Introduction

1001 movies you must see before you die. Must I? Let's see.

My name is Dagmar and I am from Czech Republic. I have a bachelor's degree in screenwriting. I study movies. I watch movies. I write about movies. I kind of mention movies a lot. I even cross stitch things I like in movies. My views on cinema could be described as peculiar. My views on the "1001 movies" list as complicated. It happens a lot that I get the feeling it wasn't that necessary to see some particular movies. Sometimes I'm really grateful I saw them. And there are also times when I don't watch any new movies for six months straight. And they keep adding new movies every damn year so I might have to never die to watch them all.

What's the score right now?
606/1245 - That's 639 left to see.
I started this experiment on July 3rd 2009 and the latest update was made on April 19th 2023.

You can find the full list here.

Monday, 27 November 2006

The Ear (1970)

Ucho
Czechoslovakia
directed by: Karel Kachyňa
written by: Karel Kachyňa, Jan Procházka (+book)
starring: Radoslav Brzobohatý, Jiřina Bohdalová, Bořivoj Navrátil
seen: 27th November, 2006 - comment: 29th April, 2017

The Ear by Karel Kachyňa and Jan Procházka is one of the classics from my home country of Czech Republic. It's one of the so called "safe vault films", a name given to films that vere prohibited by the communist regime because they dared to show "the socialist reality" in other than optimistic light. They were "put in a vault" shortly after they were made and they were seen by wider audiences only after the regime was dismantled many decades later.

The Ear is truly a horrifying film, but something perhaps even more scary happend back in 2006 when my high school sent older students to see this film, thinking it will give them insight about the darkest sides of our former communist regime. My classmates watched the film and thought it was a comedy because it has Jiřina Bohdalová speaking with a silly voice in it. (The actress eventually colaborated and became a popular comedy figure in mainstream pro-regime media and after the Velvet revolution she switched sides. Today she continues to be friends with politicians currently in power and is percieved to be popular and beloved despite her past affiliations.) I rembember thinking to myself "Oh my god, people like that walk among us!", meaning both the movie and my classmates. But then, I was also a huge idiot back at high school and I choose to believe that people do have the capacity to change (for the better).

The older I get the more I adore formal parts of The Ear. The things camera shows and the way it makes the audience watch it renders the distress very palpable. One example for all: Today it's apparently really cool to show certain scenes in slow motion, like when there's a fire burning or when someone breaks glass or a window. (And I mean current (czech) movies that aspire to be artistic, I don't mean action movies and such where a completely different set of rules aplies.) These scenes have no deeper meaning in the course of the story and to visually separate them from the rest of the movie makes no sense and ultimaly makes them extremely ridiculous. There's a scene in The Ear where Jiřina Bohdalová breaks a window and the audience get to see the shattered glass fall slowly to the ground in a long separate shot. And oh boy, that's one clever use of slow motion. The film-makers used a stylized subjectivity throughout the film so this shot still feels organic and in line with the overall stylistic approach, but the slow motion distinctly separates it from the rest of the film. The act itself is rather banal, someone broke a window so shards of glass are falling to the ground, action and reaction, but context and execution make it (in my eyes, at least) one of the most important and beautiful shots in the entire film.

And once again I want to pose a question on my way out. Is it possible to make this kind of film (and by this kind I mean The Ear and Who's Affaid Of Virginia Woolf?) with a more standard couple in place of the protagonists? A couple who loves each other without the secret hatred and perhaps even doesn't have any shocking skeletons in the closet to throw at each other in moments of deep despair? I guess "Virginia Woolf" wouldn't be possible like this because the skeleton is the thing that sets everything else in motion. But the thing that provokes everything else in The Ear is external, it's the ear itself creeping its way inside their private lives. Perhaps I would enjoy even more to see how it takes down two people who are in fact innocent as newborn babes. ♥♥♥


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