Word: joking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...success has spoiled Monty Python--this movie was made before it became the Rowan and Martin of the mid-seventies--but something's done it. Probably just a silly decision to concentrate on a single plot, making the whole hour and a half seem like one extended joke that very quickly loses its savor. Monty Python's best routines have often been its shortest, and the longer ones--like "The Piranha Brothers" and "Fairy Tale"--were very often the only losers on their records. And Now for Something Completely Different was extremely funny, leaping from skit to skit without worrying...
...close, almost microscopic observation; they find "in that microcosm of human action a portrait of the social reality as a whole" This accounts for the political dimension of a film with an apparently nonpolitical subject, such as Firemen's Ball, 1968. Others, like Jaromil Jires (The Joke, 1968) preferred social analysis and political generalizations, while Chytilova's Dazies or Nemec's Report on the Party and the Guests are philosophical tales in the Voltairian sense of the word...
...stayed, the "normalization" meant no longer being allowed to shoot the kind of films they wanted. Sometimes they had to agree to film according to the expectations of the new regime. Thus Jaromil Jires, who revealed his extraordinary talent with The Cry (1963), and confirmed it with The Joke (1968), (a powerful critique of Stalinism), and with his surrealistic tale Valerie and her Week of Wanders (1969), last year completed a new movie about the construction of the Prague subway, with a heavy emphasis on the Soviet technological assistance...
Another prolific, now-silenced Czech writer is Milan Kundera. While he became famous in the West with his political novel The Joke, his work became a classic in Prague where anybody would know the famous quotation from it when Ludvik, replying to his enthusiastically communist girlfriend who wrote to him about the "health atmosphere" prevailing at the summer Party school, quips on a postcard...
...Joke is the story of an individual's life destroyed by the absurdity of a sociopolitical system (and of an era) that was deadly serious. Kundera's new novel Life is Elsewhere (NY: A. Knopf) explores the individual's motivations for joining that system and playing a part in its arbitrary destructive powers...