On January 7, 1966, an omnibus film was released in Prague called Pearls of the Deep. It consisted of five segments, with every one directed by a filmmaker who would quickly become world famous for a feature film of his and her own. Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Věra Chytilová, and Jaromil Jireš.
Pearls of the Deep was based on a collection of stories by the same name published in 1963. written by Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997), the finest Czech fiction writer of his generation. Every one of the young directors who adapted Hrabal’s stories would also experience some of the same problems with censorship that Hrabal had known since the end of the war in Czechoslovakia, when the country found itself behind the Iron Curtain, run by a government appointed by and loyal to Moscow.
By the 60s, however, the process of de-Stalinization that had begun in 1953 has stalled and there was an economic slump. Menzel, Němec, Schorm, Chytilová, and Jireš had all grown up under Communism, and had figured out their own ways to live and work. Together with other filmmakers like Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jiří Weiss, they created a cinema revolution of their own that became known as the Czech Miracle.
On the invasion of the country by Soviet Pact forces on August 20, 1968, many Czech artists defected to the West, including Forman and Passer. On the occasion of Milos Forman’s passing two years ago, I wrote:
But then I remind myself of the fates of the filmmakers who chose to stay in Czechoslovakia. Jiří Menzel's Larks on a String was filmed in 1969. After the Dubcek government fell in August of 1968, it was banned and Menzel prevented from making another film until 1974. Now 80, he still lives and works in the Czech Republic.
Jiří Menzel died last Saturday. If miracles really happen, he contributed to the faith of cinephiles all over the world with his first film, Closely Watched Trains, which was based on Hrabal’s 1965 novel. After the completion of Pearls of the Deep, Hrabal worked closely with Menzel in the making of Closely Watched Trains, which was released in November 1966.
Closely Watched Trains was phenomenally successful in the West, eventually winning an American Academy Award for Best Film in a Foreign Language. For his third film, Menzel turned to another work by Hrabal called Larks on a String.
Though the oppressive regime that Larks on a String satirizes is long gone, it is much more than a dissident film. It transcends time if only because its story is set in the 1950s, it was made in 1969 (the same year as Jaromil Jires’s The Joke, based on the Milan Kundera novel), whereupon it was banned by the Czech government censors that succeeded the ousted government of Alexander Dubcek. Menzel was prohibited from making feature films for 5 years. Efforts to destroy the film elements of Larks on a String were frustrated by various clandestine efforts to preserve it, and it was finally released to cinemas in 1990 after the Velvet Revolution that finally swept away the communist government. Larks on a String shared winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival with the Costa-Gavras film Music Box.
When I was in the Army there was a popular saying – Hurry up and wait. That was what life in a peacetime Army was like. Even though we were trained to be proficient with our weapons, there was so much time on our hands that my memories of being in uniform consist largely of a great deal of standing around, waiting to be dismissed. Occasionally groups of us would be engaged in what were called “police calls”: picking up cigarette butts and “anything that doesn’t grow” in designated areas. It wasn’t necessary for us, apparently, to be doing anything purposeful. It was only necessary that we should appear to be doing it. In the enormous junkyard setting of Larks on a String, in which everyone is compelled to be reeducated or to serve out his sentence, I felt an immediate kinship with all of the people who had failed, in one way or another, to conform to life in communist Czechoslovakia. But merely by being noncomformists and prisoners they were tacitly more at liberty than so-called productive citizens because they had already been found guilty of dissent, of being non-conformists. Within certain limits, they could say whatever they pleased because who would bother to spy on people who were already enemies of the state?
But everything in this junk yard is superfluous. Objects manufactured for a purpose had been scrapped and were being melted down to form new objects. Ibsen’s Button-Molder melted down not only buttons to be reconstituted, but souls as well. So the Stalinist Czech state had ordained that law breakers and former members of the bourgeois class should be scrapped and reconstituted into citizens who were more useful to it.
In his essay on Hrabal, James Wood wrote:
What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? 'A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn't for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.'
Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote. There is a comedy, and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large ('for all mankind') that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the 'tiny black cloud' that impedes his destiny? - at least it is the mark of something. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism. And isn't that phrase 'tiny black cloud' done with great finesse? It hints at a man whose sense of himself has so swelled that he now sees himself geographically, like a darkened area experiencing a bout of low pressure on a weather-map of Europe. 'Tiny', above all: a marvellous word, because it suggests that this man, while possibly proud of his handicap, might also disdain it, or believe that he could just brush it away whenever he wanted and get on with the business of doing great things.
All of Hrabal’s love of a muddled humanity can be seen in Larks on a String, in which the strata of society are represented, from intellectuals discussing Kant while tossing chunks of metal debris into a waiting railcar bin all the way down to the Roma who are so unused to modern conveniences that one newlywed girl spends her wedding night marvelling at a flushing toilet. Bowed but unbroken, they each must discover a way through the labyrinth in which communism has placed them.
Hrabal, too, was banned in 1969, but clandestinely printed copies of his writings were circulated in underground circles. Menzel would eventually make several more films, some based on Hrabal’s novels, like The Snowdrop Festival (1984) and I Served the King of England (2006). His films didn’t make nearly as big of a splash as some of Milos Forman’s, who enjoyed a long and lucrative career in the West.
But there is a lesson here that Milan Kundera illustrated in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which two Czech people, Tomas and Sabina, react in different ways to the crackdowns in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Sabina flees to freedom in the West (just as Kundera himself had done), while Tomas goes to live in a small Czech village. Sabina (like Milos Forman) eventually finds herself in California, but her physical flight is mirrored in her life by her flight from emotional attachments. Tomas, and Tereza, his wife, find a haven together in the countryside and, before they both die in a car crash, their happiness is complete. Tomas and Sabina seem to represent two forces that Robert Frost called Thought and Love in his poem “Bond and Free”:
And sits in Sirius’ disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.
His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
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