Czech New Wave

Not too long ago, the idea of a Czechoslovak Film Festival would have seemed as unlikely as a yacht regatta in Peking. When Jan Kadar's The Shop on Main Street was shown at New York's Lincoln Center Film Festival in 1965, it had no U.S. theater bookings; neither did Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde, when it opened the festival the following year. Shop went on to win an Oscar as the year's best foreign-language film, while Blonde, accompanied by delighted reviews, eventually proved a profitable box-office success. Czech movies may soon be as much a staple on the art-house circuit as the effervescent outpourings of France's New Wave directors were a few years ago.

Last week, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened its doors to the first American festival of Czechoslovak films--a moviegoer's feast of a dozen pictures never before shown in the U.S. Anxious to avoid their past neglect, commercial exhibitors snapped up five of them before the festival opened; more are almost certain to be booked. The distributors are making no mistake. Based on the festival evidence, it is clear that the Czech New Wave may soon reach tidal proportions. Four of the most interesting features:

Courage for Every Day. Two lovers meet on a hilltop. In a scene reminiscent of Room at the Top, the camera shows waves of grass rippling idyllically --then cuts to another angle to show the backdrop of an ugly industrial town behind them. The film message is that there is room at the bottom for workers who still believe in the drab cliches of doctrinaire Communism. As the film's central figure, Jan Kacer plays a slogan-spouting, blockheaded factory worker --a model product of the Stalinist old regime. Representing the newer, more relaxed style of Communism are his cheeky blonde mistress (Jana Brejchova) and an impudent young cynic (Josef Abrham), who refuses to echo Kacer's unquestioning beliefs. A puritanical bore who turns off friends and fellow factory workers, Kacer is beaten in a beer hall by resentful colleagues, ultimately comes to realize that his pompous pronunciamentos can no longer be the life of the Party. Obviously influenced by the early Antonioni, Director Evald Schorm, 36, shows his courage less in style than in subject matter. Because of his iconoclasm, the 1964 film was banned for export until recently.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone is a shattering splice of life after the third World War. No one is left alive except eight young women and one old one (Beta Ponicanova), who wander like nomads over the sere landscape. The nubile girls have never seen a man; their leader can scarcely remember what one looks like. Equipped with some of the trappings of the defunct civilization--tin cans, rifles, combat boots--they live like savages, telling the years by counting the rings of a tree trunk, hunting by blasting fish out of the river water with grenades.

Quite by accident, they meet the last man on earth--an aged Adam, too feeble to father children. His prize possession is a windup Gramophone with one record, Roll Out the Barrel, a toy the girls covet. At his dwelling--the abandoned Hotel Ozone--the old lady enjoys one final, dreamlike dinner by candlelight. Then she dies, knowing that the race will die with her and with the girls she has overseen since their childhood. Her charges pack up to resume their wandering, and try to take the Gramophone with them. When the old man protests, they gun him down like an animal and resume their aimless journey. Director Jan Schmidt has given Ozone the spare style of a Kafka fable, abetted by Ponicanova's tragic portrait of a woman who seems to be lifted directly from a Kollwitz engraving.

The First Cry owes much to the work of Alain Resnais. In such films as Hiroshima Mon Amour and La Guerre Est Finie, Resnais flashed back and forth between present and past, giving sense impressions that made the pictures considerably more than the sum of their parts. Jaromil Jires, 31, who made The First Cry three years ago, tries the same technique with moderately interesting results. A young woman is awakened by labor pains. She arouses her husband (Josef Abrham) and begins to recall their first meeting, the affair that followed, the marriage. Abrham, a television repairman, takes her to the hospital, then goes on his rounds, gazing at the young with the fresh insight of a new father. In one sequence, as he watches schoolchildren make a game of an airraid drill, his mind--and the camera--recall the real thing, complete with screaming jets and exploding bombs.

The First Cry gains its greatest power when it abandons trickery and makes surprisingly caustic side excursions into everyday life in Czechoslovakia: the ugly racial prejudice that surfaces when a black African stays too long in a phone booth and precipitates a fight; the prudish moralism of a policeman who makes Abrham turn the painting of a nude face down; the arrogance of a movie critic who puts down a "bourgeois Italian film" while ogling a couple of girls in bathing suits. Like many films about the young by the young, The First Cry counts somewhat less as a picture than as a promise.

The Daisies is a hippie's pipe dream that looks and sounds like something concocted by a den member of America's own underground cinema clique. Made with Marxism far less than Harpo, the film is not about anything except itself. Two teen-age girls, labeled Marie I and Marie II (Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbonova), live like dolls, chattering and giggling, floundering about in their oversized bed, making a shambles of sets and sense. In scenes suffused with unearthly tints and shades, the girls attack each other with scissors and cut off each other's heads, wear butterflies instead of bikinis, eat food ads instead of food, swing from a chandelier over a banquet table they have just tromped into a mangled mess.

Pictorially, The Daisies is brilliantly audacious; nearly every moment is overlaid with iridescence and dazzling color combinations. In subject, unfortunately, it is little more than another of Dada's precocious offspring. The leaden symbolism of the girls snipping pickles, sausages and bananas is only one example of a script that has all the consistency of an amateur happening. Director Vera Chytilova views her film as social commentary: "A necrologue about a negative way of life." The Daisies' nose-thumbing dedication--"To all those whose indignation is limited to a smashed-up salad"--suggests that its real theme is absurdity.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.