My third Second Run contribution is a fairly considerable departure from the first two (The Party and the Guests and Valerie and her Week of Wonders). Although I generally specialise in writing about European cinema, and indeed have no real track record when it comes to the Australian variety, I was commissioned to contribute a booklet essay to accompany Ann Turner’s debut Celia after I let slip that I’d been peripherally involved with the original UK cinema release in 1990 (I worked for the Everyman Cinema, which at the time had strong links with independent distributors Electric Pictures – which effectively meant that I was frequently roped in to help with their releases).

I particularly remembered this one, because the reviews were terrific, and yet it sank like a stone when it opened – a sobering lesson that critical acclaim may not be enough if the public doesn’t seem to be that keen to watch an Australian film made by and starring complete unknowns. Another useful lesson came from my first professional encounter with the British Board of Film Classification, which raised concerns about possible animal cruelty – proscribed by the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act. Handily, the producers had anticipated issues like this, and were able to prove that the shot in question had been simulated, so the BBFC gave it a 15 without requesting cuts.

I’d always liked the film, and it stood up very well indeed – in fact, now that I’m a father myself it resonated with me much more deeply. The relationship between Celia and her father Ray is particularly well drawn: Turner both manages to get inside Celia’s head, with all the impulsiveness and unreasonableness that that implies, while at the same time presenting an entirely objective view of a man who isn’t wicked by any sensible yardstick – merely honestly baffled by his daughter’s obsessions and trying to do good by them while simultaneously trying to stay in line with the small-c conservative community that they inhabit.

The BFI Library was a major godsend when researching the piece, as they turned out to have an extensive collection of Australian magazines and cuttings, enabling me to trace the film’s long gestation (it won an award for Best Unproduced Script) as well as its reception both in its native country and elsewhere. The British reviews were every bit as good as I remembered, but I also found out that the US release was a disaster. It was already arguably a mistake for the British poster to hint that it might be a horror film (it’s much subtler than that), but the US version went the whole hog and retitled it Celia: Child of Terror. Ann Turner strongly objected, but she had no contractual veto, and the film duly died a death.

My booklet essay is a fair bit shorter than the one I wrote for The Party and the Guests, largely because I knew in advance that it would be sharing space with another piece, by Australian academic Joy Damousi, and the original folktale ‘The Hobyahs’. I was given a copy of Professor Damousi’s piece in advance, so that I could avoid overlapping material – and I tailored my piece so that it was more or less the same length.

Given the issues over previous ad campaigns, I was intrigued to see what Second Run would come up with for their cover. I knew in advance that they were determined to avoid the horror-film trap, and instead they came up with this:

The multiple layers of symbolism make more sense if you’ve seen the film, but the colour red is as important as the rabbits and the ghostly Hobyahs that can be seen scuttling out of the picture at the bottom.

Reviews

• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);
• DVD Talk (Chris Neilson)
• DVD Times (Gary Couzens);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.

Today sees the British DVD premiere of one of the best films of the Czech New Wave, complete with a video appreciation by Peter Hames and a booklet essay by me. It’s comfortably the longest booklet piece I’ve written to date, largely because Second Run didn’t give me a word limit, and I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to do some serious digging into Němec’s entire career: at the time the booklet was commissioned, I’d only seen his first two features (Diamonds of the Night and this).

The immediate challenge, as ever in these situations, was actually getting to see much of it. Handily, the BFI National Archive had copies of his 1988 documentary Peace in Our Time? and Pawel Pawlikowski’s 1990 documentary Kids from FAMU, in which Němec was one of the interviewees, and I was able to track down American VHS copies of Oratorio for Prague (1968) and Code Name Ruby (1996) and a DVD of Late Night Talks with Mother (2001). Which wasn’t perfect – I’d have especially liked to have had the chance to see Martyrs of Love (1967), the film he made in between the completion and release of The Party and the Guests – but it was better than nothing, and meant that I could piece together a pretty comprehensive career overview from assorted interviews in English and French publications.

A challenge when writing about the film itself was that I had to rely on an old VHS recording of a BBC2 broadcast from 2 June 1990, the last time British television showed any sustained interest in Czech cinema or indeed Czech culture in general (the same period saw the British television premiere of Jan Švankmajer’s BBC-commissioned The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia, a handful of 1960s Czech New Wave classics and various documentaries). The tape itself was still perfectly watchable, but it became very clear on closer examination that the subtitles were woefully inadequate – they translated the important dialogue, but tended to elide anything that sounded like an aside. The problem is, this film is overwhelmingly about asides, about reading (and therefore listening) between the lines, and I was very conscious that I might have missed out a potentially important detail simply because it wasn’t translated and my Czech wasn’t good enough to catch it when spoken.

So one of the first things I checked when the Second Run DVD arrived was whether it had used the same subtitles – and I’m delighted to confirm that it has a far more comprehensive translation. I don’t think there’s anything in the booklet that I wanted to change as a result, but I can say with some authority (based on the BBC2 version and a 35mm screening that I caught at the Ciné Lumière a few years later) that this is the most English-friendly version of the film yet released. Also, full marks for the cover, which wittily alludes to a key plot point without ever resorting to spoilers – here’s an enlargement:

Reviews

• DVD Times (Noel Megahey);
• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.