Word: czech
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Repressive Communism may once again be ascendant in Czechoslovakia, but there is one facet of Czech life where liberalism remains strong. TIME Correspondent Horace Judson spent a fortnight in Prague studying its burgeoning theater. His report...
TODAY'S avant-garde in film is a director's movement. The American audience knowns Italian, French, Czech films as the work individual men. College audience, the newly-discovered gold mine of U.S. film distributors, appreciate foreign films for qualities of high social artistic awareness and personal expression. Given the importance of the youth market for ticket sales, the trend has even hit Hollywood, long considered by native critics the place where individual talent is lost. The names of young directors (Arthur Penn and, unfortunately, Mike Nichols) are becoming good box office. Hollywood has even begun to conceive that...
Seeing the same qualities in Italian, French, Czech, and American directors may appear sweeping and uncritical, but there are good historical reasons for it. American audiences which go one night to see Antonioni and the next Godard, and like them for the same things, are implicitly recognizing a clear line of aesthetic influence. A healthy chunk of the French New Wave's conception of film comes from Neo-Realism (Antonioni, visconti, Rossellini, de Sica, Fellini). Neo Realism's original choice of social reality for subject-matter and its tendency to documentary as method had a tremendous influence in France, giving...
...CZECH films have been in vogue for several years now, for a variety of stylish reasons. (Political capital is surely a featured consideration; American critics have a habit of translating the Czech's frequent portrayal of stolid bureaucracy--intended as neutral moral backgroun to more intimate drama--as veiled protest against socialist rule). Most Czech films share an "unstylish", descriptive approach to reality, attempting to cast social themes in individualized dimensions (Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel). But a few filmmakers have made a radical break with previous Czech film, abandoning descriptive conventions for vivid stylization and a strong strain of philosophical...
These splintered existences, defined both by the processing and their apartment, are compared in one scene to that of a Czech farmer. He is seen in long shot (one of the film's few long shots) surrounded by his home, his field, and his dog, at one with the environment. (In contrast, the few long shots of the Marys are always chosen to emphasize the unreality of their lives; for instances, one shot is of Mary standing in the middle of a field by a tree full of obviously plastic fruit). Hopelessly fragmented, the Marys cannot relate to a whole...