Kinoblog

It’s dated yesterday, but I don’t think it ever made it into the printed version of the Guardian, which is why I didn’t spot it until now. Anyway, here’s an excellent interview with Jiří Menzel as his latest film I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007) finally gets a belated and brief British cinema run.

Apologies for the apparent lack of activity over the past few days: I’ve spent them preparing the various multimedia elements of my talk Andrzej Wajda: An Introduction, which I’ll be presenting at the BFI Southbank tonight at 6.15 - and, as ever, these things take much longer than expected!

Polish Radio recently interviewed me about the Wajda season, though they only ended up using a short snippet on Katyn. The recording is here - I’m the one without a Polish accent.

Once the immediate Wajda pressure is off, I’ll post more pieces on individual films, and I’ll also be looking at Jiří Menzel’s collaborations with the novelist Bohumil Hrabal as the latest, I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), finally gets a (minuscule) British cinema release.

And I can also thoroughly recommend the Imperial War Museum’s ongoing season of Polish films, which I mentioned a few days ago - I paid a visit myself on Friday and saw Krzysztof Zanussi’s In Full Gallop (Cwał, 1995) on the big screen for absolutely nothing. Sadly, the number of people in the auditorium didn’t even stretch to double figures, which just goes to show how little value people place on things when you give them away.

As I may have hinted on a few occasions in the past, I’m a bit of a fan of the Czech composer Zdeněk Liška (1922-1983) - which is why I was delighted to get an e-mail from Joe Walker, possibly Liška’s most obsessive fan, informing me that he’s recorded an hour-long celebration of the man and his work and uploaded it to the Totally Radio site.

You can find it here - there are various listening options, not all of which involve spending money.

Last Sunday saw the Barbican’s London premiere (and only the second UK screening) of Jiří Menzel’s I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), his sixth adaptation of the work of the great Czech writer and eccentric Bohumil Hrabal following his contribution to the anthology Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně, 1965) and the features Closely Observed Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1966), Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti, 1969), Cutting It Short (Postřižiny, 1980) and Snowdrop Festival (Slavnosti sněženek, 1983).

What made the event particularly memorable (aside from the joy of being able to see the film in a packed cinema with an audience that was clearly heavily Czech, judging from the way they laughed at the spoken dialogue rather than the subtitles) was that Menzel himself was there to introduce it and discuss both it and his career after the screening with the critic and Czech cinema expert Peter Hames. Sadly, the curse of the Sunday evening rail timetable meant that I had to leave before the end, but here’s a précis of what I managed to catch.

Hames opened the discussion with a brief summary of Menzel’s career, which the director upstaged by wiggling his eyebrows at the audience, thus setting a gleefully irreverent tone that continued throughout. (Menzel clearly understood much more English than he was comfortable admitting to officially, and he and his interpreter had become something of a comedy double-act by the end).

Menzel began by discussing the writer Bohumil Hrabal and his various travails with the authorities: he was very much a cult figure at a time when the Czech authorities were relaxing the imposition of Socialist Realism. Menzel and his friends initially made a film (Pearls of the Deep) that consisted of a number of Hrabal adaptations, and Hrabal was sufficiently impressed not only to let Menzel adapt his novel Closely Observed Trains for the screen, but to agree to work on the script with the young neophyte (who wasn’t even thirty at the time).

Hrabal is often described as being essentially untranslatable, his work often consisting of seemingly random anecdotes and streams of consciousness - but Menzel pointed out that although this might be true linguistically, he’s actually much easier to adapt for film as his writing is so visual. Although the script for Closely Observed Trains was revised six times before Hrabal and Menzel were satisfied with it, that’s scarcely a problem (”Like a good spirit, it has to be distilled.”)

Hrabal died in 1997, but had several conversations with Menzel on the subject of I Served the King of England. Menzel initially turned down the project, as he thought it was too complex. Then, shortly before Hrabal’s death, he relented and wrote a first draft of the script, of which Hrabal was… constructively critical. He was nicer about the second draft, though Menzel doubted whether he’d actually read it. Menzel said that it was ultimately good for the film that he couldn’t get it off the ground for several years (he didn’t specify why, but the project was tied up in legal red tape over a dispute over the rights).

Someone asked him whether he had any plans to film Hrabal’s masterpiece Too Loud a Solitude, but Menzel said he didn’t dare: he thought the material was too strong. Hames pointed out that he’d actually toned down quite a lot of the darker material in I Served the King of England, but Menzel defended this by pointing out that the scene in the novel where Lise is decapitated would be easier to process in verbal form than it would be in visual form, where the image would be so powerful that it would unbalance everything else. (He added that it would also make the film “too contemporary”, to audience laughter).

In response to a question about whether the film was a comedy, Menzel said yes. Although it might seem that the protagonist Jan Dítě is hard to sympathise with after he turns a blind eye to the Nazi threat, this was part of Menzel’s overall portrait of what he sees as the Czech character, and its infinite capacity for blending in. Dítě is a typical Czech figure, and he’s made likeable in order to establish some point of identification. (”Dítě has to be good, even if his deeds aren’t”). He said that writing the script took a year and a half, but shooting was generally delightful as he was working with an excellent team. However, the worst bit was reading the largely negative reviews in the Czech press (”Czech critics are cleverer than the rest of us”).

The discussion about the film was interleaved with various other subjects: Menzel reminisced briefly about his time at FAMU when he studied alongside many of the leading lights of the Czech New Wave, but in response to a question about whether he was consciously evoking Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966) in the film’s frequent food scenes, Menzel said a stronger role model was Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973).

Asked about how Eastern European films differ today from those made under socialism, Menzel said that it’s harder to make films today because filmmakers previously had very specific artistic aims, often dictated by external forces (technological or political restrictions). Today, you can do literally anything, and this can be limiting. Also, it was easier to get funding under socialism once the project had been approved.

Asked about the differences between adapting Hrabal and the equally distinguished novelist Vladislav Vančura (author of Capricious Summer/Rozmarné léto, which Menzel filmed in 1967), Menzel quipped that Vančura was much easier to work with, as he was dead and couldn’t defend himself.

Acknowledging that all his films can be described as comedies, Menzel explained that humour has a long tradition in Czech literature, and most classical books have some element of humour (”so it’s in my blood”). Czech humour is very close to Jewish humour, in that the Czechs often see themselves as serfs running rings around their masters, unlike Hungarians or Russians who saw themselves very much in the latter role. Unsurprisingly, Menzel is a big fan of silent comedy, and he fondly cited Chaplin and the way his films are “narrated by the image”.

And that, sadly, was all that I had time for - but I Served the King of England is opening in London on May 9th, and I’m hoping to have written about at least some of Menzel’s earlier Hrabal adaptations in more detail by then. Surprisingly, all five are out on DVD with English subtitles (a complete list of current Menzel DVDs can be found here), and while the Czech DVD of the new film isn’t English-friendly, it will doubtless appear on a British or American label at some point this year.

Last night I attended the keenly-awaited Censorship as a Creative Force Screentalk discussion at London’s Barbican Arts Centre, in which Jiří Menzel, István Szabó and Agnieszka Holland (an eleventh-hour replacement for Andrzej Wajda) discussed their experience of censorship under the various totalitarian régimes under which they had to spend much of their creative careers.

It was a fascinating evening that covered a lot of ground, and it was a particularly inspired idea to open with a screening of Wojciech Marczewski’s undeservedly obscure 1990 feature Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema (Ucieczka z kina ‘Wolność’), as this riff on Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo in the context of late-1980s Polish communist censorship was very funny, very pertinent, and much appreciated by the audience.

Then the critic Peter Hames took the stage to introduce his distinguished guests - including Andrzej Wajda. Although not physically present, Wajda had sent a ten-minute video address that made a perfect scene-setter, not least when technical problems at the start caused half the image to be obscured by a thick black bar (an irony noted by many, including Holland).

Wajda opened with the point that Communist countries were notorious for their toilet paper shortages, but claimed that this was actually a by-product of their governments deliberately restricting the production of paper of any kind. In other words, they didn’t censor specific words so much as the medium on which they were printed.

The same principle applied to film stock, which was strictly rationed and recorded - which caused difficulties for Wajda’s former protégé Roman Polański when he made his short film Mammals (Ssaki, 1963). Like most resourceful and cash-strapped young filmmakers, he made it with short ends - offcuts of film saved from other productions - but problems arose when he wanted to submit it to a film festival. Film Polski required him to produce receipts for the film stock - and because he couldn’t, the film didn’t officially exist.

Wajda then described the typical censorship process, which involved several stages. First of all, the film’s subject had to be approved, and then the script once it was written. In some countries, a so-called ‘editor’ would be present on the set making sure that what was shot matched what was written, which led to an anecdote about a debate in Moscow as to whether shooting scripts counted as works of literature - if they did, they couldn’t be altered by the director. However, this didn’t happen in Poland, to Wajda’s relief.

The finished film was then examined by officials in a closed screening known as a ‘Kolaudacja’, and if there were problems the Head of the Cinematography Committee would request changes. They also decided what kind of distribution the film should get: general or specialised, international or domestic, and in some cases whether to put them forward for major awards such as Oscars. Clearly, this ostensibly routine decision could also be used to punish filmmakers who were perceived to have overstepped the mark.

Surprisingly, Wajda only once had direct dealings with a censor (he recalled the man had a number, not a name) - after the ‘kolaudacja’ screening of Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958) he was ordered to remove the final scene in which Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) meets his death on a rubbish tip. Wajda persuaded him that the scene meant that “whoever raises his hand against People’s Poland ends up on the rubbish heap of history”, and the scene stayed - and audiences interpreted it the way Wajda originally intended.

This led to Wajda’s fundamental point: that because censors were more comfortable with words, this meant that filmmakers relied heavily on images, and the more ambiguous the better. The same was true of Kanal (1957) - everyone watching the film at the time knew that the Soviet Army was on the opposite bank of the Vistula, so merely showing the river was sufficient: the censors couldn’t cut it.

Agnieszka Holland then talked about the experience of working on Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1976), which finally went into production some 13-14 years after the script was written - she was initially asked to read it because she was one of the youngest people in Wajda’s film unit (Zespół Filmowy X), and the minister of culture was worried that it might have dated. Ministers of culture generally got replaced every nine months or so, which was handy as filmmakers could always invoke their predecessor’s approval of their project if necessary.

István Szabó recalled an incident at Cannes in which he replied “yes” to a journalist’s question regarding whether there was censorship in Hungary. A Hungarian friend said that he must have lost his mind - and, sure enough, two weeks later he was ordered to attend the film office. The official had French newspapers on his desk, signalling the subject in advance, but instead of giving Szabó a carpeting, he congratulated him and said that Hungarian filmmakers should be outspoken, so that foreigners will know that they come from a liberal country. This, needless to say, was also part of the censorship process.

Jiří Menzel said that the system in Czechoslovakia was similar to that in Poland and Hungary: no censorship office as such, but people knew what was or wasn’t possible. It was a sequence of tightening-up and loosening of restrictions, seen at its most extreme form in 1968, when censorship was abolished, only to be reinstated with a vengeance after the Soviet tanks invaded that August. His 1969 film Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti) illustrated this process: Bohumil Hrabal couldn’t publish in the 1950s, but was more acceptable in the 1960s, when he wrote stories satirising the stupidity of the Stalinist regime. In 1968, Menzel felt he could get away with adapting them into a film, which was completed before the new Czech government could crack down on it - but in the event they shelved it for twenty years.

In response to a question about whether censorship was necessary for creativity, Agnieszka Holland said that it was a complicated issue. Fundamentally, there is no place where censorship doesn’t exist, though in the West it’s economic rather than political. But she made the point that audiences in the Eastern bloc were generally more sophisticated, because they had to be, and barely-watchable third-generation VHSes of films like Wajda’s Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza, 1981) were scrutinised as though they were holy writ. Now, films are available in perfect copies, but they’re moronic romantic comedies - so censorship is still operating. István Szabó discussed the evolution of Miklós Jancsó’s highly stylised film language as a means of getting round the censors, and thinks that this is a point in favour of censorship, in that it encourages artists to be more creative.

This led to the most contentious issue of the evening, when Szabó reminisced about meeting a Cuban doctor-turned-film distributor, who had just seen a Hungarian film that he adored (Szabó didn’t identify it, but his description of the atmosphere of decadence and the lovingly-shot treatment of food suggests it may well have been Zoltán Huszárik’s Szindbad, 1971). However, he thought it was quite unsuitable for screening to Cubans, because there was too much indulgence - not least in the fact that the lead character often left food uneaten. Szabó sympathised with this, but Holland strongly disagreed, sayng that Cubans were hungry because of the regime, not the film, and they should be grown-up enough to be allowed to confront the truth, however brutal. Her audiences are her partners, not her children. (This led to a somewhat heated exchange about the differences - if any - between Nazism and Communism).

After a question about John Osborne’s surprise credit on Colonel Redl (in a nutshell, the rights to A Patriot For Me were cleared after Szabó realised that his script bore a passing resemblance, but Osborne was never directly involved - incidentally, copyright issues can also result in the censorship of films, though this wasn’t spelled out), the discussion turned to whether humour could be a subversive weapon. Szabó expressed his admiration for Menzel’s films, and Menzel said that everything serious must have a trace of humour, but a good comedy should be about serious things (something recognised by Shakespeare and Chaplin). However, if you talk about serious things too seriously, unintentional humour is often the result. Szabó said that a key difference between Hungarians and Czech is that the former take themselves more seriously (Holland claimed that Poles are in between).

Finally, in response to a question about whether censorship would always be an issue. Holland felt that as long as religion and similar ideologies existed, censorship would prevail. The Middle Ages were less bothered about it, because they didn’t know they were being lied to. In Communist Poland, they did, and resented it, so the tension was enormous. But after 1989 Holland understood that humanity couldn’t handle freedom either - they needed the illusion of some kind of order. And for that reason, censorship of some kind will always continue.

And on this rather pessimistic (albeit justified) note, that was that. My congratulations to the Barbican, the Czech Centre, the Hungarian Cultural Centre and the Polish Cultural Institute for pulling it all together (not least in seamlessly resolving the last-minute changes) - and Peter Hames and Menzel’s interpreter did their jobs to near-invisible perfection. It was well worth the trip.

Anyone who’s planning to visit Prague between now and the end of May might well be interested in the exhibition František Vláčil: Zápasy (or The Struggles of of František Vláčil), a multimedia tribute to the great Czech director of Marketa Lazarová (1967).

Those of us trapped elsewhere will have to make do with its bilingual (Czech-English) website, though at least that offers plenty to get your teeth into, including a series of stunning photogalleries.

Talking of Marketa Lazarová, it’s receiving two rare 35mm outings in Britain, at London’s Riverside Studios this Sunday (April 20) and at the Edinburgh Filmhouse on May 23. Anyone who goes will earn my undying jealousy - I still haven’t seen the film on the big screen yet, but the London show directly clashes with my niece’s christening.

Had he not died in 1983, yesterday would have been the 86th birthday of the great Zdeněk Liška, unarguably the greatest of all Czech film-score composers, and someone who for my money ranks alongside the likes of Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone for his instantly recognisable blend of tireless innovation (both musically and sonically) and utter appropriateness to the task in hand.

Partly because he wrote almost exclusively for Czech film and theatre, and partly because the current copyright holder refuses to let his music be used in any context other than the original one (as the Quay Brothers found out the hard way when they initially edited their 2003 film The Phantom Museum to extracts from Liška’s back catalogue but found that this version was legally unreleasable), he’s nowhere near as well known as he should be, though Jan Švankmajer fans will certainly be familiar with his work: after they first worked together on the film Johanes doktor Faust (1958) and at the Laterna Magika theatre in the early 1960s, Liška scored the vast majority of Švankmajer’s films from 1966’s Punch and Judy (Rakvičkárna) to 1979’s The Castle of Otranto (Otrantský zámek).

These films alone provide a terrific showcase of Liška’s range, from the creaky theatre barrel-organ of Punch and Judy and Don Juan (Don Šajn, 1969), the percussive piano triplets that give The Flat (Byt, 1968) a sense of propulsive urgency, the eight-part dance suite that does at least as much as Švankmajer’s associative editing to bring the long-dead animal exhibits of Historia Naturae, Suita (1967) to uncanny life, the mournful jazz-tinged Jacques Prévert setting that replaced the original banned soundtrack of The Ossuary (Kostnice, 1970), the wordless vocal line with a hint of the nursery rhyme in Jabberwocky (Zvahlav aneb Šatičky Slaměného Huberta, 1971) and the brass fanfares of Leonardo’s Diary (Leonardův deník) and The Castle of Otranto. If you have the recent BFI edition of his complete shorts, there’s an option on disc one to play just the Liška-scored films - in fact, the whole “themed programmes” idea developed from this single ambition.

But Švankmajer’s work formed a tiny part of Liška’s hugely prolific output, and I’m very conscious that I’ve only just scratched the surface. Two of his more accessible scores are the gorgeous, swooning opulence of Juraj Herz’ The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol, 1968) with its incense-tinged a cappella accompaniment to the ecstatic ramblings of the film’s demented protagonist, and the even more extraordinary score for František Vláčil’s masterpiece Marketa Lazarová, which sounds like an unholy collision between Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, medieval plainchant and the sonic innovations of American eccentric Harry Partch (like Partch, Liška built his own instruments when conventional ones failed to match the sounds in his head). And for Jindřich Polák’s sci-fi opus Icarus XB-1 (Ikarie XB-1, aka Voyage to the End of the Universe) he proved himself just as adept when it came to electronics, his score here having more than a hint of Juan Garcia Esquivel’s then-contemporaneous space-age bachelor pad albums.

But, as his IMDB filmography reveals, there’s much, much more, and one of the perennial pleasures of exploring 1960s and 1970s Czech cinema comes from the almost immediate realisation, usually well before the onscreen credit confirms it, that another Liška revelation is in prospect. And given the current inaccessibility of many of the titles, it’s a wellspring I’m unlikely to exhaust any time soon.

(Sadly, there’s very little information available online (or indeed elsewhere) about Liška in English, but a reasonably hefty Czech-language biography can be found here. Sadly, my own Czech has atrophied to the point where it doesn’t stretch much beyond ‘Happy Birthday’, the title of this post)

In late April, the Barbican Arts Centre in London is hosting a week-long season, Censorship as a Creative Force, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute, the Czech Centre and the Hungarian Cultural Centre.

I’ve already booked tickets for the two highlights - a panel discussion on April 25 with the extraordinarily impressive line-up of Andrzej Wajda, István Szabó and Jiří Menzel, and Menzel pops up again on April 27 to introduce a preview of his new(ish) film I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2006). The latter has been out on DVD in the Czech Republic for some time, but it definitely doesn’t have English subtitles.

Other screenings include Wajda’s Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1976) on April 26, Szabó’s Taking Sides (Szembesites, 2001) and Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, 1965) on April 28 (presumably separately) and Zdeněk Sirový’s Funeral Rites (Smuteční slavnost, 1967) on April 30. There also seems to be an extended run (30 March to 30 April) of Menzel’s long-banned 1969 film Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti, 1969).

And I’ve been meaning to do a proper Menzel DVD survey ever since uploading this sketchy overview a few months ago, so I’ll try to schedule that for this time next month.

While researching something else (as is always the way), I stumbled upon former Guardian critic Derek Malcolm’s A Century of Films - a survey of his personal Top 100, with a robust defence of each film’s inclusion.

And on glancing down the list again for the first time since 2001, I notice that nine of his choices came from central and eastern Europe (or, in the case of Blanche, from a Polish filmmaker adapting a Polish play). This is perhaps unsurprising for a critic who came of age in the 1960s when Jancsó, Tarkovsky and the Czech New Wave dominated cinematic proceedings, but it’s gratifying nonetheless.

So here’s a direct link to his individual reviews:

• Andrei Rublev (Андрей Рублёв, d. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, USSR)
• Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, d. Andrzej Wajda, 1958, Poland)
• Blanche (d. Walerian Borowczyk, 1970, France)
• Closely Observed Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, d. Jiri Menzel, 1966, Czechoslovakia)
• Love (Szerelem, d. Károly Makk, 1971, Hungary)
• The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, d. Miklós Jancsó, 1965, Hungary)
• A Short Film About Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu, d. Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1987, Poland)
• Strike (Стачка, d. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, USSR)
• W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism (W.R. - Misterije organizma, d. Dušan Makavejev, 1970, Yugoslavia)

There are some intriguing-looking spin-off events from the British Library’s ongoing Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 – 1937 exhibition, including two that have strong links with the 1930s avant-garde cinema of Czechoslovakia and Poland.

The full list of January events is here, and the two I’m particularly interested in are:

Wednesday 9 January 2008
An evening for the Themersons

A celebration of the eclectic genius of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, including film, music, readings and discussion. From 1930 the Themersons collaborated on experiments in photography and film, and became highly active pioneer members of the Polish cinematic Avant-Garde. Their early works combined an innovative use of photograms, photography and photo-collage techniques. In later years they moved to Britain, becoming better known for their books for children, as painters, publishers and theatre designers.

Presented in association with LUX and the Polish Cultural Institute.

Event time: 18.30 – 20.00
Location: Conference Centre, British Library
Price: £6.00 (concessions £4)

(I’ve seen the two films that the Themersons made while in exile in Britain in 1944-45 - Calling Mr Smith and The Eye and the Ear. The first is a somewhat hectoring but visually enthralling propagandist collage, aiming to show the British people the likely consequences - both political and cultural - of failing to stop Hitler, while the second comprises four beautiful abstract interpretations of four pieces of music by Karol Szymanowski.)

Tuesday 15 January 2008 (repeated Tuesday 22 January)
The Czech Avant Garde: Devětsil and Karel Teige

This talk is given by Susan Halstead, Slavonic and Eastern European Collections Tickets are free but must be booked in advance. Spaces are limited. These talks are not seated.

Event time: 12.30 – 13.00
Location: In the Breaking the Rules Exhibition
Price: free