Literate and witty, playful and poetic, visually evocative and tonally rich -- these are but a few of the qualities marking the wide-ranging films exported by Czechoslovakia in the '60s. At a time when our art house cinemas were dominated by Japan, France and Italy, this small country roared onto the world cinema landscape, winning awards, critical laudits and audiences' hearts. Between the chaos of WWII and the rigorous watch of Stalin, Czech cinema laid dormant for over a decade. Unfettered by the weight of an indigineous film history, but with a deep and sophisticated culture to draw upon, a generation of filmmakers explored the possibilities of cinematic storytelling in fresh and interesting ways. Czech New Wave films are rarely screened in the U.S., so it's a pleasure to share with you four of the movement's most distinct masterpieces, in gorgeous archival prints from the Czech National Film Archive.
2/6 @ 7:30pm / Series: Czech Your Head Daisies Daisies is a bubbling and buoyant spring of irrepressible female creativity; it is an overflowing audio-visual bouquet of color, music, and texture; it is a freewheeling and effervescent farce, a formal free-for-all, a paradoxical mixture of bourgeois indulgence and cultural critique, and it's your next favorite movie. Two young Czech girls (both named Marie) decide that the world is so corrupt that they might as well join in, and they do so with wild abandon -- prancing, food-fighting, pranking old men, carousing in nightclubs, and creating anarchy everywhere they go. Director Vera Chytilova's love of cinema's potential is both playful and palpable, as exuberant as the spirit of the two "daisies" whose misadventures have surprising weight and meaning. Banned upon its release by the Czech government, Daisies has become a major cult favorite thanks to its dazzling setpieces, the charismatic and fashionable art-girl heroines, and an infectious sense of fun that's as potent today as it was when it first premiered behind the Iron Curtain.
Dir. Věra Chytilová, 1966, 35mm, 74 min.
Watch an excerpt from "Daisies"!
Tickets - $10
2/13 @ 7:30pm / Series: Czech Your Head Intimate Lighting (w/ director Ivan Passer in person!)
Watching Intimate Lighting is like having drinks with an old, rarely seen friend on a warm summer night -- after some gentle laughs (too mild to ache one's belly) and a wistful reminisce or two, it's off to bed in a warm and drunken shroud of soft, sweet melancholy. After co-writing Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman's Ball for Milos Forman, Ivan Passer directed this quotidian comedy centered around a brief semi-professional visit between two such friends; one is a professional musician, the other an amateur, and together they will play in a local concert. The "city mouse/country mouse" storytelling is deceptive artless and endlessly pleasing. Amusing incidents, observed absurdities, and other soft-sold bits and pieces of comic business all swirl around in constant orchestration. Music seems to imbue everything; even men peeing against a wall, or the sounds of wives snoring is conducted in graceful and humorous rhythms. With its small cast, a bucolic setting, and the slightest of stories -- more of an anecdote, really -- Passer has created not so much a pastoral symphony, but a chamber piece. One you can enjoy time and time again, as the sun sets on another day.
Dir. Ivan Passer, 1965, 35mm, 71 min.
Watch an excerpt from "Intimate Lighting"!
Tickets - $10
2/20 @ 7:00pm / Series: Czech Your Head Marketa Lazarova "Marketa Lazarova is without a doubt the best historical film ever made anywhere" - Film Quarterly ...the most convincing film about the Middle Ages made anywhere" - Sight & Sound, 75 Hidden Gems of Cinema
Repeatedly voted the best Czech film ever made, Marketa Lazarova is a harrowingly beautiful epic about whose blood runs thick with the passions and humors of the Dark Ages. In this tale of two warring clans, and a young maiden caught between them, director František Vláčil set out to make a film that transcended the usual period piece anachronisms, not just in details but also in spirit. He filmed for three years with his cast and crew in the Sumava forest, where he says they all "lived like animals...lacking food, and dressed in rags," to help create the tangible atmosphere he wanted. Rich animastic imagery, stark and savage snow-filled landscapes, and virtuoso filmmaking that rivals Tarkovsky for his mystic beauty and Kurosawa in its focused ferocity, together all make Marketa Lazarova a must-see.
Dir. František Vláčil, 1967, 35mm, 162 min.
Watch an excerpt from "Marketa Lazarova"!
Tickets - $10
2/27 @ 7:30pm / Series: Czech Your Head Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders
"Virtually every shot is a knockout." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
As joyful as it is impossible to pin down, VAHWOW is a haunting psychoactive period piece which plunges the beautiful heroine Valerie into a phantasmagorical world of thirsty vampires, the dark arts and dreamy free love -- all set to one of the great film scores of the era, a cocktail of psych-folk and avant-garde classical by the great Luboš Fišer. The film opens with 13-year-old Valerie's first menstruation and subsequent sexual awakening, the unsteady discovery of which lets loose a torrent of quixotic, hallucinatory experiences both terrifying and beautiful; amongst a haze of shifting tones and a flurry of role reversals and Gothic nightmares in broad daylight, Valerie floats along, buoyed by the fears and fantasies that come with nascent sexuality and teenage fantasy. This bewitching brew is a must to behold on 35mm -- do not miss it.
Dir. Jaromil Jireš, 1970, 35mm, 77 min.
Watch the trailer for "Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders"!
Tickets - $10
Masters of the Long Take / Early Saturdays in March
If the silver screen is, as Andre Bazin said, a kind of window through which we gaze upon the captured reality of film, then no single technique lends itself more to pure picturesque beauty than the single, flowing long take. Unbroken streams of time beat at their own rate, and even the most minute and subtle changes tover the course of a long take carry weight and significance. The director's hand is still felt, in the selection of where we look, how long we look, and in the choreographed ballet between objects, people and the camera itself. At their best, these macho demonstrations of mise-en-scene are powerful examples of the sculptural possibilities of a single continuous piece of camerawork. From the unfurling, revealing scrolls of Mizoguchi to the intricate dances of Ophuls, we present four master directors' personal approaches to the long take.
3/6 @ 7:00pm / Series: Masters of the Long Take The Man From London
After several years' absence, Bela Tarr returned to the big screen in 2007 with his latest feature, The Man From London, a philosophical noir parable that, in the hands of another director like Sam Fuller, would play fast 'n rough, but in Tarr's signature slow-burn style, radiates with a seductive, chilly intensity. The dreary Maloin (played with morbid creakiness by Miroslav Krobot) works at a gloomy seaside port, and catches a sudden murder taking place on a dock. He recovers a mysterious suitcase full of cash abandoned in the bloody struggle -- which only worsens his despair-laden life, as the moral implications of keeping the loot weigh on him like concrete loafers. Tarr's languid, epic takes, upwards of the ten-minute mark (as in the mesmeric opening shot, exploring every inch of the dock before shockingly switching gears to reveal the murderous act), offer stark accompaniment to the story of a man trapped in the ferocious ambience of his own indecision.
Dirs. Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2007, 35mm, 139 min.
Watch the trailer for "The Man From London"!
Tickets - $10
3/13 @ 7:15pm / Series: Masters of the Long Take Sansho The Bailiff
Director Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterful use of depth-of-field and camera movement reveals itself subtly and powerfully in this classic Japanese melodrama. The immersive power of its long takes conjures the poetic, emotional tone of a folk tale, yet Sansho the Bailiff remains startling in its realistic depiction of poverty, suffering and the cruelty of power. The family of an exiled provincial lord, travelling through a treacherous countryside, are tricked by bandits and sold into slavery; the two children, separated from their mother, find themselves in the servitude of the heartless Sansho the Bailiff. Through years of brutal treatment and toil, the children grow up, waiting for their chance to escape and reunite with their long-lost mother, now a courtesan on a distant island. Mizoguchi’s technique rarely draws attention to itself; by limiting his use of the long-take to the scenes of the greatest dramatic impact, the director frames a profound humanist message with unparalleled immediacy and clarity. Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954, 35mm, 124 min.
Watch the trailer for "Sansho The Bailiff"!
Tickets - $10
3/20 @ 7:30pm / Series: Masters of the Long Take The Earrings of Madame De...
One of Max Ophuls’ wittiest depictions of boudoir intrigue, Madame De... proves that exquisite technique and elaborately orchestrated camera movements can be used as effectively for comedy as for tragedy. In this densely-plotted satire of marital fidelity, we follow the eponymous earrings as they are sold, gambled, gifted and grifted between an arrogant general (Charles Boyer), his impetuous wife (Danielle Darrieux), and her Italian aristocrat lover (Bicycle Thieves director Vittorio de Sica). As in Lola Montes and La Ronde, Ophuls uses ornate camera movements to depict desire as the ultimate currency of high society. Just as this desire defies the rigid social order, so too does Ophuls’ camera defy, as in the legendary ballroom sequence, the boundaries of space and time. The masterful staging of traveling shots is Ophuls’ claim to fame, and he surely doesn’t disappoint here, with dazzling extended displays of set design, choreography and performance from the very first shot to the last. Dir. Max Ophuls, 1953, 35mm, 105 min.
Watch the opening of "The Earrings of Madame De..."!
Tickets - $10
3/27 @ 7:30pm / Series: Masters of the Long Take The Round-Up
A gripping parable of power and rebellion drawn from the pages of Hungary’s tumultuous history, The Round-Up is perhaps the most timeless and universal of director Miklos Jancso's films of the '60s and '70s. Set in a prison camp on the vast, desolate Hungarian steppe, the film chronicles the oppressive techniques of the Austrian military as they torture, humiliate and turn their captives, a downtrodden mob of peasants and revolutionaries, against one another. The film's moral ambiguity and dispassionate depiction of suffering invokes not only the Communist regime of the film's era, but the Abu Ghraib prison scandal as well. Though the film hints at the hardcore formalism of Jancso's later works, The Round-Up strikes a delicate balance between experimentation and narrative intrigue; Jancso's dazzling widescreen cinematography and precise arrangement of bodies in space never overwhelm the urgent, focused storytelling that propels this classic of political cinema. Dir. Miklós Jancsó, 1965, 35mm, 95 min.
Daisies
Intimate Lighting
Marketa Lazarova
Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders 
The Man From London
Sansho The Bailiff
The Earrings of Madame De...
The Round-Up
