The Barnabáš Kos Case (1965) Triangle of Madness

Without doubt the greatest film ever made about a triangle player in a symphony orchestra, Second Run’s Blu-Ray release of The Barnabáš Kos Case sees them returning to the work of the Slovakian director Peter Solan. Previously, they’d released the other film the busy director made in 1965, Before Tonight is Over; Solan also appeared in their Jerzy Skolimowski box-set as a contributor to the Skolimowski-led anthology feature Dialogue 20-40-60. Anyone looking for a good jumping-on point to this film-maker’s work would be well-advised to pick up The Barnabáš Kos Case. Its subject matter might sound like the most niche thing imaginable, but there is a lot that’s universal and still-relevant in this comedy of ego and bureaucratic incompetence.

The titular triangle tinkler is played by Josef Kemr, a reliable supporting player in Czechoslovak classics like Witchhammer, Marketa Lazarova and The Hop-Pickers (the latter of which Second Run released just three months ago). He’s the kind of hangdog character actor who thrives in fourth- or fifth-billed roles, and The Barnabáš Kos Case finds the best possible lead for him. Kos is an unimpressive man playing an unimpressive instrument; the opening credits, which deliver the first big laughs of the film straight away, are built around his absence from an orchestra rehearsal. Thanks to a bureaucratic misjudgment, though, Kos will soon become the orchestra’s leader, and the likes of Dvořák, Liszt and Tchiakovsky will soon find their most famous symphonies rewritten to include a surprising amount of triangle solos.

Anyone familiar with Czechoslovak cinema of the 1960s will be aware that its directors excelled at practically every genre: historical epics, science fiction, war movies, horror, surrealism. Personally, I’m finding the most rewarding and surprising films are increasingly the comedies, which offer a fusion of artistic excellence and genuine hilarity rarely matched. Part of the appeal of Czechoslovak comedies is that their humour is surprisingly accessible for a British audience. The absurdism of Daisies will chime with fans of Spike Milligan and Vivian Stanshall, the high-concept sci-fi satire of films like I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen will be recognisable to admirers of Douglas Adams. In the case of Barnabáš Kos, the main character initially resembles one of British comedy’s long heritage of maddeningly dull pedants: Mr. Pooter, Adrian Mole, Alan Partridge, E.L. Wisty. Certainly shades of these characters are detectable in the early scene where Kos lectures his housekeeper on the different kinds of envelopes official letters are sent in. But when one of those envelopes contains a summons to meet the local authorities, the film goes in a different direction – stylistically as well as narratively.

Kos’s meetings with the party high-ups takes place in a blinding white, futuristic Op Art building. The views from the window keep changing, in the manner of the backdrops in a Krazy Kat cartoon; sometimes they show huge statues, sometimes they show incomprehensible charts and made-up languages. The tannoys remind employees that this is their final warning about yesterday’s final warning; a repeat of the warning will be broadcast in five minutes time. Suddenly The Barnabáš Kos Case has switched from Diary of a Nobody to The Prisoner, and one of the most remarkable facts about the film is that it can keep switching back and forth between these levels of reality.

If the scenes in the local government offices seem to exist in a different world from the rest of Barnabáš’s life, this is entirely deliberate. Solan depicts the party officials as distant gods, unable to admit they’ve made a mistake in giving Kos absolute power over the orchestra but tactfully deciding that they’ve done something that may be perceived as a mistake by the uninformed public. Jonathan Owen’s booklet essay offers some clarity about how such an extraordinary depiction of the Czechoslovak Communist bureaucracy got past the censors. Apparently Solan had made repeated efforts to adapt Peter Karvaš’s short story ‘The Rise and Fall of Barnabáš Kos’, but it could only be produced during one of the brief windows in which the government wanted to encourage political satire as a method of self-critique. Ironically, a government deciding when they can and cannot be made fun of is the kind of surreally petty exercise of power that Solan’s film satirises so mercilessly.

The Barnabáš Kos Case is very good at parodying the dry, doctrinaire language which Communist states use to normalise the ridiculous. Kos’s sudden rise to power means every impromptu triangle solo he adds to the orchestra’s repertoire is justified as being what the composer would surely have intended, were he around to hear it. When the players briefly rebel by making mocking triangle-like tapping sounds on their different instruments, Kos misses the joke entirely and finds it an interesting experiment in avant-garde composition. Previously, it would have been easy to fixate on these surface-level differences and thank our lucky stars that we don’t live under this kind of regime. But as the director Peter Strickland notes in the booklet’s other essay, “The fact that the film has aged well is also paradoxical proof of real-life politics not having aged well”. Solan and Karvaš’s story depicts a completely vacuous non-entity promoted beyond their means as a thank-you for not rocking the boat, then squandering their power on disastrous ego-driven policies that a small child could see were doomed. Anyone wondering whether it could happen here is in luck: the Kindle edition of Liz Truss’s Ten Years to Save the West is just £1.99 on Amazon.

Usually, the age and obscurity of the films Second Run put out means their extras aim for quality over quantity. Happily, they’ve managed both here: as well as the excellent essays by Owen and Strickland, there’s an introduction to the film by the Slovak Film Institute’s curator Rastislav Steranka, and a witty short animated film (Promotion) by Viktor Kubal. The two best features on the disc could not be more different from each other: Solan’s short Nemecká is a blistering documentary about Nazi war crimes, whose chaotic editing and camerawork suggests that even the film’s formal aspects are boiling over with moral fury. Meanwhile, Portrait: Jarmila Koštová is a delightfully groovy 1969 profile of the film’s female lead. Shot in bright primary colours, it suggests Koštová would have enjoyed the modernist frenzy of the party offices, even if she wouldn’t have approved of all those white walls.

Graham’s Archive – The Barnabáš Kos Case