Czechoslovakia: Into Unexplored Terrain

• Share

(8 of 10)

Věra Chytilová, whose dazzling photography and experiments in surrealism amount to nose thumbing at the party's effort to dictate style in art. Her Daisies, for example, is a plotless romp of two teenage girls whose stunts include holding up butterfly specimens in place of their bras, swinging from chandeliers and eating food ads instead of food. The work of Milos Forman has helped to make Czechoslovak films popular abroad; his Loves of a Blonde was a human, tender, wry love story of ordinary people with ordinary emotions that had no socialistic message to dull it; it appealed to people everywhere. One of its features: the first nude love scene in the history of the Czechoslovak cinema. Other top films range in style from Vojtech Jasný's fantasy about a cat with magic glasses who sees through human deceptions, When the Cat Comes, to Jaromil Jires' charming record of a couple's reminiscences on the eve of their first child's birth, The First Cry.

Since 1954, the Czechoslovak directors have carried off no fewer than 35 major international prizes for their films. The Czechoslovaks are also pacemakers in new screen technology, as illustrated by two highly successful experiments at their Expo 67 pavilion. Packed audiences were all delighted with the "Kinoautomat," which enabled them to affect the outcome of a movie's plot through an electronic vote, and with "Polyvision," a technique that projected a series of synchronized patterns and images on more than 100 small, moving screens. Many people thought that the pavilion, which cost more than $10 million, was the fair's best.

Biting Satire. These days, Czechoslovakia's writers specialize in biting satire on Communist bureaucracy. Their work is in the tradition of Kafka and Karel Capek, whose play R.U.R. first introduced the concept of a robot. In The Memorandum, a popular play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smoček, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways and hedges, which represent bureaucracy. While an amused keeper watches with his vicious dog, they crawl piteously about, toss out the bones of their dead comrades and conduct absurd conversations.

None of the better writers seems to have written even a line in praise of the triumphs of socialism. The popular Bohumil Hrabil's erotic stories about barflies, criminals and layabouts (The Pearls and' The Palaver ers) are filled with surrealism and black humor. Novelist Vačulik writes about languid Czechs such as the farmers in The Axe, who are brutally herded into Communist collectives. Novelist Ladislav Mñačko, who went to Israel in protest against Novotný's repression last fall, writes in Delayed Reports about tortures and rigged trials that he has seen as a journalist. In his A Taste of Power, Mñačko describes an apparatchik whose character is twisted by power.

But a sophisticated and relatively free cultural life has been of no help in solving Czechoslovakia's dire economic problems. Once a highly industrialized country that had a healthy trade with the West, Czechoslovakia has seen its economy warped and