Pearls of the Deep (1966) Manifesto of the Czech New Wave (Review)

Anthology and portmanteau movies are often something of a curate’s egg, and never more so than when those films feature the work of several directors. Released by Second Run this week, Pearls of the Deep was a 1966 showcase for young Czechoslovakian filmmakers. It was subsequently heralded as the manifesto for the new wave movement in the Czech film industry – a movement that blossomed for a brief period known as the Prague Spring, before the Soviet tanks rolled in and reasserted their dominance on the satellite nation.

Pearls of the Deep comprises of five separate stories from five different directors Jiří Menzel (whose acclaimed movie Closely Observed Trains would also make its debut in ’66); Jan Němec (the enfant terrible of the movement whose film The Party and the Guests was banned twice and almost led to the director’s arrest for subversion); Evald Schorm (who came to the attention of cinemagoers with 1964’s Courage for Every Day, and acted in Němec’s The Party and the Guests and The Joke by Jaromil Jireš); Věra Chytilová (best known for 1966’s wildly irreverent and avant garde Daisies; and Jaromil Jireš (arguably best known for the Gothic fairytale Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), and whose 1969 movie The Joke (an adaptation of a Milan Kundara novel), was banned for twenty years in Czechoslovakia.

Each story was based on the work of Bohumil Hrabal – who’s often hailed as one of Czechoslovakia’s greatest writers and, like some of the filmmakers involved here, would also find himself banned by the Soviet authorities after the 1968 invasion. Originally there were plans for two more stories to form Pearls of the Deep (Ivan Passer’s A Boring Afternoon and Juraj Herz’s The Junk Shop), but these were ultimately omitted due to concerns over the film’s running time. Passer – who fled his homeland once the Soviets invaded, went on to make Hollywood movies such as Cutter’s Way, but both he and Herz (who’s best known for The Cremator – the 1969 horror often hailed as Czechoslovakia’s finest cinematic achievement), made their directorial debuts here.

Menzel opens Pearls of the Deep with ‘The Death of Mr Balthazar’ – a story about a family outing to a motorcycle racetrack that was inspired by the fatal accident that befell a West German rider during the Czechoslovak Grand Prix the previous decade. It introduces a morbid curiosity with death that can arguably be considered the unifying theme of the portmanteau, and it looms large across several stories in one form or another. Our protagonists are a middle-aged couple and their elderly male relation who arrive at a racetrack in their 1930 Walter cabriolet – a vehicle that has conked out en route after transporting six people and a bedstead. As the husband extolls the virtues of his cabriolet to an aged double amputee and veteran rider, the wife showcases her perfect pitch by identifying motorcycles from the sound of their engine alone, and the elderly relation remains an isolated figure, immersed in his own private monologues concerning the past. Meanwhile, Menzel delights in choosing to depict the race itself with a dreamlike aura, as evinced by its accompaniment of a waltz from composer Jiří Sust.

The second tale is ‘The Imposters’ by Jan Němec. Essentially a two-hander, it is the least visually engaging or cinematic of the offerings, depicting a conversation between two elderly patients in hospital. One bedridden fellow claims to have been an opera singer in his prime, whilst the other, hobbling up and down the room with the aid of his walking stick, talks of his illustrious career as a journalist. When Němec changes the scene, we discover that not only have both men have died, they were also exaggerating their lives. As their bodies are prepared in the morgue, an attendant denounces them for their fantasies, before taking to the corridor and reassuring a patient all will be well. “Thank you Doctor” the patient replies, and the attendant does not seek to correct the man of his mistake. Hrabal’s message, that we are all prone to exaggeration and we are equally prone to hypocrisy, may work well on the page, leaving the reader with a wry chuckle, but it doesn’t really amount to very much on the screen.

Things liven up considerably with ‘The House of Joy’ from Evald Schorm, the only segment of Pearls of the Deep to be filmed in colour. The reason behind this switch lies in the tales subject matter; the artwork of a primative painter by the name of Václav Žák, who genuinely existed and plays a version of himself here. Hrabal had been interested in Žák for a number of years, first writing about him as far back as 1947. In ‘The House of Joy’, Žák’s curious and obsessive visions, which he liberally committed to every conceivable surface of his farmhouse home, are presented to two visiting insurance salesmen and, in turn, the audience as a whole. The extraordinary interior, populated with primative depictions of Christ, King Wenceslas, Czech national hero Jan Žižka and a menagerie of wildlife and mythical creatures (including a procession of dwarves marching across the wall towards Žák’s radio with demolition in mind – a punishment for the lies the artist occasionally hears on the airwaves), are gazed upon in wonder by one of the salesmen who enquires as to where Žák gets his inspiration from (the inside of a goat is the answer – Žák makes a living slaughtering the animals and selling their skins – their bodies and hides hanging unceremoniously inside the farmhouse, making a mockery of the segment’s title), but routinely ignored by the other, who remains determined to sell the artist life insurance.

It’s only in the sudden and surprising arrival, from beneath some bedsheets, of Žák’s improbable mother (a crone who looks as old as he undoubtedly is), that stymies his hopeless enterprise. The first segment to point towards the Czech taste for the absurd, ‘The House of Joy’ is whimsical and weird, contrasting modernity with a more traditional, untamed and peculiar way of life. As with a lot of Czech humour, its very funny, but it is also laced with something of the sinister, as evinced by Schorm’s decision to play some of the comedic scenes – such as Žák and his mother positioning his figure of the martyred Christ on the roadside, where it causes numerous (thankfully non-fatal) collisions and Žák dancing before a congregation of schoolchildren – with sonorous, unsettling organ music and either slowing down or speeding up the footage. It’s like watching A Hard Day’s Night starring Salvador Dali.

Hrabal once again places a real-life creative figure at the centre of the next segment, Chytilová’s ‘At the World Cafeteria’, in the shape of graphic artist Vladimír Boudník . A proponent of the ‘explosionism’ movement of structural graphic art, Boudník developed his creative talents whilst working at Czechoslovaki’s chief engineering company, ČKD Works, using industrial offcuts and waste as the raw materials for his art. He died in 1968, after experimenting with asphxiation. In ‘At the World Cafeteria’ he is realistically depicted as a factory lathe worker using industrial material to create art and contemplating suicide with his girlfriend. Death casts its shadow specifically over Chytilová’s tale, as it is revealed that the cafeteria’s female bartender has discovered a young woman has committed suicide on the premises.

Turfing out all of the clientele, bar Boudník, the pair talk of suicide until the police arrive. It is also revealed that a rowdy wedding is taking place in the cafeteria, and the bridegroom has been arrested for punching one of the attending policeman. Affronted that she should spend her wedding night alone, the insolent bride decides that Boudník should spend the night with her. The pair go off into the wind and rain, the artist busying himself with tying down the trees that line the streets they pass down. Chytilová’s segment is definitely the highpoint of Pearls of the Deep, it’s visually stunning for a start and, along with that detailed imagery, possesses something of the same insouciant fatalism that characterises Daisies.

Where Chytilová hints at love before immersing herself with the now familiar theme of death in the previous chapter, Jaromil Jireš finally rids the portmanteau of the latter to fully embrace the former in the aptly titled ‘Romance’, the story of a working class youth and a Roma girl. Said to be inspired by Hrabal’s own experiences, ‘Romance’ takes in the couple’s initial meeting, their lovemaking and the dreams and concerns of a potential future together. It’s a story that quietly addresses the prejudice that Roma people experience in society, shooting on location at a Roma camp the girl takes her beau, Gaston, to and fro exploring the differences between the protagonists, both real and imagined.

Gaston is described by her as ‘a Czech’ throughout, suggesting the divisions are clearly delineated. Likewise, Gaston wonders if his mother would ever approve of him marrying someone from the Roma community. Likewise, the community at the camp are depicted as relaxed and carefree, lazing in the sun, their bodies visible for all to see, whilst Gaston moans about his boss and his bourgeois sensibilities. The final shot is of a young, naked Roma boy urinating a great arc of piss from atop a hill, below which the town is swamped by Czechs going about their daily 9 to 5 lives, umbrellas held aloft from a rainfall from the heavens that ironically coincides with the boy’s impressive flow.

Thanks to Second Run, and for the first time, A Boring Afternoon and The Junk Shop can be viewed as part of Pearls of the Deep, as the Blu-ray has included them as extras. Passer’s film is a seemingly insignificant snapshot of a Sunday afternoon in a bar. As the football fans leave for the match, we follow the barflies left behind; a book-reading, chain-smoking youth whose presence exacerbates the publican who believes him arrogant, and two old men who recall the footballers of their youth. The young man leaves, the fans return dismayed that their team lost the match, and that’s about it.

Herz’s film, like ‘The House of Joy’ before it, points towards the absurd. Set in the eponymous scrapyard, we witness people come to dump their old paper, whilst a toothless employee misconstrues the instructions of his boss and saws to pieces the statue of a saint gifted to him by the local verger. Meanwhile the boss daydreams about the voluptuous young woman who lives above the yard, a moustachioed old crone is aghast to find that he won’t pay more for her paper because they are her collection of love letters, a child is lost in the mountains of discarded paper, and a woman carrying a goose in her handbag falls down into the cellar. Herz’s film makes use of animated sequences that not only strengthen the comedically absurd but lend the narrative a spry and whimsical touch.

The final extra is a short film on Hrabal entitled About Cats, Beatniks and All Sorts of Other Things, which seems to sum up the author’s concerns and protagonists very well.

Mark’s Archive – Pearls of the Deep