Not too long ago, the idea of a Czechoslovak Film Festival would have seemed as unlikely as a yacht regatta in Peking. When Ján Kadár's The Shop on Main Street was shown at New York's Lincoln Center Film Festival in 1965, it had no U.S. theater bookings; neither did Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde, when it opened the festival the following year. Shop went on to win an Oscar as the year's best foreign-language film, while Blonde, accompanied by delighted reviews, eventually proved a profitable box-office success. Czech movies may soon be as much a staple on the art-house circuit as the effervescent outpourings of France's New Wave directors were a few years ago.
Last week, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened its doors to the first American festival of Czechoslovak films—a moviegoer's feast of a dozen pictures never before shown in the U.S. Anxious to avoid their past neglect, commercial exhibitors snapped up five of them before the festival opened; more are almost certain to be booked. The distributors are making no mistake. Based on the festival evidence, it is clear that the Czech New Wave may soon reach tidal proportions. Four of the most interesting features:
Courage for Every Day. Two lovers meet on a hilltop. In a scene reminiscent of Room at the Top, the camera shows waves of grass rippling idyllically —then cuts to another angle to show the backdrop of an ugly industrial town behind them. The film message is that there is room at the bottom for workers who still believe in the drab clichés of doctrinaire Communism. As the film's central figure, Jan Kačer plays a slogan-spouting, blockheaded factory worker —a model product of the Stalinist old regime. Representing the newer, more relaxed style of Communism are his cheeky blonde mistress (Jana Brejchová) and an impudent young cynic (Josef Abrhám), who refuses to echo Kačer's unquestioning beliefs. A puritanical bore who turns off friends and fellow factory workers, Kačer is beaten in a beer hall by resentful colleagues, ultimately comes to realize that his pompous pronunciamentos can no longer be the life of the Party. Obviously influenced by the early Antonioni, Director Evald Schorm, 36, shows his courage less in style than in subject matter. Because of his iconoclasm, the 1964 film was banned for export until recently.
The End of August at the Hotel Ozone is a shattering splice of life after the third World War. No one is left alive except eight young women and one old one (Beta Poničanová), who wander like nomads over the sere landscape. The nubile girls have never seen a man; their leader can scarcely remember what one looks like. Equipped with some of the trappings of the defunct civilization—tin cans, rifles, combat boots—they live like savages, telling the years by counting the rings of a tree trunk, hunting by blasting fish out of the river water with grenades.