Sweet Light from a Dark Casino

As film festivals go, the biennial splash at the baths of Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, seldom causes more than a ripple of interest in the world of cinema. Last week, however, the centuries-old spa--known as Carlsbad when Dostoevsky used to gamble away rubles at the casino, while the crowned heads of Europe took the waters to prolong their reigns--was jammed with film buffs, critics, buyers and distributors from all across Europe and the U.S. None of them had anything more than a peripheral interest in the dreary assortment of 42 films from such ersatz Hollywoods as Mongolia and Tunisia that were officially in competition for Karlovy's Crystal Globe Award. Instead, the moviemongers spent their days traipsing off to small, crowded screening rooms, tucked away on cobbled side streets or in sedate hillside sanatoriums, to see the latest work being produced by the host country.

Czechoslovakia is the latest country to have splashed up a new wave of fresh, original films by a coterie of talented directors and writers. "It's not a wave, it's a flood," proudly says Jan Kadar, whose The Shop on Main Street (co-directed by Elmar Klos) won this year's Oscar as the best foreign film. Within the past three weeks, two other Czech films have opened in Manhattan, and an astonishing 55 more have been acquired for U.S. distribution in the near future. Already festooned with garlands of laurels from European competitions, Milos Forman's The Loves of a Blonde has been chosen to open the annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center this fall.

"Oh" for an Answer. At their best, the new Czech films combine a zest for cinematic experimentation with a thematic audacity and wry humor that is surprising in a Communist culture. A recurrent motif of the Prague cinemakers is the plight of the dogged individualist who bombards society with question marks, and usually receives "Oh" for an answer. Black Peter, Forman's first feature film, is a droll defense of an aimless Czech teenager, who drifts from senseless jobs to hopeless dance-hall encounters to empty lectures at home. In the devastating symbolism of Joseph Kilian, by 30-year-old Director Pavel Juracek, the protagonist borrows a cat from a pet shop and is entangled in a bleak, Kafkaesque nightmare while trying to return it. Painting a surprisingly harsh portrait of Communism's common man, Evald Schorm, 34, debunks bureaucracy with unmuffled freedom in his Courage for Every Day. Chosen by a magazine as the exemplar of the socialist ideal, a factory worker stumbles over every slogan, ends by trying to numb his senses with sex and alcohol.

Giving life to such themes, the Czechs frequently blend the understated documentary techniques of cinema verite with a slice-of-life narrative style that suggests rather than tells, synopsizes rather than expounds. Ivan Passer's Intimate Lighting, for example, is an all but plotless comic gem about a concert violinist and his doxy who go off to spend a country weekend with friends. Seemingly as improvised as jazz, the film breathes like life itself, reflecting a family warmth and a humanist feeling for nature that recalls the work of France's Jean Renoir. In Vera Chytilova's Something Different, the camera methodically records the daily routine of two women--an aging Olympic gymnast who has sacrificed everything for the sake of her gold medals, a bored Prague housewife who joylessly tries adultery to escape the prison of her marriage. Though their banal lives are utterly different, Director Chytilova subtly evokes the sense that they are sisters beneath the skin.

Tracts & Children's Tales. It was the Nazis who taught the Czechs the professional craft of film making when, during World War II, Joseph Goebbels' technically astute propagandists took over the country's embryonic movie industry. After the 1948 Red coup, the nationalized Czech industry began churning out an endless stream of slow-grinding socialist tracts that bored even the bureaucrats who ordered them into production. Then, the country's only claim to film fame was the veteran puppeteer and animator Jiri Trnka, 54, whose gentle re-creations of such children's tales as The Emperor's Nightingale are considered classics of their kind.

By 1961, the Czech political hierarchy had begun to give a certain amount of artistic leeway to the moviemakers, virtually all of them graduates of the exacting, state-run Prague Film Faculty. Even though all projects are subject to precensorship, movies are rarely banned, and deviationists seldom punished. Recently, Jan Nemec's On Celebrations and Guests, a scathing attack on Communist authoritarianism, was withdrawn from distribution by the government. His fellow directors assume that the ban will eventually be lifted, and Nemec himself is still on the payroll of Prague's big Barrandov studios, working on another film.

Fame = Fortune. The Czechs have already discovered that success can be a mixed blessing. Well aware that not everything they have produced is a jeweled masterpiece, the better directors are annoyed that distributors are now snatching up old films of theirs that might have been better left in the vaults. Jiri Weiss, for example, is known in the U.S. only through his Sweet Light in a Dark Room, a conventional wartime melodrama, made six years ago, that he would just as soon forget.

For some, fame also means fortune, Western style. Forman, whose monthly salary at Barrandov is only $100, plus a bonus for every film, has a $100,000 contract to direct two movies for Italy's Carlo Ponti next year. European producers are dangling attractive offers before Actress Jana Brejchova, 26, who is probably the nearest thing to a sex symbol that the director-oriented Czech movies have produced. The authorities, however, are pleased by the thought of across-the-curtain cooperation: eleven movies by Italian, German, U.S. and British firms are under way in Czechoslovakia, using local facilities and technicians. And Barrandov is planning eight films to be made in cooperation with Western European studios.

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