Format: DVD

Release date: 3 December 2007

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Frantisek Vlí¡cil

Director: Frantisek Pavlicek, Frantisek Vlí¡cil

Based on: the novel by Vladislav Vancura

Cast: Magda Ví¡sí¡ryoví¡, Frantisek Veleckí­Â½, Josef Kemr, Michal Kozuch

Czechoslovakia 1967
159 mins

I had to sneak into work after hours to watch this one on a big screen. Distributors like Second Run are doing wonders in the way of DVD release of films you might otherwise never have had the chance to see. But some films make you more aware of the limitations of your laptop than others. Marketa Lazaroví¡ is on the grand scale from the opening frames. The camera dwells on a blinding snowscape fusing into a cold sky for a minute before some black specks become discernible; only when these have become wolves does it lurch into motion, tracking the sinuous loping forms across the unending white. In the laptop version, the screen is merely white, and the wolves remain specks. This does make a difference, as the sense of a vast and indifferent natural world is the cinematic keynote of the film. Throughout, human groups batter each other to smithereens, leaving isolated figures wandering, floundering in swamps, or crawling on all fours in the undergrowth of some of cinema’s most unnerving forestry. You need that feeling of everything just going on and on in every direction, on every side of the frame.

The story concerns the squabbles of neighbouring clans in a time before Christianity has successfully turned warlords into estate managers. The Kozlí­Â­k clan are hunters, of rich travellers as much as of game. Lazar, on the other hand, is a hypocritical yeoman, happy to scavenge after the Kozlí­Â­k boys have done their worst, but wheedlingly pious when he is caught at it. Think of my Marketa, he pleads, effectively pimping his daughter’s innocence to top Kozlí­Â­k son Mikolí¡s. A sudden radiance illuminates the doting father’s face as we share a vision of Marketa following a peloton of dove-toting nuns up a wind-blown hill to chapel. Even the grimly determined Mikolí¡s has to look uncertainly over his shoulder in an effort to locate the mysterious light source. Whether or not he sees, as we do, Marketa extricating a dove, and an inadvertent nipple, from her bodice, remains doubtful. Back in reality, a horse, inspired in a quite different way, licks the supplicant Lazar’s bouffant headgear.

All in a day’s work for the Kozlí­Â­k boys then, in a world they master as far as they can see. Unfortunately, however, this time they have gone too far: by raiding the caravan of a German Bishop, and abducting his son, they bring upon themselves the unwelcome attention of the King’s regional representatives. As fat old Hetman Pivo (Captain Beer) pursues the Kozlí­Â­ks, Lazar naturally does nothing to stand in his way. Kozlí­Â­k revenge costs him dear, however, as Mikolí¡s seizes his most treasured possession, Marketa. Guerilla warfare, and mutual annihilation, with some brutal, doomed romance along the way, ensue; pretty much the way of things for the hell-bent, werewolf-descended Kozlí­Â­k’s, but something of a journey for intending nun Marketa; from lamb of god to Czech art-house Sarah Connor.

Rhyming with the nomadic fury of the participants, the narrative method is nomadic and furious. A simple tale in its broadest strokes is skewed by narrative loops and interleaving; memories and moments of clairvoyance come out of nowhere in vertiginous dislocations of point of view. Holding it all together is exceptionally strong and coherent art direction on all fronts. Costume, in particular headwear, is the index of beast fable in this beastly world. Kozlí­Â­k’s lupine descent seems to be spreading over him like a fungal infection: starting from his claws, the fur has gained as far as the elbows, and his wolf-eared hood is surely only the first step towards prognathous developments. Conversely, as she gazes out from the back of the sled on her way home from the convent, Marketa’s face is framed by the heart-shaped opening of a woolly white snood. She has just been offered to Christ and somehow you already know this is a world in which lambkins get roasted. The range of lighting throughout is fantastic, much of it pointed at Marketa’s receptive face. Zdení„›k LiÅ¡ka’s soundtrack is curious and intense, ranging from the expected medieval plainchant to wild, incongruous outbursts of marimba. Sound in general is one of the film’s most distinctive features: every word, every movement whips back at you in a dry, staccato echo. Like bullets off armour plating, every act rebounds on you, every prayer is rebuffed. From the clattering courtyard of the Kozlí­Â­k homestead to the depths of the immemorial forest, the landscape is not listening, and it doesn’t care.

Stephen Thomson

Format: DVD

Release date: 19 February 2007

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Jií…(TM)í­Â­ Weiss

Screenplay: Jí¡n Otcení¡sek, Jií…(TM)í­Â­ Weiss

Original title: Romeo, Julia a tma

Cast: Ivan Mistrí­Â­k, Daniela Smutní¡, Jirina Sejbaloví¡

Czechoslovakia 1960

92 minutes

Czechoslovakia, 1942, during the Nazi Occupation. Hanka, a Jewish girl, escapes the transports to Theresienstadt by hiding in the attic of a large apartment block. Hanka is helped by Pavel, an 18-year-old boy who uses his mother’s attic storeroom as a darkroom. Pavel brings her food, drink and books and his daily visits become her only contact with the outside world. Predictably, the two teenagers fall in love until Hanka is discovered by the mistress of a Nazi officer living in the house. While echoes of Anne Frank are present within the story, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness is not a wartime thriller but a love story set in the midst of the fear and violence of occupation.

Film director Jií…(TM)í­Â­ Weiss knew his topic intimately; as a Jewish refugee Weiss spent the war years in London and later fled Prague for the US after having established himself as an award-winning filmmaker. There are echoes of the nouvelle vague and Italian neo-realism in his style, and as in MiloÅ¡ Forman and Roman Polanski’s early work, there is a strong nod in the direction of a more politicised and yet consistently lyrical use of melodrama. The use of the house as a realist location is cunningly devised with much of the action taking place on the windy stairs, which separate as well as bring together, in both ethnic and social terms, the various occupants of the house. Even more impressive is the sparse use of sound effects that help to temper as well as accentuate what is naturally an overtly melodramatic story line. Throughout the plot, the melodic and at times piercing song of a caged canary evokes the situation that Hanka finds herself in; caged and kept by Pavel whom we first meet as he is about to recuperate an abandoned hamster in a flat previously occupied by a Jewish family.

Weiss was quoted as saying that he was attracted to the subject matter firstly as a love story, and only secondly because of its social and political implications. In reality, Weiss could just as well have said that he was motivated by cinema’s ability to affectionately portray the minutiae of human circumstance rather than the sturm und drang of forbidden and tragic love. Because of this, the love element in the film is almost downplayed and the two youngsters spend most of the time gazing at the stars from the attic window rather than engage in corporal pleasures. Miles apart from, for example, Bergman’s portrayal of young love in Summer with Monika, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness displays no fresh eroticism or vigour, and Weiss’s lovers are instead shy embodiments of dreams hindered by circumstance. As in that infinitely more extravagant version of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, the lovers here are caught in ethical and moral dilemmas that have more to do with larger affiliations than with intimacy. Even faced with his wholesome blonde girlfriend in a swimsuit at the local pool Pavel cannot forget that his fellow countrymen are simultaneously being executed by the Nazi occupiers.

Herein lies the film’s curious strength as well as its outdated-ness, perhaps, for more modern viewers. What seems to matter is not so much the relationship between these two young people as how a young boy is forced to make extraordinary decisions in the face of imminent danger. The camera lingers over actress Dana Smutní¡’s classically beautiful features as if to remind us that the character of Hanka is indeed the vessel for Pavel’s romantic yearnings but with little information to flesh her out as a person, she remains just that. Consequently, Ivan Mistrí­Â­k as Pavel is more effective in the scenes at home or at school, where he has to externalize his internal torment, than when he is looking at Hanka.

To a large extent, the story is told through the little details such as the balance wheel that Pavel’s watchmaker grandfather spends all day working on, or the incessant yapping of the Nazi mistress’s dog who nearly discloses Hanka’s whereabouts. The viewer is well aware that time is running out for Hanka, and in Shakespearean terms, it provides the lovers with no other opportunity than to turn night into day, when Pavel can visit Hanka unseen. Likewise, it is no coincidence that Pavel dreams of being an astronomer: the lovers are genuinely ‘star-crossed’, their fate determined by forces much larger and insurmountable than mere mortal love.

Despite such little nods in the direction of Shakespeare, the film, it seems, chooses to downplay whatever complex literary references one might expect in favour of a more guileless visual and spoken language. If it works, it is because the actual horrors of the Holocaust are left unspoken. Ultimately, the first image of the film is perhaps its most poignant as Pavel helplessly watches a Jewish family dragging their few possessions through the empty streets of Prague. Romeo and Juliet may have been the instigating factor for Weiss’s melancholy film but it is the darkness of the impending genocide that we are fittingly left with.

CB

Format:DVD

Release date: 26 May 2008

Distributor: BFI

Director: Chris Petit

Writer: Chris Petit

Cast: David Beames, Lisa Kreuzer, Sandy Ratcliff

UK/Germany 1979

100 mins

Finally available on DVD for the first time in the UK, Chris Petit’s Radio On is one of the most striking feature debuts in British cinema. A haunting, existential synthesis of thriller and road movie, it reflects a fascination with not only all things automotive but also the mythology of freedom and the lingering ennui that underpins the finest films in the road movie genre.

Previously the film editor at Time Out, Petit claims to have seen nothing on the English screen that corresponded to a modern life that for him combined ‘drift and boredom, Alphaville, JG Ballard and Kraftwerk’. An admirer of Two-Lane Blacktop and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Petit began to wonder why a British film could not explore the enduring theme of migration whilst presenting contemporary England as a cinematic landscape. While he was similarly enthralled by the austere aesthetic of Bresson, Straub and Rossellini, it was the films of Wim Wenders that indicated that a way of actually making films might be possible. Possibility became reality when the German responded to Petit’s overtures and became his Executive Producer.

Minimalist in plot, Radio On follows a young man (a suitably distant David Beames) as he travels by car to Bristol to investigate the death in mysterious circumstances of his brother. As he drives he encounters figures as rootless as himself: a soldier deserting from duty in Northern Ireland, a German woman looking for her lost child (Lisa Kreuzer, on loan from Wenders), and a rural rock ‘n’ roll loving garage mechanic with dreams of stardom (an early Sting cameo). Stunningly photographed in luminous monochrome by another Wenders regular, Martin Schäfer, the film offers a mythic and quietly compelling vision of a late and very gloomy 1970s England stricken by economic decline and stalled between failed hopes of cultural and social change and the imminent upheavals of Thatcherism.

In his preface to my road movies book Petit, who has carved out a simultaneous career as a novelist, eloquently writes of his love of driving and music, citing the portable radio cassette as one of the ‘greatest inventions of the twentieth century and the in-car stereo as the means by which the dreary reality of Britain could be transcended’. Given this appreciation of the relationship between music and motion it should come as no surprise that Radio On delivers one of the great film soundtracks, utilising the new wave sounds of David Bowie, Robert Fripp, Kraftwerk and Devo. But despite these pop accoutrements and despite suggesting an audacious new direction for British cinema, this undeniably alien and alienating work was met with suspicion and incomprehension on release.

Later celebrated by the writer Iain Sinclair in his book Lights Out for the Territory, Radio On‘s reputation has rightly remained in the ascendancy and it remains very much a personal favourite. Theatrically re-released to an audible fanfare by the British Film Institute in 2004, the film’s availability on DVD (again through the BFI) will give further pause for re-discovery. It’s a handsome package too, incorporating 1988’s 24-minute Radio On (Remix) project (a stunning digital video essay with radical disruption of the original soundtrack by Wire’s Bruce Gilbert), extended interviews with both Petit and maverick producer Keith Griffiths and essays by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, John Patterson, Ian Penman, Chris Petit, Sukhdev Sandhu and road movie guru Rudy Wurlitzer.

Jason Wood

Jason Wood is the author of 100 Road Movies (BFI Publishing).

Format: DVD

Release date: 14 April 2008

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Piero Schivazappa

Writer: Piero Schivazappa

Cast: Philippe Leroy, Dagmar Lassander

Italy 1969

86 mins

A deceptively mocking parable about the eternal fight between the sexes, Femina Ridens (aka The Frightened Woman) ratifies with ill-concealed irony the ‘natural inferiority’ of the male faced with female cynicism and rationality. Shot as an ambitious gamble by Piero Schivazappa in 1969, this is a film that deals with issues that were still socially censored at the time and would become political debates the following decade.

Terrorized by the sexual act due to a childhood trauma, Dr Sayer, the director of a philanthropic institute, regularly uses complying prostitutes to act out his sadistic fantasies until one day he decides to try it with a ‘real woman’. Stylishly performed by Philippe Leroy and the sensual Dagmar Lassander, the film boasts an avant-garde artistic direction, which pays homage – as specified in the final credits – to Claude Joubert, ‘Plexus’, and Giuseppe Capogrossi, and features a large statue of a woman with a pronged vagina that is a reproduction of the artwork by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely.

Set in Dr Sayer’s vast and futuristic villa, the audacious content of the film is matched by the stylish photography that contributes to the formal ambitions of this forgotten cinematic gem. Schivazappa icily and sarcastically breaks the characters’ bodies and minds, catching the spectator out with sadistic inventions unthinkable for the time; playing hide-and-seek with his audience, he simultaneously declares and denies his misogyny. The director dissects the outrages suffered by Maria’s body, framing it in close-ups, thus conveying the perverse psychosis of Dr Sayer, who is impotent in facing the erotic power of the female body. Maria, once untangled from the restraints of bondage, blows Dr Sayer’s mind up in the scene where she performs a teasing dance, gradually removing the veils wrapped around her almost naked body.

The narrative is interspersed with plasticized eroticism and sadomasochist practices touched by a marvellous sense of POP that has an immediate effect on the amazed spectator. To watch Femina Ridens today is an amusingly surprising experience because the film uses a morbid, psychedelic tone to describe the changes society would undergo in the immediate future, but also warning the audience against a dangerous drift towards female domination of society; this turning point is represented in the scene where Maria gives a blow job to a subdued Dr Sayer, an action humorously signified by images of a group of clarinet-playing women.

A nightmarish tale on the incompatibility of men and women, the film uses a psychedelic context to illustrate a gender issue still unresolved to these days; the finale boasts an astonishing mix of genres: the swimming pool scene is shot and musically arranged like a Western duel, putting an abrupt end to the director’s reflections on gender. Wrongly labelled as sexploitation, Femina Ridens anticipated a certain type of daring, sexually explicit, marginal Italian films and stands as one of the few attempts to analyse sex power relations from a Ferreri-esque point of view. In fact Schivazappa’s film bears striking similarities to Ferreri’s Il Seme dell’uomo (The Seed of Man), shot in the same (apocalyptic) year.

Celluloid Liberation Front