Exam Period on a Shot of Gin, a Couple Bucks and a Bit of Gall
Some of the best film offerings of last fall came from the Radcliffe Quad Film Society. Showing a commercial stubborness and just about the best taste around, it was the only film society on campus that would replace probably the best silent dramatic film ever made (M., by Fritz Lang) with another Lang classic that is almost never shown--Metropolis. They're also responsible for bringing you Lubitsch's great The Blue Angel. This reading period the folks at Radcliffe are doing a retrospective of Czech New Wave films, something they did five years ago, replete with screenwriters, film makers and critics. The films of the New Wave are all characterized by black, startlingly funny humor, and people who need a study break, or need to see others in plights more Kafkaesque than their own, would do well to check it out.
Probably the best known Czech director is Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and Forman's Black Peter will be on a double bill with a film called Intimate Lighting beginning at 7:30 Saturday night. But Forman is probably not even the best of the Czech New Wave directors. The films are all almost topheavy with black humor--some are political allegories, but don't beat you over the head with it. The Czech film industry began to burdgeon in the early '60s under Dubcek and was basically crushed when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968; most of the top directors either emigrated or were thrown in jail. Quite a few of the films feature amateur actors, and they're all concerned with how ordinary people deal with life and the bureaucracy in a socialist state--generally the way you're meeting reading period--with hope, pathos, and humor.
The show begins Friday with Jan Kadar's film, A Shop on the Main Street, which won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Martin Rochek, who helped get the festival together, says Radcliffe chipped in some money to help out, and they're hoping Kadar can show up for a screening and questions, but it's unlikely. On the double bill with The Shop is Long Live the Republic, a film about Czech life during and after World War II. The show begins at 7, in Hilles Library.
On Saturday the Festival continues withBlack Peter and Intimate Lighting (Hilles, 7:30), and follows in a Sunday matinee with Loves of a Blonde and Capricious Summer, neither of which I know anything about, showtime's at 2. Sunday night is Daisys, made by the foremost Czech woman director, Vera Chytloda. Daisys is a feminist film with a Bunuel touch; it was condemned in official circles as decadent and bourgeois because it showed a foodfight. The other half is Jan Nemez's A Report on the Party and the Guests, and his 1966 feature was frowned upon also because of its political overtones, but basically because--you guessed it--included in his cast of unprofessional actors were almost all of Czechoslovakia's leading dissidents.
Rochek and crew have used some of the money to get Joseph Skvoresky, a screenwriter, to appear at the festival, and also two people named A. Lehm and D. Oliva, apparently highly-regarded as critics (Lehm helped choose and order the films), and they're comments are bound to instructive, because Czech films of the New Wave are complex, multi-layered movies. Combining the manic blackness of Altman with the visual scope of the great German directors--you either feel as if you could step into the great wide spaces on the screen and raise a family or immensely claustrophobic--this was the finest expression of cinema east of Paris since Eisenstien, and foreshadowed the cold brilliant world of the young Germans like Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. At any rate, it's a good opportunity to be hugely entertained, support a film society that hasn't sold out and done Jaws in the Science Center, and learn a little about a neglected area of filmmaking you probably wouldn't know otherwise. Tickets are on sale at Currier dining hall, $2 for each showing of two films, and Friday and Sunday nights come especially recommended.
One Sings, the Other Doesn't. This is a nice film about women's liberation. But nice is unfortunately all. Yes, it does tell the story of two likeable and very different women, a wild-haired non-conformist pop singer (Valerie Mairess) and a reserved, soulful-eyed young mother (Therese Liotard) devoted to her two children. Yes, it does portray the lasting, supportive friendship between the two in a way that few films have examined women's relationships before, since movies have largely been a man's medium and most male directors don't have that experience to draw on. And yes, it does convey a valuable message in demonstrating how women can learn to live without men, if that's what their full development as women and individuals requires. Particularly moving is the story of the young mother, Marie. After her artist lover commits suicide because he cannot provide for the family, she sacrifices all to survive with her two small children, and as her self-confidence grows, finds she can be perfectly content on her own. And there is something, too, in the saga of the feminist groupie, Pomme, although most of her polemical songs and free-spirited antics are pretty silly. But the value of all this lies in its novelty, not in its depth. For in all her feminist enthusiasm, French director Agnes Varda fails to delve beyond the difficult circumstances of these women's lives to probe into their hearts and psyches. The resolutions of the two journeys are too simple--the widow cautiously remarries and finds happiness, while the singer leaves her domineering husband and, lo and behold, also finds happiness. There is an important moral here: that cutting loose entails pain and uncertainty, but that it can work. But Varda ties the free-floating ends back up just a bit too swiftly and neatly.