Cinema: Sweet Light from a Dark Casino

As film festivals go, the biennial splash at the baths of Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, seldom causes more than a ripple of interest in the world of cinema. Last week, however, the centuries-old spa—known as Carlsbad when Dostoevsky used to gamble away rubles at the casino, while the crowned heads of Europe took the waters to prolong their reigns—was jammed with film buffs, critics, buyers and distributors from all across Europe and the U.S. None of them had anything more than a peripheral interest in the dreary assortment of 42 films from such ersatz Hollywoods as Mongolia and Tunisia that were officially in competition for Karlovy's Crystal Globe Award. Instead, the moviemongers spent their days traipsing off to small, crowded screening rooms, tucked away on cobbled side streets or in sedate hillside sanatoriums, to see the latest work being produced by the host country.

Czechoslovakia is the latest country to have splashed up a new wave of fresh, original films by a coterie of talented directors and writers. "It's not a wave, it's a flood," proudly says Jan Kadar, whose The Shop on Main Street (co-directed by Elmar Klos) won this year's Oscar as the best foreign film. Within the past three weeks, two other Czech films have opened in Manhattan, and an astonishing 55 more have been acquired for U.S. distribution in the near future. Already festooned with garlands of laurels from European competitions, Milos Forman's The Loves of a Blonde has been chosen to open the annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center this fall.

"Oh" for an Answer. At their best, the new Czech films combine a zest for cinematic experimentation with a thematic audacity and wry humor that is surprising in a Communist culture. A recurrent motif of the Prague cinemakers is the plight of the dogged individualist who bombards society with question marks, and usually receives "Oh" for an answer. Black Peter, Forman's first feature film, is a droll defense of an aimless Czech teenager, who drifts from senseless jobs to hopeless dance-hall encounters to empty lectures at home. In the devastating symbolism of Joseph Kilián, by 30-year-old Director Pavel Juráček, the protagonist borrows a cat from a pet shop and is entangled in a bleak, Kafkaesque nightmare while trying to return it. Painting a surprisingly harsh portrait of Communism's common man, Evald Schorm, 34, debunks bureaucracy with unmuffled freedom in his Courage for Every Day. Chosen by a magazine as the exemplar of the socialist ideal, a factory worker stumbles over every slogan, ends by trying to numb his senses with sex and alcohol.