocratic humanitarian tradition and experience of a Western-style democracy in the interwar
period. The reformers drew on this past tradition and experience in seeking to implement
what they understood by a socialist society. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, undoubt-
edly saw any proposal to formalise the existence of conflicting ideas as a purely capitalist-
bourgeois phenomenon. It was not part of their experience, and consequently difficult to
explain in other terms.
The Soviet Union always understood the game of realpolitik. By implementing Czecho-
slovakia’s Soviet-modelled constitution and introducing, to quote Alexander Dubéek, ‘the
widest possible democratisation of the entire socio-political system, the Czechoslovak
Communist Party would have encouraged similar developments in other countries of the
Eastern bloc.° The introduction of genuine democratic procedures implied the dismantling
of the security apparatus, the Party's main instrument of power and the organisation most
directly linked to Soviet control. The destruction of ‘condemned bureaucratic-police meth-
ods’ would also lead to unpredictable repercussions elsewhere.’ Given these factors, together
with Czechoslovakia'’s strategic position, we can understand Soviet and East German atti-
tudes more easily. From the perspective of the ruling bureaucracies, a genuine democratic
Socialism was seen as a doubtful virtue and, in any case, subservient to the requirements
of power politics.

2 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

 Despite the political and strategic arguments for the invasion, several reports suggested
that the decision was taken by a small majority. According to Ludék Pachmann, the voting
inside the Soviet Politburo was five for invasion, three opposed, and one abstention. It
has been argued that, had the Soviet Union recognised the depth of public support for the
Dubéek government, they would not have invaded. However, what is clear is that, once com-
mitted, there was no going back.
Vladimir Fisera has suggested that the Prague Spring was concerned with politics in the
narrow sense of the term (i.e. the civil rights preoccupations of the intellectuals and relations
with the Soviet Union).? What he has called the ‘worker's spring’ began in the autumn. The
plans for workers’ participation in the management of the economy were included in the
Action Programme of April, but by September only nineteen workers’ councils had been
established. The number rapidly expanded, with an additional 260 being created by the end
of the year, until a figure of over 500 was reached in June 1969. Fi8era stresses not only the
spontaneity of their growth, but also their mass character. They were finally banned by the
government in July 1970. Although they did not constitute a major reason for Soviet inter-
vention, they were, Fiera argues, one of the principal causes of the policy of ‘normalisation
that followed.
Given the strength of public opposition to the invasion, those who chose to collaborate
with the occupying powers had no choice but to return to the well-tried bureaucratic/police
methods of the 1950s. The only way to remove people with the wrong ideas from positions
of responsibility was to expel them in what can only be regarded as a ‘purge’ of extraordinary
depth and range. As early as 1970, some 600,000 people either had been expelled or had
resigned from the Communist Party, and worker membership had declined from 38% in
1968 to 24%." Special attention was paid to the media, and an estimated 90% of television
staff were sacked. The arts moved rapidly towards the restrictive models of the 1950s.
Internationally, Czechoslovak cinema provided the most visible manifestation of the
intellectual ferment that developed from the mid-1960s. Although its political significance
went unrecognised abroad, it anticipated the freedom of expression that, when transferred to
the press, radio and television, caused concern to the Soviet Union and her allies.'’ As such,
the cinema fared no worse than other forms of expression after 1968-69. The leaders of the
film industry and of the union were sacked, and the semi-autonomous production groups
were disbanded. Those such as Antonin Liehm, film critic and journalist, and Jan Prochazka,
writer, scenarist and head of one of the most adventurous production groups, the Svabik-
Prochazka group, found themselves on a list of most-wanted intellectuals. All controversial
films were banned, and apparently innocuous works with suspect connections (i.e. writers
or directors) were locked away. Apart from Milo’ Forman, Jan Kadar, Ivan Passer, Vojtéch
Jasny and Jifi Weiss, relatively few of the major directors chose permanent exile. But those
who remained found themselves in serious difficulty. Jan Némec joined the exiles in 1975;
in the same year, Ji¢{ Menzel and Frantisek V1acil were reinstated after giving a ‘satisfactory
explanation of their activities in the 1960s. After a six-year gap, Véra Chytilova completed a
new feature in 1976. The major figures of the New Wave were effectively silenced throughout
that period.

FILM MOVEMENTS AND THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

A comparative study of film movements has scarcely been attempted, but three major
movements have been accepted by a general consensus: Soviet cinema of the 1920s (which

introduction 3
George Huaco called ‘Expressive Realism’),'? German Expressionism and Italian neoreal-
ism. As Andrew Tudor has pointed out, all three emerged from societies that had under-
gone drastic socio-cultural trauma, and all represented a major aesthetic break with existing
traditions.'* On the other hand, 1960s movements such as the French and British new waves
were more limited in their significance, and cannot be related to social disorders of equal
magnitude.
Terry Lovell has pointed out that the concept of ‘movement is an ‘intentional’ one, and
is related to other socio-political concepts such as ‘revolution’ and ‘change’ It implies col-
lective action towards a conscious goal. She also cites A. F.C. Wallace's definition of ‘revi-
talisation movement ... a deliberate and self conscious attempt to provide a more satisfying
culture.'* Whereas most Czechoslovak filmmakers would almost certainly deny the exist-
ence of an intentional movement, in that there were no manifestos and a variety of aesthetic
approaches, they were clearly united in their rejection of the restrictions of Socialist Realism
and the desire to create ‘a more satisfying culture’
Both Lovell and Tudor apply Neil Smelser’s theory of collective behaviour to their
respective examples, the French Nouvelle Vague and German Expressionism. His set of
determinants can equally well be applied to the development of Czechoslovak cinema. Lovell
defines them as follows: ‘structural conduciveness, structural strain, growth and spread of a
generalised belief (in terms of which the situation is redefined), precipitating factors, mobi-
lisation of participants for action, and finally, social control’? In Czechoslovakia the cir-
cumstances for the development of the New Wave were favourable, economic and political
strains existed in the society, and there was a generalised recognition of the need for free
expression. Precipitating factors included critical and commercial success abroad, and social
control related back to the generalised belief of the community through the system of film
production groups headed by creative people.
It is clear that the Czechoslovak New Wave was a film movement, and its develop-
ment was intimately bound up with the socio-political changes that took place in the
country during the 1960s. What is less easy to explain are the hostile or apathetic atti-
tudes adopted by many Western Marxists to the films produced. When V1acil’s important
precursor of the New Wave, Holubice (The White Dove, 1960), was shown at the Venice
Film Festival, it was condemned as a ‘nonpolitical fantasy.'° Luc Moullet condemned
Némec’s Démanty noci (Diamonds ofthe Night, 1964) for its reactionary aesthetics.'’ Jean-
Luc Godard, one of the foremost critics of Czech film, interviewed Véra Chytilova in his
Pravda (1969), and came up with the equation ‘Chytilova = Zanuck and Paramount. He
criticised her for her incorrect attitude, and commented that she spoke ‘like Arthur Penn
and Antonioni."
Apart from the questionable references to Penn and Antonioni, the parallels are mani-
festly absurd. Ivan Passer has turned the argument around and criticised the work of Godard
as itself ‘petty bourgeois. He describes it as putting on a radical face, but of exhibiting an
attitude of condescension towards the viewer. Likening Godard’s films to the inhumanity of
advertising, Passer says:

What is interesting about advertising is that you cant learn anything from it about
the people who create it, unless it is the fact that they are good craftsmen ... And this
is precisely all I know about Godard from his films. He seems to be ashamed of the
most beautiful passages in his films. And when people like that contend that our films
are bourgeois, I get the feeling that I know where it all comes from: everything that

4 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

 doesn't stink of blood and gunpowder deserves the epithet ‘petty bourgeois’ except,
who knows if it isn’t the other way around."

Antonin Liehm sees the problem as related to a fundamental misunderstanding between

West and East: ‘it was based on a difference in experience, and on the fact that many Western
Marxists used non-Marxist criteria in interpreting art and behavior, not within their context,
but rather within the context of the interpreter, which can hardly lead to a valid analysis or
understanding.” Liehm also makes the important point that ‘whenever an aesthetic view-
point is dictated from above, the only way to step out of the circle is by means of a different
aesthetic viewpoint, even if it must sometimes look to the past for its models. And a step
out of the circle is a step forward, because it is a step into the unbounded, into unknown
terrain.”!
Another factor that prevented left-wing critics from examining Czechoslovak cinema
was a preoccupation with the study of the cinema under capitalism. An emphasis on Holly-
wood studies developed from the attempt by magazines such as Cahiers du Cinéma and
Movie to assert the respectability of commercial movies then rejected by Establishment taste.
The blanket rejection of Hollywood had been shared by left-wing critics, and was, as Alan
Lovell has pointed out, based on a vulgarisation of Marx that collapsed economics, art and
politics.”
Louis Althusser's work on ideology gave impetus to an analysis of the dominant forms
of commercial cinema, while semiotics followed the example of the early work of Christian
Metz in emphasising the primary role of narrative. More recently, emphases on the study of
gender and racial representation have inevitably privileged an emphasis on mass culture.
In recent years, the term ‘European art cinema’ has often been used as a pejorative
description for films presumably made and created for consumption by an élite audience.
The term ‘art movie’ was not widely used until the 1960s, and can be linked to the American
industry's attempts to categorise and exploit foreign films when they first gained access to
US markets. This followed the Supreme Court decision of 1948, when the major studios were
forced to divest themselves of their distribution and exhibition outlets. The dismissive nature
of the term reflects the ghetto-like distribution reserved for foreign films in both the United
States and Great Britain. Significantly, in the US, most English-language films originating
outside the country were also regarded as ‘art’ movies.
Although rarely defined with any degree of consensus, the concept of the ‘art movie’
is widely used; it has even been suggested that it can be regarded as a film genre. While
many critics would probably include directors such as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais and certainly Peter Greenaway in their ‘art’ category,
others exclude filmmakers such as Luis Buftuel and Carl Dreyer or areas such as “Third World
Cinema; despite the fact that the films are marketed in the same way.
In his collection of interviews with leading Czech and Slovak writers and intellectuals,
The Politics of Culture, Antonin Liehm constantly returns to definitions of culture. This is
almost always seen as a national culture with its roots in something other than the market-
place. His own views are given in two speeches: one to the 1967 Writer’s Congress, the other
to the Cesky filmovy a televizni svaz (FITES; Union of Film and Television Artists) given in
March 1968. He argued that the dictatorship of the marketplace was ‘nothing but the dic-
tatorship of obsolete taste, the dictatorship of the average, of the consumer, of ideas which
society has already digested or accepted. This he opposed to ‘true culture ... that which
doubts, questions, leads to uncharted depths or unknown possibilities.”

introduction 5
 Drawing parallels between the dictatorship of the marketplace and that of political
power, Liehm argued for an extension beyond existing perspectives towards a ‘complete cul-
tural freedom’:*

In the case of a true work of culture ... the consumer becomes an active participant
in a process which begins with a particular work, and continues after the consumer
has experienced it ... the true way of socialism does not lead to mass culture, but to
making true culture available to all who are interested, accompanied by strenuous
efforts to make such interested people more and more numerous.”

While he was not writing about cinema, but poetry, the ‘dissident’ Marxist philosopher Ivan
Svitak argued that the meaning of poetry lay in the cultivation of “human sensibility, per-
ceptiveness and understanding of the world.”* Accepting that art had taken over functions
associated with religion, he argued that the ‘sphere of mystery in works of art is the last
prophylaxis against incursions of faith into other forms of social consciousness — morals,
politics, philosophy, science.”” Karel Kosik argues that a ‘real work of art or philosophy dis-
closes the world. It sees and describes what has not been seen before. It contemplates and
formulates previously unknown and unformulated thoughts, and with this act of discovery
enriches reality.”*
One may contrast these views with those of American critic Henry Pleasants:

The [art] establishment's most formidable bastion becomes society's acceptance of

a concept of art as a kind of mystery above and beyond the pleasure of the senses,
separate and distinct from and superior to entertainment, amusement and diversion;
of the artist as a source of revelation, a high priest answerable only to his assumed
genius, and of art patronage as a secular and intellectual counterpart of church
attendance and evidence of culturally-enlightened good citizenship.”

Quite apart from its emotive language, this apparently dismissive attitude towards the ambi-
tions of art is all too characteristic of what one might now describe as dominant Anglo-Saxon
attitudes (i.e. that art is merely an élite form of ‘entertainment, amusement and diversion’
and very little else). What is clear is that it is very different from the views of the three Czech
Marxists whom I have quoted, which, I would argue, formed part of the cultural context of
the 1960s in Czechoslovakia.
The Czechoslovak New Wave can, in many ways, be seen as an exemplification of these
ideas. Milan Kundera argued as follows:

Our nationalised cinema industry has freed film from the bonds of commercial-
isation and profit, which hamper film art all over the world. If our socialism is at all
capable of becoming conscious of itself, it is bound to encourage this growth and to
guard the freedom won by the young filmmakers, because this freedom is a source
of honour and pride.”

From these perspectives, the Czechoslovak New Wave can be seen both as a ‘revitalisation
movement and as a progressive development towards a socialist culture. The break with
the normative traditions of Socialist Realism was an essential first phase in providing the
opportunity to create freely and in accordance with an inner need. Chytilova’s famous com-

6 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

ment that not telling the truth should be made illegal was characteristic of the time. In their
attempts to present their versions of the truth, filmmakers would adopt many models and
influences — neorealism, cinéma-vérité, the Nouvelle Vague, the nouveau roman, the Theatre of
the Absurd, Kafka, and a return to the lyrical and Surrealist traditions of the interwar period.
Each in its own way provided a means of coming to terms with the reality of experience.
The multiplicity of products and influences clearly poses a problem for those who like
to see art movements easily identified and linked to specific societies and historical periods.
However, a fundamental unity can be demonstrated beneath the various aesthetic approaches.
The period of the New Wave presented a heightened aesthetic response in a society emerging
from a period of enforced cultural orthodoxy. Given uninterrupted development, it is clear
that there would have been an evolution beyond the styles of the 1960s. By 1968-69, many
filmmakers looked back on the films that they had produced in the mid-1960s as the prod-
ucts of a particular period and a particular mood. Jan Némec, for instance, felt that, having
settled accounts with the ‘forces of reaction, it was time to change his approach and seek
contact with a wider audience.

The following study of the development of the Czechoslovak New Wave is approached
through an analysis of the work of individual directors. In Czechoslovakia, the director was
both trained to exercise the main creative responsibility in the production of a film and per-
sonally credited or blamed for the result. It would be pointless to pretend that this was of no
significance, and the form of organisation adopted here is both the most convenient and the
least misleading of the various alternatives. However, this is not to ignore the important part
played by writers, cinematographers and others.
There are limitations that need to be accepted at the outset. The first is the difficulty
of approaching a foreign culture on the basis of partial knowledge and experience. Peter
Harcourt has suggested that this may enable one to respond to an essential form that might
otherwise be obscured by surface familiarity.*' Whatever the case, it is clear that a foreigner
must view films from within his own cultural context and experience. This can never be
equivalent to that of a Czech or a Slovak, despite efforts to correct the balance.
Another difficulty has been the practical impossibility of seeing all the films. In the first
edition of this book I referred to the toll taken by censorship, but I am now satisfied that the
most significant omissions have been covered. However, there are still some gaps, and this
applies particularly to the area of Slovak film.
I have used the term ‘Czechoslovak New Wave’ somewhat loosely to apply to a whole
range of innovative filmmaking in the 1960s. The term ‘Czech New Wave’ or ‘Czech Film
Miracle’ was first used to refer to those directors who made their first feature films in 1963
(Forman, Jire’, Chytilova), and then to colleagues who followed them in the mid- to late 1960s
(Menzel, Némec, Passer, Schorm, Juraéek, Boéan, Maga, Schmidt, Vihanova, Krumbachova,
Sirovy and others). I have used the term ‘Czechoslovak New Wave’ to recognise the contribu-
tion of the Slovak directors, specifically Stefan Uher in the early to late 1960s, and the Slovak
wave of the late-1960s (Juraj Jakubisko, Elo Havetta, DuSan Hanak). Most of them studied at
FAMU (Akademie muzickych uméni Filmova a televizni fakulta) and worked in collabora-
tion with their Czech colleagues on their early films.
Slovak cinema enjoyed a separate existence throughout the period and, since the divi-
sion of the state into different countries in 1993, this has become even more obviously a
different story. While the Slovak industry ideally deserves an individual study, its history is
also one of interrelation.

introduction 7
 I have also extended my coverage to include the directors I have referred to as the ‘First
Wave; because it is illogical to exclude them. Jan Kadar’s and Elmar Klos’ A Shop on the High
Street and Vojtéch Jasny’s Az prijde kocour (Cassandra Cat/That Cat/When the Cat Comes,
1963) and All My Good Countrymen are conventionally regarded as New Wave films, even
though their directors made their debuts in the 1950s (or, in Klos’ case, the 1930s). Can
Uher’s Slnko v sieti (Sunshine in a Net, 1962), Frantisek Vlacil’s Marketa Lazarova (1967)
or Karel Kachynia’s Ucho (The Ear, 1969) be sensibly excluded from what is essentially an
interactive history? Forman and Chytilova were also older than their colleagues, and Forman
had graduated in the 1950s. In the final analysis, we are looking at a specific socio-cultural
context that allowed increased creative freedom for all generations, albeit spearheaded by the
international success of the younger directors.
I have not attempted to deal with the role of animation and documentary during the
1960s, partly because of film availability, but mainly because they require a separate and more
specialised treatment. Many of the New Wave filmmakers worked in documentary — notably
Schorm and Jire&, but also, in the years of normalisation, Vihanova, Chytilova, Jakubisko and
others. Documentary nevertheless played an important role in its interaction with features
and in the addressing of contentious or taboo subject matter. Among the 1960s filmmakers
to attract international attention were Vaclav Taborsky and Jan Spata. More recently, there
has been some remarkable work from women filmmakers, including Helena Trestikova, and
Jana Sevéikova (Piemule, 1984).
I have nevertheless included some consideration of the work of Jan Svankmajer, the
most outstanding of the filmmakers to emerge from animation from the late 1960s, and
also Karel Vachek, whom some might describe as a documentarist. I have included them
here partly because they are impossible to ignore, but also because their work transcends
established categories. Their commitment to innovation and links to a submerged artistic
inheritance also place them within the responses that characterised the late 1960s.

8 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

 CULTURE AND SOCIETY

THE CZECHOSLOVAK CINEMATIC TRADITION

JAN ZALMAN OPENED his monograph on the Czechoslovak New Wave with the comment that
the culture of small nations is too often seen as a pale reflection of the ‘great’! In the case of
Czechoslovakia, the Surrealist movement of the interwar years has often been treated as little
more than a footnote to the French, while the best works of pre-war Czechoslovak cinema,
if they are considered at all, are seen as reflections of German Expressionism and French
realism. The Czechoslovak New Wave has, in turn, often been looked at solely in terms of
the Western European influences exerted upon it. There has been little attempt to examine
the ways in which Czechoslovak cinema itself has set the pace or made significant additions
to approaches initiated elsewhere. As Zalman pointed out: ‘without some inherent resources
and traditions, intellectual and creative inspiration, the Czechoslovak cinema which is at
present the object of so much interest could not have come into being ... Culture draws its
sustenance from far deeper sources than those that supply political programmes.”
While the Czechoslovak New Wave developed under quite specific historical conditions,
it had the advantage of springing from a strong national tradition in cinema. The first films
were made in 1898, and, although the majority of those produced between the wars provided
conventional film entertainment, there are a number that equal in quality the best films of
the German and French cinemas. A personal selection would include Karel Anton’s Tonka
Sibenice (Tonka of the Gallows, 1930); Gustav Machaty’s Ze soboty na nedéli (From Saturday
to Sunday, 1931) from a script by the Surrealist poet Vitézslav Nezval; Josef Rovensky’s Reka
(The River, 1933); and Karel Plicka’s Zem spieva (The Earth Sings, 1933). Perhaps, like Franz
Kafka and Leos Janacek, they needed a Max Brod to popularise them and establish their
significance outside their local context.
The most significant long-term developments for Czechoslovak cinema grew out of
the ‘Devétsil’ movement. Devoted to revolution in art, life and politics, the Devétsil linked
itself to the Communist Party, advocated work of a consciously avant-garde nature, and
attempted to promote the cinema as an art form. Among the many important figures asso-
ciated with the movement were critic Karel Teige, the poet Vitézslav Nezval and novelist
Vladislav Vanéura. Nezval wrote a number of film scripts, most notably From Saturday to
Sunday, and Vanéura directed five films, including the important Pred maturitou (Before the
Finals, 1932). Martin Frié, who was to become Czechoslovakia’s most popular film director,
directed former Devétsil members, the comedy team of Jiti Voskovec and Jan Werich, in
Hej-Rup! (Heave Ho!, 1934) and Svét patri ndm (The World Belongs to Us, 1937). Vancéura
was closely involved in plans for the new nationalised film industry prior to his execution as
part of the Nazi retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. It was clearly
no accident that one of the first New Wave films - Jasny’s Cassandra Cat - should feature
Werich, or that some of the most individual films ofthe 1960s should be based on the work

culture and society 9

of Devétsil writers. In particular, one should mention Frantisek Vlacil’s Marketa Lazarova
(from Vanéura), Jiti Menzel’s Rozmarné léto (Capricious Summer, 1968, from Van¢ura)
and Jire’’ss Valerie a tyden divii (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 1969, from Nezval). In
1968, Josef Skvorecky and Evald Schorm were planning to reunite Werich with the exiled
Voskovec in a new film that would also have featured Suchy and Slitr of the Semafor Theatre,
and pop star Eva Pilarova.
Before moving to a consideration of the more immediate determinants of the New
Wave, it is worth discussing some of the pre-war films and directors in more detail. Not only
would the major films be familiar to the younger directors, but many were regularly revived
in Prague cinemas, providing a kind of cultural continuity with the pre-war period that was
not known, for instance, in the case of the British cinema.
After the formation of the independent republic in 1918, Czechoslovak cinema initially
faced economic insecurity. Although there was a brief postwar boom in which patriotic
films caught the mood of the public, producers were soon forced to compete with foreign
imports. Technical standards were hampered by the absence of properly-equipped studios
until the American and Biografia companies combined into the A-B Company, and con-
verted a former restaurant and dancehall into a studio in 1921. This was supplemented by
the Kavalirka Studios, established by actor-director Karel Lamac in 1924, where some of the
most important films of the 1920s were made before the destruction of the studios by fire
iL 29)
The coming of sound provoked yet further problems, with the cost of new equipment
and an inevitable rise in production costs. Furthermore, it was not immediately apparent
that producing feature films for a market of only thirteen million inhabitants was a viable
economic proposition. The first Czech talkies were actually produced in Paris, but the matter
was finally resolved in favour of Czech-language production after the success of the first
films in the domestic market in 1930. In 1933 the A-B Company constructed the Barrandov
Film Studios in Prague, which were to form the basis for both pre-war and postwar devel-
opments. The studios were originally intended to attract international production, and the
A-B Company itself undertook three costly historical films produced in foreign-language
versions and aimed principally at the French market: Julien Duvivier’s Golem (1935), Victor
Tourjanski’s Volha v plamenech (The Volga in Flames, 1934) and Nicolas Farkas’ Port Arthur
(1936). The plan misfired, but the studios were fully employed, and there was a rise in domes-
tic production to over forty features a year by the late 1930s.
The 1920s and 1930s in Czechoslovakia are scarcely touched on by the standard film
histories, and still await a substantial examination by non-Czech and Slovak critics and
historians. It is immediately apparent that the key importance conventionally attached to
Gustav Machaty’s Extase (Ecstasy, 1932) is diminished when set in the context of other pro-
ductions of the period. No doubt a systematic study would produce a number of discoveries
and reassessments.
Machaty is the one Czech director of the interwar years who gained an international
reputation. He directed his first film as early as 1919, and worked in Hollywood in 1920-21,
reputedly as an assistant to both D.W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim. His first film of
significance was an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Kreutzerova sondta (The Kreutzer Sonata, 1926),
followed by the unsuccessful Svejk v civilu (The Good Soldier Svejk in Civilian Life, 1927),
inspired by Jaroslav Hasek.
Machaty’s fame rests squarely on the succés de scandale of Ecstasy at the Venice Film
Festival of 1934 and, in particular, its featuring a nude Hedy Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr). Although

10 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

Parker Tyler included it in his Classics of the Foreign Film — the only Czech title - he regarded
this study of female sexuality as ‘not important as a finished work of art but arresting as an
unusual gesture, in an unusual direction, at a moment when its subject-viewed seriously
as I think its maker viewed it — required courage to film and offer to the general public’
However, Machaty had previously made two important films in collaboration with Vitézslav
Nezval: Erotikon (1929) and From Saturday to Sunday (1931). Together, the three films pro-
vide a clever and often subtle analysis of male/female relations.
Erotikon is a film about passion and human relations that, despite the frank sensuality
of its early scenes, favours accepted morality. It examines the outcome of a night of love at
a provincial railway station. The stationmaster’s attractive daughter, played by the Yugoslav
actress Ita Rina, sleeps with a man from the city who is forced to stay the night after missing
his train. She becomes pregnant, brings shame to her father, and is sent away to have the
child.
In its juxtaposition of country/innocence and town/decadence and in upholding the
values of family life, the film is entirely conventional. However, the depiction of a sympa-
thetic heroine governed by passion and capable of twice going astray provides added com-
plexity to the subject, and looks forward to the theme of Ecstasy. The convenient killing off of
her seducer, the object of temptation, and the miraculous intervention by an understanding
and well-off young man who doubles as husband and father-figure nevertheless provide a
strong confirmation of existing values.
Machaty’s stylistic brio is reserved for the film’s opening scenes, depending heavily on
the background of a thunderstorm and scenes of erotic tension built from cutting between
the two participants in separate rooms. The girl’s longing is conveyed through her open
mouth, knees protruding from the bedcovers, and the symbolism of telegraph poles in the
pouring rain. In the bed scene itself, the man appears as a Dracula-like figure as he rises
above her naked breast. The beginning of their clinch is filmed from overhead, the room
spinning round at its climax, and the sequence ends with the merging of raindrops on the
window. Easy to parody today, it was an opening of considerable power that also drew atten-
tion to the atmospheric lighting of Vaclav Vich.
Ecstasy, often described as a landmark in the history of the erotic film, is a logical exten-
sion of Erotikon. However, while it focuses directly on the woman’s sexual needs, its plot has
little to offer. The central figure, played by Hedy Lamarr, is newly-married to a dull husband,
who ignores her both personally and sexually, treating her as little more than a decorative
acquisition. She leaves for home and the countryside, where she becomes the mistress of
the virile foreman of a work team. When her husband comes to fetch her, it is too late. For a
while, the threat of murder hangs over her lover, but it is the husband who finally commits
suicide.
The film is a visual celebration of sexuality and the physical that uses its countryside set-
ting with considerable skill. The famous nude scene has Lamarr pursued through the trees
by tracking shots and swimming in long shot, the motif of horses emphasising a union with
nature, rather than crude voyeurism. The attempt to portray her lover in similar terms is less
successful. He is photographed against the skyline in the kind of shots reserved for athletes
and Socialist Realist heroes. The film concludes with the ‘Pisem prace’ (“Hymn to Work), a
virtually abstract section based on Frantisek Halas’ poem, in which the muscular bodies of
workers are juxtaposed with ripening corn - an evocation of birth/construction that ends
with a poetic image of mother and child. It is, above all, the tonal qualities of Jan Stallich’s
photography that make these sequences the prototype of ‘Czech lyricism. Paul Rotha wrote:

culture and society I

 With much of its action shot in natural surroundings, Machaty’s direction was as
good as anything being made in Europe in the 1930s. His use of editing to build
up moments of high tension, such as the automobile drive to the level crossing, his
sense of movement and symbolism, and his very delicate handling of situations that
could easily have become laughable, put him with the best directors of the period
... Its attempt to create a soundtrack which would be easily translatable for interna-
tional markets by having only one sequence in direct synchronous speech is worth
analysis, as indeed was its ingenious use of off-screen sound. The photography was
superb.*

In comparison with both Erotikon and Ecstasy, From Saturday to Sunday is a much more
mature work. The script attempts greater depth of characterisation, and makes a more
convincing effort to deal with the problems of everyday reality. The film opens with doors
swinging to and fro, a second hand moving around a clock to the figure twelve. A tracking
shot shows typists working at their desks. A well-dressed and voluptuous young woman
persuades her conventional colleague, Mana, to go on a double date with her - but she has
to borrow a dress and some shoes. It is an economical summing up of the world of everyday
work, of financial and character differences, and of the solutions that may be on offer. In the
nightclub scene that follows, the decadence/attraction of night life is emphasised as it had
been in Erotikon. In one image, the camera manages a close up juxtaposition of pince nez
and a girl's bosom. The camera swoops across the room towards the group - a hand grasps
a knee and a face gets slapped. The two girls get drunk, and a clown sings about people at
night to a background of paper sun and stars, coquettish faces and winking eyes. A finger
moves down a list of hotels in a telephone directory.
Mania tries to stave off the evening’s apparently inevitable outcome, but she is prevented
from leaving, and money is thrust surreptitiously into her handbag. Another young woman
cries, saying that she was taken to a private room and given nothing for her services. In fact,
Mana makes a last-minute escape from the threatening hotel bedroom, and takes refuge
from the pouring rain in a café. There she meets a man, and the film records the progress of
their romance after their return to his flat.
The simple, almost neorealist account of their developing affair is disturbed by the need
to provide a conventionally dramatic ending. The money secretly advanced in anticipation
of her favours leads to a breakup in the relationship, and Mana’s attempted suicide. The final
chase to her rescue seems false, a near-tragedy not adequately based in the plausible char-
acter observation that has preceded it.
The strength of the film derives from a delicate and lyrical romanticism. Particularly
impressive are the scenes in the bachelor flat, strewn with clothes and discarded footwear.
Mania puts her tiny feet into the man’s great slippers and wriggles with pleasure as he makes
coffee for her. Their first kisses are accompanied by a radio programme of early morning
exercises (intercut with shots of a fat announcer and a fat couple demonstrating them). The
tone of mockery continues when the young man burns a hole in her dress while ironing it,
a minor disaster welcomed by the sound of a muted trumpet. The film differs from Erotikon
and Ecstasy in its avoidance of excess, the absence of tragedy, and the equal matching of a
hero and heroine from the same social class.
At a number of levels, Machaty’s films are reminiscent of the late 1920s work of G.W.
Pabst. The heroine of From Saturday to Sunday finds herself in an initial situation not that
different from Greta Garbo in Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925); the ‘poetic’

12 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

criticism of decadent city life is shared with a number of German realist films, and the star
performances of Ita Rina and Hedy Lamarr recall the same kind of director/actress rela-
tionships. However, the German films do not show the same concern with a realist surface,
location shooting or lyrical camerawork. As Rotha and others have suggested, the control of
camera and cutting is certainly as advanced as any other films being made at the time, and it
is at this technical level that the films are so effective, providing a visual range and mobility
over and above the immediate requirements of the script.
A film that shares a number of these characteristics is Karel Anton's Tonka of the Gallows
(1930), which accidentally became the first Czech sound film when part of the negative was
destroyed in the Kavalirka fire of 1929. Anton reshot the sequences and took his actors to
Paris and Joinville to add sound. Its cast included Ita Rina as Tonka, with Vera Baranovskaya
(Pudovkin’s ‘Mother’) and the Czech actor/director Josef Rovensky. Anton’s international
ambition was indicated by the fact that the film was made in Czech, French and German
versions.
The story was taken from a novel by the Czech-born German writer Egon Ervin Kisch,
in turn based on a journalist’s report about a Prague prostitute who gives herself to a con-
demned man at the request of the authorities. Another film contrasting the decadence of city
life with the innocence of the countryside, it stresses the financial attractions of prostitution
for a woman forced to earn her own living. In the opening sequences, the coming of spring
is linked to her return to the country, her mother and her sweetheart. She brings gifts and
clearly has a ‘good’ job in the city (although she is looking pale). Her romance develops
against a background of lyrical, impressionist photography, with a gay and skittish perform-
ance from Rina. Suddenly, she returns to the city without explanation.
It transpires that Tonka is the most popular girl in a Prague brothel, and she responds
to the authorities’ request for a volunteer to spend the night with a condemned man (Josef
Rovensky). In contrast to the lyricism of the scenes in the countryside, this sequence depends
heavily on Expressionist effects. Tonka first sees the shadow of the man cast against prison
bars as if he has already been hanged. A huge, grasping shadow reaches for her, the man’s
eyes glazed. Her comforting of him is intercut with shots of the waiting executioner with
clipped hair and formal dress sitting in an empty guardroom - angular, geometric lines, the
shadow of the barred grill against the wall. He had only wanted an ordinary street whore,
but she is able to break through the despair of a man who ‘has no one: She encourages him
to ‘have courage in the face of his execution, and her face is superimposed on his before the
hanging. With the ironic words, ‘Justice has been done; a black cross dominates the screen.
She prays to God to have pity on his soul.
This strange romance profoundly affects Tonka, giving her a quasi-religious insight into
the meaning of life that goes beyond the values of the society in which she lives. She is so
clearly depressed by the man’s death that she is soon referred to as his ‘widow, her loss of
vitality making her unattractive to customers. The other whores leave a model of the gallows
and a hanged man in her room, and she is eventually thrown to the streets, an object of both
pity and ridicule.
The story of ‘Tonka of the Gallows’ becomes popular, and pursues her to the end of
her life. Her lover takes her back to the countryside, but literally on the verge of marriage
(she is wearing her wedding dress) someone tells the story of Tonka. She returns to Prague
and, at the end of the film, is shown telling her story in exchange for a drink. Her death is
directly linked to her desire for a ‘normal’ married life. She imagines that she sees a wed-
ding dress on a street stall, grabs it, and runs across the road under a passing taxi. She

culture and society 13

dies in her lover’s arms to visions of marriage, waving friends, the countryside and her
honeymoon.
Like Pabst’s Die Biichse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929), Tonka of the Gallows portrays a
woman whose sexuality cannot be contained by conventional moral values and whose down-
fall cannot be forgiven, her generosity of spirit leading directly to her destruction. Like the
city decadent in Erotikon and the husband in Ecstasy, the only eligible male character shows a
crucial inability to understand the problems of the female. In this respect, although the female
characters remain the object of male voyeurism, they are shown to be emotionally and spiritu-
ally superior. Both Anton's Tonka of the Gallows and Machaty’s films can be seen, despite com-
mercial restraints, as genuine attempts to reflect on the contemporary status of women.
The director most often associated with the tradition of Czech lyricism is Josef Rovensky
that is, if one excepts Karel Plicka’s excellent Flaherty-inspired documentary on the folk tra-
ditions of Slovakia, The Earth Sings. Rovensky had played a leading part in Tonka of the
Gallows, but is probably best known for his co-starring role opposite Louise Brooks in
Pabst’s Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929) and for his discovery of Anny
Ondrakova (Ondra), the leading star of Czech movies, who later appeared in Hitchcock's
Blackmail (1929). His most important work, which, together with Ecstasy and The Earth
Sings, made a major impact at Venice in 1934, was The River (1933).
The characteristic tone and mood of The River are set by a methodically poetic introduc-
tion. There are lyrical shots of streams running in woods, tracking shots of the river-foam,
waves - and a shot of a man on a raft steering his way into the foam. Then there is calm, and
light shimmers on the water. In church, a voice intones: ‘First there was nature and then there
was man, who came to tame nature...’ There are images of birds, trees and deer swimming.
‘But man has an evil side’ - shot of a man carrying a gun. However, this is no trite lyricism,
since the economic realities are soon revealed. Peasants till impossible hill soil, the man
pushing and the women pulling a wooden plough like human cattle. They empty baskets full
of stones collected from the earth.
The film's story centres on the life of the poacher. The mayor of the village, himself an
ex-poacher, is afraid that his son may fall into the same ways, and decides to send him to
the city. This theme is linked to the developing love between his son and the daughter of one
of the impoverished peasant families. A simple and intimate love story culminates in the
confrontation between the youth and a large pike, so that he can earn enough to buy her a
pair of boots.
The scene in which the boy and the girl make their farewell is beautifully done. The
obvious lyricism of crowns of daisies, butterflies, and the playing of a mouth organ is coun-
terbalanced by her tapping big toe in a bandage, and a blouse that will not do up. The mood
of the scene reinforces the feeling of adulthood as both a new beginning and the ending of
a period of innocence.
The photography is again by Jan Stallich, but employed here to present the context of
a real location in the countryside, rather than, as in Ecstasy, a correlative to the heroine’s
romantic/sensual condition. However, the film does include a characteristically-Czech
dream fantasy in which the youth sees himself as a prince accompanied by a turbaned boy-
slave carrying the beautiful new boots he has bought for his beloved. The final struggle with
the pike is filmed as an extended battle similar to that between the boy and the alligator in
Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948).
The two subsequent films of significance directed by Rovensky were both co-scripted by
the young Otakar Vavra, with an attendant emphasis on dialogue and literary construction.

14 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

In Marysa (1935), adapted from a late nineteenth-century drama by the Mrstik brothers,
the main feature is a compelling performance by Jitina Stépni¢kova in the central role. Its
opening portrays yet again a countryside idyll. This time, it is much more of a stereotyped
city-dweller’s view with the narrative commentary: ‘In this world, no one would look for evil,
but even here the soul and the heart of man are filled with evil?
The plot concerns the decision of a rich peasant to marry off his daughter Maryéa to a
miller in order to merge their properties and gain control of the latter’s mill. Her sweetheart
Frantisek has to go away to the Army where he will be ‘taught his position. The marriage
nevertheless goes ahead to a man who is reputed to have killed his previous wife with over-
work. MarySa accepts, despite initial opposition, so that her parents will not condemn her;
and when Frantisek returns from the Army, she refuses to run off with him while she is still
married. Her distorted sense of obedience and morality leads her to an extreme solution
— the poisoning of her husband.
While the script exploits all the clichés in the situation, the characters are shown to be
firmly in the grip of economic or class determinants. No one individual is to blame for the
situation, and the stereotypes are undercut in various ways. Her father is aware of the injus-
tice of his action, and her husband, despite his shortcomings, had wanted a real marriage.
While there is a Socialist direction in all this, the film, like The River, casts its story within
a religious context. It ends with the image of Christ and the message that ‘Love is stronger
than anything:
Despite its success at the level of script and characterisation, Marysa does not repeat
the light and lyrical touch of The River. The scene in which Marya is ritually dressed for her
marriage — a sacrifice to the accompaniment of a folk song — is beautifully executed, but the
film remains primarily an illustration of a literary script.
Hlidaé ¢.47 (Guard No. 47, 1937), Rovensky’s final film, suffers in many ways from the
same problems, but it is also a film of greater subtlety and complexity. It is a triangular story
set at a provincial railway station. The local guard and his wife save the life of a potential sui-
cide, but in the process the guard loses his hearing. The rescued man then falls in love with
the wife, who is dissatisfied and bored with her existence in the provinces. Miraculously,
the guard recovers his hearing and discovers what people (including his wife) really think,
before there is a final reunion. Rovensky again ends with his religious message, the figure of
Christ and the motto, ‘He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone:
In any consideration of Czechoslovak cinema in the interwar years, the name of Martin
Frié must bulk large. In 1973, five years after his death, more films directed by Fri¢ were
on display at Prague cinemas than by any other director. He was not an ‘auteur’ in the
conventional sense, but rather a highly prolific filmmaker who made more than 85 films
and worked with most of the leading actors and writers in Czechoslovakia for a period
of over forty years. His work included the first Slovak feature-film proper, Janosik (1935),
regarded by Frié as an ‘art’ film, but described by Graham Greene as the story of ‘a serf who
takes to the mountains and robs the rich so that he may give to the poor ... treated in such
a romantic rollicking tuneful way that we are reminded of The Maid of the Mountains.’
However, he is most remembered for his comedies, his work with Voskovec and Werich
and Vlasta Burian in the pre-war years, as well as later films such as the two-part Cisaruv
pekat-Pekariv cisa* (The Emperor’ Baker, The Baker's Emperor, 1951). This again featured
Werich, and provided a welcome relief from the sufferings of the 1950s. Werich once said to
him: ‘You'll never make a bad comedy, and so you don't have the right to do anything else.
People need comedies.®

culture and society 15

 Voskovec and Werich had produced their first play at the avant-garde Osvobozené
divadlo (The Liberated Theatre) in 1927, taking over the management in 1929. Of Voskovec
and Werich, Skvorecky writes:

Together with Jaroslav Jezek, the father of Czech jazz, they moulded Dadaism, circus,
jazz, Chaplin, Buster Keaton and American vaudeville into a new art form. They cre-
ated a new form of intellectual-political musical. Never before had anything like that
existed in Bohemia, and it was a quarter of a century after the Nazis had closed the
Voskovec and Werich theatre before it appeared again in the Semafor Theatre of Jiri
Suchy and Jif Slitr.’

Voskovec and Werich made a number of films based on their plays in the 1930s, includ-
ing Pudr a benzin (Powder and Petrol, 1931) and Penize nebo zivot (Your Money or Your
Life, 1932), both directed by Jindiich Honzl. Frié directed them in Heave Ho! (1934), widely
regarded as their best film, and The World Belongs to Us (1937). Both films had music by
Jaroslav Jezek, and photography by Otto Heller, who later worked in Britain on such projects
as Richard III (1955), Peeping Tom (1959) and The Ipcress File (1965).
The World Belongs to Us is an attack on Nazism, and Heave Ho!, the more substantial of
the two, is an attack on capitalism. In this film, Werich plays the head of a firm who is ruined
by a ruthless rival (a cripple given to such phrases as “Business is slow. Don't be sentimental
about the workers. Fire them or go broke.). Voskovec plays a worker representative who is
supposed to speak on the radio about the unemployment situation. He begins with the script
prepared for him: ‘It is my privilege to speak for the unemployed. Smilingly we gaze into the
future...” He throws away the script and tells the truth, only to be set upon from all sides and
dragged away from the microphone.
The two are thrown together and go through a number of comic routines owing much
to traditional Hollywood slapstick — cutting a hedge at different levels for an eccentric phi-
latelist with stamps stuck to his backside; ironing trousers with a steamroller that goes out
of control and buries a car; displaying the kissing techniques of ‘happy endings’ in films that
range from Douglas Fairbanks and Charles Boyer to King Kong (1933).
However, their progress is never divorced from social reality. Their first night is spent
in a cheap doss-house where the world of high finance is soon placed in perspective by the
monetary problems of the poor. Their own situation is the cue for a song in the tradition of
‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime, set against a background of unemployment charts dating
back to 1929.
A series of accidents lead to Werich’s inheriting a half-built factory, which he completes
with the help of unemployed labour. Building on their endeavours, they form a successful
collective that produces milk products and puts Werich’s rival out of business. Business mul-
tiplies, the results being recorded through split-screen techniques. The return of their first
lorry, where the milk in churns has turned to butter, becomes the excuse for an affectionate
parody of Eisenstein’s General‘naya liniya (The General Line, 1929). Lorry one becomes the
cream separator; and, as Voskovec speaks in fake Russian, a procession of lorries appears that
recalls the ranks of tractors that fill the screen in Eisenstein’ film.
Beginning with the words ‘Our century is a horror show to which no horror show can
aspire, The World Belongs to Us provides an analysis linking unemployment, capitalism and
the rise of Nazism. Set during the depression, a new demagogue sets himself up as a cham-
pion of the unemployed, but his election campaign is financed by the very firm that helped

16 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

to create the crisis. Initially hired by rival factions to paint slogans on factory walls, Voskovec
and Werich end up on the side of the workers and defeat a Fascist plot to overthrow the gov-
ernment. A film depending more on both politics and narrative than their earlier work, it was
enormously successful on its first release. The only existing version was reconstituted from
fragments after the negative was destroyed during the Nazi Occupation. As Michal Schonberg
suggests, ‘the Liberated Theatre and the films of Voskovec and Werich remained associated in
the consciousness of the Czech people with the highest ideals of liberty and democracy’®
Two films that addressed the problems of the working class more directly were Premysl
Prazsky’s Batalion (Battalion, 1927) and Carl Junghans’ Takovy je Zivot (Such is Life, 1929).
Battalion was adapted from a novel by Josef Hais-Tynecky about the early Czech Socialist
Dr Frantisek Uher. The title is the name of an inn frequented by the Prague underworld,
providing a focus for the analysis of class relationships, problems of drink, prostitution and
police behaviour. It is an often compelling story that employs montage effects owing much
to the Soviet example.
Such is Life is often seen as a by-product of the German realist film of the early 1930s,
that included such films as Mutter Krausen’s Fahrt ins Gliick (Mother Krausen’s Journey to
Happiness, directed by Piel Jutzi, 1929), Berlin-Alexanderplatz (directed by Jutzi, 1931) and
Kitihle Wampe (directed by Slatan Dudow, 1932), based on the script by Bertolt Brecht and
Ernst Ottwald. It is rated highly by Czech critics and by Siegfried Kracauer, although it gets
only faint praise from Lotte Eisner in L’ Ecran Démoniaque (1965). Carl Junghans was a
German journalist, playwright and director who failed to find commercial backing for Such
is Life in Germany. It was originally to have been backed by the Social Democrats and the
Communists, but they decided to back Mother Krausen’s Journey to Happiness instead, a
theme that, according to Junghans, had originated with him. He was later to co-direct a
second Czech film, A Zivot jde dal (Life Goes On, 1933-35), featuring Ita Rina, which was
made as a Czech- Yugoslav co-production. Such is Life was provided with a music soundtrack
in 1959 by Zdenék Liska, working under the direction of Elmar Klos.
Technically, Such is Life is a remarkably accomplished film and one of a number that
looked forward to the principles of neorealism. It centres on the character of a washerwoman
(Vera Baranovskaya), and the everyday problems surrounding the life of her family. The title
of the film is reflected in its six major divisions: ‘Days of Work, “Days of Pleasure, “Days of
Sadness; ‘Days of Rest; “Days of Bitterness’ and ‘Final Days: She faces the not-uncommon
problems of a pregnant daughter and a drunken husband who is both unfaithful and sacked
from his job. A hard and exhausting life ends in a premature death. Although the immediate
cause is an accident, her physical and mental state are contributory factors.
The striking aspect of the film lies in its use of locations and a sense of documentary —
this despite the use of such well-known actors as Baranovskaya, Theodor Pisték and Valeska
Gert. On the whole, the decorative image is avoided, although some degree of lyricism is
permitted in the river scenes that comprise ‘Days of Rest’ (for everyone except the film's cen-
tral character). Junghans also employs montage sequences at key points. The most notable
is when Baranovskaya walks across the Charles Bridge in Prague after she has spent Sunday
washing by the river. Her figure is intercut with the statues on the bridge (Christ, Mary, and
so on), and the sequence ends in an overhead shot emphasising her isolation/martyrdom as
she drags the tools of her trade on a small cart. There is also an effectively-cut dance scene
and a montage of tombstones at the end of the film to remind us that her fate is not unique.
Although the lot of the mother is harsh, she remains buoyant, and there are scenes of
everyday happiness as well as of suffering. The scenes of her daughter at work as a manicurist

culture and society \7

have elements of humour and observation worthy of Milos Forman, and her husband's quiet
but deeply-felt reaction after her death is rendered with an understatement uncharacteristic
of the German school. The final scene of the funeral party moving off suggests inevitability,
the typical nature of her suffering, and the universality of the topic. Kracauer quotes Carl
Vincent's description of the film as showing a ‘touching and smiling tristesse in the face of
human pain and decay.” Thus, the film provides a critical observation of working-class life,
but in no sense attempts the kind of political analysis aimed at in Kiihle Wampe. Nevertheless,
it does stress the life of the working class, and the credit before the funeral, “The Days of the
Poor Have No End; makes it more than an example of the ‘social décoratif.
The main challenge to cinematic orthodoxy was mounted by the novelist Vladislav
Vancura. The first chairman of the Devétsil and the leading experimental novelist of the
interwar years, he wrote many unrealised film scripts, and was one of the prime movers in
the attempt to develop cinema as an art independent of commercial demands. He believed
in collective work, and brought many eminent names together to work on his films, includ-
ing Nezval, Roman Jakobson, the novelists Ivan Olbracht and Karel Novy, Bohuslav Martinu
and the composer and stage producer E. F. Burian.
The first film on which Vanéura worked was Before the Finals, for which he took credits
as co-director with Svatopluk Innemann. The film is a delicate and lyrical observation of life
at a boys’ school, focusing on the humanisation of a narrow-minded mathematics teacher.
The film’s strongest quality lies in its sympathetic identification with the school community,
and Van¢ura’s avant-garde interests are closely integrated within the concerns of a predomi-
nantly mainstream film. Nevertheless, there are some unusual innovations. In one scene, a
staff meeting is seen through a glass window, the characters standing and gesticulating like
shadow puppets. The music is exaggerated and satirical, and the camera circles and tilts in
an acrobatic manner. There is also a preoccupation with overhead shots, which give a sense
of distanciation, as well as of spatial relationships and geographical context.
With Na slunecni strané (On the Sunnyside, 1933), Vancura adapted the ideas of the
Soviet educationist A. S. Makarenko, examining the fate of children brought up within dif-
ferent social classes. Set in a children’s home, it demonstrates the ways in which equal talents
and needs are threatened by the injustice and division of the outside world. The screenplay
was written by Nezval, Jakobson and Miroslav Disman. Both acting and costume are used
in a deliberately symbolic and stylised manner. Whenever conventional narrative or drama
seems about to take over, Vancura introduces some form of disjunctive effect. In one scene,
a conflict between husband and wife, the camera swings like a pendulum above them, lurch-
ing off the set and then back again. The use of ellipses, wipes and deliberately-posed figures
produces an effect of constant disorientation, while the class parallels are stressed through
montage — mannequins intercut with bourgeois ladies; finance with the serving of food; a
clandestine affair with a mechanical dredger. A puppet show commenting on the role of
money is itself exposed as a mechanism. ‘The film was rejected by its producers and released
only in a revised version.
In the meantime, Vancura had formed a film cooperative, for which he made Marijka
nevérnice (Faithless Marijka, 1934). Set in Ruthenia (part of Czechoslovakia until 1945), it
was written by Karel Novy and Ivan Olbracht, and became known as ‘the film by three nov-
elists. With few exceptions, most of the characters were played by non-professional actors,
members of the regional Ruthenian and Jewish communities. Fascinating on many levels, its
main focus is on economic issues and the world of work. There are lyrical scenes of the river,
ennobling shots of workers against the landscape, and an inventive use of split-screen. Its

18 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

virtuoso use of montage, often using images turned on their sides, is unusual in a 1930s film,
and the work was given added power through Martint’s only film score.
Apart from Machaty, who had embarked on an ultimately abortive international
career in the mid-1930s, another filmmaker to leave for the United States was Alexandr
Hackenschmied (later known as Alexander Hammid). The fact that he worked principally
in documentary, often as cinematographer/editor, and rarely took more than a co-director
credit, has kept his name out of the public eye. In Czechoslovakia he was a champion of the
independent or avant-garde film, and made a number of short films, including Bezticelnd
prochazka (Aimless Walk, 1930) and Na Prazském hrade (Prague Castle, 1932), in which he
tried ‘to find the relationship between architectonic form and music.'° He worked as a scene
designer on Machaty’s Erotikon, and took a major credit as ‘artistic collaborator’ on From
Saturday to Sunday. He also played a key creative role as editor of Plicka’s The Earth Sings,
which was transformed into ‘a visual and aural symphony;'' and he photographed Vavra’s
Listopad (November, 1934). Apart from a major contribution to American documentary,
Hammid made further films on musical subjects, including a feature version of Menotti’s
opera, The Medium (1951). In 1943, he demonstrated a continued interest in the independent
film when, with his then-wife Maya Deren, he co-directed Meshes of the Afternoon (1943),
one of the seminal works of the New American Cinema. Thomas E. ValaSek argues that there
are strong similarities between this and the earlier Aimless Walk, and that Hammid made a
significant contribution to Deren’s later work, in particular At Land (1944).
Another figure that should perhaps be mentioned is that of Hugo Haas, who became
well known as an actor/director/writer in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, with a number
of his films based on Czech originals. He made his name as a popular comic actor in films
such as Innemann’s MuZi v offsidu (Men in Offside, 1932) and Zivot je pes (Its a Dog’ Life,
1933), part of a sequence of seven films in which he was directed by Martin Fri¢. He turned
to direction in the late 1930s, notably with his film version of Karel Capek’s anti—Fascist play,
Bila nemoc (The White Sickness, 1937), in which he also played the part of Doctor Galén.
Both this and the Voskovec/Werich The World Belongs to Us were the subject of Nazi protests
in the year before Munich. The Jewish-born Haas completed two more films before leaving
for the United States.
It would be wrong to overemphasise the native cinematic tradition. Nevertheless, the
Expressionism of Karel Anton, the lyrical eroticism of Machaty, the pastoral qualities of
Rovensky’s best work, the capacity for subtle observation of character and the socially-con-
scious humour of Voskovec and Werich provide a strong national context. The influence of the
characteristic ‘Czech style of photographic lyricism, associated with Jan Stallich, is particu-
larly apparent in the films of the late-1950s. The early work of the cinematographers Jan Curik
(The White Dove) and Jaroslav Kuéera (Touha [Desire, 1958]) owes much to his example.
In the more open atmosphere of the 1960s, it was natural that new directors would
be most influenced by the radical breaks with tradition characteristic of contemporary
French and Italian cinema. Among the most obvious influences were Godard, Resnais,
Truffaut, Reichenbach, Antonioni and Fellini. There were also links with the English ‘real-
ists’ (Anderson, Reisz, Richardson) of the early 1960s, with their emphasis on the problems
of everyday life."
However, more than anything else, the Czechoslovak New Wave was the product of its
times, of the political and cultural situation in Czechoslovakia. With the benefit of hind-
sight, it can be seen that the reforms of the 1960s resulted from a return to traditions that
had remained latent during the Stalinist period. In the sphere of culture, the flourishing of

culture and society 19

ideas and hunger for the arts were a spontaneous response to de-Stalinisation; once the lid
was off, the repressed energy had to find expression. As Skvorecky has pointed out: ‘In all
branches of art the artistic common sense gnawed at the glazing of officious socialist-realism
from the very beginning." Before the 1960s, this took the form of having the conviction to
tell the truth about everyday life within traditional narrative conventions or in emphasis-
ing the poetic, formal qualities of the lyrical photographic tradition, developments that in
themselves would not seem inherently subversive. It is noticeable that, even with the greater
freedom provided in the 1960s, directors who served their apprenticeship in the 1950s did
not radically change their approach or methods. Such a ‘generation gap’ is equivalent to
similar developments in Western Europe.

THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

After the aptly-described ‘Munich betrayal’ of 1938, when the Anglo-French allies handed
over to Hitler a third of the country, 40% of its industry and Czechoslovakia’s frontier
defences, it was only a matter of time before the German invasion. At the end of the Second
World War, the Yalta Conference agreed on Western and Soviet spheres of influence, and
the Red Army was granted the honour of liberating Prague. The Soviet Occupation, which
lasted six months after the liberation, seemed to indicate almost inevitable adherence to a
Communist form of government. The realpolitik of the Great Powers ruled then as it had in
1938, and would again in 1968. The new government lasted for less than three years before
being replaced by a Communist dictatorship that was to prove one of the most conformist
and repressive in Eastern Europe.
While the Communist accession to power in 1948 was prepared for by the decisions of
the Great Powers, it was also the reflection of a strong Communist tradition in Czecho-
slovakia. The Party was the outcome of a split in the Social Democratic Party and, at the
time of its inception in 1921, numbered some 350,000 members. In its first parliamen-
tary election in 1925, it polled 13.2% of the votes and became the second largest party
in the country. It was predominantly working class and had a genuinely urban organisa-
tion. However, as Vladimir Kusin has pointed out, the numerical strength of the Party and
the national and democratic traditions of the country clashed with the rigid revolutionary
demands of the Third International.'’’ By 1931, two years after Klement Gottwald became
the Party’s leader, membership had dropped to 40,000. In the late-1930s, under the influ-
ence of Popular Front ideas, the popularity of the Party increased, and in 1938 membership
rose to 100,000.
During the war, the headquarters of the democratic government-in-exile under Pres-
ident Edvard Bene’ was in London, while the Communist Party representation under
Gottwald was in Moscow. With the Soviet Union in alliance with the Western allies and a
growing Communist influence in the Czechoslovak underground movement, it was logical
for Benes and Gottwald to collaborate. Around 1943 the idea developed of what was later to
be called a ‘specific Czechoslovak road to socialism.'* The idea that Czechoslovak Socialism
could, at the same time, embrace nationalism, democracy and Communism was carefully
nurtured, and Gottwald repeatedly stressed the fact that Czechoslovak Socialism would not
follow the Soviet model. During the Soviet presence (which ended in the summer of 1945),
‘national committees’ were set up, led by activists trained in Moscow. Gottwald was also able
to ensure Communist control of the key ministries — Interior and Information. In the 1946
election, the Communist Party polled 38% of the vote, and became the country’s strongest

20 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

political party. What is important to note was the existence of genuine popular support that
maintained democratic and national ideals. As Cecil Parrott suggested, the Czechoslovak
Communists ‘unlike the Russians ... took democracy for granted?!”
Jiti Pelikan, a former member of the Party’s Central Committee and head of the state
television service, pointed out that Czechoslovakia was distinguished from the other Eastern
European countries liberated by the Soviet Union in two important ways: (i) the existence
of a legal Communist Party in the pre-war period; and (ii) the possession of an industrial
working class with revolutionary and democratic traditions. There was also no Soviet mili-
tary presence. It was precisely because of this potential for independent development that
Stalinist repression proved greater than elsewhere.
As early as 1952, the Secretary General of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf
Slansky, was put on trial, convicted and executed. Of the fourteen leading Communists
arrested at the time, eleven were executed and three were sentenced to life imprisonment. It
is also noteworthy that eleven out of the fourteen accused were Jewish. If non-Communists
are included, the purges are calculated to have included some 136,000 victims through death,
imprisonment and internment. Among those sentenced was the post-invasion Secretary
General of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gustav Husak. (In this respect, his fate was
similar to that of other Eastern European politicians who later ‘turned back’ the tide of reform
- Wiadystaw Gomutka in Poland and Janos Kadar in Hungary.) If, in 1956, the date normally
accepted for the beginning of de-Stalinisation following Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th
Party Congress, Czechoslovakia failed to respond with the alacrity of other countries, it was
not surprising. The natural base for any extensive reform had already been removed.
Nevertheless, it is from this time that one must date the beginning of the self-examina-
tion that was to lead to the Prague Spring of 1968. Intellectuals and students did make a
stand. At the 2nd Writers’ Congress of April 1956, writers such as Ladislav Mnacko and the
poets Frantisek Hrubin and Jaroslav Seifert criticised Stalinist practices, and managed to
elect a liberal presidium. On May Day 1956, student processions in Bratislava and Prague
demanded liberalisation and greater contacts with the West. In 1957 and 1958, the first films
of the Czechoslovak filmmakers I have referred to as the ‘First Wave’ made their appearance.
However, any far-reaching developments were fairly rapidly nipped in the bud, and at the
Writers’ Congress of 1959 the conservatives were returned to leadership. In the same year, the
conference at Banska Bystrica ensured the banning of most of the critical films produced in
the previous year and a reorganisation of the management of the Barrandov Film Studios."*
Vladimir Kusin has shown how the revelations of 1956 and the need to explain the
Stalinist experience affected almost all aspects of intellectual life in the late-1950s.!° Ota Sik,
who was to play a leading role in the economic reforms, writes:

The shock of Khrushchev’s historic speech was such that my former political activity
lost all meaning for me. Naturally, I could not be satisfied with the ingenuous argu-
ment that the ‘cult of Stalin’ was the root of all evil. I had to decide either to leave the
Communist Party, or to stay in order, by long-term, patient and systematic work, to help
change the system. With a few like-minded friends I opted for the latter course.”

Sik’s reaction was not unique, and it is clear that a good deal of thinking was going on
behind closed doors. The changes of the 1960s owed their development initially to the 12th
Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, held in December 1962. Outwardly con-
formist, it nevertheless made one important concession - the establishment of a commis-

culture and society 21

sion to investigate the cases of the leading Communists prosecuted in the 1949-54 period.
As a gesture towards de-Stalinisation, a committee had been set up under Rudolf Barak
in 1955 to review the trials of 1949-51 (the period of Slansky’s power). In 1956, the brief
was extended to include 1952, and a report was duly forthcoming in 1957. However, lead-
ing politicians went no further than placing the blame for excesses entirely on the head of
Slansky. Barak himself, widely regarded as the most likely successor to Antonin Novotny as
Secretary General ofthe Party, was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment during a secret
trial in April 1962. It was of some significance, therefore, that a new committee should be
set up in the same year as ‘the Barak Affair’ and that its terms of reference should extend
to 1954 (a period that now included the trials of the Slovaks and Novotny’s early years as
First Secretary). The importance of coming to terms with the trials cannot be too strongly
emphasised, and as late as 1968, the pressure to tell the whole truth was still pre-eminent.”!
Czechoslovak Television's investigation into the alleged assassination of Jan Masaryk and the
threat of revelations about the role of the Soviet security forces were two of the most contro-
versial by-products of the Prague Spring. Artur London’s personal account of the trials was
about to be published at the time of the 1968 invasion.” Skvorecky has described Forman’s
film, Hori, md panenko (The Firemen’ Ball/Like a House on Fire, 1967), as a scarcely-veiled
allegory of the Party’s varying attempts to face up to the truth of this period.”
Reform was overdue in Czechoslovakia, and when the 22nd Soviet Party Congress
renewed its plea for de-Stalinisation in 1962, the position of Novotny was further weakened.
An important additional factor in the situation was the country’s deteriorating economic
condition. By mid-1962, Czechoslovakia'’s industrial growth rate was the lowest in Eastern
Europe, and in 1963, the rate of industrial production went backward by 0.4%. In 1962, it
was also admitted that the level of agricultural production was the same as, if not lower
than, that of 1938.” The situation was ripe for change, and increasing Slovak demands for
the rehabilitation of their former leaders gave added impetus to the dissatisfaction with a
monolithic system that had succeeded in effecting the breakdown of what had once been the
most productive economy in Central Europe. The revolt of the intellectuals that got under
way in 1963 thus took place against a background of both internal and external pressures for
liberalisation and the manifest economic failure ofthe regime. In December 1962 Jiti Hajek,
the conservative editor of the Svaz ceskoslovenskych spisovateli (Writers’ Union)’s monthly,
Plamen, argued:

The instances when we have solemnly renounced dogmatism are numerous, and we
are nearly the world champions as regards the number of proclamations against it ...
yet dogmatism still exists ... |could provide further concrete evidence to the effect
that our specifically Czech (and Slovak) dogmatism not only goes on living and in
security, but that it has recently been flourishing more than ever before.”

In January 1963, Plamen and Slovenské pohlady (the journal of the Slovak Writers’ Union)
organised a symposium on the problems of contemporary prose, to which Eastern European
(including both Yugoslav and Soviet) writers were invited. During the conference, Jarmila
Glazarova attacked the corruption of prose through the use ofpolitical jargon; Milan Kundera
attacked the traditions of Socialist Realism, complaining of the isolation of Czechoslovak lit-
erature from the outside world; and Karel Kosik urged a re-estimation of the work of Jaroslav
HaSek and Franz Kafka. In May, Eduard Goldstiicker was the leading organiser of the Liblice
conference that finally saw the recognition and rehabilitation of the works of Kafka.

792 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

 The pre-eminence of the intelligentsia in the movement for change was partly related to
the intellectual poverty enforced during Novotny’s regime and partly to their traditional role
as the nation’s conscience. Kusin writes:

The Czech intellectual was traditionally inclined to resist this peculiar combination
of arbitrariness and stupidity. In several historical phases, especially in the anti-
Reformation period, the Czech nobility had been practically wiped off the face of the
earth. At the end of the eighteenth century, a thoroughly plebeian nation was facing
its ordeal without aristocracy in either the material or the spiritual sense. And when
the time was ripe for a national reawakening, the leaders could only be recruited
from among the intelligentsia which itself had its origin in the plebeian layers of the
nation. Scientists and scholars took over the job which a nobility would have played
in other circumstances. The intellectual became the aristocrat of the spirit, endowed
with the three basic traits of his nation: nationalism, democratism and an inclination
to heresy. The Czech regeneration of the nineteenth century was the result of a delib-
erate decision by the intelligentsia.”

Only the Czech respect for scholarship can explain the impact of a work of philosophy such
as Karel Kosik’s Dialektika konkrétniho (Dialectics of the Concrete), which went through three
editions (1963, 1965, 1968) and was always sold out. According to Kusin, all the key devel-
opments in culture (in literature, film, drama and cultural policy) were conceived either
directly or indirectly in relation to Kosik’s idea of ‘concrete totality. For Kosik, concrete
totality is

reality understood as a structured (not chaotic) whole, constantly evolving and form-
ing itself. It is not given once and for all; it is not complete in foto and mutable only in
parts. As concrete totality, reality is, at the same time, a totality of nature and a totality
of history. Man is always simultaneously in both, and he constantly reproduces his
union with the world through practice.”

Kosik’s book reformulated the dialectic in such a way as to make subjectivity its basis. As
Paul Piccone points out, Kosik viewed the dialectic as the ‘method of the spiritual and intel-
lectual reproduction of reality through labour understood not merely as wage labour, but as
teleological human activity.” This places all people on the same footing, and it is noticeable
that Kosik tends to talk about ‘man; rather than ‘class:
Entrepreneurial capitalism can be seen to have given way to both late capitalism and
bureaucratic centralism. Late capitalism is characterised by the rule of social capital, while
the ‘Socialist’ countries of Eastern Europe are ruled by the bureaucracy. Both are character-
ised by intensified reification, a false totalisation attendant on political, as opposed to eco-
nomic, determination. In such a situation, pseudo-concreteness is not restricted to any one
class or group, but is the condition of all. As Piccone argues: ‘Kosik’s critique of pseudo-con-
creteness readily translates into a political project for the elimination of manipulation and
of the contemplative viewpoint through a politisation of hitherto privatised individuals.”
While he defends the working class, he also defends the rights of the peasants and intellectu-
als not to be reduced to objects of manipulation. In 1968, one of Kosik’s main components
for a Socialist democracy was a national front: ‘a political and social alliance of workers,
peasants, intellectuals, youth and office workers.*°

culture and society 23

 If Kosik’s work influenced cultural developments, the reverse was also true. The reason
why philosophers devoted so much time to the interpretation of films, plays, novels and
poems was because they embodied the same problems which they themselves were encoun-
tering. Kosik argued that by ‘interpreting these works and commenting on them, they were
thus actually answering their own questions by means of material supplied by others.*' He
saw culture, particularly cinema, as attacking the existing bureaucratic regime at its core and
essence. For Kosik, however, the very nature of Czech culture did not derive from subtle
political allusions, explicit political criticism or veiled attacks on the government, but in
emphasising ‘such basic aspects of human existence as the grotesque, the tragic, the absurd,
death, laughter, conscience and moral responsibility.”
The response to the initiatives of 1963 was rapid. The period 1963-65 saw the pro-
duction of important Western plays, including the work of Friedrich Diirrenmatt, Eugene
Ionesco’s Rhinocéros (1960), Samuel Beckett's Waiting
for Godot (1952) and Edward Albee's
Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) (retitled Kdopak by se Kafky bal? [Who Would be
Afraid of Kafka?]). The theatres, in particular the Semafor, Divadlo na zabradli (Theatre on
the Balustrade), Divadlo za branou (Theatre Beyond the Gate) and Cinoherni klub (The
Drama Club), became immensely popular because of their high artistic quality and their
irreverent productions. The 1963-64 season saw the production of Peter Karvas’ Jazva (The
Scar), an attack on Stalinist persecution, while by 1965 Czechoslovakia’s own avant-garde
had emerged with the work of Josef Topol and Vaclav Havel. Havel’s work rapidly acquired a
Europe-wide reputation. It is worth noting that the Western plays were often seen to have an
immediate political relevance unintended by their authors.”
Shortly before he was removed from office Cestmir Cisai, then Minister for Education
and Culture, produced a report on the theatre, in which he called for a new intellectual
dynamism among playwrights, who ‘only rarely deal with the “microworld” of modern man
which is full of conflicts that society and the social order reflect only indirectly in their over-
all complexity.** He deplored the fact that Czechoslovak audiences had to look to Western
playwrights for these themes. However, Novotny expressed his dissent in October 1966:
‘Some work centres whose mission it is to watch over adherence to the norms of socialist life
also succumb to political and ideological liberalism and to laxity in the face of anti-social
actions and excesses.*°
In the novel and literature in general, the main changes were reflected in the publication
of Ladislav Mnacko'’s Oneskorené reportaze (Delayed Reportages, 1963) and Ako chuty moc
(The Taste of Power, 1967). Skvorecky’s novel, Zbabélci (The Cowards), originally published
in 1958 but banned, was reissued in 1963. In poetry, the magazine Kvéten had been founded
in 1956 by a group that included Miroslav Holub and Miroslav Florian, but was suppressed
in 1959.*° By 1964-65, there had been a growth in poetry-reading clubs, and the influence of
the Beat poets was felt among the younger generation.
Activity in the fine arts, an area traditionally neglected by Western observers, had for
some time moved beyond the areas of descriptive naturalism and propaganda. According
to Jifi Padrta, many of those who graduated from art schools in the early 1950s ‘went
through ten years of repetition of the classic forms of cubism, fauvism, and expression-
ism, a manifestation of their opposition to the officially supported academic naturalism.
He records a dynamic movement in the period 1956-66, pointing out that galleries both
large and small were ‘quite freely exhibiting many different varieties of abstract art, pop
art, and the new figurative art, and even included geometric and kinetic art” Again,
emphasis should be placed on native traditions, the fact that the Surrealist movement had

24 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

extended throughout the war years and beyond, and that the movement towards geometric
abstraction in the early 1960s related to the tradition of Franti8ek Kupka and the Russian
Constructivists.
It is within this context that the filmmakers of the mid- and late-1960s found themselves
working, and it is important to remember that there were specific as well as general interrela-
tions between the cinema and the other arts. The significance of literature as a basis for film
work had always been stressed by Otakar Vavra, and a high proportion of the films produced
in the Socialist Realist period had derived from literary sources. The same was true of the
1960s, and Milan Kundera even went so far as to describe the leading films as part of the
history of Czechoslovak literature.** A random selection of writers who became involved in
important Czech and Slovak films would include:

Ludvik Askenazy Krik (The Cry, 1963)

Alfonz Bednar Slnko v sieti (Sunshine in a Net, 1962)
Ladislav Fuks Spalovaé mrtvol (The Cremator, 1968)
Ladislav Grosman Obchod na korze (A Shop on the High Street, 1965)
Bohumil Hrabal Perlicky na dné (Pearls from the Deep, 1965)
Ost?e sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains, 1966)
Skrivanci na niti (Skylarks on a String, 1969)
Frantisek Hrubin Zlata reneta (The Golden Rennet, 1965)
Romance pro kridlovku (Romance
for a Bugle, 1966)
Vladimir Korner Udoli véel (Valley of the Bees, 1967)
Adelheid (1969)
Milan Kundera Nikdo se nebude smat (No Laughing Matter, 1965)
Zert (The Joke, 1968)
Arnost Lustig Transport z raje (Transport from Paradise, 1963)
Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night, 1964)
Dita Saxovad (1967)
Sergej Machonin Navrat ztraceného syna (Return of the Prodigal Son, 1966)
Vladimir Paral Soukroma vichfice (Private Hurricane, 1967)
Jan Prochazka Kocar do Vidné (Coach to Vienna, 1966)
Noc nevésty (Night of the Bride, 1967)
Ucho (The Ear, 1969)
Josef Skvorecky Zlocin v divéit skole (Crime in the Girls School, 1965)
it konec (End of a Priest, 1968)
Zlocin v Santanu (Crime in the Night Club, 1968)

However, the situation had changed quite radically since Vavra criticised the 1930s gen-
eration for their inability to write challenging material. The new writers were much more
aware of the needs of the film medium, and tended to work closely with directors in the
conception of their films. In addition, there was a group of specifically film writers that
included Jaroslav Papousek (all the Forman/Passer films), Antonin MaSa (Kazdy den odvahu
[Everyday Courage, 1964]), Pavel Juracek (Postava k podpirani) [Josef Kilian, 1963]) and
Ester Krumbachova (The Party and the Guests, Mucednici lasky [Martyrs of Love, 1966],
Sedmikrasky (Daisies, 1966], Valerie and Her Week of Wonders), and their contribution was
to prove central to the developments of the 1960s. Maga and Juracek had graduated in dram-
aturgy at the Akademie muzickych uméni Filmova a televizni fakulta (FAMU; Prague Film

culture and society 25

School), but Papougek had graduated as a sculptor and Krumbachova was also an art school
graduate, later establishing her career as a theatre and costume designer.
One of the key theatrical influences on the New Wave was Alfréd Radok’s Laterna magika
combination of live action with cinema that took the Brussels Exposition of 1958 by surprise,
and enjoyed a repeat success at Expo 67 in Montreal. According to Milos Forman, ‘Laterna
used multiple projections, cinemascope, a “live” stage, and stereophonic music; so it was
really kind of a cybernetic machine one had to keep one’s eye on all the time. Forman, who
served his apprenticeship with Radok, said that he was ‘such a genius that at a time when we
were forced to talk about nothing, he discovered how to do it so it was enjoyable.*” Among
other directors who at one time or another worked on Laterna magika were Evald Schorm,
Jan Svankmajer, Jan Rohaé, Ladislav Rychman, Vladimir Svitd¢ek and Martin Tapak.
Another major influence was the Semafor Theatre of Jiri Suchy and Jif{ Slitr, which
clearly had its parallels with the work of Voskovec and Werich before the war. The music
and lyrics of Suchy and Slitr were at the centre of the growth of Czechoslovak pop music,
and they made a substantial contribution to Czech films in this form. Perhaps the best
screen tribute to the Semafor Theatre was Rohaé and Svita¢ek’s Kdyby tisic klarinetu (If a
Thousand Clarinets, 1964). Basically, it was a string of musical numbers, but it had all the
enthusiasm and verve that characterised some of the best Hollywood musicals of the 1940s.
It was linked to a pacifist theme that examined reactions to the mysterious transformation
of Army weapons into musical instruments. Among those involved were Suchy and Slitr,
Jana Brejchova, Jiti Menzel and Ester Krumbachova, together with the pop singers Hana
Hegerova, Waldemar Matuska, Eva Pilarova and Karel Gott. The film directors most closely
associated with the Semafor included Rohaé, Svita¢ek, Rychman, Menzel and Juraj Herz.
The Cinoherni klub prided itself on its close association with the cinema and the
work of Menzel and Schorm. Menzel directed Machiavelli's Mandragora (Mandragola/ The
Mandrake, 1518) in 1965, while Schorm directed a dramatisation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime
and Punishment (1866) in the following year. Jan Kacer, one of the directors of the company,
played leading roles in films by Schorm, Boéan and V1a¢il. Other members of the company
who appeared regularly in films were Pavel Landovsky, Petr Cepek and Josef Somr.
Outside the ranks of the cinematographers, the main link between the cinema and the
visual arts lay in the work of Krumbachova, who made a distinctive visual contribution to
many films and, in particular, those that she co-scripted. In music, the work of composers
Zdenék Liska, Jan Novak, Lubo’ FiSer and Jan Klusak was to prove as distinctive a contri-
bution as had British film music of the 1940s. However, none of these elements could have
proved meaningful without fundamental developments in the structure of the film industry
and the specific contribution of FAMU.

INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION

The first and most important fact about Czechoslovak cinema was that it was a national-
ised industry — with all the advantages and disadvantages which that implies. The impulse
towards nationalisation dated from the mid-1930s, when the Leva fronta (Left Front of the
Arts) set up a society for the showing of experimental films, principally those of the Soviet
avant-garde. Otakar Vavra, whose career as a writer/director had dated from 1931, was one
of the main advocates of the development. During the 1930s, his script credits included
Rovensky’s Marysa and Guard No. 47, plus work for Martin Frié and Hugo Haas. His own
early features include Filosofskd historie (A Philosophical Story, 1937), Panenstvi (Virginity,

26 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

1937), taken over from Rovensky on the latter’s death, Cech panen kutnohorskych (Guild of
the Kutnd Hora Maidens, 1938), which won an award at the Venice Festival, and Humoreska
(1939). It was a time when film was on the verge of achieving an artistic respectability, a
potential new wave that Vavra clearly feels was destroyed by the Nazi Occupation. Vavra
moved in the artistic circles associated with the Devétsil. Vanéura, Honzl, Teige, E. F Burian,
Jan Mukaiovsky, Bediich Vaclavek and Julius Fucik are the names that he lists as forming the
groundwork for the development of the cinema.*°
However, as Antonin Liehm has pointed out, the idea of nationalisation was not as obvi-
ously radical as it might seem elsewhere.’ There was a strong tradition in favour of public
patronage of the arts in Central Europe. The existence of fully-subsidised theatres, orchestras
and galleries was something that was taken for granted. In a small country limited by its
language from access to foreign markets, the concept of transforming cinema into a cultural
service could be seen as a logical progression.
The project for the future was very much centred on the work of Vladislav Vanéura and
the Ceskoslovenska filmova spoleénost (Czechoslovak Film Society). Vanéura and fellow
novelist Ivan Olbracht had written widely on film in an attempt to raise the level of critical
writing, and it was during the war that the film society prepared plans for the nationalisation
of the industry and the formation of a film academy. As mentioned earlier, Vancura did not
live to see his ideas realised, but Otakar Vavra was to play a key role in the realisation of both
projects. The decree nationalising the industry was signed as early as August 1945, and, as
Vavra has pointed out, this achievement was by no means identified exlusively with the poli-
cies of the Communist Party.** FAMU was established a year later in 1946.
The second factor of importance in the postwar development of Czechoslovak cinema
lay in the outstanding production facilities at the Barrandov Studios and the Prague labora-
tories. During the war, the Germans had expanded the existing studios when they planned
to transfer a substantial part of their own production programme to Prague after the Berlin
and Munich studios were destroyed or seriously damaged by air raids.
The Stalinist period was characterised by rigid centralisation, and this was reflected in
the number of films produced - only 22 in 1950, nine in 1951, with a steady rise to about
a dozen in 1952-54. Nevertheless, it was precisely at this time that Czech animated film-
makers attained world recognition. This was in part because less ideological pressure was
exerted in this field, and the extreme stylisation characteristic of animated and puppet films
was accepted as a fact of life. As Liehm puts it: ‘It was much harder for the watchdogs to
penetrate the land of fairytales, folk stories and poetic visions, in pursuit of puppet film, all
the more so since at that time folklore was recommended and defended by the state’* In
addition, the animated films of Jifi Trnka and Karel Zeman were produced in small studios,
which generally implied greater creative autonomy and creative freedom. If a film was to be
banned, it would happen after its completion, when financial investment would be lost. The
international success of their work also helped to preserve freedom. Yet, at the same time, it
was the kind of work that would have proved altogether impossible outside the protection of
a nationalised industry.
This small-scale organisation provided inspiration for the later organisation of the
Barrandoy Studios into semi-autonomous production groups. Decentralisation of the film
industries was, to a greater or lesser extent, a product of de-Stalinisation in all Eastern
European countries. The setting up of independent production groups led by sympathetic
managers or the filmmakers themselves was originally organised in Poland in 1955, and
led directly to the success of Polish cinema in the late 1950s. The other countries of Eastern

culture and society 27

Europe, including Czechoslovakia, followed suit. Apart from Jan Prochazka, key figures in
the Barrandov production groups included people such as Ladislav Fikar, a poet and former
director of the publishing firm of the Writers’ Union, and Vladimir Bor, one of the found-
ers of the ‘recese’ movement.” In 1968, Pavel Juracek was given responsibility for one of the
groups. In the mid-1960s, when the Union of Film and Television Artists was established,
it was figures such as Ludvik Pacovsky and director Ladislav Helge who were able to help
in the development of the more open conditions necessary for the development of the New
Wave. As Liehm points out, the film union was created later than the other unions: ‘For the
first time, a so-called social organisation was born within the Stalinist system that was not a
transmission belt ... Gradually, and especially in 1968, the new union became the focus of
political activities on the cultural front.”
The role of FAMU itself has sometimes been overemphasised, but when Jan Némec
claimed that all it had given him was ‘tuition and a correct attitude towards society,** he was
being ironic. The fact is that FAMU brought students into direct contact with leading direc-
tors and writers. Among the former were Otakar Vavra, under whom Chytilova studied;
Vaclav Krska, who worked with Némec; Vaclav Wasserman, who worked with Jakubisko;
and Elmar Klos. The writers included Milos Kratochvil and Milan Kundera. Milos Forman
has spoken of the importance of Vavra, Kratochvil and Kundera to his own education, sum-
ming up as follows: ‘a sense of freedom, hundreds of films, and the character and stature of
the people you have around to talk them over with - I guess those are about the most impor-
tant things anybody can give you.”
The school was organised around seven departments: screenwriting, direction (includ-
ing editing), photography, documentary and reportage, techniques (including sound/music),
production, and theory (including history, criticism and management), The first gradu-
ates were produced in 1949-50, and among them were directors Jasny, Kachyna, Stanislav
Barabaés and Peter Solan, and cinematographer Jaroslav Kuéera, all of whom were to pave
the way for and participate in the developments of the 1960s. On the other hand, important
directors such as Kadar, Brynych and V1aéil, and cinematographer Jan Curik were either too
old for FAMU or came into the industry through other channels. The directors of the mid-
1960s were, however, virtually all FAMU graduates.
It is difficult to assess the contribution of film schools, and ex-students (such as Némec)
are sometimes careful to avoid overpraising them. However, one factor that was clearly vital
was the opportunity afforded to students to see films from all over the world. If foreign films
were brought to Prague, the students would get to see them, whether or not they were subse-
quently purchased for distribution. The students at FAMU were therefore fully aware of what
was going on in the international film world. Perhaps the best summary of the importance
of FAMU has been given by Juraj Jakubisko — like Némec, a strongly individualistic student
who graduated in the mid-1960s, almost ten years after Forman:

A higher education doesn't give you the basic knowledge that would, in and by itself,
be particularly applicable in art. But one thing is there: When Chytilova, Némec,
Menzel, Schorm, and the rest were studying at the Film Academy, we were in a single
building; and counting the professors and the staff, there were a hundred of us at
most. Every completed film was in essence sort of a small family celebration."

In other words, the importance of FAMU derived from the existence of a group of commit-
ted and enthusiastic people living through a time that was ripe for cultural advance.

28 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

 THE FIRST WAVE

THE BEGINNING OF the Czechoslovak New Wave is normally dated from the feature debuts of
Forman, Chytilova and Jires in 1963. The ‘First Wave’ may be defined as that group of direc-
tors who prepared the way for the developments of the 1960s through thematic or formal
breaks with the conventions of Socialist Realism. It includes early FAMU graduates such as
Jasny, Kachyna and Uher, together with non-FAMU graduates such as V1acil, Helge, Kadar
and Brynych. With the exception of Kadar, who made his first film in 1950, the rest made
their feature debuts in the late 1950s, following Khrushchev’s denunciation of the personality
cult in 1956. They made distinctive contributions at this time and during the period of the
New Wave as such.
While any tendency to establish a united group was broken by Banska Bystrica, they
were all able to make significant challenges to the approved conventions. However, before
discussing their work in detail, it is essential to consider that of the immediate postwar years,
since they too constituted a period of artistic struggle. The filmmakers of this period made
their debuts either then or in the late 1930s, and include such figures as Otakar Vavra, Jiri
Weiss, Jiti Krejcik, Vaclav Krska and Alfréd Radok. They were people who worked during
the Stalin years, when any sign of group identity might have been interpreted as conspiracy.
Despite adverse conditions, some individual films of quality were made, and if the directors’
talents could not be fully realised, it was because the times did not permit it. What is clear
from any analysis of the development of Czechoslovak cinema since the establishment of
Communist rule is the way in which, in Skvorecky’s words, ‘artistic common sense’ worked
against the prevailing orthodoxy. This has applied to all generations, and the films are there
to prove it.

THE POSTWAR YEARS

After the Second World War, Czechoslovakia’s Western-style democracy lasted for less than
three years prior to the establishment of a Communist government in 1948. As already
indicated, a large number of Czechoslovakia Communist and left-wing artists had been
associated with the avant garde and Surrealist movements of the interwar years. When, in
1947, a speech by A. A. Zhdanov in the Soviet Union led to measures against the poet Anna
Akhmatova and composers Aram Khatchaturian and Dmitri Shostakovich, Czechoslovak
artists were told by their own leadership that Socialist Realism was the result of the specific
factors governing the historical development of the Soviet Union. There would be no attempt
to impose a single style in Czechoslovakia.' In fact, there was a fairly prompt adherence to
the principles of Soviet Socialist Realism as outlined by Zhdanov.
According to this view, it is the object of the artist to ‘depict reality in its revolution-
ary development ... The truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic portrayal
should be combined with the ideological remoulding and education of the toiling people.”

the first wave 29.

Zhdanov’s statement, made at the 1934 Writers’ Congress, may be amplified by Troschenkos:
‘Our realism is the most objective because the point of view of the proletarian party is the
fullest, the most consistent scientific expression of the laws of development of modern soci-
ety into Communism.” Put at its simplest level, reality is defined by the Party. In practice,
this gave rise to the ‘theory of lack of conflict, in which ‘positive’ heroes must, at least mor-
ally, triumph over ‘negative characters. The enforcement of this requirement gave rise to a
standardised plot, in which an inevitable happy ending was preceded by nominal conflicts
between ‘negative’ and ‘positive characters. Socialist Realist films, writes Herbert Eagle,

are typically elaborated along the rational logical lines of ‘classical narrative cinema’:
spatial and temporal linearity, with actions ‘driven’ by character motivation — a chain
of intentions, causes and effects. Such intentions are seen to have class or ideological
bases, which are often made verbally explicit in the films. Characters represent their
value systems clearly, and conflicts are seen in unambiguous terms ... The official
socialist realist system ... encouraged the production of grossly distorted representa-
tions or actual life and actual history.’

As Mira and Antonin Liehm have pointed out, the reassertion of the Zhdanov line in the
period 1946-48 was directed against a spontaneous cultural liberalisation in the Soviet
Union, and was linked to the need to reassert control over non-Russian national minorities.
Athough, in 1934, Zhdanov’s speeches still bore some relationship to aesthetic debates, in
the 1940s they took up the rhetoric of the 1930s purges. Following his attack on the writers
and publications of Leningrad, ‘almost the entire committee of the Leningrad party organi-
sation was arrested, along with thousands of leaders of political, economic and cultural life
in the Leningrad region.® Apart from developments inside the Soviet Union itself, the years
1947-48 saw the breakup of the wartime alliance and the beginning of the Cold War. The
announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 led to an ideological crusade against
the Soviet Union, and a Soviet response that sought to seal off its sphere of influence from
Western penetration. After the expulsion of Yugoslavia from Cominform in the summer
of 1948, the possibility of a specifically Czechoslovak approach to Socialism disappeared,
and it was only to be expected that the dogmatism of Soviet cultural policies would be
implemented.
Nevertheless, Skvorecky has made the important point that in Czechoslovakia in 1948
‘the desire to serve the people or the Party (this was synonymous) was not just an empty
expression; the big axes had not yet stricken, and the radical youth still believed that revolu-
tion was made of poetry, flowers, enthusiastic work on voluntary projects, and an evening of
love in a communal dormitory.
Jaroslav Broz has pointed out that the nationalisation of the film industry freed produc-
ers to deal with politically significant themes, and there is no question that films such as
The Strike (Karel Stekly), Uloupend hranice (The Stolen Frontier, Jiti Weiss, 1947), Krakatit
(Vavra, 1948), Némd barikdda (Silent Barricade, Vavra, 1948) and Vstanou novi bojovnici
(New Heroes Will Arise, Weiss, 1950) were works of commitment and conviction. Films
deriving from the Second World War were no more schematic than their Western coun-
terparts, and both The Stolen Frontier and Silent Barricade had the immediacy that charac-
terised such diverse films as Rossellini’s Roma, citta aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945), Carol
Reed's and Garson Kanin’s The True Glory (1945) and René Clement’s La Bataille du Rail
(Battle of the Rails, 1946).

30 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

 The Stolen Frontier, which dealt with Munich and the crisis in the Sudetenland, proved
an immediate success. More specifically, it was set against the background of the ‘Czech
Munich, the capitulation that, for many, condemned the policies of the pre-war govern-
ment. As Jiti Weiss put it: “The problem of Munich was a fundamental one, particularly
for my generation. The question of why, and under what circumstances, the Czechoslovak
Republic - with its outstanding army had surrendered without a fight was a very painful one
for me.” Working on the script in collaboration with Miloslav Fabera'® and Josef Mach,"
Weiss dramatised the subject by focusing on the situation of a youth of mixed Czech-
German parentage, who gives himself to the Nazi cause. He rejects his name, Jan, in favour
of the German equivalent of Hans, and betrays his own family. In the process, he shoots his
sister, and his mother is shot by a blonde Nazi functioning as a virtual alter ego. His father
commits suicide, and Jan himself is eventually shot down by machine-gun fire. The film is
a compelling and pessimistic account of fanaticism and the destruction of normal human
relationships.
Weiss came from a rich Jewish family (the Jewish theme forms one of the subplots of
The Stolen Frontier), and became committed to the cause of Socialism at an early stage in
his career. He spoke of his overwhelming desire to become Czechoslovakia’s Pudovkin or
Eisenstein and, before the war, he established his reputation in documentary film. He spent
the war years in Britain where he was associated with the documentary movement, worked
for the Crown Film Unit, and made his first fiction film. In The Stolen Frontier, he built on
his experience of British documentary, using unknown actors and non-professionals, and
making extensive use of the hidden camera.
Otakar Vavra also took his camera onto the streets for Silent Barricade, which, like
Weiss’ film, seems a quite spontaneous development of ‘neorealist’ techniques. Its subject is
the Prague uprising against the Nazis prior to the arrival of the Red Army. It has a fluidity
and a pace uncharacteristic of Vavra, who has too often remained the slave of his literary
sources. Despite its overall sense of conviction, the propaganda points rely heavily on Soviet
silent cinema, particularly the Eisenstein of Stachka (Strike, 1925) and Oktyabr’ (October,
1928). The representative of the middle classes, wearing gloves and worrying about his elec-
tric bill, is a forerunner of the schematic concepts that were to dominate Czechoslovak film
in the 1950s. Similarly, the conclusion, which shows a mother shot down on the Czech flag
by the Nazis, followed by the blooming of white lilacs and the arrival of the Red Army, shows
the influence of the romantic excesses typical of Soviet Socialist Realism. Unlike Rossellini
in Rome, Open City, Vavra does nothing to suggest the historical complexities in his subject.
At the same time, the film is intensely nationalistic. In linking its nationalism to the arrival of
the Russians, Vavra was doing no more than asserting an emotional belief common to those
unaware of the Soviet American agreement that effectively ensured a Russian liberation of
Czechoslovakia.
The Strike, adapted from Marie Majerovad’s novel documenting a miners’ strike, also
looks schematic from the viewpoint of the present. This is due partly to a dependence on
Soviet models, but also to the fact that The Strike itself became a model, its own insights
debased by sterile repetition. It was the only Czech film to win the Golden Lion at the Venice
Film Festival, and is now seen primarily as a collective statement by the pre-war avant garde,
including theatre director E. F. Burian and the cinematographer Jaroslav Tuzar. Its director,
Karel Stekly, never made a film of similar quality again. An uncompromising attack on capi-
talism, it was in this respect similar to Weiss’ New Heroes Will Arise, which also owed much
to the dramatic cinematography of Tuzar.

the first wave 31

 New Heroes Will Arise was based on a novel by Antonin Zapotocky,”’ set at the end of
the nineteenth century and analysing the origins of the Social Democratic Party. Although,
at times, one could be forgiven for thinking that the film was concerned with the Communist
Party, it places great emphiasis on the introduction of a genuine democracy. According to
Mira and Antonin Liehm the propagation of such views ‘would have been unthinkable in
the Soviet Union." Yet again, it is a schematic film, but it is interesting to note that as late as
the spring of 1968, Weiss described it as one of his best works. The reasons are perhaps to be
found in the following quotation, in which Weiss recounts his own experience of the 1930s
Depression:

My father was a wealthy man by Czechoslovak standards. He owned about five houses,
three cars, a factory, a wholesale operation. When I was a child, crowds of hungry
workers demonstrated in their districts on the periphery of Prague, and I watched.
I remember the terrible depression of 1930, which created a force of 800,000 unem-
ployed among the 15 million inhabitants of Czechoslovakia. Beggar after beggar
would ring at our gate; when my mother put ham on my bread for lunch, she would
always tell me, “Now see to it you don't give anybody a bite; this is just for you’ My
father made a success of playing the stock market. One day I was present when he
made 20,000 crowns with three telephone calls. He looked at me and said, ‘See, that's
the way to make money!’ I replied, “That's the way to rob the worker’

Weiss’ championship of the workers and the conflict with his capitalist father itself read like
an outline for a Socialist Realist film. What is significant about the four films discussed -
only New Heroes Will Arise was produced in the period of bureaucratic restriction — is a clear
commitment to Socialist themes and the influence of Soviet models. They show a belief on
the part of their makers in the social changes about to take place in Czechoslovakia.
If they appear schematic in form, this is one of the unfortunate legacies of propaganda.
The incessant repetition of particular themes and rote analyses makes it increasingly difficult
both to make and respond to sincere attempts to deal with labour history. A British example,
the Ken Loach/Tony Garnett Days of Hope (1975), offers a sophisticated account of the early
years of the British labour movement, but its portrayal of class conflict, however justified,
inevitably recalls Socialist Realism. In other words, the repetition demanded by propaganda
leads to a rejection of those aspects of an analysis that may still be valid.
Although many Czechoslovak writers and artists had a fairly good idea of what had
happened in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, they now felt that they had to bury their per-
sonal identity in the struggle for a classless society. According to Vavra, the influence of the
war was paramount: ‘No other explanation can help us to imagine and to understand how
educated people, with a tradition of international cultural and political knowledge, could
voluntarily submit to the authoritarian leadership and manipulation that they accepted after
1948 ... They believed that at such a time even democratic thinking must be temporarily
suspended?"
The special circumstances that allowed the animated film to flourish in this unpromis-
ing situation have already been considered. Nevertheless, even outside this exceptional
area, films of merit were produced. Weiss and Jiti Krejéik, in particular, both new to feature
production in the postwar period, were able to produce films of quality. Most of the best
films ran foul of the censors. These included Krejcik’s Svédomi (Conscience, 1949), Alfréd
Radok’s Dalek cesta (Distant Journey, 1949), Vaclav Kréka’s Stéibrny vitr (The Silver Wind,

32 THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE

Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Again they lapsed into silence. And all round them, subject to blind
taciturn laws, and heedless of man, myriads of things were
happening, in the grass, in the trees, in the sky.
Luke yawned and stretched himself. "It must be getting near dawn,"
he said.
They had successfully doubled the dangerous cape of midnight, and
he began to feel secure of safely weathering what remained of their
dark voyage.
It was the hour when night-watchers begin to idealize their bed, and,
with Sancho Panza, to bless the man who invented it. They
shuddered, and drew their cloaks closer round their shoulders.
Then, something happened. It was not so much a modification of the
darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one
felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its
density ... ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills
she is bleeding to death.
At first the spot was merely a degree less black than the rest of the
sky. Then it turned grey, then yellow, then red. And the earth was
undergoing the same transformation. Here and there patches of
greyness broke out in the blackness of the grass, and after a few
seconds one saw that they were clumps of flowers. Then the
greyness became filtered with a delicate sea-green; and next, one
realized that the grey-green belonged to the foliage, against which
the petals were beginning to show white—and then pink, or yellow,
or blue; but a yellow like that of primroses, a blue like that of certain
wild periwinkles, colours so elusive that one suspects them to be due
to some passing accident of light, and that, were one to pick the
flower, it would prove to be pure white.
Ah, there can be no doubt of it now! The blues and yellows are real
and perdurable. Colour is steadily flowing through the veins of the
earth, and we may take heart, for she will soon be restored to life
again. But had we kept one eye on the sky we should have noticed
that a star was quenched with every flower that reappeared on earth.
And now the valley is again red and gold with vineyards, the hills are
clothed with pines, and the Dapple is rosy.
Then a cock crowed, and another answered it, and then another—a
ghostly sound, which, surely, did not belong to the smiling,
triumphant earth, but rather to one of those distant dying stars.
But what had taken Ranulph? He had sprung to his feet and was
standing motionless, a strange light in his eyes.
And then again, from a still more distant star, it seemed, another
cock crowed, and another answered it.
"The piper! the piper!" cried Ranulph in a loud triumphant voice. And,
before his astonished companions could get to their feet, he was
dashing up one of the bridle-paths towards the Debatable Hills.
 CHAPTER XXI
THE OLD GOATHERD
For a few seconds they stood petrified, and then Luke was seized
with panic, and, calling to the little boys to stay where they were,
dashed off in pursuit.
Up the path he pounded, from time to time shouting angrily to
Ranulph to come back, but the distance between them grew ever
wider.
Luke's ears began to sing and his brain to turn to fire, and he
seemed to lose all sense of reality—it was not on the earth that he
was running, but through the airless deserts of space.
He could not have said how long he struggled on, for he who runs
hard leaves time behind as well as space. But finally his strength
gave way, and he fell, breathless and exhausted, to the ground.
When he had sufficiently recovered to think of starting again the
diminishing speck that had been Ranulph had completely vanished.
Poor Luke began to swear—at both Ranulph and himself.
Just then he heard a tinkle of bells, and down the bridle-path came a
herd of goats and a very ancient herdsman—to judge, at least, from
his bowed walk, for his face was hidden by a hood.
When he had got up to Luke, he stood still, leaning heavily on his
stick, and peered down at him from underneath the overhanging flap
of his hood with a pair of very bright eyes.
"You've been running hard, young master, by the looks of ye," he
said, in a quavering voice. "You be the second young fellow as what
I've seen running this morning."
"The second?" cried Luke eagerly. "Was the other a little lad of about
twelve years old with red hair, in a green leathern jerkin embroidered
in gold?"
"Well, his hair was red and no mistake, though as to the jerkin...."
And here he was seized with a violent attack of coughing, and it took
all Luke's patience not to grab him by the shoulders and shake the
words out of him.
"Though as to the jerkin—my eyes not being as sharp as they once
were...."
"Oh! never mind about the jerkin," cried Luke. "Did you stop and
speak to him?"
"But about that jerkin—you do cut an old man short, you do ... it
might have been green, but then again it might have been yellow.
But the young gentleman what I saw was not the one as you're
after."
"How do you know?"
"Why, because he was the Seneschal's son—the one I saw," said
the old man proudly, as if the fact put him at once into a superior
position to Luke.
"But it's the Seneschal's son—Master Ranulph Chanticleer, that I'm
after, too!" cried Luke, eagerly. "How long is it since you saw him? I
must catch up with him."
"You'll not do that, on your two feet," said the goatherd calmly. "That
young gentleman, and his yellow jerkin and his red hair, must be well
on the way to Moongrass by now."
"To Moongrass?" And Luke stared at him in amazement.
"Aye, to Moongrass, where the cheeses come from. You see it was
this way. I'm goatherd to the Lud yeomanry what the Seneschal has
sent to watch the border to keep out you know what. And who should
come running into their camp about half an hour ago with his red
jerkin and his green hair but your young gentleman. 'Halt!' cries the
Yeoman on guard. 'Let me pass. I'm young Master Chanticleer,' cries
he. 'And where are you bound for?' cries the Yeoman on guard. 'For
Fairyland,' says he. And then didn't they all laugh! And the little chap
flew into quite a rage, and said he was off to Fairyland, and no one
should stop him. And, of course, that just made them laugh all the
more. But though they wouldn't let him go to Fairyland, the young
rascal...." And here the old man was seized with a paroxysm of
wheezy laughter which brought on another bout of coughing.
"Well, as I was saying," he went on, when he had recovered, "they
wouldn't let him through to Fairyland, but they said they would ride
back with him where he came from. 'No, you won't,' says he; 'my
dad,' says he, 'don't want me to go back there, never any more.' And
he whisks out a letter signed by the Seneschal, bidding him leave
the widow Gibberty's farm, where he was staying, and go straight off
to Farmer Jellygreen's at Moongrass. So one of the Yeomen saddled
his horse, and the youngster got up behind him, and they set off for
Moongrass by one of the cattle-paths running northeast, which
comes out at about the middle of the road between Swan and
Moongrass. So that's that, my young fellow." In his relief Luke tossed
his cap into the air.
"The young rascal!" he cried joyfully; "fancy his never having told me
he'd got a letter from his Worship, and me expecting that letter for
the last three days, and getting stomach-ache with worry at its not
coming! And saying he was off to a certain place, too! A nice fright
he's given me. But thank'ee, gaffer, thank'ee kindly. And here's
something for you to drink the health of Master Ranulph
Chanticleer," and with a heart as light as a bird's, he began to retrace
his steps down the valley.
But what was that faint sound behind him? It sounded suspiciously
like the Ho, ho, hoh! of that impudent Willy Wisp, who for a short
time, had been one of his Worship's grooms.
He stopped, and looked round. No one was visible except the old
goatherd in the distance, leaning on his stick. What he had heard
could have been nothing but the distant tinkle of the goat bells.
When he reached the farm, he found it in a tumult. The little boys
had frightened Hazel out of her wits, and confirmed her worst fears
by the news that "Master Ranulph had run away towards the hills,
and that Master Hempen had run after him."
"Granny!" cried Hazel, wringing her hands, "a messenger must be
sent off post-haste to the Seneschal!"
"Stuff and nonsense!" cried the widow, angrily. "You mind your own
business, miss! Long before any messenger could reach Lud, the
lads will be back safe and sound. Towards the hills, indeed! That
Luke Hempen is a regular old woman. It's just a bit of Master
Ranulph's fun. He's hiding behind a tree, and will jump out on them
with a 'Boo!' Never in my life have I heard so much fuss about
nothing." And then, turning to the farm-servants, who were clustering
round the children with scared, excited eyes, she bade them go
about their business, and let her hear no more nonsense.
Her words sounded like good sense, but, for all that, they did not
convince Hazel. Her deep distrust of the widow was almost as old as
herself, and her instinct had told her for some time that the widow
was hostile to Ranulph.
Never for a moment did Hazel forget that she, not the widow, was
the rightful owner of the farm. Should she for once assert her
position, and, in direct defiance of the widow, report what had
happened to the law-man of the district and send a messenger to
Master Nathaniel?
But, as everybody knows, legal rights can be but weaklings—puny
little child princes, cowed by their bastard uncles, Precedent and
Seniority.
No, she must wait till she was of age, or married, or ... was there any
change of condition that could alter her relations with the widow, and
destroy the parasite growth of sullen docility which, for as long as
she could remember, had rotted her volition and warped her actions?
Hazel clenched her fists and set her teeth ... she would assert
herself!—she would!... now, at once? Why not give them, say, till
noon, to come back? Yes, she would give them till noon.
But before then, a rather shame-faced Luke arrived with his
confession that Master Ranulph had made proper fools of them.
"So, Miss Hazel, if you'll give me a bite of something, and lend me a
horse, I'll go after the young scamp to Moongrass. To think of his
giving us the slip like that and never having told me he'd heard from
his father! And there was me expecting a letter from his Worship
every day, telling us to leave at once, and...."
Hazel raised her eyebrows. "You were expecting a letter ordering
you to leave us? How was that?"
Luke turned red, and mumbled something inaudible. Hazel stared at
him for a few seconds in silence, and then she said quietly, "I'm
afraid you were wise if you asked the Seneschal to remove Master
Ranulph."
He gave her a shrewd glance. "Yes ... I fear this is no place for
Master Ranulph. But if you'd excuse me for being so bold, miss, I'd
like to give you a word of warning—don't you trust that Endymion
Leer further than you can see him, and don't you ever let your
Granny take you out fishing!"
"Thank you, Master Hempen, but I am quite able to look after
myself," said Hazel haughtily. And then an anxious look came into
her eyes. "I hope—oh! I hope that you'll find Master Ranulph safe
and sound at Moongrass! It's all so ... well, so very strange. That old
goatherd, who do you suppose he was? One meets strange people
near the Elfin Marches. You'll let me know if all is well ... won't you?"
Luke promised. Hazel's words had dampened his spirits and brought
back all his anxiety, and the fifteen miles to Moongrass, in spite of a
good horse, seemed interminable.
Alas! there was no Ranulph at the Jellygreens' farm; but, to Luke's
bewilderment, it turned out that the farmer had been expecting him,
as he had, a few days previously, received a letter from Master
Nathaniel, from which it was clear that he imagined his son was
already at Moongrass. So there was nothing for Luke but, with a
heavy heart, to start off the next morning for Lud, where, as we have
seen, he arrived a few hours after Master Nathaniel had left it.
 CHAPTER XXII
WHO IS PORTUNUS?
About half-way to Swan, Master Nathaniel, having tethered his horse
to a tree, was reclining drowsily under the shade of another. It was
midday, and the further west he rode the warmer it grew; it was
rather as if he were riding backward through the months.
Suddenly he was aroused by a dry little laugh, and looking round, he
saw crouching beside him, an odd-looking old man, with very bright
eyes.
"By my Great-aunt's rump, and who may you be?" enquired Master
Nathaniel testily.
The old man shut his eyes, gulped several times, and replied:

"Who are you? Who is me?

Answer my riddle and come and see,"

and then he stamped impatiently, as if that had not been what he

had wished to say.
"Some cracked old rustic, I suppose," thought Master Nathaniel, and
closed his eyes; in the hopes that when the old fellow saw he was
not inclined for conversation he would go away.
But the unwelcome visitor continued to crouch beside him, now and
then giving him little jogs in the elbow, which was very irritating when
one happened to be hot and tired and longing for forty winks.
"What are you doing?" cried Master Nathaniel irritably.

"I milk blue ewes; I reap red flowers,

I weave the story of dead hours,"
answered the old man.
"Oh, do you? Well, I wish you'd go now, this moment, and milk your
red ewes ... I want to go to sleep," and he pulled his hat further down
over his eyes and pretended to snore.
But suddenly he sprang to his feet with a yap of pain. The old man
had prodded him in his belly, and was standing looking at him out of
his startlingly bright eyes, with his head slightly on one side.
"Don't you try that on, old fellow!" cried Master Nathaniel angrily.
"You're a nuisance, that's what you are. Why can't you leave me
alone?"
The old man pointed eagerly at the tree, making little inarticulate
sounds; it was as if a squirrel or a bird had been charged with some
message that they could not deliver.
Then he crept up to him, put his mouth to his ear, and whispered,
"What is it that's a tree, and yet not a tree, a man and yet not a man,
who is dumb and yet can tell secrets, who has no arms and yet can
strike?"
Then he stepped back a few paces as if he wished to observe the
impression his words had produced, and stood rubbing his hands
and cackling gleefully.
"I suppose I must humour him," thought Master Nathaniel; so he said
good-naturedly, "Well, and what's the answer to your riddle, eh?"
But the old man seemed to have lost the power of articulate speech,
and could only reiterate eagerly, "Dig ... dig ... dig."
"'Dig, dig, dig.' ... so that's the answer, is it? Well, I'm afraid I can't
stay here the whole afternoon trying to guess your riddles. If you've
got anything to tell me, can't you say it any plainer?"
Suddenly he remembered the old superstition that when the Silent
People returned to Dorimare they could only speak in riddles and
snatches of rhyme. He looked at the old man searchingly. "Who are
you?" he said.
But the answer was the same as before. "Dig ... dig ... dig."
"Try again. Perhaps after a bit the words will come more easily," said
Master Nathaniel. "You are trying to tell me your name."
The old man shut his eyes tight, took a long breath, and, evidently
making a tremendous effort, brought out very slowly, "Seize—your—
op-por-tun-us. Dig ... dig. Por-tun-us is my name."
"Well, you've got it out at last. So your name is Portunus, is it?"
But the old man stamped his foot impatiently. "Hand! hand!" he cried.
"Is it that you want to shake hands with me, old fellow?" asked
Master Nathaniel.
But the old man shook his head peevishly. "Farm hand," he
managed to bring out. "Dig ... dig."
And then he lapsed into doggerel:

"Dig and delve, delve and dig,

Harness the mare to the farmer's gig."

Finally Master Nathaniel gave up trying to get any sense out of him
and untethered his horse. But when he tried to mount, the old man
seized the stirrup and looking up at him imploringly, repeated, "Dig ...
dig ... dig." And Master Nathaniel was obliged to shake him off with
some roughness. And even after he had left him out of sight he could
hear his voice in the distance, shouting, "Dig ... dig."
"I wonder what the old fellow was trying to tell me," said Master
Nathaniel to himself.
On the morning of the following day he arrived at the village of
Swan-on-the-Dapple.
Here the drama of autumn had only just reached its gorgeous
climax, and the yellow and scarlet trees were flaming out their silent
stationary action against the changeless chorus of pines, dark green
against the distant hills.
"By the Golden Apples of the West!" muttered Master Nathaniel, "I'd
no idea those accursed hills were so near. I'm glad Ranulph's safe
away."
Having inquired his way to the Gibbertys' farm, he struck off the high
road into the valley—and very lovely it was looking in its autumn
colouring. The vintage was over, and the vines were now golden and
red. Some of the narrow oblong leaves of the wild cherry had kept
their bottle-green, while others, growing on the same twig, had
turned to salmon-pink, and the mulberries alternated between
canary-yellow and grass-green. The mountain ash had turned a fiery
rose (more lovely, even, than had been its scarlet berries) and often
an olive grew beside it, as if ready, lovingly, to quench its fire in its
own tender grey. The birches twinkled and quivered, as if each
branch were a golden divining rod trembling to secret water; and the
path was strewn with olives, looking like black oblong dung. It was
one of those mysterious autumn days that are intensely bright
though the sun is hidden; and when one looked at these lambent
trees one could almost fancy them the source of the light flooding the
valley.
From time to time a tiny yellow butterfly would flit past, like a little
yellow leaf shed by one of the birches; and now and then one of the
bleeding, tortured looking liege-oaks would drop an acorn, with a
little flop—just to remind you, as it were, that it was leading its own
serene, vegetable life, oblivious to the agony ascribed to it by the
fevered fancy of man.
Not a soul did Master Nathaniel pass after he had left the village,
though from time to time he saw in the distance labourers following
the plough through the vineyards, and their smocks provided the
touch of blue that turns a picture into a story; there was blue smoke,
too, to tell of human habitations; and an occasional cock strutting up
and down in front of one of the red vines, like a salesman before his
wares, flaunting, by way of advertisement, a crest of the same
material as the vine leaves, but of a more brilliant hue; and in the
distance were rushes, stuck up in sheaves to dry, and glimmering
with the faint, whitish, pinky-grey of far-away fruit trees in blossom.
While, as if the eye had not enough to feed on in her own domain,
the sounds, even, of the valley were pictorial—a tinkling of distant
bells, conjuring up herds of goats; the ominous, melancholy roar
which tells that somewhere a waggoner is goading on his oxen; and
the distant bark of dogs that paints a picture of homesteads and
sunny porches.
As Master Nathaniel jogged leisurely along, his thoughts turned to
the farmer Gibberty, who many a time must have jogged along this
path, in just such a way, and seen and heard the very same things
that he was seeing and hearing now.
Yes, the farmer Gibberty had once been a real living man, like
himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never
heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined
between the walls of other people's memory. And then he would
cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in
stone. What would these words be, he wondered.
A sudden longing seized him to hold Ranulph again in his arms. How
pleasant would have been the thought that he was waiting to receive
him at the farm!
But he must be nearing his journey's end, for in the distance he
could discern the figure of a woman, leisurely scrubbing her washing
on one of the sides of a stone trough.
"I wonder if that's the widow," thought Master Nathaniel. And a slight
shiver went down his spine.
But as he came nearer the washerwoman proved to be quite a
young girl.
He decided she must be the granddaughter, Hazel; and so she was.
He drew up his horse beside her and asked if this were the widow
Gibberty's farm.
"Yes, sir," she answered shortly, with that half-frightened, half-defiant
look that was so characteristic of her.
"Why, then, I've not been misdirected. But though they told me I'd
find a thriving farm and a fine herd of cows, the fools forgot to
mention that the farmer was a rose in petticoats," and he winked
jovially.
Now this was not Master Nathaniel's ordinary manner with young
ladies, which, as a matter of fact, was remarkably free from flirtatious
facetiousness. But he had invented a role to play at the farm, and
was already beginning to identify himself with it.
As it turned out, this opening compliment was a stroke of luck. For
Hazel bitterly resented that she was not recognized as the lawful
owner of the farm, and Master Nathaniel's greeting of her as the
farmer thawed her coldness into dimples.
"If you've come to see over the farm, I'm sure we'll be very pleased
to show you everything," she said graciously.
"Thank'ee, thank'ee kindly. I'm a cheesemonger from Lud-in-the-
Mist. And there's no going to sleep quietly behind one's counter
these days in trade, if one's to keep one's head above the water. It's
competition, missy, competition that keeps old fellows like me
awake. Why, I can remember when there weren't more than six
cheesemongers in the whole of Lud; and now there are as many in
my street alone. So I thought I'd come myself and have a look round
and see where I could get the best dairy produce. There's nothing
like seeing for oneself."
And here he launched into an elaborate and gratuitous account of all
the other farms he had visited on his tour of inspection. But the one
that had pleased him best, he said, had been that of a very old friend
of his—and he named the farmer near Moongrass with whom,
presumably, Ranulph and Luke were now staying.
Here Hazel looked up eagerly, and, in rather an unsteady voice,
asked if he'd seen two lads there—a big one, and a little one who
was the son of the Seneschal.
"Do you mean little Master Ranulph Chanticleer and Luke Hempen?
Why, of course I saw them! It was they who told me to come along
here ... and very grateful I am to them, for I have found something
well worth looking at."
A look of indescribable relief flitted over Hazel's face.
"Oh ... oh! I'm so glad you saw them," she faltered.
"Aha! My friend Luke has evidently been making good use of his
time—the young dog!" thought Master Nathaniel; and he proceeded
to retail a great many imaginary sayings and doings of Luke at his
new abode.
Hazel was soon quite at home with the jovial, facetious old
cheesemonger. She always preferred elderly men to young ones,
and was soon chatting away with the abandon sometimes
observable when naturally confiding people, whom circumstances
have made suspicious, find someone whom they think they can trust;
and Master Nathaniel was, of course, drinking in every word and
longing to be in her shoes.
"But, missy, it seems all work and no play!" he cried at last. "Do you
get no frolics and junketings?"
"Sometimes we dance of an evening, when old Portunus is here,"
she answered.
"Portunus?" he cried sharply, "Who's he?"
But this question froze her back into reserve. "An old weaver with a
fiddle," she answered stiffly.
"A bit doited?"
Her only answer was to look at him suspiciously and say, "Do you
know Portunus, sir?"
"Well, I believe I met him—about half-way between here and Lud.
The old fellow seemed to have something on his mind, but couldn't
get it out—I've known many a parrot that talked better than he."
"Oh, I've often thought that, too! That he'd something on his mind, I
mean," cried Hazel on another wave of confidence. "It's as if he were
trying hard to tell one something. And he often follows me as if he
wanted me to do something for him. And I sometimes think I should
try and help him and not be so harsh with him—but he just gives me
the creeps, and I can't help it."
"He gives you the creeps, does he?"
"That he does!" she cried with a little shiver. "To see him gorging
himself with green fruit! It isn't like a human being the way he does it
—it's like an insect or a bird. And he's like a cat, too, in the way he
always follows about the folk that don't like him. Oh, he's nasty! And
he's spiteful, too, and mischievous. But perhaps that's not to be
wondered at, if ..." and she broke off abruptly.
Master Nathaniel gave her a keen look. "If what?" he said.
"Oh, well—just silly talk of the country people," said Hazel evasively.
"That he's—er, for instance, one of what you call the Silent People?"
"How did you know?" And Hazel looked at him suspiciously.
"Oh, I guessed. You see, I've heard a lot of that sort of talk since I've
been in the west. Well, the old fellow certainly seemed to have
something he wanted to tell me, but I can't say he was very explicit.
He kept saying, over and over again, 'Dig, dig.'"
"Oh, that's his great word," cried Hazel. "The old women round about
say that he's trying to tell one his name. You see, they think that ...
well, that he's a dead man come back and that when he was on
earth he was a labourer, by name Diggory Carp."
"Diggory Carp?" cried Master Nathaniel sharply.
Hazel looked at him in surprise. "Did you know him, sir?" she asked.
"No, no; not exactly. But I seem to have heard the name somewhere.
Though I dare say in these parts it's a common enough one. Well,
and what do they say about this Diggory Carp?"
Hazel looked a little uneasy. "They don't say much, sir—to me. I
sometimes think there must have been some mystery about him. But
I know that he was a merry, kind sort of man, well liked all round, and
a rare fiddler. But he came to a sad end, though I never heard what
happened exactly. And they say," and here she lowered her voice
mysteriously, "that once a man joins the Silent People he becomes
mischievous and spiteful, however good-natured he may have been
when he was alive. And if he'd been unfairly treated, as they say he
was, it would make him all the more spiteful, I should think. I often
think he's got something he wants to tell us, and I sometimes wonder
if it's got anything to do with the old stone herm in our orchard ... he's
so fond of dancing round it."
"Really? And where is this old herm? I want to see all the sights of
the country, you know; get my money's worth of travel!" And Master
Nathaniel donned again the character of the cheerful cheesemonger,
which, in the excitement of the last few minutes, he had, unwittingly,
sloughed.
As they walked to the orchard, which was some distance from the
washing trough, Hazel said, nervously:
"Perhaps you hadn't heard, sir, but I live here with my granny; at
least, she isn't my real granny, though I call her so. And ... and ...
well, she seems fond of old Portunus, and perhaps it would be as
well not to mention to her that you had met him."
"Very well; I won't mention him to her ... at present." And he gave her
rather a grim little smile.
Though the orchard had been stripped of its fruit, what with the red
and yellow leaves, and the marvelous ruby-red of the lateral
branches of the peach trees there was colour enough in the
background of the old grey herm, and, in addition, there twisted
around him the scarlet and gold of a vine.
"I often think he's the spirit of the farm," said Hazel shyly, looking to
see if Master Nathaniel was admiring her old stone friend. To her
amazement, however, as soon as his eyes fell on it he clapped his
hand against his thigh, and burst out laughing.
"By the Sun, Moon and Stars!" he cried, "here's the answer to
Portunus's riddle: 'the tree yet not a tree, the man yet not a man,'"
and he repeated to Hazel the one consecutive sentence that
Portunus had managed to enunciate.
"'Who has no arms and yet can strike, who is dumb and yet can tell
secrets,'" she repeated after him. "Can you strike and tell secrets, old
friend?" she asked whimsically, stroking the grey lichened stone. And
then she blushed and laughed as if to apologize for this exhibition of
childishness.
With country hospitality Hazel presumed that their uninvited guest
had come to spend several days at the farm, and accordingly she
had his horse taken to the stables and ordered the best room to be
prepared for his use.
The widow, too, gave him a hearty welcome, when he came down to
the midday meal in the big kitchen.
When they had been a few minutes at table, Hazel said, "Oh, granny,
this gentleman has just come from the farm near Moongrass, where
little Master Chanticleer and young Hempen have gone. And he says
they were both of them blooming, and sent us kind messages."
"Yes," said Master Nathaniel cheerfully, ever ready to start
romancing, "my old friend the farmer is delighted with them. The talk
in Lud was that little Chanticleer had been ill, but all I can say is, you
must have done wonders for him—his face is as round and plump as
a Moongrass cheese."
"Well, I'm glad you're pleased with the young gentleman's looks, sir,"
said the widow in a gratified voice. But in her eyes there was the
gleam of a rather disquieting smile.
Dinner over, the widow and Hazel had to go and attend to their
various occupations, and Master Nathaniel went and paced up and
down in front of the old house, thinking. Over and over again his
thoughts returned to the odd old man, Portunus.
Was it possible that he had really once been Diggory Carp, and that
he had returned to his old haunts to try and give a message?
It was characteristic of Master Nathaniel that the metaphysical
possibilities of the situation occupied him before the practical ones. If
Portunus were, indeed, Diggory Carp, then these stubble-fields and
vineyards, these red and golden trees, would be robbed of their
peace and stability. For he realized at last that the spiritual balm he
had always found in silent things was simply the assurance that the
passions and agonies of man were without meaning, roots, or
duration—no more part of the permanent background of the world
than the curls of blue smoke that from time to time were wafted
through the valley from the autumn bonfires of weeds and rubbish,
and that he could see winding like blue wraiths in and out of the
foliage of the trees.
Yes, their message, though he had never till now heard it distinctly,
had always been that Fairyland was nothing but delusion—there was
life and death, and that was all. And yet, had their message always
comforted him? There had been times when he had shuddered in
the company of the silent things.
"Aye, aye," he murmured dreamily to himself, and then he sighed.
But he had yielded long enough to vain speculations—there were
things to be done. Whether Portunus were the ghost of Diggory Carp
or merely a doited old weaver, he evidently knew something that he
wanted to communicate—and it was connected with the orchard
herm. Of course, it might have nothing whatever to do with the
murder of the late farmer Gibberty, but with the memory of the
embroidered slipper fresh in his mind, Master Nathaniel felt it would
be rank folly to neglect a possible clue.
He went over in his mind all the old man's words. "Dig, dig," ... that
word had been the ever recurring burden.
Then he had a sudden flash of inspiration—why should not the word
be taken in its primary meaning? Why, instead of the first syllable of
Diggory Carp, should it not be merely and order to dig ... with a
spade or a shovel? In that case it was clear that the place to dig in
was under the herm. And he decided that he would do so as soon as
an opportunity presented itself.
 CHAPTER XXIII
THE NORTHERN FIRE-BOX AND DEAD MEN'S
TALES
That night Hazel could not get to sleep. Perhaps this was due to
having noticed something that afternoon that made her vaguely
uneasy. The evenings were beginning to be chilly, and, shortly
before supper, she had gone up to Master Nathaniel's room to light
his fire. She found the widow and one of the maidservants there
before her, and, to her surprise, they had brought down from the attic
an old charcoal stove that had lain there unused for years, for
Dorimare was a land of open fires, and stoves were practically
unknown. The widow had brought the stove to the farm on her
marriage, for, on her mother's side, she had belonged to a race from
the far North.
On Hazel's look of surprise, she had said casually, "The logs are
dampish today, and I thought this would make our guest cozier."
Now Hazel knew that the wood was not in the least damp; how could
it be, as it had not rained for days? But that this should have made
her uneasy was a sign of her deep instinctive distrust of her
grandfather's widow.
Perhaps the strongest instinct in Hazel was that of hospitality—that
all should be well, physically and morally, with the guests under the
roof that she never forgot was hers, was a need in her much more
pressing than any welfare of her own.
Meanwhile, Master Nathaniel, somewhat puzzled by the outlandish
apparatus that was warming his room, had got into bed. He did not
immediately put out his candle; he wished to think. For being much
given to reverie, when he wanted to follow the sterner path of
consecutive thought, he liked to have some tangible object on which
to focus his eye, a visible goal, as it were, to keep his feet from
straying down the shadowy paths that he so much preferred.
Tonight it was the fine embossed ceiling on which he fixed his eye—
the same ceiling at which Ranulph used to gaze when he had slept
in this room. On a ground of a rich claret colour patterned with azure
arabesques, knobs of a dull gold were embossed, and at the four
corners clustered bunches of grapes and scarlet berries in stucco.
And though time had dulled their colour and robbed the clusters of
many of their berries, they remained, nevertheless, pretty and
realistic objects.
But, in spite of the light, the focus, and his desire for hard thinking,
Master Nathaniel found his thoughts drifting down the most fantastic
paths. And, besides, he was so drowsy and his limbs felt so
strangely heavy. The colours on the ceiling were getting all blurred,
and the old knobs were detaching themselves from their background
and shining in space like suns, moons, and stars—or was it like
apples—the golden apples of the West? And now the claret-coloured
background was turning into a red field—a field of red flowers, from
which leered Portunus, and among which wept Ranulph. But the
straight road, which for the last few months had been the projection
of his unknown, buried purpose, even through this confused
landscape glimmered white ... yet, it looked different from usual ...
why, of course, it was the Milky Way! And then he knew no more.
In the meantime Hazel had been growing more and more restless,
and, though she scolded herself for foolishness, more and more
anxious. Finally, she could stand it no more: "I think I'll just creep up
to the gentleman's door and listen if I can hear him snoring," she
said to herself. Hazel believed that it was a masculine peculiarity not
to be able to sleep without snoring.
But though she kept her ear to the keyhole for a full two minutes, not
a sound proceeded from Master Nathaniel's room. Then she softly
opened the door. A lighted candle was guttering to its end, and her
guest was lying, to all appearance, dead, whilst a suffocating
atmosphere pervaded the room. Hazel felt almost sick with terror, but
she flung open the casement window as wide as it would go, poured
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