Desire (1958)/All My Good Countrymen (1968); Two Films by Vojtěch Jasný (Review)

Second Run are really spoiling us this week. This two-disc release may claim to be ‘Two films by Vojtěch Jasný, but it is in fact four; alongside the main features, 1958’s Desire (Touha, in its native Czech) and All My Good Countrymen (aka Všichni dobří rodáci) from a decade later, there’s also his feature-length graduation film from 1949, It’s Not Always Cloudy (Není stále zamračeno), which he co-directed with Karel Kachyňa, the Czech filmmaker who went on to direct, amongst others, Coach to Vienna and The Ear, whose Second Run release includes an essay from The Geek Show’s very own Graham Williamson, and his acclaimed short Bohemian Rhapsody (Česká rapsodie) from 1969. As such, this volume is an absolute must for anyone who appreciates Czech cinema.

1958’s Desire is a poetic and personal epic that explores through the anthology or portmanteau structure the four ages of man. Based on a screenplay by Vladimir Valenta (who would go on to be best known for his role as the station master in Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains) each story is distinctly set in each season of the year and looks at childhood, youth, middle age and old age in the most heartbreakingly lyrical of ways.

The film sets its stall out with its first chapter, The Boy Who Wanted to Find the Edge of the World. A beautifully springtime sweet story about Joska, an inquisitive boy filled with wonder for the world around him, whose mother is due back from the hospital after giving birth to his baby sister. As he waits to meet this new addition to the family, Joska and his friends race across the fields and up and down hills, hoping to find the edge of the world. He also ponders how a baby has come into being, and whether it has been brought to his mother by a stork or a crow. Crows feature significantly across the tale; they’re there in the sky, ever beating the children in their quest to find the world’s end, upon the arm of a wise old neighbour, and in the barn where Joska, tired from all the exertion falls into a deep, dream-filled sleep. His dream sees him and his father preparing for the homecoming. They climb up one of the many hills, once again accompanied by crows, and come across several billowing sheets. Finally, they reach the edge of the world and Joska’s father must push through the final sheet to reach the land beyond where the elderly neighbour is transformed into a holy mystical figure who presents the father and son with a giant egg containing Joska’s baby sister. Back home, the sister arrives fully dressed from the hatched egg, before Joska awakes to greet her for real. The Boy Who Wanted to Find the Edge of the World is a charming start to the film, blessed with a fairytale quality that is simply enchanting. Birds, eggs and seemingly never-ending hills will continue to make their presence felt in each chapter, providing an accessible thread for audiences.

The film’s second story, The People of the Earth and the Stars in the Sky is a more straightforward episode, concerning the summer romance between an astronomer who works as a land surveyor by day (Jiří Vala) and a beautiful young girl named Lenka (Jana Brejchova). This chapter recalls something of the French New Wave and feels very free-spirited as befits Lenka’s desire to see the world beyond her village. The surveyor, who must contend himself with his interest in the universe, is naturally disappointed but he understands that she needs her freedom and the pair part at the end. The visual motif of an egg, seen in the previous film, reoccurs here with a brief mention of the eggs Lenka is taking on her train journey out of the village; her jokey fear that she may end up sitting on them, recalling the hatching that went before.

If the second chapter surprises with its nouvelle vague aesthetics, the third instalment delivers the socialist realism normally expected in Czech cinema. Andela stars Věra Tichánková in the titular role of a strong-willed middle-aged woman who has resisted the pressure to join a collective farm. Agricultural collectivism is a subject that Jasný returned to more than once in his career and you can see examples several times across this release, with It’s Not Always Cloudy serving as propaganda for the system, and All My Good Countrymen being a much more sceptical exploration.

The brainchild of Stalin, as a means of improving productivity and embracing modern technology in the Soviet Union, collectivisation was effectively a target-driven programme of state-controlled farms the outcome of which was, in theory, an efficient food production that met the needs of the Soviet population. In practice, dissent from the Kulaks who resisted Stalin’s advances led to widespread famine in the early 1930s that saw millions starve to death. Following the end of WWII and the Communist coup of 1948, Czechoslovakia saw 95% of its farms nationalised as a law was passed declaring no one could own more than 50 hectares of land. The Soviet dream of agricultural worker-controlled collectives was a painful and troubled process in Czechoslovakia, with productivity actually falling in the early years as many young workers left for work in the cities instead. It was only after significant reforms in the 1970s that productivity began to rise, with record harvests being recorded in the 1980s.

A forerunner to All My Good Countrymen, Andela presents the harsh realities of agriculture in Communist Czechoslovakia as it is revealed that Andela’s prime land was confiscated for the collective during the nationalisation process. Now, with an infirm and elderly father, the stubborn Andela must rely solely upon Michal (Václav Lohniský) an itinerant worker, to help plough the paltry fields she was granted in the exchange. The sight of this determined woman toiling away with her horse-drawn plough as her neighbouring collective farmer operates the latest tractor is a pitiable sight; like Sisyphus, she must work the gruelling uplands beneath the darkening autumnal skies, with no edge of the world in sight.

The film’s final story is the wintry Mother and stars Anna Meliskova in the central role of Maminka, an elderly teacher who believes she is facing her final hill to climb in life, just as her son’s wife is about to give birth. It’s a story about the loneliness of old age, of how, having devoted one’s life to raising a family, you’re ‘rewarded’ with the natural order of them flying the nest – a phrase which itself recalls the bird motif inherent in the movie. Thankfully, before she dies Maminka gets a taste of how it once was when her son Vaclav returns home to spend the week with her. The sight of him, playing the piano as she makes tea, her sole, remaining companion the dog at her feet, is suffused with poignant, bittersweet familiarity. In the final moments, Jasný’s camera once again soars over hills just as the film had started.

This first disc concludes with the aforementioned It’s Not Always Cloudy, Jasný’s graduation film depicting the process of collectivisation he made with Karel Kachyňa. Told through the eyes of a newly appointed administrator, the film suggests hardships (the administrator reveals he is the third assigned to the area, with one of his predecessors’ going mad), but is unmistakably the work of two young men and party members who had no cause to believe Communism could be anything other than a force for good. Like an episode of Countryfile merged with a Party Political Broadcast (I guess it just needs Theresa May running through those fields of wheat!) it’s fine Soviet propaganda, but that’s not to say that it is false – just naïve. Jasný and Kachyňa worked with real farmers in the socialist realism style and depicted the positives of the programme, based on the mood and experiences of their cast. It’s worth recalling that Marx believed peasants were incapable of appreciating the theory of Communism but, whilst such peasants remained ignorant of his doctrine, they could nevertheless appreciate the positives of collectivisation and the party used their enthusiasm for this new programme to create momentum across the land.

The film on the second disc, All My Good Countrymen explores that momentum in greater detail; brutal enforcement, blackmail, liquidation, corruption, imprisonment and even murder. It is an epic story of a Moravian village between 1945 and 1968, a story of friends pitted against one another and of former loyalties and the harmony of the countryside usurped by an insidious ideological interloper. Many cite All My Good Countrymen as Jasný’s masterpiece, I’d go one further and suggest it is the masterpiece of Czech cinema.

What changed in the period between It’s Not Always Cloudy and All My Good Countrymen? The irony is that Jasný’s success and privilege as an officially approved and much-acclaimed filmmaker afforded him the opportunity to see something of the world beyond Czechoslovakia. In the 1950s, he accepted the offer to work in China and Russia. It was to change his outlook irrevocably. “When I came back from the Soviet Union and China I decided that I will never more make dogmatic or stupid films,” he told Radio Prague International in 2004 “I promised this to myself and I found this courage. You believed that socialism is good but, I have seen that in the Soviet Union they murder people. I talked to Polish people who were brought to Siberia there. I was in Siberia and they blocked our cameras I could not shoot in the Soviet Union. I’ve seen it’s everything cheat and there is a terror like the Nazis. I stopped believing in this stupidity and I decided we will make our own Czechoslovak socialism if we can, and we will do it humanly and properly, like Christianity.”

Drawing on his mother’s own background and experiences of village life in Kelč, as well as his memory of a friend, victimised at the hands of the party, Jasný originally wrote the script for All My Good Countrymen on his return from overseas in 1956. It would not see the light of day however until almost a decade later when the policies of ‘Socialism with a Human Face’, the brainchild of Alexander Dubček, the country’s leader during the Prague Spring reforms of 1968, made it possible to commission a film that could be critical of Communism. Indeed, Jasný is on record as claiming the film received Alexander Dubček’s personal seal of approval; “Now you can make the film, no one will oppose it. You will get the necessary finance” was how Jasný related Dubček’s words to Peter Molloy of the BBC series The Lost World of Communism in 2009 “That’s how it was. Thanks to him I could make the film. Dubček was a wonderful person” Neither man could predict what would happen next.

Beginning with the liberation of Czechoslovakia in May 1945, All My Good Countrymen focuses on the friendship of a handful of villagers including their nominal leader and the film’s hero František (Radoslav Brzobohatý), the clown Lispy (Vladimír Menšík), the hapless Franta (Vaclav Babka) a tailor with a love of lamps, the young postman Bertin (Pavel Pavlovsky) and Očenáš (Vlastimil Brodsky) the church organist, to name but a few. These early scenes capture the collective sigh of relief Czechoslovakia must have felt at the end of the war, a time of high spirits, optimism and exultation. We witness the group undertake a series of japes and mishaps; Lispy steals a German staff car, whilst František discovers an unexploded mine which they set off to detonate at the local quarry. The resultant explosion sees Franta shit himself and, after a night on the booze, the friends fall into fitful slumber beneath a tree. There’s a sense of spring after a long and unseen winter, with the characters in harmony with the countryside around them. It’s a nostalgic start to the movie, recalling similar odes to village life, such as the more rose-tinted and optimistic moments in Edgar Reitz’s mammoth Heimat.

Again, as with Desire, Jasný is preoccupied with seasons and how they can be used for dramatic or metaphorical emphasis; the next chapter takes in the early spring of 1948, the introduction of Communism arriving with the snowfall. We begin to see a split in the village as some embrace the new world that their Soviet masters offer whilst others prove sceptical and resistant to their advances. The intellectual Očenáš, who was introduced diverting from his normal duties to lead the choir in an ode to Stalin, has joined the Communists and incurred the wrath of others. An assassination attempt is staged, but fate lends a cruel hand; Bertin the postman, on the eve of his wedding to the flame-haired Machačová (Drahomíra Hofmanová), is mistaken for the organist and shot dead. A firm believer in the cause, Očenáš flees the village, arguing that if the people do not realise he is attempting to do his best for them, then maybe their children will. As the years progress, his words become increasingly hollow as party apparatchiks behave like the Gestapo they had so recently fought to be rid of, headed up by Ilja Prachař’s monstrous Plecmera, bullying the villagers and bending them to their will as the farms they have nationalised fall to rack and ruin. In time, František emerges as a figure of resistance for the village to rally behind and look up to. The party do their best to break him; they lean on the villagers to sign documents attesting to his guilt and, though, is sent to prison, he soon escapes, returning home on foot despite suffering from pneumonia. Nursed back to health, he forgives the sins against him and realises he must accept the party’s pleas to run the collective and right their wrongs or else the village will face ruin. The film concludes with Očenáš returning from exile to ponder  “We have made our beds and now we have to lie in them. But have we made them ourselves? What have we done, rather, what have we undone, all my fellow countrymen?”

All My Good Countrymen is a remarkable film, its topicality as a critique of post-war Communism and the stranglehold the Soviet Union had upon those in its orbit co-existing with more timeless, age-old themes, such as picaresque rural travails; the ‘merry widow’ Machačová doomed to attempt to replicate the love she had for Bertin with others who will, in turn, be doomed to the same fate that befell him, and the near-folk horror like aesthetics of the village’s many carnivals, culminating in the Christmas procession of villagers masked with the heads of animals and monsters forcing those they meet in their path to dance and sing. Shortly after its release, Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and the reforms and freedoms made by Dubček were immediately crushed by hardliners who plunged the country into the period known as normalisation. All My Good Countrymen fell foul of the censors and, in 1973, was one of four films to be ‘banned forever’.

Speaking to the BBC, Jasný recalled his intentions with the film and his feelings for the ban “I am not against collectives, but in this case, it was done violently. They killed a lot of people. They didn’t like that I said that. After the Soviet occupation, they wanted to destroy the negative and all copies of the film. They wanted to burn it, burn it, burn it” We should be grateful that they did not get their way. In 1969, Jasný made one more film Bohemian Rhapsody, included as an extra on here. An abstract essay that summarises the effects he saw in the wake of the occupation, it’s a silent study of blank faces staring out at the camera, a funeral procession replaces the carnival and again, birds; as the Czech people congregate to sing a tune together – Jasný’s camera lingers on some fluttering birds hopping about in their cage. It’s a potent metaphor; I know why the caged birds sing, indeed. The authorities spotted the metaphor too and demanded that Jasný recant publicly for his most critical work. If he expressed support for the Soviets, he could continue to work. If he did not, he would face prison. Refusing what he called “a moral death” Vojtěch Jasný went into exile and continued to work, notably in Austria, West Germany and even America, where he contributed to Steven Spielberg’s series of films on the Holocaust, recalling his own father’s death in Auschwitz. In later years he returned to the Czech Republic and died in November 2019, just days before his 94th birthday.

Along with the films listed here, this Second Run release also includes such extras as a 1988 interview with Vojtěch Jasný, his own personal introduction to All My Good Countrymen, an interview with Drahomíra Hofmanová who played the film’s ‘Merry Widow’ from 2015, a featurette and essay from Peter Hames and a commentary.

Desire/All my Good Countrymen