Czechmate – In Search of Jiri Menzel (2018) a love letter to Czech New Wave (Review)

Let’s get the big thing out of the way first – and I mean big. The new Second Run Blu-Ray, CzechMate – In Search of Jíři Menzel, is a 448-minute documentary about Czech and Slovak cinema. It’s been cited as the longest Indian film ever made, and that’s a country with plenty of competition. Is seven and a half hours daunting nowadays? It’s only three minutes shorter than the total run-time of this season’s buzziest box set, Mrs. America. That, though, is a television show, parcelled out in digestible segments with built-in opportunities for a break. CzechMate is a proper film, which flows and builds like a movie should. It’s split into two parts simply because the discs will only hold so much. I watched it in five sittings, each of which was roughly equivalent to a feature film, and even then I wish I’d not interrupted it so often.

Still, this is a measure of director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s success. Some documentarians are film-makers who happen to work in non-fiction, while others are akin to journalists who write using moving images. Dungarpur’s work feels like film criticism that has itself taken on film form, which is not as unusual a thing as it once was. Social media has brought us a plethora of videos and supercuts about film, the best of which are truly excellent. CzechMate, though, is not just longer than the average video essay. It’s more carefully researched, more intimate and more historically important.

The subtitle is slightly misleading. For a start, it implies a quest narrative which Menzel is far too forthcoming for – at one point the elder film-maker estimates Dungarpur has shot some twenty hours of interviews with him. For another, it’s not just about Menzel, but the whole of the 1960s Czechoslovak New Wave. Telling this story through Menzel proves to be a wise decision; his career emerges as both exceptional and typical of his generation. Graduating from FAMU, Prague’s most prestigious film school, he made his feature debut with the extraordinary, Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains. Just as he was establishing himself as a favourite with critics and audiences alike, though, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Menzel’s Larks on a String was one of many films banned by the country’s occupiers, but he found a way through the mire and continued making films under Communism and capitalism. He’s still alive: his most recent film came out in 2013.

Menzel’s story, then, is the story of the Czechoslovak New Wave in microcosm. If this movie was nothing other than a strong, unusually comprehensive narrative retelling of the most rewarding cinematic movement, it would be enough. Coming at a time when many European nations, like the rest of the world, appear to be backsliding into authoritarianism, it also prompts reflections on the toll of surviving such a system. Evald Schorm and Eduard Grečner were banned from film-making for decades; Štefan Uher, the older Slovak director who Miloš Forman famously dubbed the John the Baptist of the movement, died of cancer at just 62. Otakar Vávra suffered less physically, but his reputation took a hit. With his searingly political Witchhammer withdrawn from distribution, he became known for flag-wavers like The Liberation of Prague, and was criticised for his closeness to the regime as a result.

There’s a touching moment at the end of the Vávra segment where Dungarpur loops back to the beginning of his career, showing his first abstract short The Light Penetrates the Dark, as if yearning for the days when films didn’t have to have ideologies or even people in them. There are several moments of similar richness; I enjoyed the famous sunrise scene from All My Good Countrymen being used to allegorise the brief moment of liberalisation preceding the Soviet invasion. The length of the film also allows for a few dissenting voices and questions. Agnieszka Holland notes that Closely Observed Trains treats Nazism with a droll, dark humour that she finds both quintessentially Czech and slightly callous. Other interviewees ponder the differences between Czech and Slovak films, and wonder if Slovak films lack that irony that Holland objects to. It’s true that a lot of the New Wave’s emotional gut-punches – The Shop on the High Street, most obviously – come from the Slovak side.

Myself, I associate Slovak movies with some seriously dark vibes; films like The Cremator and Birds, Orphans and Fools left me feeling like some kind of hex had been laid on me. I was therefore delighted to see the director of the latter, Juraj Jakubisko, turn up with long grey hair and a black hat that made him look like the villain in an Italian horror movie. Fans of the other directors interviewed will note similar moments where they play to type; Věra Chytilová lives near a wood that’s straight out of her film Fruit of Paradise, while Pictures of the Old World‘s Dušan Hanák has partially dismantled dolls decorating his walls. One interview with the very literate Menzel seems to be shot in an enormous library – only when he starts giving a guided tour of the different sections do you realise it’s actually his house.

All of this is good fun for fans of the directors profiled, but how does it play for newcomers? Unquestionably the length will be daunting for newcomers. It tested me, yet imagining Dungarpur’s film being cut to a standard feature-length made me actively mournful for the expansive montages, in-depth historical discussion and terrific anecdotes that would be lost. Anyone wanting a snack-sized introduction to Czech cinema is catered for by two of Menzel’s earliest shorts – 1959’s Prefabricated Houses and 1962’s Our Mr. Foerster Died – as extras. Dungarpur’s voice is largely absent from the film’s soundtrack but his booklet makes it clear that CzechMate was every bit the labour of love it seems, and allows you to vicariously enjoy his delight at seeing some of these extraordinary films for the first time.

Thanks for reading our review of CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel

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