LECTURE 05/12/23: A Fresh Look at the Czech New Wave and some of the most beautiful films in modern cinema history
Any attempt to revisit the Czech New Wave will need to spend a bit of time on the classics, and to try to say a few new things about them. Yet what really characterised the movement as a whole was its extraordinary depth and variety. As the writer Josef Škvorecký puts it in his wonderful personal history of Czech cinema All the Bright Young Men and Women (1971): “No movement is adequately described by a simple enumeration of its major personalities…The group of young people who moved the Barrandov mountain was larger than the world might imagine, including artists who are unknown to the world, either due to bad luck, or because they worked for a long time as ‘mere’ screenplay writers, before they began directing.” The talk will feature the artists Škvorecký refers to as well as obvious greats like Menzel, Forman, Chytilová, Němec or Schorm, and proposes to contemplate the “second layer” of Czech directors František Vláčil, Voytěch Jasný, Pavel Juráček, Karel Kachyňa, Jaromil Jireš, and Slovak artists such as Juraj Jakobisko, Peter Solan and Štefan Uher.
Mark Le Fanu is a London-based film historian who has written books on Tarkovsky, on Mizoguchi and on the contribution made to European cinema by the depleted tradition of Christianity (Believing in Film, Bloomsbury, 2019). Essays by him on individual classic films can be found on criterion.com
Image: promotional material © Barrandov Studios Loves of a Blonde, Closely Observed Trains, The Cremator, The House on the Main Street
Event Properties
Event Date | 05-12-2023 6:30 pm |
Event End Date | 05-12-2023 8:30 pm |
Capacity | 80 |
Registered | 10 |
Available place | 70 |
Cut off date | 05-12-2023 5:30 pm |
Individual Price | Fifteen Pounds |
Location | Embassy of the Czech Republic |