Czech

A man, apparently on the run, takes shelter in a dilapidated house. Every day, he drills a hole through a wall and looks into one of the rooms, each time seeing a different surreal vision… Read More »

A non-narrative voyage round Sedlec Ossuary, which has been constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons (victims of the Black Death).Read More »

A cautionary tale about the dangers of unprotected promiscuity among heterosexuals, this story chronicles the exploits of three good friends. Pepe is the playboy of the bunch: despite having a lovely girlfriend, he finds a way to have sex with as many women as possible. His buddies from time to time exchange girlfriends with him. Though they are by no means the lothario he is, they do quite enough bed-hopping to get into trouble. When it becomes obvious that Pepe has gotten AIDS, his buddies, afraid for themselves, get mean.Read More »

Quote:
Any film that cites Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel, and the Marquis de Sade as cardinal influences clearly is not standard mall movie fare. In Conspirators of Pleasure, Jan Svankmajer has created a film that is thoroughly surreal in the truest sense of the term. Like Un Chien Andalou, this film brilliantly takes a basic human instinct — sexuality — and renders it not only very strange but also very funny. Scenes of a newswoman responding sexually to toe-sucking carp or of a policeman luxuriating in a tactile smorgasbord of nails, rubber, and fur are not easily forgotten.Read More »

Description:
Rostislav sitting on the beach with friend Peter philosophize about who is he – a creation of God or the Devil. Their conversation is interrupted by a naked man from a nearby nudist beach “Paradise”, which is looking for a doctor. At this point it appears that the doctor is both an experimental film’s director.Read More »

Quote:
Short Cut is a comedy revealed more in the acting and witty dialogue than in the simple premise of the story itself: how the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal was born. Actually, the story is, in many ways, the writer’s conception. The setting is a small town where Hrabal’s father Francine (Jiri Schmitzer) is in charge of a large brewery. Both the blessing and bane of his life is his gorgeous wife Marja (Magda Vasaryova). Blessing, because she is not only beautiful but resourceful and intelligent and lively, bane because every other man would like to get to know her better. Marja saves the day more than once, and the couple are happy in their life together. When Francine’s brother arrives for a visit, an attraction starts to develop between Marja and her brother-in-law that may have upset the marriage, were it not for a fortuitous accident. Read More »

Quote:
The story of a Prague family who decides to buy a country cottage, but also with a “grandfather”, the original owner. He currently rents one room to them and promises to sell the whole house later. However, the sale itself is constantly postponed, so the eager Praguers are forced to live with him on weekends and holidays…

From the confrontation of people from the city and the rural environment, the authors Zdeněk Svěrák and Ladislav Smoljak were able to benefit from a number of unforgettable comedic situations, and at the same time very aptly describe the phenomenon of cottage farming, which spread in the 1970s.Read More »

Synopsis:
There are still water spirits among us. One group lives in Prague, led by Mr. Wassermann, who is using his wife’s family as a servants. All they need is their old house near the river. But the house is to be demolished. They have to stop it. And the only way is to drown Dr. Mrácek, who is responsible for the demolition. But he falls in love with Wassermann’s niece Jana. He changes to fish, is mistaked for water spirit from Germany, is drowned and revived again. The other problem is the flour with ears… and so on…Read More »

By the director of Cabinet of Dr.Caligari, this is the Passion embedded in a contemporary story. An anarchist jailed for an attempted assassination is told the Passion story by the prison chaplain, who seeks to convince him that it is better to sacrifice ones own life than take the life of ones enemy. The framing story, taken from a novel, is believed to have been intended to give the Biblical story an anti-Bolshevist propaganda function. In any case, it was added without the knowledge of the actors in the Passion story, who included some of the major stars of the period Asta Nielsen as Mary Magdalene, Henny Porten as Mary, Grigori Chmara as Jesus, and Werner Krauss as Pontius Pilate -bampfa.berkeley.eduRead More »