![]() Not least of these was Menzel, who would go on to enjoy a long-term collaboration with Hrabal, most famously winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 1966’s Ostře sledované vlaky ( Closely Observed Trains), co-scripted with Hrabal.īetween all five, such was the variety in aesthetic and narrative approaches, indicative of the breadth of directions the New Wave filmmakers would pursue overall, that Pearls of the Deep came to be regarded ipso facto as a manifesto of the Czechoslovak New Wave. ![]() Each of them, bar one (Jiří Menzel) – Jireš, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm and Věra Chytilová – had at least one highly accomplished feature film already behind them, and all had more glories to follow. ![]() While two segments of the seven were later released separately – Ivan Passer’s Fádní odpoledne ( A Boring Afternoon) and Juraj Herz’s Sběrné surovosti ( The Junk Shop), the five filmmakers whose works made the final cut nonetheless represented the New Wave in miniature. The initiator of the project, Jaromil Jireš, and six others promptly signed up to adapt stories from Hrabal’s debut towards the production of an omnibus film, with talismanic cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera in tow (another who’d emerge as a major cinematographer, Miroslav Ondříček, operated second camera.) The New Wave directors immediately identified in him a kindred spirit whose work they wished to promote. At other times, his work was marked by a caricaturist’s heightened, albeit deadpan, skewered sense of the absurd. New to the times, his work celebrates people from a wide array of walks of life, reflective of the author’s own highly varied prior employment and company kept, rendered oftentimes with a corresponding quotidian authenticity. The stories are thus told, often as not, serving as discursive crossfire amongst participants and delivered in lockstep soliloquies rather than functioning as conversation, per se.Įnriched by a distinctly Prague vernacular, Hrabal’s stories’ garrulous denizens favour free-associative anecdotal exchanges inspired in part by the French Surrealists’ predilections for automatism. Nowadays a revered, canonical figure but then a newly emergent talent whose rambunctious first official collection of stories, his Perlička na dně ( Pearl on the Bottom), had only just been released after four years of delays.īe there such a thing, the typical Hrabalian character fancies themselves a captivating raconteur and is given to regaling others with dovetailing stories tall yet sometimes true. No author better exemplified this, nor more intersected with the vital film culture of the time, than Bohumil Hrabal. The literature which inspired it celebrated individuality and idiosyncrasy, rather than the hidebound extolling of the benefits to the body politic of collectivisation and uniformity. While Czechoslovakia had long tapped home-grown literature as a fecund wellspring for its cinema, the thawing of Soviet censorship in the 1960s allowed newer, more subversive works to be adapted. This allowed for an unprecedentedly rich period of formal and narrative experimentation emblematic of huge strides taken from the doctrinaire, Stalinist tenets of Socialist Realism – if only until the quashing of the Prague Spring late in 1968. The state subsidised these students’ practical studies and their later works both, even if it wasn’t always willing to release the films produced. An extraordinary pool of talented young filmmakers came to study together at Prague’s storied film school FAMU under the tutelage of several of Czechoslovakia’s greatest filmmakers, like Otakar Vávra and Elmar Klos, who covertly exposed their young charges to the revolutionary cinema from neighboring lands which they otherwise would not have been exposed to. ![]() The 1960s’ Czechoslovak New Wave was lightning in a bottle, a glorious film miracle born of an unrepeatable collision of societal and political factors.
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