czech new wave

Most of its directors graduated the same few years from FAMU, the Prague film school, and critics abroad coined "Czech New Wave" once the films started winning prizes at Cannes and Karlovy Vary; Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, Jiri Menzel and Jan Nemec themselves shared no style, only a refusal of socialist-realist uplift. Czechoslovak cinema got about five years of room in the 1960s and spent it shooting with non-professional actors and loose, improvised dialogue no state script department had approved. Daisies takes the refusal furthest: two girls decide that since the world is already spoiled they will be spoiled too, and spend the film wrecking banquets and fleecing older men, with no factory or Party meeting anywhere in sight to correct them. Closely Watched Trains aims the same refusal at war itself, a station apprentice in occupied Bohemia who cares more about losing his virginity than about the resistance going on around him, the official heroism of the moment simply not his subject. The Soviet invasion of August 1968 shut the whole thing down; some of the films it caught were banned "forever," in the censors' own word, and did not screen again until 1989. The comedy is deadpan and the target is always the official account of how people behave.

Distinguish from Contemporary with and inspired by the French New Wave, but more rooted in absurdist humour and social observation than in cinephilic stylistic experiment. The Czech films are funnier, warmer, and more interested in communal life than individual alienation. Some overlap with Poetic Realism through Menzel's lyrical naturalism.