In his epic documentary entitled CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur provides a comprehensive and sometimes mind-blowing overview of the Czechoslovak New Wave.
India
4*
Director:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Screenwriter:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Director of Photography:
David Čálek
Running time: 430 minutes
Without exception, an entire generation of Czech and Slovak filmmakers made their best films – and arguably some of the best their country ever produced – shortly after leaving film school. A perfectly balanced dose of freedom and oppression, along with powder kegs of talent, made these works possible. Unfortunately, half a century later, only a handful of them have received the recognition they deserve outside Central Europe. But now a new documentary clocking in at more than seven hours goes a long way towards remedying this oversight.
Almost every viewer interested in the history of cinema is aware of the French New Wave. Dating to the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the nouvelle vague basically comprised a handful of male film critics from the monthly Cahiers du cinéma journal who shared similar aesthetic sensibilities and looked up to many of the same filmmakers (“auteurs” like Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks and Robert Bresson). However, despite being even more ambitious in scope and more numerous and diverse in its composition, the Czechoslovak New Wave (Československá nová vlna) is much less known.
The movement’s best-known film is Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), which was released at the end of 1966 and was then-28-year-old Jiří Menzel’s début feature. It was based on the eponymous novel by famed Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, which had been published the year before. The film was screened at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1968 – the first Czech film and only the second Czechoslovak film (after Ján Kadár’s Slovak-language The Shop on Main Street) to do so. This elegant depiction of a young station agent who loses his virginity during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia remains one of the defining films of the era.
And yet, it is but one in a panoply of cinematic masterpieces produced by Czech and Slovak filmmakers under extraordinary political circumstances in the 1960s. To better understand the time and the people involved and to inform the world of the magic that was conjured up between Prague and Bratislava in a very small window of time, Indian filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur travelled to the Czech Republic to interview Menzel. Along with Miloš Forman, he is perhaps the best-known Czech filmmaker outside his own country. What developed from their initial conversations over the course of seven years was the 430-minute CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel.
“Film is my job”, Menzel announces in the opening moments of this massive film. It is a seemingly unremarkable comment but perfectly encapsulates this man’s view of his place in history, and its implications vibrate throughout the rest of the film. He sees himself not only as being at the service of a customer but also as part of a greater network of individuals. Most importantly, in order to get his movies made, he saw (and still sees) compromise as part of the process. Others, most notably Miloš Forman, who had enjoyed wild success with Black Peter (Černý Petr), Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) and The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko), chose to leave the country rather than work out a deal with totalitarians.
The morality of compromise is addressed most directly with the ambiguous case of legendary director and FAMU founder Otakar Vávra. Vávra was a chameleon able to adapt to the regime of the day and has been sharply criticised for his pro-communist films. And yet, many of his film school students subsequently went on to make anti-establishment films. Agnieszka Holland, who studied under him, says the dossier the secret police kept on her revealed how Vávra had falsely vouched for her belief in socialism, presumably in order to keep her from being kicked out of the school. Unfortunately, while writer-director Drahomíra Vihanová, who was banned from making features under communism, touches on Menzel’s apparent willingness to downplay the tragedy of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the film doesn’t push its professed subject on this point.
CzechMate focuses mostly on the 1960s but also spends a good chunk of time on the films the directors (especially Menzel) managed to make after 1968. It is at its best when it drills down into the historical context and the different ways in which political pressure affected or illuminated the character of the young filmmakers. Easily the most attention-grabbing part of the documentary is its account of the events between August 1968 (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and January 1969 (the funeral of Jan Palach, a student who had set himself alight in protest against the Soviet occupation). Director Ivan Passer’s description of how he and Miloš Forman escaped the country is also an unforgettable episode packed with adrenaline, incredible luck and white knuckles.
Emir Kusturica notes that Vávra once impressed on him the importance of having strong conflict in a film, as no one could keep still for two or three hours without it. In a surprising self-own on the part of Dungarpur, whose film contains no conflict whatsoever, Kusturica makes this statement around the three-hour mark. Menzel’s incredulousness at what the documentary will ultimately look like also provides some occasional levity, and more than five hours into the running time, he quips: “It will be long, long, long, long film!” Fortunately, the length is mitigated in no small measure by the absolutely stunning imagery from the directors’ films, with almost all of the clips appearing to have been restored to mint condition.
Jiří Menzel, in his late-70s, cuts a congenial figure who can seemingly talk for hours on end without much prodding. With a lifetime of experience in the director’s chair and counting many of the best-known directors of the time among his friends, he is a font of knowledge about the New Wave. His infatuation with the female body, although infinitely less nuanced than the work of François Truffaut, is also emphasised on multiple occasions and gives a childlike quality to this director, not unlike that of his main character in Closely Watched Trains. However, quirky as he is, there are simply too many scenes with him speaking while lying in an empty bathtub, his dirty feet sticking out at the bottom, and this becomes a distraction in the latter part of the film.
He may well be the most talkative, but it is wholly unclear why Menzel should be the focus of attention and what the “search” in the title refers to. While Dungarpur provides a multifaceted view of Czech and Slovak filmmaking in the 1960s and beyond, thanks in large part to Menzel’s willingness to discuss it at great length, the latter is never challenged in any serious way. The last hour or two of the film does make clear that he is not universally beloved, but the director is not directly confronted with the criticisms his peers have of him and his work.
This brings up another missed opportunity. Perhaps it was just a matter of logistics, but it feels regrettable that almost all the interviews were conducted one on one. One of the film’s only truly emotional scenes is when Menzel talks about a rare group photo showing the luminaries of the New Wave together and goes down the line to point out the rare ones who are still alive. What the film doesn’t make all that clear is that many of the interviewees actually passed away during the seven-year production of CzechMate, including Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Drahomíra Vihanová and renowned cinematographer Miroslav Ondřícek.
Although some thematic montages are stronger than others, the film’s editing consistently ensures smooth transitions between a free-flowing, somewhat heterogeneous mixture of topics. The loose structure also means that a lot more time is often spent on one film in Menzel’s filmography while another is almost completely ignored (Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut had the same problem, among many others). Thankfully, despite the vast number of interviews with close to 100 people, we never feel like this is all just a sequence of talking heads.
Watching a seven-hour film is physically exhausting, and one has to wonder whether a theatrical release was the best format. Given the lack of a strong thematic thread (sometimes, Menzel and his work all but disappear from the film), it might have been a better idea to rearrange the material as a miniseries according to topic or time period. The screening I attended at Prague’s Ponrepo cinema had no intermissions, so for those wishing to have a snack, relieve themselves or keep their legs from turning to jelly, it was necessary to leave the theatre and, therefore, miss out on part of the film. This situation is far from ideal, and it is up to either the cinema or the filmmaker to solve the problem.
CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel judiciously positions the Czechoslovak New Wave, brief though it was, as one of the most important movements in the 125-year history of the seventh art. While the highlights include the beautiful first scene of Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s Joseph Kilian (Postava k podpírání), the amazing three-minute opening shot of Jan Němec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) and a memorable dream sequence from Karel Kachyňa’s Long Live the Republic (Ať žije republika), the list goes on and on, and one can easily feel overwhelmed by just how talented this group of individuals clearly was.
Menzel is on the right track when he says that two of the most unfortunate events of the 20th century were the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the talkie. Seeing what these filmmakers created in the 1960s and knowing that it had all been snuffed out by 1969, when the most interesting works were banned (put in “the safe”) in the name of “normalising” the country is absolutely tragic. Just as cinema would undoubtedly have been better off had silent cinema evolved well past 1927, the global motion picture industry almost certainly would have benefitted from the raw energy and unbridled creativity of the nová vlna continuing long after the Prague Spring. While their counterparts in France were receiving rave reviews for each making one or two convention-busting films, these Central Europeans were churning out one jaw-dropping film after another, often in very different ways. Of course, just like the French films, not all of them were masterpieces, but CzechMate certainly piques our interest, and during the screening, one can’t help but make notes of which of these films to watch (again).
Successful at conveying the mesmerising skill on display in the many, many, many films that can be classified as part of the Czechoslovak New Wave but less exhaustive a portrait of its main protagonist, this documentary hides its minor flaws very well behind an assortment of likeable and very informative individuals and editing that rarely draws attention to itself. Because of its unusual running time, this is not your average film. But then, it was far from your average film movement.
I had two minor quibbles with the onscreen text: Only the English (not the original Czech or Slovak) titles are shown, which is a shame. In addition, we are not reminded very often of the names of the nearly 100 people who are interviewed, and over the course of more than seven hours, it is impossible to remember who is who. More reminders of people’s names would have been very helpful.