Into History

In his first feature film, Alexander Hackenschmied used a subjective camera to evoke a modernist dilemma: the celebration of the big city and social criticism. The protagonist, who is to some extent Hackenschmied’s alter ego, travels by tram from the city centre to its outskirts. The hustle and bustle of traffic gives way to the shabbiness of the suburbs, and the protagonist remains torn between the two worlds.

The film depicts a story of erotic passion through symbolic imagery strongly influenced by the interwar avant-garde. Vladimír Šmejkal and Čeněk Zahradníček employed avant-garde techniques almost to the letter in their films. The work won several awards at international amateur film competitions in Barcelona, Budapest and Vienna.

An adaptation of Boris Vian’s short story Blues for a Black Cat, set against the backdrop of Pilsen’s suburbs in the grey days of the 1980s. The film transports the fantastical characters, who represent the decadent Parisian elite, into the grotesque world of normalisation and intellectual circles in local pubs.

In this genre parody, the murder of Milan Kohout with a May Day flag is unsuccessfully investigated by a socialist reincarnation of Detective Pinkerton. He also embodies the comical figure of a local communist secret police officer. The film was made at a time when Milan Kohout was under surveillance by the Pilsen police.

The film Hands on Tuesday can be classified as an “urban symphony”, a genre that celebrates the hustle and bustle of modern city life. The filmmakers, in a film that contains not a single shot of a human face, focused all their attention on the narrative possibilities offered by cinematic detail, editing and visual collage.

The multimedia production May (1935–1936) by theatre director E. F. Burian was based on the complex avant-garde concept of the D 34 synthetic theatre, which featured the legendary “voice-band” technique and incorporated film projections. These stage films, shot in 1935 by Jiří Lehovec for the first season and a year later by Čeněk Zahradníček, are examples of the use of surrealist formalism by the Czech interwar avant-garde. Whilst only fragments of Lehovec’s material have survived, Zahradníček re-edited his version in 1976 into a short avant-garde film.

In the form of a visual poem, Monastery captures the decay of the abandoned Augustinian Church of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary in the village of Klášter in the Domažlice region. In the 1980s, it was well received at amateur film festivals as a testament to the neglect and deterioration of historical monuments.

The city’s newly erected brutalist buildings stand in stark contrast to its crumbling historic monuments. Dvorský’s film is one of a number of critical cinematic experiments – an Eastern Koyaanisqatsi – which, throughout the 1980s, addressed the deteriorating state of urban planning and the environment in the Eastern Bloc.

The film was made at a time when Milan Kohout was studying philosophy through underground lectures organised by the Prague dissident movement and reading Egon Bondy’s samizdat writings. The “Slaughterhouse” was conceived as a personal reflection on the impossibility of knowledge and the conflict between inner experience and the elusiveness of a philosophical view of the world.

The promotional film School Assignment was shot at the Baťa factories’ film studios in Zlín by director Elmar Klos and cinematographer Alexander Hackenschmied. Two language versions – Czech and German – were produced at the time, both featuring the same humorous script but with different casts. Both versions have been preserved in the National Film Archive.

The film Soldier’s Story depicts fears of mobilisation whilst the echoes of the traumas of the First World War still linger. Thanks to skilful editing, the images of gunfire, air raids and screaming people also evoke a sense of sound, even though the film was shot as a silent film.

Dvorský made this free-form film, reminiscent of the lyrical films of the post-war avant-garde, as a poem brimming with visual experiments with the shapes, colours and textures of the urban landscape, against a backdrop of the changing seasons throughout the year.

Alexander Hackenschmied conceived this cinematic portrait of Prague Castle not only as a celebration of the emancipated seat of Czechoslovak statehood and history, but also focused on it as a remarkable architectural complex. The dynamic shots are organically interwoven with experimental music composed specifically for this film by composer František Bartoš.

This programme, featuring archive radio recordings and films with commentary, explores the media coverage of the most closely followed Czech retribution trial. The year 1946 in the Czech lands was marked by efforts to come to terms with Nazi crimes. From March to May, the trial of the “executioner of the Czech nation”, former Minister of State K. H. Frank, took place in a courtroom in Prague’s Pankrác prison; thanks to the radio, the public followed it live, day after day. Filmmakers also documented the process of holding Frank accountable in their own way. Tomáš Dufka (Czech Radio Archive) and Terezie Hlaváčková (National Film Archive) will guide us through a selection of archival footage.

A wild party is taking place on board the sinking ship of late socialism, dominated by a fiery political speech by Milan Kohout. At times, the film shifts from dramatic scenes to a television programme about the importance of water. As time goes on, events spiral out of control and the chaos intensifies as catastrophe looms.

This satirical film, which explores the theme of human haste, straddles the line between documentary and fiction. It captures the hectic atmosphere of the city through a series of visual metaphors, as well as visual experiments with film footage.

Kohout conceived his gift for Jiří Dvorský’s wedding as a caricature of a bachelor entering the yoke of marital duties. This parodic commentary, written in the style of 19th-century poetry, plays on the contrast between the high and the low, the sublime and the mundane, against the backdrop of a stereotypical socialist family.