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John Edmond wrote:heh. Though I don't like the subtitle information. Of course a picture like that suggests not all the info is at hand.

As with Amazon preorders, I suspect they're just printing what they've got to hand, and aren't confirming anything they aren't sure about.

It now seems certain that the DVD at least will have subtitles, though of course that doesn't guarantee that the Blu-ray will have - as I found to my cost when I bought the Blu-ray of Xawery Żuławski's Snow White and Russian Red. Despite being on the same label as the DVD, it didn't have English subtitles, while the DVD did.

Shipping costs more than the blu...

Well, I've taken the plunge and ordered, and I'll report back when it arrives.

I ordered about eight other titles to keep postage down - or at least to spread it around a bit. They seem to charge the same flat rate regardless of how much you order.

Second report back from 60s Slovakia:

The Sun in a Net - A great, great film. From the outset you know you're in the hands of a filmmaker who knows what he's doing, and you can just enjoy the ride. I can't wait to get to the other Uhers.

The Boxer and Death - Solid WWII drama, aided immeasurably by the ever-reliable Manfred Krug. I always have issues with narratives that reduce the Holocaust to conventional interpersonal drama - as if that event needs to be 'heightened' by adding the trappings of individual goodie vs. individual baddie melodrama. If any historical event demands the very difficult 'collective protagonist' approach, this is the one. (It's a subject for Jansco if ever there was one.) That aside, this film works better than most, and it gains strength from presenting Krug as an inadvertent monster - a guy biding his time perpetrating monstrosities, looking forward to getting back to his 'normal life' after the war ends and he's spared the inconvenience of genocide. There's something grimly honest and I think quite perceptive regarding his delusional assumptions about how his behaviour will be judged after the war. The genocide has been so normalised that he believes posterity will be more concerned about how he treats the one man he fights than the thousands he slaughters. That character insight certainly offers a better account of how something like the Holocaust could happen than the "they wuz all psychopaths" nonsense of a film like Schindler's List.

That said, the film still struggles with how to represent this event, and makes a few missteps along the way. As an example, there's an effective sequence in which the boxer walks past a yard full of old men and women and children, and when he walks back a little later, it's empty. That's fairly understated and eloquent, but then the drama is overplayed by having the boxer stop and gaze in horror at the smoke pouring out of the chimney of the ovens. But even then the filmmakers can't let it be, they have to have the smoke (rather implausibly) swoop back down to earth and envelop and choke the boxer. Now do you get it, viewers? Huh? Huh?

The Sheriff Behind Bars - Solid, standard borstal drama. Well done, but familiar stuff.

Dragon's Return - This is what cinephilia - and this forum - is all about. Here's a major masterpiece I'd never heard of, by a director I'd never heard of, that has vaulted to the top reaches of my hotly contested 1960s list already. It's just sheer mastery from the first seconds. As the film opens, I thought to myself that Zdenek Liska really outdid himself this time, with an incredible score of orchestral dissonances and chanting, whispering voices that expand and contract into a complete detailed, semi-abstract soundscape as if the soundtrack were breathing and stretching like an organic thing. And then I check the box and find that it's not Liska at all, but Ilja Zeljenka (who also did fine work on The Sun in a Net). Seriously, this is one of the all-time great film scores, and the wonder of it all is that the film's up to it.

It's a simple medieval tale of village politics, vindictiveness and revenge, told in the glancing, impressionistic style of many a New Wave classic, but strengthened by a wonderfully tactile sense of its world, very much in line with Vlacil and Tarkovsky (though the timeframe doesn't seem right for either Andrey Rublyov or Marketa Lazarova to be a direct influence, since Dragon's Return was made in '67). When two of the characters take off on a dangerous mission in the middle of the film, it actually anticipates the 'ecstatic truth' of Herzog's filmmaking expeditions. A first-rank masterpiece, anyway, that on its own justifies picking up all these discs. Anything else now is a bonus.

Well, presuming MichaelB's report is good, I think I know what I'll help fill out my Marketa Lazarova order. This is silly.

zedz wrote:It's a simple medieval tale of village politics, vindictiveness and revenge, told in the glancing, impressionistic style of many a New Wave classic, but strengthened by a wonderfully tactile sense of its world, very much in line with Vlacil and Tarkovsky (though the timeframe doesn't seem right for either Andrey Rublyov or Marketa Lazarova to be a direct influence, since Dragon's Return was made in '67).

Marketa Lazarová premiered on 6 October 1967.
Dragon's Return premiered on 10 May 1968.

But it seems pretty clear from the interview with Eduard Grečner in the indispensible Golden Sixties box that Dragon's Return was completed some considerable time earlier, belatedly released during the Prague Spring, shortly after which Grečner was blacklisted from directing and worked in a dubbing studio for over a decade.

And I can't see how either Grečner or Vláčil could have seen Andrey Rublyov - which, although complete, was then shelved. It certainly wasn't an influence on Vláčil, since both Marketa and Rublyov were shooting at the same time in 1965-66.

Incidentally, Grečner also reveals that the "glancing, impressionistic style" in this case was achieved by shooting 90% of the film through long lenses - initially an expedient method of getting the sets to look less artificial.

Oh, and I agree with you about the score, though Grečner is seriously pushing it when he claims that the film "initiated that whole style of music". Zdeněk Liška's score for Vláčil's The Devil's Trap (1961) alone gives the lie to that!

Any idea what kind of access Soviet Bloc filmmakers had to each others work by backchannel means - even when shelved?

Perhaps one of you knows of an English-friendly website offering Marketa? I can sort of figure out Italian and French, but Czech wasn't offered in California public schools in the late 50s/early 60s. Thanks -

John Edmond wrote:Any idea what kind of access Soviet Bloc filmmakers had to each others work by backchannel means - even when shelved?

It might have been possible to have caught a private screening of the Tarkovsky in Moscow between completion in 1966 and premiere in 1969, but I'd be very surprised if a 35mm print had been shipped all the way to Prague while it was still in purdah.

isakborg wrote:Perhaps one of you knows of an English-friendly website offering Marketa? I can sort of figure out Italian and French, but Czech wasn't offered in California public schools in the late 50s/early 60s. Thanks -

The only one I've found so far is filmcity.cz - not my favourite supplier, but I've used them before with no problems. Sadly, my favourite supplier, whose website is at least partially English-friendly, doesn't seem to list it.

But if Filmcity comes up with the goods, there's a strong case for one of us (probably me, I suspect) to co-ordinate a bulk order.

Thanks for the extra background, Michael (I really need to get that Golden Sixties box, I guess!) The Slovak edition seems to give production dates rather than release dates, and it dates Dragon's Return as '67 (which doesn't quite jibe with its being shelved for a while, so maybe their dating method is even more idiosyncratic than I thought), which certainly doesn't allow for much influence from a film that debuted at the end of the year, as you note. And I would be very cautious about speculating any influence from shelved Soviet films, since you're getting into areas that are unlikely and presumably unverifiable.

Another deft strategy Grecner employs to aid the verisimilitude of the film is to incorporate weird modernist designs (Dragon's ceramics, the phials and flasks employed at the tavern) that sort of goose the historicity and dislocate the setting from any too-specific temporal reference. (Of course, these may well be based on actual historical objects, but my point is they don't read that way.) The fact that these signifiers are also really tactile objects augments Grecner's smart technique of establishing his world with textures and sound - it 'feels' real before it has to look real.

It was more a question raised by the subject matter than speculation (disclaimer of the obvious, I haven't even seen Dragon's Return); I know it's unlikely and unverifiable. It's just that I've never really come across any discussion of how the bloc cinemas bureaucratically related to one another nor precisely what happened to banned films (for instance, who stored them? the party, the studio, archivists or the film school? Was it the same in each country, for each film?).

Jan Švankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue was not only shelved in Czechoslovakia, but screened behind closed doors as an example of what should not be made.

That's a good question, and there's probably a range of explanations, but I remember when a large number of suppressed films were finally unleashed in the late 80s / early 90s that it was pretty clear that the studios responsible had taken very good care of their 'unshowable' treasures. I suspect that the experience of decades of bureaucratic and political reversals had led the studio archivists to assume that no ban would ever be permanent. In this respect I think the Communist bloc studios have a much stronger track record for protecting 'lost' films than any of the Hollywood ones. Dozens of films emerged from the woodwork in pristine condition at the time: their preservation seemed to be systematic and diligent.

And as Michael notes, there are oral accounts of screenings of otherwise suppressed films (Communist and non-), particularly in film schools, but I've never heard of a suppressed film crossing a border behind closed doors, so to speak. Which isn't to say it didn't happen.

zedz wrote:I suspect that the experience of decades of bureaucratic and political reversals had led the studio archivists to assume that no ban would ever be permanent.

...including the four Czech films that were officially "banned forever", an edict laid down in 1973 that in the event only lasted a mere sixteen years.

For the record, they were Jan Němec's The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966), Miloš Forman's The Fireman’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko!, 1967), Vojtěch Jasný's All My Good Countrymen (Všichni dobří rodáci, 1967) and Evald Schorm's The End of a Priest (Farářův konec, 1968).

All survive in excellent condition - unlike Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow, which really was deliberately destroyed.

MichaelB wrote:The End of a Priest (Farářův konec, 1968).

All survive in excellent condition

Albeit not on DVD in this one case. Schorm is perhaps the last major Czechoslovak New Wave director whose work is totally unknown to me, and I'm really getting desperate to see it. This film played in New York about 10 years ago, and I'm still kicking myself for missing it.

I've only ever seen Return of the Prodigal Son, which is certainly a great film. Since this is (by some miracle) the appropriate thread, can anybody inform us whether any of Schorm's films are available with English subtitles?

zedz wrote:I've only ever seen Return of the Prodigal Son, which is certainly a great film. Since this is (by some miracle) the appropriate thread, can anybody inform us whether any of Schorm's films are available with English subtitles?

I know only about Dům radosti (House of Joy), 1965 and Žít svůj život, 1963 (available only at the Ateliér Josefa Sudka.
Každý den odvahu (Courage for every day), 1964 is available with french subtitles.

So much of Schorm on DVD's, but NOT SUBTITLES!?
Návrat ztraceného syna (The Return of the Prodigal Son), 1966
Každý den odvahu (Courage for Every Day), 1964
Farářuv konec (The End of a Priest), 1969
Den sedmý, osmá noc (The Seventh Day, the Eighth Night), 1969
Bratři Karamazovi (The Karamazov Brothers (stage adaptation)), 1979
Žít svůj život, 1963
Proč?(Why?), 1964
Zrcadlení, 1965
Žalm, 1965
Carmen nejen podle Bizeta (Carmen Not Only According to Bizet), 1968
Etuda o zkoušce, 1976

MichaelB wrote:All survive in excellent condition - unlike Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow, which really was deliberately destroyed.

Although production on 'Bezhin Meadow' was deliberately stopped by the authorities at the time and the film was never released, they didn't actually destroy the film. The footage was destroyed in by a bomb during World War II. Unless, of course, you're simply refering to war as being deliberate destuction...

Also, while on the off-topic topic of the film, I always find it of note that one of the reasons given for halting production on 'Bezhin Meadow' was that it was a waste of money. Shortly after, the politician who gave the order to cease production on it was exectuted for, amongst other things, wasting money by halting half completed productions!

Any review of the marketa lazarova blu yet?

Mine hasn't shipped yet, and it usually takes at least a week even without factoring in Christmas postal delays.

UPDATE: The release date seems to have shifted from 2 to 14 December, so if I'm very lucky I'll get it just before Christmas. But I'm assuming I won't be, as I ordered loads of other discs so am relying on them all being in stock.

admira wrote:MARKETA LAZAROVA IN HD FOR SALE

admira wrote:

admira wrote:MARKETA LAZAROVA IN HD FOR SALE

Terry posters charge 20 EUR for shipping to 'other countries'

Yes, I couldn't work out any cheaper method than ordering two copies of Marketa plus loads of other DVDs that I'd had my eye on - my usual method of keeping postage down when ordering from central/eastern Europe, since retailers usually charge a flat rate.

But if you just want Marketa, a bulk order shared with several other people may be the best way to go. As I said, I'd be happy to coordinate such a thing once my FilmCity order turns up and I can assess whether it's worth giving them repeat business (and of course whether the Blu-ray is any good!).

UPDATE: Based on the current exchange rate and the postage I paid for approx. 10 items from FilmCity, I reckon we're looking at a price of £20.90/€24.70/$32.67 per disc, plus the cost of posting it from the UK to wherever you're based. But I won't be setting this up for at least a week - probably not till after Christmas, more realistically - so if you can find a better deal, feel free to post it here.

Juraj Jakubisko
Tisícročná včela (The Millennial Bee), 1983
Pehavý Max a strašidlá (Freckled Max and the Spooks), 1987
Perinbaba (The Feather Fairy), 1985
Vtáčkovia, siroty a blázni (Birdies, Orphans and Fools), 1969
Bathory, 2008
Kristove roky (The Prime of Life), 1967
Postav dom, zasaď strom (Build a House, Plant a Tree), 1979
Lepšie byť bohatý a zdravý ako chudobný a chorý, 1992
Nejasná zpráva o konci světa (An Ambiguous Report About the End of the World), 1997

Vladimír Sís
Balada pro banditu (Ballad for a Bandit), 1979

Věra Plívová - Šimková
Krakonoš a lyžníci, 1980
Páni kluci(Gentlemen, Boys), 1976

Dan Wlodarczyk
Indián a sestřička, 2006

Petr Nikolaev
Lidice, 2011

Marta Nováková
Marta, 2006

Vojtěch Jasný
Návrat ztraceného ráje (Return to Paradise Lost), 1999
Hell on Earth, 2002

Zdeněk Tyc
Malé oslavy, 2008
Smradi (Brats), 2002
El Paso (Not a Chance), 2008

Julius Ševčík
Normal, 2009

Radim Špaček
Pouta (Walking Too Fast), 2009
JEŠTĚ HRAJOU DUDY (Call of Dudy), 2004

Tomáš Řehořek
Piko (ONE WAY TICKET), 2010
Proměny (Changes), 2009
Czech Made Man, 2011

Robert Sedláček
Pravidla lži (Rules of Lies), 2006
Největší z Čechů (The Greatest Czechs), 2010