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.