134 / BD 43 The Fifth Horseman is Fear

[Ribs]

The Fifth Horseman is Fear
(…a pátý jezdec je Strach)

A film by Zbyněk Brynych
Czechoslovakia, 1964

A Jewish physician in Nazi-occupied Prague is compelled to work cataloguing the homes and possessions of his countrymen as they are displaced to designated ghettos. When he helps an injured resistance fighter, he is plunged into a moral and ethical dilemma, and begins a nightmarish odyssey to help save the man.

Focussing on the intense anxiety, paranoia and terror prevalent in a fascist state, Zbyněk Brynych’s film subverts its historical context, creating an expressionistic, thinly disguised allegory about communist Czechoslovakia - or indeed any totalitarian system - that is richly atmospheric and frighteningly real.

“A nearly perfect film... it is unmistakably the work of a master... a beautiful, distinguished work.” Roger Ebert

ON BLU-RAY & DVD AUGUST 2021

[senseabove]

Excellent news!

Very curious whether Second Run can get ahold of the various bits of additional footage that have been discussed elsewhere on here and contextualize them.

[MichaelB]

I'm thrilled about this, because I know this has been very near the top of their wishlist pretty much since the label was first founded fifteen years ago - and I've never seen it in anything better than a fairly crappy DVD from an ancient analogue telecine (which is why they very sensibly waited).

But it's a properly astonishing film - as I wrote about it the last time I watched it:

This palm-sweatingly relentless study of paranoia and guilt is ostensibly set during WWII, but aside from the occasional low-key swastika on a poster and overheard radio reference to "the Reich" there's nothing that firmly dates the film in the 1940s: Dr Braun, the main protagonist, looks vaguely Jewish, but he's never explicitly identified as such (certainly not by the subtitles), while the men conducting regular random door-to-door searches are presumably Gestapo agents, but they could just as well be KGB, Stasi or their Czech equivalent, the StB. Which was presumably deliberate on director Zbyněk Brynych's part: he couldn't possibly have set the film openly in mid-60s Prague, but his target audience wouldn't have had any difficulty reading between the lines.

Dr Braun keeps himself to himself: forbidden to practice medicine for an unspecified reason, he works as what he calls "a warehouseman", a job that seems to involve cataloguing missing people's property (why these people are missing is never explained, and it's presumably best not to ask). He rarely indulges in more than the most superficial small talk with his varied and often garrulous neighbours, and lives in an almost bare flat with just a violin for company. With extreme reluctance, he's dragged into a conspiracy when a neighbour desperately seeks his help: a friend has been shot and needs urgent surgery, but he can't get it legitimately because he's a Resistance fighter or known subversive of that kind. Initially hesitant to the point of outright refusal, but clearly swayed by his long-suppressed vocation, Dr Braun removes the bullet and then sets out on a quest for morphine that dominates the film's mid-section and leads to its most hallucinatory set-pieces, initially in a bar, then an unnervingly white mental hospital.

It's hard to convey just how effective this film is at turning the screws on its audience. Brynych doesn't indulge in the kind of overt Expressionism that makes later Czech films like The Cremator so unforgettable, but almost every shot has something slightly skewed about it, whether it's someone framed just a little too off-centre for comfort, an unexpectedly sudden cut, or a jolting change of emphasis on the soundtrack. While Braun is the focus of attention when he's onscreen, we also get to know his neighbours well by the end, and discover (either directly or by implication) that they have guilty secrets of their own - in at least one case, that of being an informer. It seems a bit glib to draw parallels with Kafka, given that Prague was also his hometown, but this film catches his essence better than most direct adaptations that I've seen. It's riveting stuff, and I must keep an eye out for Brynych's other films, although I'm not sure if there are any others with English subtitles.

(I've since managed to see Transport from Paradise - courtesy of Second Run - and the early Cold War spy drama Skid, but that's it. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of information about Brynych out there either - I suspect that, like Vojtěch Jasný and František Vláčil, he was just too old to get included with the Czechoslovak New Wave generation, even though his two best-known films are contemporaneous with theirs.)

[L.A.]

First Slovak Film Institute’s Night Riders and now this. Like a double-bill for the coming weeks.

[What A Disgrace]

Specs according to Amazon...

• The Fifth Horseman is Fear (…a pátý jezdec je Strach, 1964) presented from a new HD transfer from original materials by the Czech National Film Archive.
• A newly-recorded Projection Booth audio commentary with Kat Ellinger, Jonathan Owen and Mike White.
• Two ‘lost’ sequences: the Italian Prologue, and the notorious Nazi brothel sequence that appeared in the 1968 American and Italian release versions of the film.
• Žalm (1966) - a short film by the renowned Czech filmmaker Evald Schorm to commemorate the tragic destiny of the Jewish people.
• 20-page booklet with new writing on the film by Jonathan Owen. • New English subtitle translation. • World premiere release

[Finch]

Lovely surprise! I had suggested this in the appropriate thread and seems like they finally got access to a transfer good enough for release.

[MichaelB]

I think I first heard they were chasing this title way back in 2006/07, but the SD masters were shockingly poor back then. Sometimes the best option is simply to wait.

[Bikey]

Full details now up at our website

[Bikey]

"Stunningly shot by Jan Kališ in black-and-white scope and featuring a haunting, sparse score by Jiří Sternwald, this tightly-wound film is a compelling experience right from the outset [...] the film is in fine shape and looks wonderful here with its original widescreen compositions coming across effectively throughout."
Mondo Digital

[Bikey]

DVD Compare

[Bikey]

"Remains one of the finest of all 60s Czechoslovak films – given the pivotal importance of that decade in their national cinema history, no small praise.[...] THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS FEAR is a literal revelation in this high-definition remaster."

Michael Brooke reviews in the latest Sight and Sound magazine

[jbeall]

This is such a terrific film. I've watched almost all of SR's Czech and Slovak releases, and Miroslav Macháček's performance as the tormented Dr. Braun may be the finest individual performance in all of them. The film itself is wonderful, too, but I just wanted to pop in and praise Macháček.

[ikms]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news on a release that is almost two years old, but there looks to be a rather serious technical error introduced at some point in the digital pipeline. While reviews dutifully caveat the absence of proper restoration on this transfer, (finally watching just now) I was more disturbed by the stair-stepping / aliasing obvious from the opening credits onward. I thought this could be a scaling issue (720p to 1080p?) but needed a proper frame to dig deeper, luckily Mondo Digital's 8th capture shows this clearly:

Along the line of roof tiles with a crop of 40 vertical pixels, counting the steps, I come up with 20 and it seems the aliasing is only on the vertical axis. This ratio all but confirms that at some point the 1080p HD picture was mistreated as interlaced, separated as 1920x540 fields, and then stretched back to 1920x1080 for the HD master. I don't know what software/hardware was used for this production, but I assume this escaped notice until now. The Devil's Trap had similarly rough looking elements, but in that case I don't remember seeing any indication SD images had been signed off on as HD.