It would be lovely if I could report that Ivan Passer, who died in January at the age of 86 (not, I gather, from Covid-19), was one of the rare exceptions, rather like his childhood friend Milos Forman, among foreign filmmakers who wound up in Hollywood and made films as good as his best work in his home country. This just isn’t the case. The list of accomplished or promising filmmakers who “escaped” to Hollywood and found work there but never managed to equal the films made in their native tongues is depressingly long.
Passer has a place in what is looked back on as the “Czech film miracle” – a brief flowering of splendid films whose vitality has not faded in the intervening half-century. Similar creative stirrings had happened in other Iron Curtain countries in the ‘50s, especially in Poland. But filmmakers in Czechoslovakia (as it was called until December 31, 1992) were the beneficiaries of shifting political forces, what was known as a “thaw,” a loosening of strict censorship in respect to subject matter and its presentation. Such loosening came to an abrupt end in 1968 when the Russian Army entered the country from nearby East Germany. Some intellectuals, writers, artists, and ordinary freedom-loving Czechs managed to escape. Forman and Passer were among them. Others, like Jiri Menzel and Jaromil Jires, stayed.
But it’s 1965. Passer helped Forman with the scripts for his second and third films and directed one short film, A Boring Afternoon, and one feature, Intimate Lighting. It is as fresh and alive as it was when it entered the world 55 years ago. Bohumil Hrabal (whose novels and stories formed the basis of several Czech films, including Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains) co-wrote the script of A Boring Afternoon, which was “about all the things that happen when, ostensibly, nothing is happening.”
Intimate Lighting was exported to appreciative audiences in Europe and the U.S. before being banned for twenty years for after the Russian crackdown in late 1968. It’s finer than any of Forman’s films because Passer invests its lightness with touches of whimsical beauty. Without ceremony, we enter the world of a provincial semi-professional orchestra. Karel plays violin with other musicians in an amateur ensemble (his nickname from school days is Bambas). An old friend, Petr, plays cello in a professional orchestra in Prague and comes to Karel’s town to perform with them in a concert. He brings along his cute young girlfriend, Štěpa (played by Milos Forman’s wife Věra Křesadlová). Karel has a plump wife, Marie, and three small children. His father and mother live with him a house erected brick by brick in the middle of billowing wheat fields. Petr looks at his friend’s domesticity without envy. It’s Štěpa who seems lost – the hardworking village women look at her with curiosity. All of the young people have absconded to the cities.
Everyone in the film presents to us their ripened humanity: the grandfather who brags of amorous conquests, his wife - the woman he kidnapped and carried off to the circus, where she performed stunts on horseback (she shows one to an amazed Štěpa), Marie, happily absorbed in motherhood, a charming old pharmacist with smiling eyes, and even a village idiot who asks Štěpa to go for a walk with him.
Praising Christopher Isherwood’s novel, A Single Man, Anthony Burgess wrote: “To make us fascinated with the everyday non-events of an ordinary life was Joyce's great achievement. But here there are no Joycean tricks to exalt mock-epically the banal.”(1) The style of the film is so naturalistic that it almost makes one overlook what is happening, the moment to moment incidents that make up the beauty of the film’s utterly plotless unfolding, until we find that it’s we who have unfolded, not the people we meet and whose lives we follow for the duration (69 minutes!) of the film. Passer loved his subject so much that he went to the trouble of presenting it to us in all its unadorned verity.
(1) 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 - A Personal Choice by Anthony Burgess (1984).
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Tennyson, "Tithonous"
Reading fiction – good fiction - often brings up subjects that have topical reference to one’s day to day life. I was in the middle of reading Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man when the riots began in Minneapolis four days ago. I came across the following passage, which has considerable relevance to the present situation.
A Single Man centers on a day in the life – a Friday - of George Falconer in December 1962. George resembles Isherwood in too many ways for it to be unintentional: he is an Englishman in his late 50s who has lived in California since the war. He teaches English at a small state university. And he is gay, though, unlike Isherwood, he does what he can to conceal it from his neighbours and colleagues.
George wakes and eventually makes his way down the freeway to the college. He arrives at a classroom where his students are to be quizzed on the subject of Aldous Huxley’s novel After Many a Summer. After a general discussion, George gets to the question, “What is the novel about?”
And now comes a question George has been expecting. It is asked, of course, by Myron Hirsch, that indefatigable heckler of the goyim. "Sir, here on page seventy-nine, Mr. Propter says the stupidest text in the Bible is 'they hated me without a cause.' Does he mean by that the Nazis were right to hate the Jews? Is Huxley anti-Semitic?"
George draws a long breath. "No," he answers mildly. And then, after a pause of expectant silence—the class is rather thrilled by Myron's bluntness—he repeats, loudly and severely, "No—Mr. Huxley is not anti-Semitic. The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause....
"Look—let's leave the Jews out of this, shall we? Whatever attitude you take, it's impossible to discuss Jews objectively nowadays. It probably won't be possible for the next twenty years. So let's think about this in terms of some other minority, any one you like, but a small one—one that isn't organized and doesn't have any committees to defend it.. . ."
George looks at Wally Bryant with a deep shining look that says, I am with you, little minority-sister. Wally is plump and sallow-faced, and the care he takes to comb his wavy hair and keep his nails filed and polished and his eyebrows discreetly plucked only makes him that much less appetizing. Obviously he has understood George's look. He is embarrassed. Never mind! George is going to teach him a lesson now that he'll never forget. Is going to turn Wally's eyes into his timid soul. Is going to give him courage to throw away his nail file and face the truth of his life....
"Now, for example, people with freckles aren't thought of as a minority by the nonfreckled. They aren't a minority in the sense we're talking about. And why aren't they? Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary. Anyone here disagree with that? If you do, just ask yourself, What would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority overnight? You see what I mean? Well, if you don't—think it over!
"All right. Now along come the liberals—including everybody in this room, I trust—and they say, 'Minorities are just people, like us.' Sure, minorities are people—people, not angels. Sure, they're like us—but not exactly like us; that's the all-too-familiar state of liberal hysteria in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see any difference between a Negro and a Swede. . . ." (Why, oh why daren't George say "between Estelle Oxford and Buddy Sorensen"? Maybe, if he did dare, there would be a great atomic blast of laughter, and everybody would embrace, and the kingdom of heaven would begin, right here in classroom. But then again, maybe it wouldn't.)
"So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality. If we're frank about our feelings, we have a safety valve; and if we have a safety valve, we're actually less likely to start persecuting. I know that theory is unfashionable nowadays. We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish....
"Where was I? Oh yes. Well, now, suppose this minority does get persecuted, never mind why—political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is—that's my point. And, of course, persecution itself is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?
"And I'll tell you something else. A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority—not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities, because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they're all persecuted, the nastier they become! Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn't! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you're being persecuted, you hate what's happening to You, you hate the people who are making it happen; you're in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn't recognize love if you met it! You'd suspect love! You'd think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick…"
