Czechoslovakia in the Mid-60�s Sure Looks like Fun: Bohumil Hrabal and the Czech New Wave

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In one of his book-length essays (and I don�t remember which one; they�re all kind of the same), Milan Kundera asserts that Czechs living under communism really didn�t have it that bad because they had, among other things, the delightful novels of Bohumil Hrabal. 

Who, you may be asking, is Bohumil Hrabal?  Now, Hrabal�s works are somewhat hard to find in English translation; it looks like he was widely translated at some point, but now many of his books are out of print, or they were only ever published by academic presses and not widely distributed.  Which is a damn shame, because he seems to be a master of whimsicality and exuberant sensuality.  I have read two of his novellas (Too Loud a Solitude and Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) and several of his stories and I would like to read more of his works.  One of the few good things about my experience at the University of Minnesota was the easy access I had to Wilson Library, which probably had an abundance of Hrabal books, had I just thought to look there at the time.

But anyway, Hrabal is a delightful writer, and when a new generation of Czech filmmakers flowered in the mid-1960�s, in what came to be known as the Czech New Wave, many of them turned to Hrabal�s stories and novels for inspiration.  Just as so many of the Japanese �crazy young people� movies that I discussed in a previous post seem to have taken the novels of Shintaro Ishihara as their source material, so the great Czech directors of the �60�s turned to Hrabal.

A young-ish Bohumil Hrabal.

The number of Czech New Wave films available in the U.S. recently increased significantly with the release of the Criterion Collection�s Pearls of the Czech New WaveEclipse collection, which includes six Czech films: the omnibus collection, Pearls of the Deep, containing five short films by five directors, each based on a Hrabal story, and then five feature-length films, each directed by a director featured in Pearls of the Deep.  Criterion had previously released Jir� Menzel�s masterpiece Closely Watched Trains (which is based on a novel by Hrabal, and which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967, if you put any stock in that sort of thing), and Menzel�s Capricious Summer is featured in the Pearls of the Czech New Wave collection.  Criterion had also previously released Milo� Forman�s Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen�s Ball (1967) which, although not based on anything by Hrabal, partake of the same satirical and sexually playful worldview that informs Hrabal�s work. (Forman later emigrated to the U.S. and directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest, among other things, and just today I read an opinion piece by him in which he castigates right-wingers for accusing Obama of being a socialist for wanting to expand the government�s role in healthcare or the economic sphere; he says this trivializes the experiences of millions of people who lived and suffered under actual tyrannical socialist regimes.  He makes a distinction between Marxist-Leninist socialism and the social democracy of the Western European welfare states, but I fear he doesn�t make it forcefully enough.  I got the gist that he was skeptical of the welfare state as well, but he didn�t say much on the topic.)

And how to define the �Hrabal worldview?� I�ve already described it as �satirical� and sexually playful, but I think the best (and certainly not the leastpretentious) term for it would be �Rabelaisian.� These films have a carnivalesque spirit to them, animated by a sense of play but also a sense of the grotesque, and featuring the frank and enthusiastic sexuality that one finds in so much of Fellini.  Last evening I watched Juraj Herz�s 1965 short film, The Junk Shop (based on a Hrabal story), and I was struck by a scene in which a lusty junk shop owner watches with glee as a buxom woman on a nearby stair landing shakes out her laundry (or something like that, I wasn�t quite sure what she was doing, the point was that her sizable breasts were bouncing to and fro, much to the delight of the junk-man).  Now, there are any number of Fellini movies I could reference by way of comparison here (the man liked breasts, after all), but the one that comes to mind most prominently is Amarcord (1973), in which a voluptuous shopkeeper dazzles the teenage boys of the town.

Here's a poster for Amarcord.  Try to guess which woman I'm referring to.

You know, I don�t actually have that much to say about Hrabal and these movies, critically, anyway, beyond the fact that I like them and I�d like people to see them.  I�ve been watching them on Hulu Plus, which streams hundreds of Criterion titles and on which Criterion has released a number of foreign films not available on DVD but which come with the Criterion imprimatur.  These include several Czech New Wave films, including Jaromil Jire��s delightful Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, about a thirteen-year-old girl whose menarche corresponds to the onset of a series of weird, fairly-tale like events unfolding in her town and in her personal life (and I admit that there is a creepy amount of sexuality swirling around what is, after all, a thirteen-year-old, but you need to look past that; to paraphrase the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song: �Just repeat to yourself it�s just a [film] and you should really just relax.� Oh, also, it wasn�t directed by Roman Polanski, so the girl was safe, sad though it may be that we even have to say that).  Jire��s adaptation of Milan Kundera�s The Joke also appears in the Pearls of the Czech New Wavecollection.  As Kundera doesn�t seem to approve of movie adaptations of his books (or possibly of anyone�s books), I suspect he didn�t like it; it�s probably not the strongest film in the collection; it would certainly have been more advisable to release Valerieon DVD and maybe just have The Joke as a Hulu-only release, but that�s a matter for debate.  When I watched The Joke, it came very shortly after my first reading of Kundera�s novel, and I admit to having been somewhat disappointed at the amount of material that Jire� left out of his eighty-minute film.  I can�t tell you what my reaction would have been if I was just watching the film as a film in its own right, without the broader context of the novel (I had a similar experience recently when I read Haruki Murakami�s Norwegian Woodand saw Tran Anh Hung�s film adaptation just the next day; I�m pretty sure that will be a future blog post).

As long as we�re talking about things I have and haven�t seen, I have not seen the American Phillip Kaufman�s 1987 adaptation of Kundera�s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I�m told features a very talented, very naked Juliette Binoche and an I don�t really care about him Daniel Day-Lewis.  I know for a fact that Kundera hated this movie, although it�s also in the Criterion Collection, so it must be good, right? My main reason for not seeing this is that it�s one of those movies where all the Czech characters speak English because it�s an American production and God forbid the Americans should have to hear a foreign language or read subtitles. 

Milan Kundera, who, as far as I can tell, was never young, and who is clearly sick of your bullshit.

Personally, I like my Czechs to speak Czech, my Nazis to speak German, and my geisha to speak Japanese.  Just because the director doesn�t speak the language doesn�t mean he can�t make a film in it; to take one language as an example, Paul Schrader, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Clint Eastwood, Abbas Kiarostami, and the above-mentioned Tran Anh Hung have all made Japanese-language films and I don�t think a single one of them spoke Japanese; so clearly it�s doable.  I think one of the things I most admire about Quentin Tarantino�s Inglourious Basterds is that his Germans speaks German and his French people speak French, and so he tricked American audiences into a seeing a movie where the dialogue was largely in a foreign language and consequently subtitled.  Take that, American provincialism!

I see I�ve digressed, if only just a bit.  To return to my main subject, the Hrabal-inspired Czech New Wave, I would encourage my reader[s?] to check it out.  The best starting-point would probably be Closely Watched Trains and then Pearls of the Deep, which provides you with a good sampling of Czech New Wave directors and their different styles and concerns.  Criterion only added The Junk Shop to Hulu a few days ago, and hopefully there will be more Czech additions to come.