This book examines links between theme, genre and visual style, and looks at the ways in which a range of traditions has extended across different historical periods and political regimes. It provides a unique study of areas of Central European film history.
This text explores the legacy of the legendary Czech surrealist filmmaker, a key influence on directors such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, and one of the greatest animators in cinema history.
"The Czechoslovak New Wave" was originally published in 1985 and was quickly established as the world's leading authoritative English-language text. A study of the most significant movement in post-war Central and East European cinemas, it examines the origins of a movement against the political and cultural developments of the 1960s leading to the Prague Spring of 1968. Peter Hames also summarizes key aspects of Czech and Slovak histories between the wars and in the 1940s and 1950s. Directors discussed include Milos Forman, Jan Svankmajer, Věra Chytilová, Jiri Menzel, Jan Nemec.
Czech animator Jan Svankmajer is one of the most distinctive and influential of contemporary filmmakers. As a leading member of the Prague Surrealist Group, his work is linked to a rich avant-garde tradition and an uncompromising moral stance that brought frequent tensions with the authorities in the normalization years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Svankmajer's formative influences have been the pre-war surrealists, the Prague of Rudolf II, experimental theatre, folk puppetry and, above all, the political traumas of the past 50 years. Like his contemporaries--including playwright president Vaclav Havel, and, in exile, novelist Milan Kundera and filmmaker Milos Forman--Svankmajer's dominant life experiences have been the realities of the Stalinist system, both the explicit state terror of the 1950s and the Brezhnevist neo-Stalinism of the 1970s and the 1980s.After training in puppetry and working in the Prague theatre, he made his first film in 1964. He directed a number of important films in the 1960s, including the live-action and Kafkaesque "Byt" ("The Flat," 1968) and "Zahrada" ("The Garden," 1968) and consolidated his international reputation with "Moznosti dialogu" ("Dimensions of Dialogue") in 1982. Since then, he has continued his highly visual and poetic approach in two feature-length films, "Neco z Alenky" ("Alice," 1987) and "Lekce Faust" ("Faust," 1994). As a filmmaker, Svankmajer is constantly exploring and analyzing his concern with power, fear and anxiety, confrontation and destruction, magic, the irrational and the absurd, and displays a bleak outlook on the possibilities for dialogue. In challenging accepted narrative, the bourgeoisie of realism (nezval), and the thematic and formal conventions of the mainstream media, Svankmajer's work is startlingly dynamic, subversive, and confrontational.
Československá nová vlna byla obecně považována za jedno z nejdůležitějších hnutí ve světové kinematografii hned po italském neorealismu. Představovala obecnější a trvalejší rozchod se socialistickým realismem než polské filmy konce 50.let a maďarské počátku 70. let 20. století. Světovou proslulost jim vydobyla řada cen z mezinárodních festivalů v 60. letech a kritický a komerční průlom na západní trhy, který vyvrcholil udělením Oscara Obchodu na korze a Ostře sledovaným vlakům v letech 1965 a 1967.