Here is a really good website where you can watch lesser known world cinema.
http://worldcinemafoundation.net/films/
and
http://www.theauteurs.com/
Monday 15 February 2010
Sunday 14 February 2010
An introduction to the Czech New Wave
Along with the French New Wave and the post neo-realism Italian cinema (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, etc), the Czech New Wave is perhaps one of the richest cinemas of the 20th century.
For about ten years (early 1960s to early 1970s) a generation of Czech filmmakers gave us the some of the most ingenious, original, innovative and most beautiful films of the entire history of cinema. This was partly because of a cultural and political reform that the country had undergone since 1962. During this time the filmmakers of the Czech new wave enjoyed a state supported film industry, an interest in both domestic and international market (with special interest in the USA) and relative artistic freedom.
For a few years they could talk about subjects that filmmakers in other communist countries would not be able to due to censorship. Their objective was "to make the Czech people collectively aware that they were participants in a system of oppression and incompetence which had brutalized them all."
Until the summer of 1968 when the Soviets took over Prague, imposing the strongest social and political regulations since the Stalin era, and officially ending the New Wave.
Vera Chytilova's Daisies (1966), her most 'famous' film, about two girls who realize that everything is corrupt around them including themselves so they go in a frenetic orgy of destruction and corruption, breaking every rule in the fiction as well as in the techniques of film narrative and montage: we jump from colour to black and white to a red tint to a completely unrelated scene, while we follow the frenetic antics of the two heroines. The film is put together in a collage-like montage, taken much farther than Godard's film of the same year, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966).*
Chytilova is arguably the most original of the Czech filmmakers, and she would demonstrate it again with Fruit of Paradise (1970), which is my personal favourite of her films. She made other interesting but hard to get films like The Apple Game (1978), Panelstory (1979) and The Jester and the Queen (1988) among others.
Jaromil Jires made one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). Based on a classic Czech surrealist novel by Vitezslav Nezval, the film is difficult to pin down, like most good films, but could be somewhat vaguely described as a surreal fairytale, bordering into fantasy and horror, with stunning photography and music. To attempt to describe the plot of the film would be to destroy the spell that this film seems to have over anyone who watches it.
Other films by Jaromil Jires of interest are The Joke (1969) and I Will Give My Love to the Swallows (1971).
Jan Nemec's The Party and The Guests (1966) is his most available film. A comment on governmental power, it is a film with a very tense atmosphere and dark humour. A group of people on a picnic are invited to a sinister meal in the middle of the forest to which they cannot say 'no'. The film was "banned forever" in Czechoslovakia.
The rest on Nemec's filmography is rather difficult to get hold of, with two exceptions: Diamonds of the Night (1964), a great film about two Jewish boys who escape from a train taking them to a concentration camp. The film is far from what you would expect judging from the theme itself, it is concerned more with the dreams, fantasies and hallucinations of the two boys while they walk through the forests, than with war or Nazis. Nemec's other available film is Late Night Talks With Mother (2001), which sees Nemec making use of digital video and a fisheye lens, which deforms images in ways never seen before, creating abstractions as the camera moves along. It is a very personal film, a sort of a documentary or nearly a confession, about his death mother. It is an interesting experiment but not the best film to watch as an introduction to Czech cinema nor the films of Jan Nemec.
It is at this point that we must talk about Ester Krumbachová. She was married to Jan Nemec and was costume designer and co-writer in Diamonds of the Night (1964), The Party and The Guests (1966), Daisies (1966) and Fruit of Paradise (1970); she was the production designer and co-writer on Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970); and she was the decorator on Ucho (The Ear 1970) among many other films of less importance. She was worked closely with a lot of the most important directors of the Czech new wave and in most of the best films of the period.
Karel Kachyna is best known for Ucho (The Ear 1970), which was immediately banned by the Czech authorities and unseen for 20 years. A masterpiece on the subject of paranoia living under an oppressive totalitarian system. A couple's life falls apart when they discover the government has bugged their house and fear consequences for things they may have said. A film that everyone should see.
Juraj Herz is one more of the geniuses that came out of that generation of Czech filmmakers. His most known film is The Cremator (1969), a masterpiece with amazing editing only paralleled in films like Love (1971) and Cat's Play (1974) by Hungarian Karoly Makk, and perhaps Szindbad (1972) a forgotten masterpiece by another Hungarian, Huszarik Zoltan. But we will save Hungarian cinema for another day.
Other must see Juraj Herz films include The Virgin and the monster (1978), which is a take on beauty and the beast like no others. It is atmospheric, beautifully shot and taken to a new terrain. Herz turns this classic fairy tale into a great horror film, with the beast no longer having a lion's head but an eagle's in stead. Herz went back into horror with Upir Z Feratu (1981), a bizarre film about a vampire car that runs on blood.
Ivan Passer's film Intimate Lighting (1965) about the dreams of two musicians, is his only Czech feature. Soon after that he moved to the US. Later on he would make other, more conventional films like Silver Bears (1977) a comedy/crime starring Michael Caine, another forgotten classic that needs to be revisited.
Jiri Menzel is best known for Closely Observed Trains (1966). He was also an actor in many Czech new wave films, as he did in his own Capricious Summer (1968), set in a sleepy village where old men swim and philosophise in the river, the men are excited when visited by a circus acrobat and his beautiful assistant. Seclusion Near a Forest (1976) and My Sweet Little Village (1986) are just a few of his many films worth watching.
Milos Forman (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 1975**) is perhaps one of the best known names of the Czech new wave because of his work in Hollywood. His parents were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz when he was a child. He began making films in his early thirties with films like Konkurs (1964), The Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman's Ball (1967), creating his own style of comedy. During the invasion of his country by the troops of the Warsaw pact in the summer of 1968 to stop the Prague spring, he left Europe for the United States. Where he made the films most people know his name for, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Amadeus (1984) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996).
I have to say that I find his early works much more interesting than his American films, seeing what someone can create with less means is always much more impressive.
* Jean Luc Godard hated Chytilova's film. He said, among other things, that it was cartoonish and apolitical. How an intellectual artist of such brilliance did not understand the importance of the film still baffles me. Maybe it is just one more instance in which a genius did not understand another genius, in the case of Pasolini, who went to see Godard's A Bout De Souffle (1959) as recommended to him by Bertolucci, and hated the film.
** I have always found strange the fact that in Forman's film, we have Jack Nicholson and Scatman Corthers. At the end of the film Nicholson gets Scatman fired. Then when they met again five years later, in The Shining (1980), Nicholson puts an axe through his back. As if he wanted to finish the job he started in the previous film.
For about ten years (early 1960s to early 1970s) a generation of Czech filmmakers gave us the some of the most ingenious, original, innovative and most beautiful films of the entire history of cinema. This was partly because of a cultural and political reform that the country had undergone since 1962. During this time the filmmakers of the Czech new wave enjoyed a state supported film industry, an interest in both domestic and international market (with special interest in the USA) and relative artistic freedom.
For a few years they could talk about subjects that filmmakers in other communist countries would not be able to due to censorship. Their objective was "to make the Czech people collectively aware that they were participants in a system of oppression and incompetence which had brutalized them all."
Until the summer of 1968 when the Soviets took over Prague, imposing the strongest social and political regulations since the Stalin era, and officially ending the New Wave.
Vera Chytilova's Daisies (1966), her most 'famous' film, about two girls who realize that everything is corrupt around them including themselves so they go in a frenetic orgy of destruction and corruption, breaking every rule in the fiction as well as in the techniques of film narrative and montage: we jump from colour to black and white to a red tint to a completely unrelated scene, while we follow the frenetic antics of the two heroines. The film is put together in a collage-like montage, taken much farther than Godard's film of the same year, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966).*
Chytilova is arguably the most original of the Czech filmmakers, and she would demonstrate it again with Fruit of Paradise (1970), which is my personal favourite of her films. She made other interesting but hard to get films like The Apple Game (1978), Panelstory (1979) and The Jester and the Queen (1988) among others.
Jaromil Jires made one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). Based on a classic Czech surrealist novel by Vitezslav Nezval, the film is difficult to pin down, like most good films, but could be somewhat vaguely described as a surreal fairytale, bordering into fantasy and horror, with stunning photography and music. To attempt to describe the plot of the film would be to destroy the spell that this film seems to have over anyone who watches it.
Other films by Jaromil Jires of interest are The Joke (1969) and I Will Give My Love to the Swallows (1971).
Jan Nemec's The Party and The Guests (1966) is his most available film. A comment on governmental power, it is a film with a very tense atmosphere and dark humour. A group of people on a picnic are invited to a sinister meal in the middle of the forest to which they cannot say 'no'. The film was "banned forever" in Czechoslovakia.
The rest on Nemec's filmography is rather difficult to get hold of, with two exceptions: Diamonds of the Night (1964), a great film about two Jewish boys who escape from a train taking them to a concentration camp. The film is far from what you would expect judging from the theme itself, it is concerned more with the dreams, fantasies and hallucinations of the two boys while they walk through the forests, than with war or Nazis. Nemec's other available film is Late Night Talks With Mother (2001), which sees Nemec making use of digital video and a fisheye lens, which deforms images in ways never seen before, creating abstractions as the camera moves along. It is a very personal film, a sort of a documentary or nearly a confession, about his death mother. It is an interesting experiment but not the best film to watch as an introduction to Czech cinema nor the films of Jan Nemec.
It is at this point that we must talk about Ester Krumbachová. She was married to Jan Nemec and was costume designer and co-writer in Diamonds of the Night (1964), The Party and The Guests (1966), Daisies (1966) and Fruit of Paradise (1970); she was the production designer and co-writer on Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970); and she was the decorator on Ucho (The Ear 1970) among many other films of less importance. She was worked closely with a lot of the most important directors of the Czech new wave and in most of the best films of the period.
Karel Kachyna is best known for Ucho (The Ear 1970), which was immediately banned by the Czech authorities and unseen for 20 years. A masterpiece on the subject of paranoia living under an oppressive totalitarian system. A couple's life falls apart when they discover the government has bugged their house and fear consequences for things they may have said. A film that everyone should see.
Juraj Herz is one more of the geniuses that came out of that generation of Czech filmmakers. His most known film is The Cremator (1969), a masterpiece with amazing editing only paralleled in films like Love (1971) and Cat's Play (1974) by Hungarian Karoly Makk, and perhaps Szindbad (1972) a forgotten masterpiece by another Hungarian, Huszarik Zoltan. But we will save Hungarian cinema for another day.
Other must see Juraj Herz films include The Virgin and the monster (1978), which is a take on beauty and the beast like no others. It is atmospheric, beautifully shot and taken to a new terrain. Herz turns this classic fairy tale into a great horror film, with the beast no longer having a lion's head but an eagle's in stead. Herz went back into horror with Upir Z Feratu (1981), a bizarre film about a vampire car that runs on blood.
Ivan Passer's film Intimate Lighting (1965) about the dreams of two musicians, is his only Czech feature. Soon after that he moved to the US. Later on he would make other, more conventional films like Silver Bears (1977) a comedy/crime starring Michael Caine, another forgotten classic that needs to be revisited.
Jiri Menzel is best known for Closely Observed Trains (1966). He was also an actor in many Czech new wave films, as he did in his own Capricious Summer (1968), set in a sleepy village where old men swim and philosophise in the river, the men are excited when visited by a circus acrobat and his beautiful assistant. Seclusion Near a Forest (1976) and My Sweet Little Village (1986) are just a few of his many films worth watching.
Milos Forman (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 1975**) is perhaps one of the best known names of the Czech new wave because of his work in Hollywood. His parents were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz when he was a child. He began making films in his early thirties with films like Konkurs (1964), The Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman's Ball (1967), creating his own style of comedy. During the invasion of his country by the troops of the Warsaw pact in the summer of 1968 to stop the Prague spring, he left Europe for the United States. Where he made the films most people know his name for, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Amadeus (1984) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996).
I have to say that I find his early works much more interesting than his American films, seeing what someone can create with less means is always much more impressive.
* Jean Luc Godard hated Chytilova's film. He said, among other things, that it was cartoonish and apolitical. How an intellectual artist of such brilliance did not understand the importance of the film still baffles me. Maybe it is just one more instance in which a genius did not understand another genius, in the case of Pasolini, who went to see Godard's A Bout De Souffle (1959) as recommended to him by Bertolucci, and hated the film.
** I have always found strange the fact that in Forman's film, we have Jack Nicholson and Scatman Corthers. At the end of the film Nicholson gets Scatman fired. Then when they met again five years later, in The Shining (1980), Nicholson puts an axe through his back. As if he wanted to finish the job he started in the previous film.
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