Amuse-bouche #1
Beginning this week and carrying on into the New Year, I’ll be sending tidbits of interest to your inbox more often. I’d thought of these as short little amuse-bouches, but if today’s issue is anything to go by, they may go longer. Not always sweet, these can also be savory, or just “interesting”…
Last year we got into the Czech New Wave films on Criterion channel, so I’m sharing some of that with you today, along with memories of early film study.
Criterion describes the series here: Of all the cinematic New Waves that broke over the world in the 1960s, the one in Czechoslovakia was among the most fruitful, fascinating, and radical. With a wicked sense of humor and a healthy streak of surrealism, a group of fearless directors … risked censorship and began to use film to speak out about the hypocrisy and absurdity of the Communist state. Ranging in style from the dazzlingly experimental to the arrestingly realistic, these revolutionary transmissions from a singular time and place stand as models of art as a tool of political resistance.
I say: Watch for the technical expertise and amazing use of black and white film in DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT. Criterion said: With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czechoslovak New Wave. Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual poetry. Along with visceral camera work by Jaroslav Kučera and Miroslav Ondříček—two of Czechoslovak cinema’s most influential cinematographers—Němec makes inventive use of fractured editing, elliptical storytelling, and flights of surrealism as he strips context away from this bare-bones tale, evoking the panicked delirium of consciousness lost in night and fog.
Read Michael Atkinson’s essay on Diamonds of the Night
More Němec
There are several articles on A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS, but this one from Michael Brooke in Vertigo Magazine resonates most with my take on it. Here’s a preview:
I first saw Diamonds of the Night in film class with Miroslav Malik, who had defected to Canada after setting up the Czech Pavilion for Expo ‘67 in Montreal. Wearing the same suit every week, he flew from Montreal to teach film history at University of Calgary, returning to teach the same (and more) at Concordia. He carried his films with him, and brought us Diamonds, other Czech experiments, and European silent classics. He’d graduated from Prague’s famous FAMU along with Němec and the others who became founders of the Czech New Wave.
In his class, he didn’t discuss the story. We looked for technique, lighting, editing, the mechanics of perception in film, and learned how to see that. For example: scanning the single frame for the whitest white and the blackest black, then next-whitest and next-blackest, and so forth, forming a pattern in the retina and in the brain.
Of course, he did also go into the story - for example, Murnaus’ 1924 The Last Laugh - screened not just for the three cameras, but to look at the sugar-confection feel-good ending tacked on by the studio for the American audience.
In an obituary on the Concordia University website, Hal Thwaites said: Dr. Malik co-operated on 34 international exhibitions during his lifetime. His expertise was recognized and sought across Canada, North America and, indeed, around the world. He delivered papers and participated in conferences and research projects on virtually every continent. Dr. Malik was one of the founding pillars of Canada's first and finest department of communication studies. He established and designed courses for the department's Learning Centre and began the Myer Pollock Research Laboratory, one of the first research labs in the field of biometrics. He was internationally known for his definition of information and his discoveries in the field of biocybernetics. Miroslav was an extremely intelligent, sensitive man whose generosity, willingness and eagerness to guide, mentor and help individuals carried on to his very last days.
I feel so grateful as I remember how he brought the great documentarian John Grierson, who had laid the groundwork for the National Film Board of Canada, to speak to our little class.
Watch your inbox for the next instalment of Holiday Amuse-bouches, coming soon.
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This was wonderful. Like opening a window on a whole new panorama that I didn't know about. I am, indeed, amused.