Czechoslovakia

Carriage to Vienna (1966)

André Crous

With gorgeous photography and a soundtrack that has religious undertones, Carriage to Vienna reminds us that the terror of the Reich’s occupiers spilled over into horrors committed by the previously occupied Czechs.

Carriage to ViennaCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Kachyňa
Screenwriters:
Jan Procházka
Karel Kachyňa
Director of Photography:
Josef Illík

Running time: 75 minutes

Original title: Kočár do Vídně
Alternate English title: Coach to Vienna

A road movie unlike any other, Karel Kachyňa’s Carriage to Vienna is also a thriller and an absolutely devastating indictment of the Czech nation after the Second World War. Set in the forests of Moravia, close to the Czechoslovakia–Austria border, the story covers roughly 24 tumultuous hours in the life of a young widow named Krista (an enigmatic, quietly brooding Iva Janžurová).

The opening crawl informs us that an anonymous “they” had hanged Krista’s husband the previous night for stealing a few sacks of cement. It’s the first week of Mary 1945, and we can reasonably assume it was Germans who did the killing. A few hours later, as day is breaking, two soldiers (one of them suffering serious injuries) appear on her doorstep and force her to take them to the border. They say they are Austrian, not “Reichsdeutschen”, although in wartime this is a distinction without a difference. Thus begins a daylong horse-drawn carriage ride through the misty forest.

Krista doesn’t speak a word. By contrast, Hans (Jaromír Hanzlík), the young German soldier sitting beside her on the carriage, is positively giddy. He can’t stop talking or moving about. Perhaps it is because the war is at an end and he has survived the ordeal. Maybe because he is going home. Or because this quiet and mysterious but seemingly submissive girl is taking him to freedom. He shows her photos of his family and his home in Vienna.

It has to be said that Hans is portrayed as far more naïve than malicious. Unlike Krista, whose life is in immediate danger, he is high-strung to the point of nearly snapping in half. And although he had been in the service of far-right fascism, he is clearly also human. In post-war Czechoslovak cinema, this was a big shift from the previous representations of German soldiers as uniformly malevolent.

However, all is not quite as it seems. We are constantly aware of the various weapons on board: The Germans have rifles and a pistol, but Krista has an axe concealed underneath the carriage. Slowly but surely, as the second soldier, Günther, loses consciousness and Hans is easily distracted, Krista disposes of the weapons one by one.  These moments are elegantly brought to our attention when the carriage moves on and the camera stays behind to discreetly reveal the items discarded in the bushes.

Beautiful organ music played by Milan Šlechta suffuses the soundtrack as we watch the trees stretching up to the heavens contrast starkly with the fog in black and white. Over time, we come to realise that the trees themselves are, in a way, the organ pipes, and we find ourselves in a sacred space where good and evil have come to do battle. Krista spends the first half of the film in silent contemplation, and it is riveting to behold. But despite the almost ethereal audiovisual atmosphere, we can feel the tension building. Will she or won’t she use the weapons on the Germans? Will they or won’t they discover what she is doing?

Then, things take a sharp turn, and the film ends in a stunning obliteration of sympathy. We had gone most of the film on the side of the underdog, hoping that Krista would escape and perhaps even take revenge for enduring the war and losing her husband hours earlier. But with the front line drawing closer, and Hans’s head is in her lap, she does not kill him. In fact, she makes a decision that can most charitably be described as unexpected, if not downright cuckoo. And yet, while her later actions may seem erratic, the very real impact of the war on her way of life cannot be underestimated.

However, Carriage to Vienna will be best remembered for its powerful final scene, which calls to mind the brutal postwar expulsion of Czech Germans. (The same applied to Hungarians, although they did not have the added burden of their people directly supporting genocide during the war.) For reasons that are easy to guess but morally questionable, anyone who was “ethnically” German was persona non grata in the newly liberated Czechoslovakia. The country’s president, Edvard Beneš, issued decrees to the effect that such individuals, even if they had lived in the Czech lands for generations, would lose their citizenship and be deported to the countries of their forefathers.

Kachyňa’s film requires just a single, well-placed scene to drive its point home about the violent backlash after the war. Its portrayal of German soldiers as people who fought on the wrong side rather than machines of immorality is equally bold. And although the film’s first half is far superior to its second, it may be one of the best and most important works of art the country has ever produced.

Daisies (1966)

André Crous

Věra Chytilová’s inventive Daisies is never straightforward, and more than 50 years on, it still has some kooky flashes of brilliance.

Daisies SedmikráskyCzechoslovakia
4*

Director:
Věra Chytilová
Screenwriters:
Věra Chytilová
Ester Krumbachová
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Sedmikrásky

Her name might be “Jarmila”, or it could be “Julie”. That is how she variously introduces herself to others. She calls her best friend “Marcelka” in public, but when they’re alone, they address each other as “Marie”. This is all beside the point, however, because the name that shines the brightest across this quirky narrative landscape is “Věra”.

The two young women in question have come to be referred to as the dark-haired “Marie I” (Jitka Cerhová) and the fair-haired “Marie II” (Ivana Karbanová), the stars of Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film, Daisies (Sedmikrásky). The duo is not only the story’s main characters but also the only characters of any consequence. This is their tale, and they couldn’t care less about the people around them, especially the men. (Every single scene would pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.) In fact, the same may be said of Chytilová’s attitude towards traditional narrative filmmaking.

Considered one of the highlights of the Czech New Wave, Daisies made a splash for a whole host of reasons. In the director’s native Czechoslovakia, it sparked controversy upon its release, and its local distribution was heavily suppressed after it drew the ire of the country’s president. A few months later, a deputy in the National Assembly called it “trash” and heatedly enquired what the film might offer “working people in factories, in fields and on construction sites”. One specific point of criticism he had was the film’s apparent delight in showing food wastage.

Admittedly, it does feature a stunning amount of food being wasted, and no reference is made to factories, fields or construction sites. The goal was to offer a different vision: a story that, on the surface, is far removed from the humdrum of everyday life but pokes the stifling social order by using a wild and atypical approach to depict the escapades of two happy-go-lucky girls. Chytilová issued a particular challenge to the country’s totalitarian government because her criticism was wrapped up in an exuberantly artistic sensibility – one whose subversive message was evident but difficult to define and, thus, perturbed those seeking to control creative endeavours.

In the first seven decades of the cinematic art form, a small number of films had been made by female directors, and there had been a few more starring women in the lead roles, but these two circles hardly ever overlapped. Prior to Chytilová, women were not prohibited from making films or portraying anything other than damsels in distress or femmes fatales, but her Daisies broke the mould: It was directed by a woman, written by two women (Chytilová and influential screenwriter/costume designer Ester Krumbachová) and featured its two wholly independent-minded Maries in every single scene. It had been – and remains – a rarity for women to be so fully represented in this creative triad.

But the film’s unusual nature didn’t stop there. In contrast to the more dramatic, serious films of her peers at the time, like Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, Chytilová chose to undertake a delightfully playful project. She deployed several unconventional editing techniques to inject visual surprises into her work and even undercut the male characters by having the women perform a memorable act of symbolic castration.

In the monochromatic opening scene, the Maries, wearing similarly patterned bikinis, make up their minds to shake things up. After deciding to “be bad” (in other words, to reject the status quo), they promptly jump off-screen into a brightly lit meadow, where they are shown, for the first time, in full colour. Evidently, the rather subversive implication is that being “bad” adds colour to life.

Throughout the episodic but free-flowing film, they play the children’s game Vadí nevadí (“It matters, it doesn’t matter”, similar to “Truth or Dare”) without getting flustered or hesitating to carry out each other’s wishes and, in so doing, push past social conventions. But their relationship remains undefined, and because they don’t seem to have lives beyond their friendship, they are mere ciphers, marionettes in the hands of Chytilová. At one point, sharing a bathtub filled to the brim with milk, they rightfully question whether they even exist.

Speaking of liquid being wasted, the film’s climax is a scene of such gastronomic debauchery it still hasn’t lost any of its shock value: Upon discovering a banquet-style buffet laid out in an empty hall, the two women move from one seat to the next, gorging themselves on a variety of meats, vegetables and desserts. After lobbing cakes at each other, they start throwing everything else that is edible, too, and turn the event into a proper food fight before strutting on the table, using it as a catwalk to crush the food under their high heels. All that’s missing is a literal applecart for them to upset.

The biggest twist of the knife in the heart of the regime comes a few moments later, when they suddenly decide to no longer be bad and return to being “good”: Back in monochrome, whispering to each other that hard work will make them happy, they carefully place all the broken pieces of crockery on the table, as if preparing for a meal, before lying down and meeting a grisly end. Chytilová appears to suggest that, under the strictures of communism, life is about going through the motions: You mechanically engage in (pointless) work, you pretend to be happy, and then you die – not quite the message the government wanted people to contemplate.

As she would continue to do in subsequent productions, Chytilová also shatters the illusion that men play any substantial role in women’s lives. In a very cheeky scene, Marie II uses scissors to cut a bread roll, a gherkin, some sausages, an egg and finally a banana into pieces while a man – who, significantly, is never shown – unsuccessfully tries to woo her over the phone.

But the destruction is much more widespread than a few sliced-up snacks. It also seeps into the physical manifestation of the film itself. In the restaurant, the two Maries upend convention by starting with dessert and finishing with the main course. And when Marie II devours the whole chicken she has on her plate, the camera essentially takes it personally as it begins to sputter and squirt in colour, alternately converting greys to purples, oranges, greens and blues and leaping across time. Later, to further underscore the notion that films themselves have traditionally been male, the images shatter into fragments when the Maries play with scissors.

Here and there, one can draw parallels with other films (perhaps most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark 1960 film Breathless, because of the jump-cut transitions), but Daisies is indisputably sui generis. Chytilová’s creation is a joyous celebration of turning the grim and dreary communist reality on its head and replacing it with something vivid and refreshing, albeit at times maddeningly incomprehensible.

Despite the short 80-minute running time, however, many viewers today might be put off by the characters’ lack of growth. Marie I and Marie II agree on everything, quite unlike the slow identity melding of the two women in Ingmar Bergman’s cerebral Persona, released the same year. While Daisies is dynamic and reaches for ever more imaginative ways to subvert the art form and its conventions, the Maries never face any real crisis in need of a resolution.

In addition, the visual gimmicks are inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary, the film doesn’t fall neatly into a genre, and at times the actresses’ deliberately mechanical, unnatural performances render their Maries silly and hard to relate to. They are neither glorified nor put on trial for their vapid conduct and their excess. And yet, perhaps because the “bad” behaviour they so nonchalantly engage in is much more interesting than the “good”, it doesn’t matter, because their brash hedonism is positively contagious.

Daisies may be more than 50 years old, but as a collage of female expression and a light-hearted romp in the face of suffocating state control, it holds up well and continues to entertain.

A Loaf of Bread (1960)

André Crous

A Loaf of Bread, which Jan Němec made for his FAMU graduation, is a tense, perfectly structured short film about a Jewish prisoner stealing the titular foodstuff off of a Nazi-operated train.

A Loaf of BreadCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriter:
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jiří Šámal

Running time: 11 minutes

The Jean Valjean character in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. In Jan Němec’s 11-minute A Loaf of Bread (Sousto), which he made as a student at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, we find a group of Jean Valjeans waiting to seize the day during the Second World War. If they are caught, the penalty will likely be much more serious than incarceration.

They are Jewish prisoners biding their time next to the train tracks in the waning days of Nazi occupation, presumably somewhere inside Czechoslovakia. Their target is a few tracks over: a train wagon containing loaves of bread. The problem? An armed Nazi officer is circling the wagon to ensure none of them gets a piece.

Němec’s screenplay is an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical short story “The Second Round” (Druhé kolo). He wrote and directed the film when he was barely 24 years old. The adaptation is perfectly structured with a setup, an execution, a complication and a resolution. It is commendable, however, that even after the climax, there is a lingering ambiguity that leaves the film the slightest bit open-ended and does not wholly dispatch the tension that preceded it.

After all, films about Jews during the Second World War should never be neatly packaged with a spotless ending. The main characters here are not victors besting their captors but rather survivors successfully making it through yet another trial by fire. But it is not just our extratextual knowledge of events that dampens the enthusiasm, it is also the strong reminder that this is but a small victory because much bigger issues are at stake.

The plot revolves around a bread heist. Three young Jewish men check out the train containing the bread. They count the number of steps the officer takes on the other side so that they know how big the window is for one of them to run there, snatch the loaf and run back unnoticed. They draw lots. Tomáš draws the shortest stick.

He quickly accepts the responsibility, but when the time comes, the moment is almost too big, and he hesitates. One second goes by, then another, then another. He finally takes off, sprinting across the no man’s land to reach the train as the officer takes his 18th, 19th, 20th step. Tomáš only has about 35 seconds left to snatch the bread and run back unseen across the tracks. He reaches inside the truck but struggles to grab himself a loaf. The clock keeps ticking. Finally, he grabs a hold of one. But by now he barely has 5 seconds left before the officer turns the corner. As he runs and realises his time has run out, he flings the bread to his friends hiding under another train.

This central piece of the action, less than 2 minutes of the film’s total running time, plainly demonstrates Němec’s skill at building tension to breaking point with the help of the central filmmaking trio: the story, the visuals and the sound, all supporting and boosting each other. All the while, we hear someone counting the seconds. And we know they only have a window of about 56 seconds in total.

A Loaf of Bread is bookended by two brief moments of narration in Tomáš’s voice. The first is explanatory, and the last is optimistic as it conveys the vital information that the Nazi officer was much weaker than the men had anticipated. Despite the most miserable of circumstances, they are undeterred in their mission to feed themselves. Tomáš tells us that they would try again the next day, and luckily the film does not show us what happened. It is not entirely clear that the voice-over was delivered after the war, and thus, after a successful second attempt, or whether it is delivered more or less contemporaneously with the action, in which case it is not at all self-evident that they would survive another try.

When it comes to stories of the Holocaust and the railway transport of Jews, such doubt is essential in clouding out any perception of victory, even in the smallest of moments.

Diamonds of the Night (1964)

André Crous

By mixing the present reality with memories and nightmarish visions and presenting them all as a fragmented whole, Diamonds of the Night offers a personal, often surreal glimpse of the Second World War.

Diamonds of the NightCzechoslovakia
3.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriters:
Arnošt Lustig
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 65 minutes

Original title: Démanty noci

Diamonds of the Night is an unconventional film about two Jews during the Second World War. For one, the two central characters are taciturn to the point of almost being mute. For another, it is unclear what does and what does not happen in the moment. But it brilliantly conveys a nagging sense of being sucked into a world collapsing onto itself.

This one-hour film, Czech director Jan Němec’s début feature, is as full of contrasts as its title suggests. It is drawn from the eponymous book (more specifically, the short story entitled “Darkness Casts No Shadow”) by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig and is filled with fragments of dreamlike memories, nightmarish visions and brutal reality. Following a black screen and the ominous tolling of a bell, the opening sequence is by far the film’s most memorable. Lasting an impressive 137 seconds, it is an exhilarating unbroken tracking shot that follows two young men (Antonín Kumbera and Ladislav Janský) uphill, frequently in close-up, as they run away from a train. Every so often, another round of bullets reminds us that this is life and death.

Finally, albeit temporarily, they reach safety deep in the forest. Because of the jackets, marked with KL, for Konzentrationslager, they were wearing, one can assume they were headed for a death camp. But the darkness they have just escaped has stained their consciousness and begins to penetrate their lived reality, too, as a giant field of rocks in the middle of the forest soon makes very clear. Suddenly, a tram passes Prague’s Municipal House in broad daylight, and we see one of these men, wearing the KL jacket, jumping in, before there is a cut back to the forest.

The film will be filled with such moments, all without any dialogue – in fact, it takes almost a full 15 minutes before either of the two men speaks a word. Many of the inserts are taken through the window of a moving vehicle, presumably a bus or a train. We see life outside continuing as normal, as if nothing is the matter, but the implication is that we share the point of view of the Jews being transported away from this “normality” that is oblivious to them.

This is confirmed when we get an insert showing the inside of a windowless train compartment meant for cargo, but we see a group of people, some dressed in striped pyjamas. The two nameless young men are seated in a corner at the far back. They devour the corn they had snuck in and put on the shoes they had hidden in their jackets. But this is the past from which they had just managed to break free. Or is it? The story unspools in such a fragmented manner that the pieces ultimately fit together so loosely that the big picture escapes us. There is even room for an (admittedly slightly contrived) reading of the ending as a prelude to the opening.

Diamonds of the Night is at its best during those brief moments, created via the inserts, that give us a vivid sense of the fear and confusion inside the mind of the younger man (Kumbera). A few shots, brilliantly captured by director of photography Jaroslav Kučera (who would become one of the most prominent cameramen of the Czechoslovak New Wave), show tall trees being felled and falling almost straight onto the camera. In another famous composition, ants crawl over an anonymous (either remembered or imagined) young man’s feet, hands and face. And in one of the most action-packed scenes, when he goes to a farmhouse to beg for bread, he imagines himself, over and over again, killing his well-doer out of concern that she will surrender him to the authorities.

But many might view all these interruptions as little more than impressionist smudges on a threadbare storyline, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. In particular, there are too many flashbacks (albeit distorted or misremembered, as made clear by the KL coat that Kumbera’s character is already wearing) to brighter days, and they do not appear to contribute substantially to our understanding of the characters or their backgrounds.

The last part of the film is the most interesting because of the tension it evokes through a very simple approach: repetition and little alteration. Having been captured by a group of dimwitted Kraut fogies, members of the so-called Volkssturm militia, the two men are made to stand with their hands in the air and face a blank wall. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, the old Germans merrily gorge themselves on chicken and drink pints of beer. Every so often, there is a cut back to the two men, immobile with fear. This alternation between the two shots, as well as the contrast between the silence and the yack-yack-yacking, creates incredible tension.

But while the film gives an atypical insight into the mind of one of its two central characters, the other (Janský) remains an enigma. Towards the end of the film, an apparent flashback even seems to suggest the possibility that he never made it past the opening scene. And as potent as some of the images are, there are just as many shots whose meaning is not immediately evident or are needlessly repeated. 

Diamonds of the Night is a film of contrasts. It uses an experimental approach to conjure up a world of mental imagery that doesn’t always connect with the viewer. And yet, we do get a glimpse of the main character’s inner struggle to make sense of the senselessness around him.

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)

André Crous

Journey to the Beginning of Time

Czechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Zeman
Screenwriters:
Karel Zeman
Josef Antonín Novotný
Directors of Photography:
Václav Pazderník
Antonín Horák

Running time: 84 minutes

Original title: Cesta do pravěku

The fossils of prehistoric creatures housed at the National Museum are just a collection of bones, either spread out or assembled in a skeletal structure or set in stone as a result of petrification over millennia. They are not alive, and they only hint at the original. Sometimes, a museum may have an exhibit that is a representation of what one of these animals from long, long ago looked like. Usually, it’s a mammoth.

What the luminary Czechoslovak special effects director Karel Zeman realised, was exactly the same motivating force that must have compelled Steven Spielberg to shoot Jurassic Park in the early 1990s: The ability of the cinema, and of skilled filmmakers, to bring to life what until now we could only imagine and to make the past almost physically present.

Journey to the Beginning of Time was released in 1955, but as the country was isolated internationally at the time and would only open up a few months after Zeman’s death in 1989, his fame and magic were confined to the borders of the landlocked country in Eastern Europe.

What we realise more and more, however, is how far ahead of his time Zeman was. Inspired by Georges Méliès and explicitly referencing Jules Verne, whose work is the obvious forebear of both these artists, Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time is a beloved classic in the Czech Republic and deserves widespread recognition, even though its visual effects have by now, more than half a century later, been surpassed by computer-generated effects.

Three teenagers, Petr, Jenda and Toník, and a younger boy named Jirka set off on a journey through the ages. Having read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, they consider themselves explorers and set off on a canoe upstream from the present day all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, where the fossil of a trilobite that Jirka found in stone will be seen for real.

It is a journey that obviously boggles the mind, and we are left wanting for an explanation of how the children go about skipping from one time period to the other (the film does employ some mist to cover the transitions, though), but what is obvious is that these machinations of the fiction are not what we should be focused on. The real reason we watch the film is to see the prehistoric animals come to life, and do so in the presence (and in the same frame!) as the children.

Petr, the de facto leader of the group, obliquely speaks for the viewer, too, when he observes:

We haven’t made this journey just for fun; we came to study what prehistoric life really looked like. We are so lucky to have the opportunity to do just that, to see everything with our own eyes.

Indeed, this is a privilege, and as the children travel back from the time of the cavemen to the time of the dinosaurs and beyond, we find ourselves constantly aware of the fact that while the events are about as possible as time travel, the thrill of seeing creatures from these two very different times in one place is extraordinary, and Zeman assembles and stages the actions with a very firm and steady hand.

While the special effects are not on the more or less seamless technical level of Jurassic Park, they are breathtaking considering the film was made in the early 1950s, in a country that had a few months earlier been racked by its infamous currency reform that cut the worth of everyone’s money by 90% while prices remained the same (a tale told in great detail by the remarkable 2012 film, Ve stínu). Often, the stop-motion animal movements would seem to be too fast or too slow, or when the mammoth stands still but raises its trunk, the bushes around it move without reason with jerky movements.

But Zeman achieves some impressive results during the staging of a nighttime fight between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and while many animals don’t have a reflection in the water because they were not shot next to the river, but separately, the Brontosaurus’s appearance in the river, reflection included, is gorgeous.

At another point, the camera follows the enormous dragonflies called Meganeura as they fly between the trees, the camera apparently tracking down below while looking up at them. The effect is powerful and this technically ambitious sequence is very rewarding.

In some ways, the film can be called superficial, but covering the various life forms of 5 billion years in 80 minutes is no small feat. From time to time, mention is made of life in the present, and the juxtaposition is worthwhile, for example when club mosses were the size of trees, their eventual stratification would give rise to coal mining in the 20th century.

The four boys, with the exception of the inquisitive Jirka, don’t get up to much trouble and have a surprisingly easy time of all this travelling through the ages, so we ultimately learn little about them, but their awe at being able to see all these creatures is something the viewer understands all too well, as Zeman’s film awakens a curiosity in us for the life of things we may never really have considered beyond the bare bones of a museum exhibit.