Sometimes, but rarely, a crack opens up in a particular country’s cinema for the extraordinary. Then sometimes, driven by courageous experiments, a completely new film language develops. German expressionism and Italian neo-realism radiated far beyond the borders of the local cinemas. When one thinks of such New Waves, one still thinks of France in the late 1950s and early 1960s – of Godard, Truffaut, Rivette and Co. With the French Nouvelle Vague, the understanding grew that a small elite of filmmakers be able to change the way we see what cinematic art is like forever.
The Czechoslovak New Wave was one of the numerous movements that shook up cinema in the 1960s. She is a wondrous but underappreciated example of what artists can do in a repressive society when the fresh breeze of freedom blows for a short period of time. The result was not only Aesopian fables about life behind prison walls, as they are still awaited with perverse curiosity by filmmakers in backward-looking societies in the West.
Radical film experiments and clever satires
Instead, Czechoslovakia’s directors delivered sophisticated reflections on cinematic realism, bold literary adaptations, bittersweet, thought-provoking comedies, bizarre horror studies, and scintillating fantasy brocades. A cinema like it doesn’t even exist in most nations, although there would be freedom, money and creative resources. This renaissance, which also went hand in hand with the flourishing of film in other Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary, also demonstrated how quickly an autonomy that had only just been fought for could be worn down under the rapidly changing political circumstances.
Scene from “The Burner”
After the Prague Spring (the efforts of the communist party under Alexander Dubček to ensure democratic conditions), which was militarily suppressed by the Soviet Union, many filmmakers fled abroad. Others had to turn good clothes again. Those who stayed and continued to make uncomfortable films saw them go into the poison closet. For example, Jirí Menzel, who had to wait until 1990 for the re-release of his film “Lerchen am Nadel” (Lerchen am Faden), which was banned in 1969, but then won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Czechoslovakian cinemas almost universally churned out lean cinema fare: kitschy Heimatfilms and pathetic historical hams that celebrated the well-being of the common man. The protagonists of the young Czechoslovak film broke radically with these standards of entertainment film. They drafted anti-totalitarian political parables (“Vom Fest und den Guests”), discovered war as a setting for amorous adventures (“Love according to a timetable”, won the 1968 foreign Oscar), unmasked the Soviet rulers as corrupt and dangerous (“Courage for everyday life ’), created philosophical puzzles using puppetry and animation art (Jan Švankmajer) and even turned the Middle Ages into a setting for an intoxicating film opera (‘Marketa Lazarová’) that makes ‘Game of Thrones’ look like a nursery twist on a dark age.
Miloš Forman and his first films
This stylistically idiosyncratic wave began almost at the same time as the “rehabilitation” of Franz Kafka, who had been ostracized in Eastern Europe for decades, in 1963. The committed directors could be proud of a local poet who, with his dark and at the same time absurdly comical art of language, closed the gaping wounds of the human existence had truly exposed. Although only a few films of the Czechoslovakian Nouvelle Vague referred directly to Kafka (for example the almost forgotten “Joseph Kilian”), others deliberately referred to experimental writers from their homeland such as Vladislav Vančura, Bohumil Hrabal or Víteˇzslav Nezval. They provided the basis for some of the most amazing films that European cinema has produced to date.
The movement remains connected to this day with what is probably the most famous representative from its ranks, Miloš Forman, who achieved world fame with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and died in April 2018. After completing his studies at the FAMU film school in Czechoslovakia, the now 85-year-old made only three feature films before emigrating to the USA. With the melancholic, Chaplinesque social satire “The Love of a Blonde”, the director celebrated the joys and hardships of youth together with amateur actors. In addition, he dared to show completely naked lovers in a playful way, which was an absolute rarity in the Eastern Bloc countries at the time. And he trusted in the magical attraction of shy girls, just as the Waves films developed a great sensitivity for women’s hopes and concerns.
But even more astonishing was “The Fire Brigade Ball”, a folksy, episodically told satire. It is set in a small village where a ball organized by the volunteer fire department, where a beauty queen must be found under the most adverse circumstances, ends in chaos. And only because of all things a fire breaks out. The naturalistically staged film is a high point in the art of comedy. It was first banned, released again in the Prague Spring and finally banned once and for all when Soviet troops marched into Prague. Initially a hit in Czechoslovakia, it was later ostracized and prompted Forman to leave his homeland and become a citizen of America. In the land of unlimited possibilities, the director shot several masterpieces (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “Amadeus”), which symbolized the struggle of free spirits against the feeble-minded (state) apparatus.
Scene from “The Fireman’s Ball”
Search for (a new) reality
The heroes of the Czechoslovak Wave, who, like cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, composer Zdenek Liška or screenwriter Ester Krumbachová, worked together in many films and thus formed a sworn unit, were no longer young savages. Rather, artists of all ages and intellectual backgrounds came together here to create a cinema that took up the burning thread of rebellious youth in the West and quenched it with that peculiar, skeptical melancholy that has set the tone in the arts of Eastern Europe for centuries.
Even if there was a lot of disagreement, the search for a sometimes unembellished, but often deliberately different view of reality remained. This gave rise to unique works of art such as “Daisies” by Vera Chytilová. Simultaneously grotesque and decor and color experiment, the most liberal of all films of the wave observes two cheeky brats (Marie 1 and Marie 2) in numerous anarchistic adventures and binge eating, completely without narrative chains and sense compulsion.
When the invasion of Soviet soldiers in Czechoslovakia had long since destroyed all hopes that such excesses would continue, Jaromil Jireš’s “Valerie – Eine Woche voll Miracles” was published in 1970 as a loud echo of this feminist dance. The breathtaking variation on “Alice in Wonderland” (with the brilliant soundtrack by Luboš Fišer) was supposed to run at the festive season like “Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella”. It still has some of the lifeblood of the wave with it, but it should have become a classic simply because of its carefully staged kitsch.
It is a pity that this pretty, harmless fairy tale is the only film from our neighboring country that is really well known here. But there is also a sad reason for this: Only a handful of the classics of the Czechoslovakian New Wave are also available on DVD or Blu-ray in this country. Films such as Zbynek Brynych’s “The Fifth Horseman Is Fear” or Ivan Passer’s “Intimate Illumination” and many other works of this extremely timeless New Wave are real pearls from the cinematic seabed.
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