Between the years 1963 and 1965, the cultural revival period of Czechoslovakia would usher in a new interest in literature and reinvigorate the avant-garde traditions of the Thirties. Noteworthy films that were based on pre-war works would include two adaptations from Franticek Vlacil's masterful historic epic Marketa Lazarova (1967), set in a thirteenth century Bohemia and Jiri Menzel's bitter-sweet tale of strolling players in a small town in 1968's comedy of manners Capricious Summer (Rozmarne leto)' Jires made a late in the game entry with his visually elaborate version of Nezval's surreal vampire novel, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). The influence of the novelist Franz Kafka was apparent in numerous films, most notable in Pavel Juracek's thirty-eight minute short, Josef Kilian (1964) where the absurd was threaded into a world of bureaucracy lost without its Stalinist supports.
Perhaps the best films based on contemporary novels were Menzel's Oscar winning version of Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Observed Trains (1966) a satirical take, concerning a lovesick station manager who unwittingly becomes a martyr during the second World War and Jaromil Jires version of Milan Kundera's The Joke (1969), about the attempted revenge of a young man who had been sent to a labor camp for the act of writing 'optimism is the opium of the people...long live Trotsky' on a postcard to his humorless Communist ladylove.
 |
| Nothing much funny happening in The Joke (1969) |
The filmmakers that were most interested in formal innovation were Jan Nemec (1936-2016) and Vera Chytilova (1929-2014). Nemec made three deliberately 'unrealistic' features, two of them containing no dialogue whatsoever, In Diamonds of the Night (1964), he portrayed the visions and hallucinations of two youths escaping from a Nazi death train, while another of his standout features (Martyrs of Love,1967) presented a dream world that drew heavily on prewar traditions of Surrealism - a paean to silent films, baroque ballads and sad heroes. The undeniable influence of absurdist theater, such as the dramas of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco can be found in 1966's O slavnosti a hostech, the most politically controversial of all Czech films. It is the story of a lakeside celebration, a riparian fete, in which guests are escorted by an ominous assembly of secret police. The real subject is the process of accommodation and self-deception by which the party guests adapt to an ideological tyranny.
 |
| I assure you that's not Carol Burnett - Chytilova's flowery Daisies (1966) |
Vera Chytilova, a maverick madchen, who was banned by the Czechoslav government and one of the founders of Czech New Wave, characteristic combination of feminism and experiment was apparent in her first film, O necem jinem (1963). It juxtaposed the unrelated lives of a humdrum housewife (filmed as fiction) with that of a world champion gymnast (filmed as semi-documentary). In 1966's Daisies, Chytilova produced a cerebral non-narrative film based on the destructive antics of two teenage heroines who in their existential conclusion decide that since the world has already been spoiled, what else really matters? Chytilova's attraction, and that of her husband and cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera (1929-1991), to the visual in its own right was even more apparent in The Fruit of Paradise (1970), a wondrously rich and beautiful film with a purposefully ambiguous narrative in which ' nothing is as it seems,' The director's objectives were in Joycian fashion, to make any single interpretation of her films impossible and to force a resolve that what has been seen forms but a part of what the truth really is.