The Passion of the Peasant Poet: Jiří Trnka, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and...
“The very name conjures up childhood & poetry.” (1) – Jean Cocteau “‘Mr. Deitch, I am a very famous man!’ Jiří Trnka was indeed a very famous man – in Czechoslovakia and in the entire world of...
View ArticlePost-Soviet Bloc Partying West of the East and East of the West, Into and Out...
Mine was at least a twofold purpose for flying half way around the world to the far west late this June just passed. Long had I wanted to make my way to Karlovy Vary for the Czech Republic’s A-list...
View ArticleThe Festival that Came in from the South: The 28th Fribourg International...
I’ve written three times previously in Senses of Cinema on the Fribourg International Film Festival, covering the festivals in 2010, ’11 and ’12. While I missed last year’s FIFF, it is very clear that...
View ArticleThe Exquisite Ecstasy and Agony of Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure
“Tactile wooden spoons, pot lids, rolling pins and boards are alchemistic tools and our bodies are the crucible for the Magnum Opus of tactilism.” - Jan Švankmajer (1) Jan Švankmajer’s third feature...
View ArticleIn and Out of the Mood: The 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
This July just past I attended my second Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, my second in succession, as a member of a five critic-strong FIPRESCI jury. Accordingly, my main focus at the KVIFF...
View ArticleAny Way the Wind Blows: A Jester’s Tale
After three feature length triumphs mixing live-action with animation, Karel Zeman took a departure from sci-fi and fantasy missions implausible and instead engaged mockingly with terrible historical...
View ArticleFly Me to the Moon: Love and Lunacy in The Outrageous Baron Munchausen
Of all the takes on the oft-filmed debonair teller of outlandish heroic tales introduced to the literary world in Rudolf Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and...
View ArticleLocal and/or General… Of Time and Place at the 50th Karlovy Vary and 6th...
Feature image: Eva Zaoralová holding aloft her book, The Story of a Festival 2015 found the summertime festivals in Karlovy Vary and Odessa in introspective but nonetheless celebratory moods. In...
View ArticleWhose are the Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant?
“When it came to Fassbinder, … one was made to feel that the real drama in film after film wasn’t so much in the makeshift characters or the fruit-salad images but in the offscreen intrigues of a baby...
View ArticleThe Nature of The Beast Remains… Irrepressible!
Few more controversial figures have enlivened cinema than the Polish polymath Walerian Borowczyk; far fewer still experienced so massive a fall from critical grace.1 At the epicentre of this fall lay...
View ArticleOf Female Trouble Here, There and Everywhere: The 30th Fribourg International...
Ah, anniversaries. How readily a landmark – and a sense of obligation towards its acknowledgment being given a due sense of occasion – might become more millstone than milestone. And so the challenge...
View ArticlePearls of the Deep, or Five Masterly Apprentices’ Guides to Bohumil Hrabal’s...
The 1960s’ Czechoslovak New Wave was lightning in a bottle, a glorious film miracle born of an unrepeatable collision of societal and political factors. An extraordinary pool of talented young...
View ArticleA Queer Tale of Two Sister Cities, 100 Years and the First FIPRESCI...
The First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema 13-15 November 2017 Lenfilm Studio, St. Petersburg Colloquium website:...
View ArticlePrefab Story (Věra Chytilová, 1979): Farcical Times at a Prague High-rise
A common misconception in the West is that Věra Chytilová directed only a few significant, narratively and aesthetically adventurous films, and all in the 1960s – O něčem jiném (Something Different,...
View ArticleA Time of Reckoning? The 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
This year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was always going to have a lot to address. For Czechs (and Slovaks), 2018 is a year overladen with anniversaries, with two in particular...
View ArticleIt’s a Cobbler’s Lot: Peter Strickland’s Penchant for Synaesthetic,...
“One sensation of mind, one fabric in recollection of touch.” – Saleswoman Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed), waxing typically gnomic, in In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018). Peter Strickland’s latest...
View ArticleFrom Saturday to Sunday (Gustav Machatý, 1931), or: Don’t you wonder...
The work of Czech director Gustav Machatý (1901–1963) is enjoying a surprise renaissance. The 76th Venice Film Festival had as its pre-opening event a screening of a new digital restoration of Extase...
View ArticleOf liberation, and of states of undress and redress both: The 54th Karlovy...
Oftentimes reports of mine on the venerable Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) have looked a mite askance at its gender politics. But along comes 2019 and, shut the front door – the 54th...
View ArticleBirds, Orphans and Fools (1969): the Rule of Three in Juraj Jakubisko’s...
Jakubisko is kin to Brazil’s Glauber Rocha, America’s Robert Downey, Mexico’s Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to...
View ArticleOf East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964)
It’s not news that the 1960s were an extraordinarily fecund time for cinema in Czechoslovakia; the output of the filmmakers connected to the FAMU1-centred Czechoslovak New Wave has been celebrated...
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