On Screen

...A set of hilarious yet sinister consequences results...

...One of these is being tuned: While we see a stop-shot of Braun crumpled over a piano, a triadic progression of notes climbs higher with ghoulish insistence...

...The films that made America aware of what has been called "the Czech film miracle" were, perhaps predictably, less than first-rate: Kadar and Klos' The Shop on Main Street and Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde...

...Though not a single part, however short, is done less than expertly, Josef Somr, as the philandering dispatcher, is a veritable bastion of absurd fatuity yet full of feckless geniality as well...

...The feeble pretense that this emulation of what is worst in the West can be made to conform to what is worst in the East only makes Daisies heir to the worst of both possible worlds...

...there are healthy signs of a coming efflorescence in Hungary and Yugoslavia...

...Similar principles obtain in film-making, at least in countries where it is a group activity in which young people can band together, and not the prerogative of a senescent commercial empire or the refuge of untrained and undisciplined drifters...

...Let me switch now to the bottom of the barrel, Daisies, by Vera Chytilova, a one-time fashion model and never director...

...Things are charged with an immanent glory that has nothing to do with materialism or fetishism...

...besides, youth is almost by definition radical, and woe betide should it be otherwise...

...Out of the 12 films shown, one seems to me a masterpiece, four are very fine indeed, one is above average, and four are not without their moments...

...But there is also in him a visual and textural elegance that suggests Bergman and Antonioni...

...Nevertheless, we should be grateful to those ice-breaking films that, in all likelihood, made possible the present Festival of New Czechoslovak Cinema, jointly sponsored by the Film Department of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art...

...an intelligent and forceful examination of people under the Nazi terror, done as much through images and the use of sound and music as is humanly, or cinematically, possible...

...Then, to get it past government censorship, it must be supplied with the limpest cop-out: The wholly amoral girls are suddenly afflicted at being ignored by members of the working class, and a chandelier that changes into an atom bomb (the dreariest cliche of underground cinema) drops on them for good measure...

...they translate into appalling English????a man, for example, refers to his mistress as "little besom...

...But he has done more: In any number of quietly puncturing ways Bocan pokes fun at existing social conditions in the Socialist Republic, and at the tyranny of the inferior many over the more talented individual...

...We are now taken on a round of escapades, disconnected, silly and essentially uneventful, in which these cretinous beatniks cavort in a manner derived from the dregs of silent comedy, Godard, and Warhol (who has nothing but dregs...

...But there is also posthumous pollination by the work of great Czech artists in other fields...

...A dispatcher trainee at a puny railroad station, he has troubles with his work that stem from greater troubles with lovemaking, which terrifies him...

...The camera often avidly closes in on an object...

...More important, I think, are the novels and plays by Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, with their bittersweet, ironic love of man...

...and, best of all, a Boccac-cian puppet film by the master puppeteer Jiri Trnka, Archangel Gabriel, one of the very few short subjects I dare unhesitatingly pronounce a work of lasting art...

...And the film abounds in wit, delicacy, and a kind of intelligent melancholy...

...and, through Olmi, of their common master, Fellini...

...That is a brave touch, and these films are replete with such bravery...

...The tension of a razzia is built up with superlative, cool understatement, and the terror is all the more chilling for being scaled down and, as it were, humanized...

...None of these influences, if such they be, is obtrusive...

...There is something so spontaneous, unconcerned, and complete about such a performance that it affects our entire sensorium????finger tips, nostrils and palate no less than eyes and ears...

...and in one country, Czechoslovakia, the film renaissance is in full, heady progress...

...If the film errs in any way, it is in underlining too hard at times, in striving too much for expressionist effects...

...But the greatest triumphs of this film are the photography of Jan Kalis and the mood of increasing horror of a diffuse, universalized sort that the director is able to convey...

...Menzel and his cinematographer, Jaromir Sofr, have achieved some of the most moving effects by the use of the camera unaided by anything except, perhaps, lighting and set design...

...A film critic is dictating a review of an unspecified Antonioniesque film...

...a chance event propels him to rise, however recalcitrantly, from pariah-dom to heroism...

...I was particularly struck by the opening sequence, showing a synagogue converted into a warehouse for confiscated Jewish property...

...But the photography yields miracle after miracle????just the way the circular staircase is shot, or the pathos wrung from the protagonist's spectacles is worthy of a critical study????and everything from wildly varied background music to the skill of the bit players blends into a whole as artistic as it is devastating...

...Menzel's actors perform with uncanny expertise...

...What specific influences contribute to this large, luminous, sudden constellation of film-makers...

...Even though the film ends tragically, Dr...

...Personally, I would like to think also that an echo of the great composer Leos Janacek has enriched these films in which, as in Janacek's music, the half-grotesque, half-plaintive melodies and rhythms of Czech speech are transubstantiated into the texture and character of an art...

...No less engaging, though in a much lighter vein, is Nobody Laughs Last, in which an art instructor and critic who shrinks from confronting people with unpleasant judgments tells a white lie about the work of a dogged but untalented middle-aged aspirant to art his-torianship...

...His mind wanders and he dictates: "The film is remarkably outspoken for a work made in a Socialist . . . er . . . capitalist country...

...and that strange blend of surrealism, humanism, and Communism that produced the poetry of Viteslav Nezval and Jiri Wolker...

...What makes Nobody Laughs Last especially interesting for me is that it falls into the middle of the thematic scale...

...There is famu, the Czech film school, which gives fledgling cineastes years of expert guidance, artistic freedom, and financial security...

...I wish I had more space to expatiate about this superb film, but let me at least say a final word about Menzel, who also appears as an accomplished comic actor in this and several other films of the series...

...This is a rank weed of the Godard-Warhol variety, to which Jaroslav Kucera's often stunning and sometimes only clever photography proves a peripheral and adscititious blessing...

...The amateur actresses are, furthermore, supremely untalented and reasonably unattractive, and the whole thing is further embellished with surrealist touches a la Hans Richter, himself a great purveyor of dregs...

...if Czechoslovakia does not have an Oscar or Otakar, one should promptly be created for Somr...

...They, like almost all these Czech actors, know not only how to be larger than life when necessary but also how to be smaller...

...I shall go on about this Festival next time...

...These conditions, evidently, are much more likely to be met by some form of radicalism than by conservatism or reaction...

...Zbynek Brynych's film is remarkable not only for its sympathetic probing of the hero, unsurpassably played by Miroslav Machacek, but also for its imaginative and hallucinatory recreation of a cross section of people as they react to a wanted man's hiding out in their building, their untidy private lives meshing with their behavior in the emergency...

...Not only is all this uproariously unfunny, it is also unconscionably dragged out...

...The reasons (as Tynan must know perfectly well) are fairly obvious...

...The best thing about Closely Guarded Trains is that it impresses one as unique, indebted ultimately only to its individual genius...

...again, the problem here is largely esthetic and intellectual—can you imagine a serious American film whose hero would be an art critic...

...Thus, for example, the shy hero is frequently shown very near the edge of the frame, or being marshaled toward it, so that his quality of timorous onlooker is conveyed by the composition...

...What particularly inspires and invigorates an artistic movement is a new-found freedom...

...a political thaw, however incomplete, following upon years of war, dictatorship, and political repression...

...They are rather mismated, mildly deadlocked, and moderately amused...

...Scarcely less outstanding is The Fifth Horseman Is Fear...

...Accordingly, we have seen an extraordinary flowering of the Polish film, now already spent...

...As it happens, for the wrong reasons no doubt, the government was right...

...The second is my admiration for the courage and ability of most of these film-makers to convey a good deal of implicit and explicit social and political criticism...

...Daisies concerns two teeniest-brained teenyboppers who decide that the world is rotten and so will they be...

...Tenderness mitigates the farcical, a certain seriousness gives an edge to the laughter, and a lyricism in the photography and editing poeticizes the foolishness...

...But until just now, we in this country have not been vouchsafed a fair sampling of it...

...This piece de resistance of the Festival is a comic view of Czech resistance to the Nazis in which a bumbling youth tragicomically comes of age in sex and war...

...Amos Vogel has called this a "splendiferous masterpiece," and Willard Van Dyke told me that if the Czech government had stuck by its refusal to release this film for export, there would have been no Festival...

...This condition is, of course, beneficial to all the arts, but especially so to those of youth, and youth, nowadays, turns with a rapturous predilection to film...

...The protagonist is an elderly Jewish doctor, now forbidden to practice...

...Moreover????and this must make such films particularly exciting on home ground????the implication that such terror is not limited to German manufacture is palpable throughout...

...Braun reasserts his dignity in death, and the sad ending becomes almost a happy one...

...The figures that surround him, notably the ambitious but inept stationmaster and a fly-specked Don Juan of a train dispatcher, are, like himself, drawn with a humor so sweeping that it would hurtle into satire or caricature were it not for the intense joviality and humaneness that inform it...

...Braun traverses the chambers of this necropolis until he collapses on top of one of an army of large, black, batlike pianos...

...There are the excellent facilities of Prague's Bar-randov Studio, increasingly made use of even by foreign productions...

...The first is that the subtitles are consistently execrable in all these films: They miss the flavor and finesse of the dialogue...

...Theatre tends to become enthralling when it is youthful, when it possesses a solidarity transcending individual needs to shine, and when it is fired with some sort of humanitarian zeal, usually one of protest against prevailing inertia...

...While harsh voices are loudly sorting out banned books, the hero, who, like other Jews, is in charge of outfitting the despoilers with desired articles, wanders through this awful kingdom of furniture, roomful after roomful of a single item like clocks or radios...

...Few things lend themselves more readily to photographic exaggeration than trains, but their use here is judiciously sparse and visually lovely????they function, in fact, as a kind of wipe between sequences of the plot, and their sound is a ritornello in the music of daily life...

...rather, it bespeaks a profoundly affectionate reverence for the artifacts that have become our companions in living...

...And there is more: The love affair in the film is thoroughly everyday????the lovers are neither blissful, nor consumed with ennui, nor locked in vicious combat...

...They have a way of rendering the trifling and irrelevant even pettier and more piddling than it is, extracting from it all the comedy or horror...

...What makes this film particularly distasteful is its idiot yearning for Western beatnikdom, its slobbering (and, I suspect, lesbian) adulation of its ghastly heroines...

...As a director, he reminds me most of Olmi (who, by the way, also has a film about a small railway station as yet unreleased in the U.S...

...Kafka has been mentioned both by Amos Vogel and Bosley Crowther, though on the evidence of these films his influence is slight, showing up in Hotel for Strangers, disastrously, and in Diamonds of the Night, erratically...

...these owe much more to Dante than to Kafka...

...In The First Cry, Jaromil Jires' charming film, there is an all-important line that the subtitles fail to translate...

...The wide screen fills up with these ghostly things that, bizarrely agglomerate, assume nightmare configurations...

...Hynek Bocan has made his film into an affecting serio-comic tale in which various elements neatly prop up one another????the excellent script by himself and Pavel Juracek, a sprightly score, evocative sets, understated but pungent cinematography by Jan Nemecek, and a flawless cast, led by Jan Kacer, the Czech Mastroianni, as the critic, and Ste-panka Rehakova, as his moody, sensuous, childlike mistress...

...There was also distinguished work among the short subjects, both live action and cartoon, often by the same directors and cinematographers who made the features...

...and they leave about a quarter of what is said untranslated...

...Despair could not become more archetypal...

...In the end, the hero, a man neither good nor bad but at least gifted and unconventional in his ways, is dragged down by the pathetic nonentity he carelessly encouraged and ends by losing both a good job and a delightful mistress...

...it is neither irresponsible froth nor portentous drama or melodrama...

...here, as in most of these Czech films, a suit that is being tried on, a rubber stamp, a pair of glasses, an old phonograph can produce an enormous visual and emotional impact...

...They are real...

...Here the most remarkable were Evald Schorm's Reflections, about life and death in a hospital...

...I would consider dead failures only a silly, but at least harmless, musical, Lady of the Trolley Tracks, and the favorite of the Festival directors, Amos Vogel and Willard Van Dyke, Daisies...

...The main devices are highly imaginative framing of the actors and eloquent use of the extreme close-up...

...Ivan Passer's A Boring Afternoon, about social conflicts and changing values as seen from the point of view of an uncomprehending bartender...

...Each object is neatly labeled with the name of someone already dead or in a death camp????each object is a cenotaph...

...We have been shown films as good by Weiss, Passer, and Brynych, but they did not catch on...

...But I want to stress two points here and now...

...That middle area is as yet scarcely explored by films (particularly in this country...

...neither did Forman's earlier Black Peter, more imaginative though it was than his Blonde...

...Jiri Menzel's Closely Guarded Trains (to be released here, it seems, under the idiotically inappropriate title, A Difficult Love) is a film where everything works, including that most dangerous of devices, the shift, at the last moment, from comedy to tragedy...

...There are vignettes of a woman turned suicidal dope fiend, of a nightclub for patrons desperately dancing, drinking, doping themselves up under the sword that hangs over their heads, of life in a Jewish insane asylum...